“A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”
—George Patton
“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”
—Sun Tzu
SITE 41
Southern Ontario, 1979. Municipalities over the Alliston aquifer—one of the cleanest water sources in the world—begin searching for a new landfill site to match their growing garbage production.353 And they unwittingly set into motion a struggle to protect the land that will last a quarter-century and bring together Indigenous and settler communities. It’s a fight that will use a spectrum of tactics from lobbying and awareness raising to mass protest and direct action.
The main garbage dump in the area, the Pauze landfill, is judged too small to cope with future waste disposal. But in the early 1980s, it’s revealed that toxic plumes of leachate have entered the groundwater near the Pauze landfill. The plumes caused by the landfill are worsened by illegal dumping of toxic industrial waste into the dump. The provincial government refuses to pump out the contaminated groundwater and treat it, so a new system is built to pipe water in to (formerly well-using) residents.354 These events cause growing worry about the groundwater among Indigenous people and settlers. Pauze landfill is closed, which puts more pressure on the existing garbage disposal infrastructure.
This pressure, combined with a general disregard for the land, accelerates the hasty landfill site search. In 1986, a location called Site 41—a farm in Tiny Township over the Alliston aquifer—is selected. What follows is two decades of back-and-forth between concerned citizens and a group of arrogant bureaucrats and “experts.”
In brief: Citizens argue that the landfill planning process is poor, even by the low standards of such bodies. A special joint board is created to investigate and in 1990 the Ministry of Environment commissions a report to see why things had gone so wrong. The joint board rejects the site selection process as “irredeemably deficient.” But, as often happens when the grassroots achieve some leverage, a higher level of government intervenes: the Premier of Ontario overrides the joint board decision and puts the process back on its original trajectory.
The resumed process prioritizes technical selection criteria. Engineers and similar “experts” are to be heard from. Community groups, farmers, and Indigenous people are not considered “qualified witnesses” and are excluded. Eleven more potential landfill sites are examined, but—surprise, surprise—Site 41 is selected again.
A community group (WYE Citizens) requests funding from the environmental assessment board to intervene. They are granted funding only for a technical expert. They are explicitly told not to discuss social, community, or agricultural impacts. Tiny Township itself files a legal challenge which is rejected. WYE Citizens presents alternate plans for conservation, recycling, and other options. They are rejected.
Concerned citizens keep trying to fight the landfill on technical grounds, but even when they successfully point out serious technical flaws, the government simply overrules them.355 A study of the groundwater quality around the proposed landfill site finds that it is extraordinarily free of contamination. Activists argue that the area deserves special protection.
But they are hemmed in by government high-handedness, and limited by technical arguments that ignore human and ecological impacts. Community prospects for victory look increasingly dim. In 2008, construction begins. Fences, roads, and other infrastructure are built on the site. Final permits are approved.
Activists from many different backgrounds decide it’s time to escalate. In November 2008, a group of activists including a Mohawk elder walk from Site 41 to Queen’s Park (Ontario’s provincial seat of government). They travel 150 kilometers and arrive with three hundred marchers. Activists enlist large progressive groups including the Council of Canadians, The Sierra Club, and the Green Party. The Métis Nation of Ontario joins in. These larger organizations help raise the profile of the campaign and get more people involved provincially and nationally.
But the key to success is local direct action. In May 2009, five women from Beausoleil First Nation (Anishinabe Kweag) build a protest camp opposite Site 41. “As Anishinabe women it’s our duty to protect the water,” one of them explains.356 The camp becomes a rallying point for both Indigenous and settler activists in the campaign. And in June, activists escalate even further; they take over and blockade the entrance of the site, preventing construction equipment or personnel from entering. The blockaders include farmers, community members, and Indigenous people.
The protest camp remains in place for 137 days. In July of 2009, the county government gets an injunction against the protesters. Police raid the camp and arrest blockaders. Seventeen participants—up to eighty-two years of age—are charged with mischief and “intimidation.”357 But the movement against Site 41 is strong and diverse and has already won popular support in the area. So three days after the police raid, there is a massive rally at which 2,500 people demand a construction moratorium.
The combination of direct action and popular mobilization works. The county government quickly backs down and votes for a one-year moratorium. A month later the county makes their decision permanent, and the Ministry of the Environment revokes the permits. Site 41 is rezoned as agricultural land officially and banned from being used for a landfill in the future. Charges against activists are dropped.
The land—and the aquifer under it—is saved.
Resistance movements have goals; their strategy is how they reach those goals. Strategy is how you piece together a series of actions to build capacity to make incremental progress. Resistance strategists intelligently apply their limited resources to work toward their goals. And they constantly adjust their approach to meet changes in circumstances and to outwit their opposition.
The Site 41 struggle is a good example of this. For a long time, those in power set the timetable and the rules of the conflict. Resisters were able to win when they seized the initiative, by escalating, and by building on the campaign they had waged up to that point.
A movement’s ultimate goal is often ambitious and may take a generation or more to accomplish. Ending apartheid, abolishing slavery, and winning the eight-hour workday were enormous goals, and organizers moved toward them using series of overlapping shorter campaigns with smaller concrete goals. These intermediate campaigns toward a grand goal help build a movement’s momentum, cultivate a sense of confidence and accomplishment among members, and develop the basic capacities and strategic abilities a movement needs to take on bigger goals.
Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty was a good example of a movement with a clear long-term objective and concrete, attainable medium-term goals which escalated over time. As Rolling Thunder explains: “The fact that there were specific animals suffering, whose lives could be saved by specific direct action, made the issues concrete and lent the campaign a sense of urgency that translated into a willingness on the part of participants to push themselves out of their comfort zones. Likewise, at every juncture in the SHAC campaign, there were intermediate goals that could easily be accomplished, so the monumental task of undermining an entire corporation never felt overwhelming.”
Dividing long-term grand strategies into shorter campaigns has other benefits. Campaigns allow movements to gather allies with similar medium-term goals while developing movement capacity and skills. The finite nature of a campaign means that organizers can look back at the end of a campaign, evaluate their successes, and improve their strategic understanding for next time.
In this chapter I will mostly write about strategy in campaigns lasting months or years. Any movement with the strategic capacity to be effective over years can apply the same skills and insights to lifelong revolutionary projects.
I wish that I could sit down and give you a master plan for perfect strategy, a blueprint distilled from movements of the past. Unfortunately, there is no universal blueprint; context is everything.
That said, there are patterns of success and failure. There are strategic and tactical principles, like those I discussed in the preceding chapter. And there are rough templates; general approaches and trajectories that many movements have used with good success.
Whatever the particular strategy in use, effective movements have a few things in common. They need processes for devising and evaluating strategy. And successful movements don’t just stumble onto good strategy. They develop strategic capacity: an organizational ability to develop strategy. Organizations in effective movements also find ways to multiply their political force by working with others in alliances or coalitions (formally or informally). And they use an escalating strategic trajectory that builds on their victories.
And they pull together all the different capacities, discussed in previous chapters, that are needed for effective campaigns.
ANATOMY OF A CAMPAIGN
Successful movements bring into play all the elements I’ve been writing about. You’ve probably noticed that many of the capacities I’ve written about have their own repeating cycles: the intelligence cycle, logistics cycle, and the tactical cycle of planning an action, carrying it out, and evaluating it. I think of these cycles together, spiraling through time, twisting together like a strong rope. (See figure 12-1)
At the core is action, since it is action that distinguishes a resistance group from a collection of dissidents. Wrapped around that core are all of the supporting capacities that protect, strengthen, and sustain a campaign. Direct action is an essential part of resistance, but without support from people working on communications, intelligence, recruitment, and all the rest, direct action rarely accomplishes much. Those capacities are force multipliers.
Figure 12-1: Campaign Strategy
And indeed, the supporting strands contribute directly to action: intelligence capacity identifies the target while recruitment and training provide the team. A campaign’s overall strategy and organization determine the way that the different parts twine together, the timing of actions, and so on.
Each of these elements is important and necessary. Let me borrow an analogy from the farm. In botany, it’s known that all plants need certain minerals—magnesium, potassium, calcium, and so on—to survive and thrive. These needs are often illustrated using the metaphor of a barrel (see Figure 12-2: Law of the Minimum) with each of the staves representing a mineral. If there is a shortage of one mineral, the barrel’s contents will pour out; its total capacity is reduced. The element in shortest supply limits the health and yield of the plant.
Resistance organizing is much the same. You can have the best and most carefully organized event in the world, but if you don’t have communication and outreach to get people to attend it, the event will accomplish nothing. You can have the best communication and outreach in the world, but if you don’t have direct action to back it up, your campaign will lack the teeth needed to change entrenched systems of power. Or you can have the most militant and dedicated actionists imaginable, but lack the recruitment capacity or the security and counterintelligence to keep that force strong in the face of arrests and repression. You really do need all these capacities to be effective.
Figure 12-2: Law of the Minimum
Of course, different campaigns and different strategies require these capacities in different amounts (which, to extend the metaphor, would suggest a barrel with staves of differing widths). Some may emphasize mass mobilization, others secrecy and tactical surprise. But any major weakness in one area will be exploited by those in power.
STRATEGIC TRAJECTORIES
Some years ago I was at a tree-sit camp with several comrades. It was a chilly January morning, partway up a mountainside in (occupied) British Columbia. One of my friends was trying to start a fire in our open hearth, little circle of stones under a big blue tarp. She was newly arrived, and I suppose she hadn’t started many campfires in the past. She started by laying out several big logs, and then some smaller sticks on top of that, and then some crumpled pieces of newspaper on the sticks. Then she lit the paper.
The stack blazed brightly for a few moments as the paper burned, and bits of ember drifted down into the wood below. But the wood didn’t catch. The flames dwindled. Stymied, she crumpled up a few more pages of newspaper and threw them on top. The fire leapt up again for a moment and consumed the new fuel, and then again faltered. She kept throwing new paper on top until another friend politely pointed out that the paper had to go under the kindling. That the little flame had to burn larger and larger pieces of fuel to turn into the fire we needed to cook our breakfast. It had to escalate. Otherwise, we were just wasting our resources in flashy—but ultimately inconsequential—flares of light and heat.
At its core, every strategy contains a trajectory. A path that moves us from our current situation to the goal we want to reach. Every successful movement passes along such a trajectory, whether it plans to or not. (Indeed, the trajectory taken is rarely the one initially planned for.)
Strategy is an iterative process. We try something. It does what we hoped, or it doesn’t. We learn from our successes and our failures, and we adapt. But struggles for justice are not one-sided. Our opposition is learning as well. Those in power have, in some cases, a longer continuous history of repression than our movements have of resistance. The loss of cultures of resistance has meant that those in power often have more expertise at putting down revolt than we have at rebellion. (And they understand this, whereas new generations of resisters—especially youth movements emerging from relative privilege—sometimes imagine they have invented everything from scratch.)
Resistance movements—whatever their plans—almost invariably suffer a series of false starts, badly paced escalations, or misplaced efforts in their early days. Even if they plan their efforts perfectly, they often experience difficult phases of growth and maturation.
Strategists and theorists of many stripes have developed their own theories about how resistance movements grow and develop. British counterinsurgency expert Frank Kitson argued that movements go through three phases: the preparatory phase, the nonviolent phase, and the violent/insurgency phase. The preparatory phase, he argued, is when movements are just putting their organization and political consciousness in place, and when movements are most vulnerable to information gathering (because they lack security culture). He argued that occupational powers must surveil and infiltrate movements early on to gather information that will be useful later in undermining the movement.
The basic pattern of escalation that Kitson observes is common in history. Many of the movements I have mentioned—such as the African National Congress or the Irish independence movement—followed a roughly similar approach. Early preparation is essential, because resisters rarely start out with strong organization or a shared culture of resistance. Early action may emphasize nonviolence because it is perceived to be of lower risk, or because there is a lower barrier to entry, or because movements want to secure what they see as the moral high ground, or for many other reasons.
In any case, Kitson’s nonviolent phase has two main outcomes. It allows movements to involve larger numbers of people and strong organizations. And it allows movements to publicly use—and publicly exhaust—conventional methods of protest. Once those conventional methods have failed, the resisters have a moral “mandate” to escalate to more serious action and, ideally, they have the organizational and support base they need to escalate successfully.
Kitson’s three-phase structure is helpful but not universal. Plenty of resistance movements have lacked a distinct nonviolent phase. (And historically successful “nonviolent” movements typically used diverse tactics anyway.) You might argue that some movements against Nazi occupation, for example, had a nonviolent stage during which they emphasized sabotage or escape and evasion. But that was due to lack of arms, training, and organization more than moral adherence to nonviolence.
The key thing I take from Kitson’s structure is the idea of escalation. Movements ratchet up their tactics in ways that allow them to lay the groundwork for later action. And they choose actions that build the strength, legitimacy, or appeal of their movement.
Often this escalation takes place by moving from low-risk to higher-risk tactics. Organizers sweep across the taxonomy of action (Volume One, p. 99) from lobbying and protest, through movement capacity building on to confrontational forms of action.
Of course, especially in long-term movements, there are defeats and reversals. On one side, a movement escalates its resistance; on the other side, those in power escalate their repression. Escalation is rarely linear or continuous.
Communist leader Mao Zedong codified a model which was used in many struggles, including the Chinese Communist Revolution, and which influenced the strategy of revolutionary movements from the war in Vietnam through to the current-day Naxalite revolutionaries in India.
In this theory—the People’s War—the first phase is a defensive phase of survival and organization. Revolutionaries build up their groups, recruit and train new cadres, propagandize, and prepare for escalation. The second phase is one of strategic equilibrium and guerrilla warfare, in which revolutionaries sabotage and harass the armies of those in power, while securing their own organizations and building parallel institutions. And in the third phase, the strategic offensive, revolutionaries shift to conventional military formations to overwhelm and decisively defeat the weakened enemy forces. The historical success of this approach lies in its flexibility; if revolutionaries encounter serious repression or losses, they can always fall back to a previous phase, maintaining their survival and movement networks. They continue their work and wait for opportunities to move forward and escalate.
One of the concepts I take away from this strategic model is the importance of stacking capacity rather than just shifting emphasis. Of building on the core capacities of a movement. Virtually any group, in the beginning, needs to recruit and train members, clarify its strategy and goals, build organization, and propagandize. Later it may proceed to larger and more serious action, supported by better intelligence and logistical capacity. The most prominent or visible activities may change, but the basic organizational capacity-building never goes away if the movement is to have any chance of long-term success.
Militant radicals are too often uninterested in these trajectories. They want instantaneous and total political transformation, unsullied by messy intermediate steps. This fiery, “no compromise” drive is part of what pushes movements forward and gives movements the benefit of radical flanking. It’s an attitude I often share. But it’s a simple fact of history that successful movements move along escalating trajectories that take time.
Militants who have rushed into armed action without a broader movement support base have rarely been successful. Certainly there are times—such as in the Nazi concentration camps—when building such a base was impossible. And certainly that base doesn’t have to be a majority for a movement to succeed. But revolutionary theories that prioritize armed struggle at the expense of building support and capacity have a poor track record.
Consider the foco theory articulated by Régis Debray in the 1960s. Drawing on Ché Guevara and the success of the Cuban revolution, the foco theory called for armed groups of revolutionaries who would inspire popular support by their very existence. This idea seemed plausible to Debray and others because of the improbable success of the Cuban revolutionaries, so small in numbers and yet ultimately victorious. One historian observes that “Castro never built up his force beyond about 300 men, yet he was able to overcome a Cuban army of 30,000 troops and to overthrow Batista in January 1959. In fact, Castro’s victory was entirely fortuitous, for Batista’s regime had been hopelessly corrupt, unpopular, and inefficient.”358
When the foco theory was put into practice in Bolivia by Guevara, Debray, and a small guerrilla band, the viability of that strategic trajectory became clear. Without civilian support, without a strong culture of resistance in the target region of Bolivia, and with serious language barriers between civilians and guerrillas, what else could have happened? The result was a lot of dead guerrillas in the jungle—Ché Guevara included—without much to show for it. Other Latin American groups following the foco theory encountered similar difficulties.359 (You might note that the foco theory is nearly the opposite of the approach successfully used by Amílcar Cabral and the PAIGC, as discussed in chapter 4.)
Building a solid culture of resistance is almost always more important than armed might. As Jeff Goodwin points out, historical revolutions rarely win by driving out the dominant force with a superior army.
In the Third World, revolutionary change has been possible when colonial or neo-colonial powers at last grew weary of the high costs of empire, although this typically did not occur until after long and bloody wars of counterinsurgency aroused opposition among the metropolitan power’s domestic populations. . . . In Eastern Europe, similarly, a revolutionary breakthrough at last became possible when the Soviet Union grew weary of the high costs of its empire. Neither Soviet forces in Eastern Europe nor (neo)colonial troops in the Third World were militarily expelled; the decision to withdraw them came, rather, after the progressive attrition of their governments’ political will to deploy them in the face of continuing, yet by no means overwhelming, nationalist resistance.360
Most of any social movement’s power is implied. Those in power fear that action will become more militant and—most importantly—that militant and disruptive action will bring in greater numbers of people. Anarchist Michael Albert wrote in The Trajectory of Change that from the perspective of those in power, any movement “that appears to have reached a plateau, regardless of how high that plateau may be, has no forward trajectory and is therefore manageable.”361 Isolated militants are defeated militants.
Sometimes I think of a strategic trajectory in terms of nodes of power. Any field of conflict has nodes where power is concentrated, and which will aid the side that controls or influences those nodes. For a military general in the Pacific in World War II, those nodes would include little islands to use for staging and as airbases. In the North-West Rebellion, storehouses and forts were nodes of power. Nodes could include anything that, when captured or influenced, would strengthen the side that held them and weaken the side that lost them.
Though resistance movements can gain great leverage through disrupting such infrastructure, they rarely have the military power to hold physical nodes like buildings in an all-out conflict. Rather, they succeed by influencing more intangible sources of power—social and political nodes—from community groups and neighborhoods to large social institutions, political parties, or unions: winning over allies or sympathizers.
Strategist Marshall Ganz writes: “Strategy is how we turn what we have into what we need to get what we want. It is how we transform our resources into the power to achieve our purposes.”362 Most resistance movements start off with very few resources. They have a few committed people and the possibility of getting more. Just as a successful fire starts with small pieces of kindling and gets bigger, successful movements identify the small nodes of power they can influence and use those to get more power. (People who play strategy games will understand this idea.)
One of the main weaknesses of privileged radical groups is that they may be reluctant to do this. They are often too insular and loath to interact with people who are different from them. (And so they fall prey to the law of involution or a culture of defeat.) But successful movements don’t have the luxury to be so picky if they want change on a revolutionary scale.
I interviewed Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, an activist and historian who has spent decades working with groups from the SDS to the ANC to the Sandinistas, and we spoke about the Green Corn Rebellion (which I wrote about in chapter 3). She said: “I compare it to the Zapatistas, and wonder why activists don’t look at [the Green Corn Rebellion] as this amazing thing.” Why don’t activists use that rebellion as an example? Because, Dunbar-Ortiz argues, some activists look at the rural people of that rebellion and see “a bunch of hicks.”
But, she explains, you could look at the Zapatistas and see the same thing. “That’s the point, they’re the people! But because they’re sort of exotic, and not American, [activists] can idealize them and think ‘nothing like that can happen here.’ So they work in solidarity with that rather than imitating it, making it happen here.” What many activists don’t realize about Zapatista areas, she adds, is that “about half the communities are Pentecostal Holiness converts, evangelicals. Others are devout Catholics. . . . Here we say ‘oh, those people are so ignorant. I would never work with them.’”
Dunbar-Ortiz explains that movements like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Black Panther Party learned an important lesson: “Loving the people. Just making the decision you’re going to love the people. Whatever their flaws are . . . Accepting them, rather than trying to correct them and having them become perfect little specimens before you even deal with them. I think [in] any revolution that’s exactly what’s done.”
Loving the people may be further than many radicals are willing to go at the moment. But effective organizers understand the necessity of sometimes working with people who are different from us, and the strength that comes from finding common goals that many groups can work toward. American temperance movements offer us some examples of that.
AMERICAN TEMPERANCE MOVEMENTS
The complicated dynamic between radicals and liberals, and between militants and moderates, can probably be seen in every social movement in history. The temperance movements of the late 1800s and early 1900s offer some examples.
To some, it may seem strange to take lessons for resistance movement strategy from prohibitionists. After all, you might argue, many of the American prohibitionists lobbied for new legislation restricting personal freedoms. And leftist cultures currently tend toward the decriminalization of drugs; to ban alcohol smacks of overbearing moralism or authoritarianism.
But there is a lot to be learned from their struggle. For one, modern social justice activists have more in common with the prohibitionists than might be apparent on the surface. During the Progressive Era (the 1890s to 1920s), there was a heavy overlap between prohibitionists and women’s suffragists. Indeed, brewery magnates funded anti-suffrage groups and claimed credit for “defeating” the women’s suffrage movement in its early days.
A strong current of feminism energized many temperance activists. Feminists in the temperance movement saw alcohol and alcoholism as being tied to domestic violence, crime, and poverty. And they saw temperance as a way of fighting both moral and political corruption.
Movement Dynamics
The prohibitionist movement of the Progressive Era had its own spectrum of liberals and radicals. The radical “drys” sought a complete ban on alcohol of all kinds. The moderate “damp” activists wanted restrictions on alcohol sales, not complete elimination. Moderates focused mostly on local initiatives. The radicals, on the other hand, were impatient with such piecemeal efforts and pursued change on a larger, national scale.363
These two branches did not always get along—they were at times held back by vitriolic horizontal hostility. The radical drys would frequently condemn and verbally attack the moderate damps. A newspaper at the time wrote they “were in some cases roundly denounced as bad or worse than rumsellers—as in league with hell. The resources of the English language were exhausted in holding [the damps] up as criminals of the deepest dye.”364 This “apparent vindictiveness” alienated many sympathizers.
Ann-Marie Szymanski studied the interaction between different temperance movement organizations, and argues that the iron law of involution (discussed in chapter 2) played a role. She notes that “the leading prohibitionists of the 1880s were indeed more ideologically pure than their counterparts in the [later] Progressive Era, and that purity helped ensure their defeat.”365
But involution is not inevitable; movements can choose to reach out, be inclusive, and build alliances. After the prohibition efforts of the 1880s failed, the next generation of feminists learned and adapted. After the turn of the century, Szymanski explains, their new “ideology downplayed the exclusive nativist and racist positions of some suffragists, and instead built support for suffrage by promoting the vote as crucial to securing woman’s full opportunities to pursue happiness. In the end, such feminism appealed to a variety of groups—from trade unionists to settlement workers—because each group believed that its own particular causes would be promoted by suffrage.”366
Inclusive movements have real strategic advantages, and a moderate approach is one way to be more inclusive. Szymanski notes that “the moderate drys’ willingness to lower the ideological barriers to movement participation meant that they could mobilize new adherents to the dry cause who might otherwise have remained uninvolved. In contrast, the radical prohibitionists energized a core group of supporters but failed to win over many potential drys.” Moderate parts of the movement, she argues, made a conscious choice to “turn outward” and appeal to damp sympathizers, evading the iron law of involution.367
Local Gradualism
In the years following the Civil War (after 1865), prohibitionists were ambitious, but not very successful. Radical drys wanted anti-liquor laws established at the state and national levels, immediately. But their statewide referenda were mostly defeated.368 And so they adopted a new strategy: local gradualism. As Szymanski explains, “the anti-liquor movement’s adoption of ‘local gradualism’ could be viewed as an act of self-preservation which allowed dry organizations to regroup after the largely disastrous 1880s.”369
Local gradualism relied on the ability of local governments to issue liquor licenses and pass bylaws. Activists used a variety of mostly low-risk tactics including petitions and lobbying, protests and rallies, political endorsements, and litigation. Low-risk tactics like petitions were both means of engaging sympathizers and methods of “testing the water” to see which areas were most promising for action. If temperance activists were successful in many localities in one region, they could escalate to lobbying or referenda at the state level. And then, assuming success, to the federal level.
This strategy was an intelligent use of the comparatively decentralized structure of political power in the United States at the time. Prohibitionists would succeed in passing national legislation in the United States, but failed in the United Kingdom. This, according to J. Christopher Soper, was in part because of differences in government structure. He argues that “the weakness of the American national state and the absence of a coherent alcohol policy opened up myriad opportunities for meaningful local activism,” while “the relative strength of the British state meant that local regions had very little political autonomy which, in turn, discouraged local activism.”370 Temperance activists in the United States had many attainable nodes of power to seize for political leverage, a benefit their British counterparts lacked.
Though they mostly emphasized protest and legislation, the temperance movement did—like most movements that achieve any degree of success—employ a diversity of tactics. Suffragist Frances Willard used the slogan “Do Everything,” encouraging feminist activists to employ many different tactics on many fronts to advance the status of women. Direct action was used by militant people and groups in the American temperance movement, including the Women’s Temperance Crusade and the Citizens’ Law and Order League. These direct actionists would monitor saloons for liquor law violations. And if they saw violations—or if they simply wanted to shut down something they saw as evil—they would take action. Their tactics included both nonviolent occupations (such as taking over saloons to hold prayer meetings) and damaging or destroying property.371
Perhaps the most famous anti-liquor vigilante was Carrie Nation. She began, as most people do, on the less risky end of the tactical spectrum. She held protests at bars, singing hymns, and occasionally escalated to barbed insults directed at bartenders. This approach was not as effective as she had hoped. After a “heavenly vision” she escalated to smashing stockpiles of alcohol bottles with rocks.
Her (soon-to-be-ex-) husband jokingly remarked that she could do more damage with a hatchet. “That is the most sensible thing you have said since I married you,” she replied, and subsequently divorced him.372 From then on, she attacked bars and saloons using hatchets. She was arrested thirty times for her “hatchetations,” mostly in Kansas which had passed statewide prohibition but enforced it poorly. She was fined and reprimanded, but paid her fines through speaking fees and by selling souvenir hatchets.
Not everyone agreed with local gradualism. Many radicals saw the local approach as a waste of time, as a diversion. And so, Szymanski, explains “the radical prohibitionists adopted an abolitionist strategy, viewing total prohibition as the only appropriate solution to the liquor problem.”373 In the 1890s, the older and well-established national prohibition groups like the Prohibition Party and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) refused to consider an escalating strategy of local stepping-stones. “Rigid in their radicalism, the Prohibition Party and the WCTU failed to innovate, even though a more modest approach might have allowed them to continue leading the movement.”374 Instead, the relatively new Anti-Saloon League—an “upstart” group—took a leadership position through local gradualism and by recruiting “damp” individuals. Szymanski observes: “By adopting local gradualism instead of pursuing state-based prohibition, the dry movement charted a new course for itself, one which was slow, piecemeal, and extremely labor intensive.”375 But this work dramatically increased the size of the movement base.
The gradualist Anti-Saloon League’s “political strategy from the beginning was aimed at developing public support for prohibition.” This strategy would mobilize and consolidate the temperance movement, while maximizing the strengths of activists and the weaknesses of their opponents. In their own words—and in language that will resonate with any asymmetric strategist—the Anti-Saloon League “proposed to attack the liquor traffic first at the points of least resistance, namely, the country cross-roads, the townships, the villages, and the rural counties.” They didn’t just want easy symbolic victories; they were thinking about long-term movement building, and winning over available nodes of power. Again, in their own words, they sought “to use sentiment already in existence, crystallizing it for immediate use while at the same time by that very process creating more sentiment for the larger conflicts ahead.”376
Szymanski explains: “Intuitively, they knew that ‘nothing succeeds like success’ and that nothing makes more sentiment than the proper utilization of the sentiment which already exists.” Local successes built the organization, momentum, and courage needed to escalate.
Strategic Effectiveness
While controversial for radical drys, the gradualist approach was quite effective. During the progressive era, temperance organizations like the Anti-Saloon League worked their way from the local level up the state level, passing more than half of the referenda they proposed.377 The ASL leadership would only advance to a state referendum when the local efforts had demonstrated that success on the state level was likely. If not, they chose to battle elsewhere.378
As an example of this strategy’s mobilization potential, Szymanski compares WCTU membership in two demographically similar states: Pennsylvania and Illinois. WCTU membership in Pennsylvania tripled between 1905 and 1920, while Illinois membership stagnated. The difference? Pennsylvania adopted a strategy of local gradualism and was more moderate in its approach.379
Local gradualism could make progress regardless of whether legislative success was achieved or not. As Szymanski explains, “local gradualism involved more than simply acquiring dry territory; it was also a device for educating and radicalizing those who sympathized with the anti-liquor cause.”380 Which is to say, local gradualism helped turn moderates into radicals. Moderates would become radicalized as they saw the way the liquor lobby used dirty tricks—like bribery and political corruption—to fight restrictions on alcohol.
As these local struggles demonstrated the intransigence of the liquor lobby to moderates, there was growing potential for moderate-radical alliances. Szymanski explains that “as local efforts proved futile against an entrenched foe, movement leaders found it relatively easy to engage their moderate adherents in more radical state and national campaigns.”381
Success—and Failure
Objectively, the radical prohibitionists succeeded with the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment, which took effect in 1920 and began the era of national prohibition. Radical social change was put into law, paradoxically, because of the strength of a moderate approach.
Prohibitionists had extremely high—almost millennialist—expectations about the effect prohibition would have on society. One evangelist presided over a theatrical “funeral” for booze, proclaiming: “The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and corncribs.”382
On one hand, these aspirations are a reflection of the quasi-utopian beliefs that many radical movements use to motivate themselves. After all, it is worth going to jail—worth dedicating your life to struggle and sacrifice—if by doing so you can usher in a new age for humanity. People won’t risk as much if their only reward is a slim possibility of incremental improvement.
On the other hand, the preacher’s words show the misconceptions that result from blaming all social problems on individual morality. Prohibitionists like that preacher believed that slums and prisons existed mostly because of the personal moral corruption caused by alcohol, not by systemic social or economic injustices.
Prohibition, of course, ultimately failed. Partly, that failure represented a failure to address the root problems behind issues of prisons and poverty (like capitalism, racism, and so on). More to the point, prohibition was simply unenforceable. Regular people ignored and defied it; ironically, the result of that successful movement was an informal kind of civil disobedience. And—like any attempt at large-scale restriction of human behavior—prohibition had unintended consequences, smuggling and a boost in organized crime among them.
All that said, the temperance movement’s use of local gradualism, and the dynamics between different wings of the movement, can teach us a lot. Szymanski argues that the civil rights movement employed a similar strategy. And some current organizations—like the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund I discussed in chapter 2—are using a strategy rather like local gradualism, and with considerable success so far.
MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY CHINESE REBELLIONS
We learn from every campaign, and we grow. Sometimes the process of learning and strategic escalation happens over months or years, but sometimes it takes decades or even centuries.
That’s a history of resistance we can see in China, and China offers us a great many movements and struggles to learn from. I’m going to focus here on the period of upheaval after the First Opium War (which ended in 1842).
The First Opium War caused enormous suffering and unrest in China. It was triggered by events in the 1700s, when British (and later American) corporations began to demand Chinese products like tea, silk, and porcelain. Chinese markets did not have the same demand for European goods, resulting in a trade deficit that the British tried to balance by selling opium in China.383 Opium, however, was soon banned in China, with government and moral authorities arguing that opium was a poison that destroyed lives and communities. Western corporations reacted to the ban by smuggling the drug across the border.
In the late 1830s, China’s ruling Qing government got fed up, arrested smugglers en masse, and seized their opium. So the British government declared war on China and sent fleets to ravage the coast until China surrendered. China was forced to accept opium imports, to give up Hong Kong, and to pay reparations to the British for the cost of the war and for lost profits. This amounted to twenty-one million silver dollars, plus interest. (Even this enormous amount of silver would soon appear tiny compared to the amount flowing out of the country to pay for forcibly imported opium.)
China was facing internal troubles aside from opium. Between 1751 and 1851, the population of China had more than doubled, reaching 432 million people. But the amount of arable land under cultivation had increased by only 8 percent.384 As the population grew, land was subdivided into smaller and smaller plots. At the same time, landlords operating under the traditional power structure continued to hoard wealth and annex land whenever they could. It was becoming almost impossible for a family to subsist on an average-sized plot of land.
By the 1840s, regular people in China were being crushed between the demands of foreign capitalism on one hand and “feudal” landlords on the other.385 The huge demand for silver on a national level intensified exploitation all the way down the social hierarchy. Unrest grew. In the 1700s there had been secret resistance networks like the White Lotus Society. But those were miniscule compared to the upheaval which was about to begin.
A group of Chinese historians wrote: “Where there is oppression, there is resistance. In the 1840s there were uprisings of peasants and handicraft workers everywhere, and the minority nationalities also rebelled. In the space of 10 years there were well over 100 uprisings, ranging from struggles against the payment of levies, taxes and rents, and the delivery of grain to landlords, to assaults on cities, and the occupation of territory. Most of these uprisings were initiated and organized by the popular, anti-dynastic secret societies.”386
And indeed, beyond local peasant uprisings and tax revolts, there were a number of large-scale rebellions through the 1850s and 1860s in China. (I’ve shown these on a simplified map of Qing-era China in figure 12-3.) There was a substantial and long-lasting Muslim rebellion around this time in Yunnan in the south, and another in Shaanxi and Gansu provinces in the northwest. There was a tribal uprising called the Miao Revolt in Hunan and Guizhou provinces, the third such uprising in 120 years. And tensions between the Hakka and Punti ethnic groups, exacerbated by population density and economic strain in Guangdong province, caused a clan war that killed around a million people over several years.
But I’m going to focus here on two long-lasting uprisings that caused the greatest political challenge to the ruling Qing Dynasty: the simultaneous Taiping and Nien Rebellions.
Origins of Rebellion
The two rebellions had distinct causes and origins. The Taipings were founded by Hung Hsiu-chuan, a Hakka dissident who fused elements of pseudo-Christianity, Taoism, and proto-communism to form a new spiritual ideology and revolutionary movement. Starting in 1851 in southern China with one hundred fighters (as shown on the map), the movement soon became an army of ten thousand marching northeast across China, expropriating wealth from the landlords and taking cities and territory.387 Three years later, a host of a million people reached the gates of the city of Nanjing and took it. They renamed the city “Tienching,” meaning “Heavenly Capital.”
The Nien Rebellion had a very different beginning. Centered north of the Taipings, the Nien fighters had their roots in rag-tag groups of salt smugglers, bandits, and displaced peasants. Their organization also drew on local militia groups that arose in some parts of China while the central Qing government was weak. Some militia groups—which protected villages from raiders—became big enough to sustain themselves through local taxation.388 Nien rebels also had connections to surviving remnants of the White Lotus Society.389
Between 1851 and 1855 the massive Huang He (Yellow) River flooded on a biblical scale. The river writhed across eastern China, killing thousands of people and destroying thousands of square kilometers of crops. By the time the river settled down, it ran a fundamentally different course, its ocean mouth relocated several hundred kilometers northward. The Qing government, nearly bankrupt from war reparations and busy putting down new rebellions, offered little aid or relief to those affected. Ecological disaster was the last straw after generations of economic misery for the Nien rebels.
The Nien rebels were smaller in number than the Taipings; their fighters numbered perhaps a few tens of thousands at any given time. But they would develop clever tactics, and their experience as smugglers and raiders maximized their impact.
The two rebellions had very different uniting ideologies. The Taiping rebels were bold and ambitious in seeking to abolish traditional social hierarchies and bring about major land reform. They fought for women’s rights and gender equality.390 They also desired spiritual transformation, of both themselves as individuals and of their country. The Nien, on the other hand, lacked a broader program of clear social justice goals or a single coherent ideology. They were motivated by practical concerns: their people were starving.
The Nien rebels’ operational and strategic goals were guided directly by their people’s hunger. They needed food, and they got it in part by raiding Qing cities and government convoys (since the government fed mostly troops and refused to help civilians). They also encouraged grain production in their own lands.391
The Nien homeland was filled with fortified villages called “earthwall communities.” These walled villages could protect the people and their food stockpiles within. Nien leaders used food as part of their efforts to win over villages in the countryside; recruitment happened on a community- by-community basis, since the villages were relatively autonomous. Siang-tseh Chiang explains that “the Nien policy was to take advantage of every opportunity to assume leadership in the countryside and, in so doing, to isolate the cities.”392 He adds that, despite their mobility in combat, “[i]t is a mistake to assume that the Nien were roaming bandits. They settled within fortified nests, which they strove to safeguard at any price.”393 Because of their emphasis on food, the Nien took a seasonal approach to combat, ranging and raiding for part of the year, and then returning home during the harvest season to protect the fields and reap their crops.394
The Taipings aimed for social transformation; when their army took a city, any “loot” went into the public treasury. In 1853, they published an ambitious plan to abolish the landlord system and to redistribute land according to yields. This plan wasn’t fully carried out, but rent in many adjacent areas was reduced or eliminated and landlords were forced to stop using hired goons to collect rent.395
Organization and Strategy
The Nien and Taiping movements differed greatly in their organizational and strategic approaches. The Nien operated mostly in the vicinity of their homeland, while the Taipings marched huge armies thousands of kilometers, taking major cities and dispatching military expeditions across China. The Nien fielded relatively small militia units with an emphasis on cavalry and mobility, avoiding enemy concentrations. The Taipings mobilized millions of combatants, using infantry to take and hold cities, and engaging in siege warfare both as attackers and defenders. The Nien were loosely organized, and drew heavily on existing family and community networks for their structure, while the Taipings had a clear political and military hierarchy with well-defined units and command structures. The Taipings published political manifestos and florid religious declarations, and were fond of issuing fancy titles to leaders. The Nien wrote virtually nothing about themselves or their ideology.
As Siang-tseh Chiang explains, the Nien were scattered at first: “Before 1853, the primary organization of the Nien was that of numerous bands, with which the leaders sought to satisfy their followers’ desires for material gain or for vengeance. Since undertakings such as smuggling, robbery, and fighting between communities were not pursued without interruption and were not concentrated in a single area, the bands ‘pinched together’ for those purposes were bound to be dispersed in location. Any individual Nien member who, with a certain adventurous aim in mind, was capable of ‘pinching’ together a certain number into a band could claim that he was in possession of a nien.”
But as unrest grew in China, the Nien chose to develop a tighter organization and established a general leadership. Around 1856, a firmer structure coalesced which grouped fighters into units under a system of colored banners. Still, they remained less formally organized than the Taipings, heavily dependent on individual initiative and on the bonds produced by clans and families. This organizational flexibility gave them a strength that the Taipings sometimes lacked, with one observer noting that Taiping armies “would collapse in the event the commander was slain.”396
Perhaps the greatest difference between the two groups was in their choice of tactics and approach to combat. The Taipings wanted to seize and hold cities. Their whole military was organized to this aim, with the enormous armies (and the huge logistical base) this required. The Taipings were expansionist, though their failure to establish functional organization in some cities they occupied meant that they quickly lost their early territorial gains after marching on.397 The Nien were not interested in occupying cities. If they took a city, they would break open the granary and the prisons, liberating both food and prisoners. But after raiding, they would leave the city and return home.398
The Nien approach to combat emphasized the mobility they gained from having fighters on horseback. They would use scout horses to keep watch for government forces and to avoid targets they could not defeat. The journals of Qing military leaders record their frustration that the Nien avoided their strongest forces and staged surprise attacks on the weakest ones, never giving Qing forces a chance to fight a pitched battle.399
Governor-general Liu Ch’ang-Yu bemoaned the elusive nature of the Nien cavalry: “The bandits never fight to the death, nor do they linger on the battlefield. As soon as we definitely locate their traces, they dash off or melt away to either side.”400 If attacked, the Nien would flee, going just slow enough for enemy infantry to pursue, but not so fast that their own horses would become exhausted. Then, after the enemy was wearied from several days of marching, the Nien would suddenly turn and counterattack.401
Late in the rebellion, the Nien used scorched-earth tactics. All food was stored in fortified villages, wells were plugged, leaving only empty fields. Government armies were hesitant to enter Nien territory, since it would require them to carry their own food, water, and other supplies. Overburdened government troops would be vulnerable to lightning-fast cavalry attacks and ambushes.402
Because of their location, the Nien forces would sometimes cut supply lines between Beijing and Qing armies attacking Taiping territory. (There had been a water route called the Grand Canal which passed from Beijing to near Tienching, but it was severed by the convulsions of the Huang He River.)
None of this is to say that the Taipings were not also innovative in their tactics. Indeed, their relative weakness was one of the reasons they overcame traditional beliefs against women fighting, and it forced them to be more creative in general. Historian Bruce A. Elleman elaborates:
For example, in taking the small town of Yung-an Zhou on 25 September 1851—the first walled town to be controlled by the Taipings—the Taiping commander, Lo Dagang, ordered his troops to light firecrackers and throw them over the city wall as if there were explosives. In the midst of the ensuing panic, the Taipings scaled the city wall and occupied the town virtually unopposed. Eighteen months later, while advancing down the Yangzi River on Nanjing, the Taipings filled empty ships with mud and rocks and sent them downstream past the Imperial garrisons. Only after the Imperial troops exhausted their ammunition on the decoys did the real Taiping ships appear. In traditional Chinese fashion, based on Sunzi’s Art of War, the Taipings also took care to use the terrain to their advantage. Once they were forced to evacuate, the Taipings ambushed the Imperial forces along narrow mountain paths, where their superior weapons and horses did them little good.403
Prior to their attack on Nanjing, the Taipings smuggled some three thousand fighters into the city disguised as Buddhist monks; once inside, they acted as saboteurs and spies, using torches to signal weak points in the walls. Before their main assault, the Taipings secretly dug three tunnels and placed explosive caches under the walls. They feinted with an “attack” of paper effigies carrying torches as a distraction to draw defenders to the wall. When the defenders lined the walls to gaze out at the effigies, the Taipings detonated their explosives, killing many defenders and opening a hole to march through.404
But despite their use of creative and surprising tactics, the Taipings were still limited by their type of mass combat and by a lack of trained and experienced officers.405 Enormous sieges and infantry battles rarely end in favor of resistance forces. The Taipings won their early successes in part because of support from the peasants for their social justice message, partly because of the weakness of the overwhelmed Qing state, and partly because of their audacious initiative.
But after they took Nanjing, they decided to pause; instead of advancing to take the capital of Beijing, they waited. They lost the initiative. Many historians believe this was a terrible strategic mistake, perhaps the worst single error the Taipings made.406 Instead of decapitating the Qing regime when they had the chance, they held back. And their hesitation gave the Qing state the time it needed to regroup and to seek military aid from overseas.
Defeat
On the surface, things still looked good for the various rebels. They controlled much of the country, had many millions of supporters, and had been very successful with their creative tactics. So what went wrong?
The Nien and Taipings would both be defeated in the end, but by different means and for different reasons. The Taipings were the first to fall. Some of their problems were internal; though they aspired to a new and spiritual life, many leaders fell into the same bad habits as the previous rulers. Professor Ssu-yü Teng argues “political corruption was the fundamental cause of the failure of the Taipings. After Nanking was conquered, the leaders began to live extravagant, indolent, and licentious lives, with a harem of women, contrary to the avowed platform of monogamy. [Their founder] Hung lived as a Taoist emperor who was not bothered either by state affairs or by foreign dignitaries.”407 This corruption filtered down to middle leadership, and morale among the rank and file suffered greatly. Ssu-yü Teng also argues that the movement was weakened by internal arguments between leaders, each of whom wanted to increase their status.408
Though the rigidly hierarchal nature of the movement allowed it to rapidly establish itself in new territory and win early military successes, it was a pseudo-religious hierarchy without accountability. The movement leaders were not elected, nor the grassroots consulted about general policy. After all, why would you need to consult regular people when your orders are being passed down from God?
Yes, hierarchy can strengthen an armed movement engaged in daily life-and-death struggle. But the inability of the lower ranks to recall bad leaders, or hold those leaders accountable, left the rank and file at the mercy of eventual corruption and incompetence in the higher ranks.
In addition to their internal schisms, the Taipings were unable to make allies externally because of their ideology. Aspects of Taiping theology were quite strange both to Christian and traditional Chinese beliefs. Many of the Taiping leadership distrusted people—like the Nien or Muslim rebels—who were unwilling to convert to the Taiping’s own religious ideology. 409 Taiping leaders continued to push their abstract religious ideals even as their practical program of economic equality faltered.
Professor Ssu-yü Teng argues: “The Taiping ideology, a combination of Christian, Confucian, and Taoist ideas intermingled with some attempt at a primitive Communism and some intention of abolishing Chinese traditions and superstitions, was theoretically not bad at all.” But, he points out, the leaders didn’t follow it, and the majority of peasants either didn’t agree with it or didn’t understand it.410 That said, they did recruit millions of participants successfully, and aspects of their ideology had more potential for broad unification than that of the Nien or the Muslim revolts.411
In general, however, the Taiping’s extensive goals for social justice and political revolution made them a threat to almost every established system of power. As James DeFronzo explains, “their sweeping attacks on all three of China’s main religions (Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism) . . . provoked opposition from many traditionalist Chinese strongly influenced by their religious training.”412 And China’s wealthier class faced both an ideological and an economic threat from the Taipings; of course the wealthy supported the movement’s violent repression.
The Taiping emphasis on holding and fortifying cities—rather than rural guerrilla warfare—was a dangerous strategy during a time of national famine. The cities—fortified but immobile—made promising targets which the Qing armies could attack when and where they pleased. And people trapped in a city under siege do not plant crops or cultivate fields; starvation inevitably weakened the defenders.
The Taipings also represented an enormous threat to foreign industrial capitalists with investments in China. As a result, foreign powers (Britain and France) intervened to support the Qing state with imported firearms and mercenaries. This made the military defeat of the rebellion and the execution of its leaders almost inevitable once the conflict entered its final stage.
The Taiping Rebellion and its repression resulted in somewhere between twenty and thirty million deaths.413 By way of comparison, this is far larger than the roughly concurrent Irish Potato Famine, which killed about one million people. This number of deaths is in the same magnitude as the First World War, which would kill about fifteen million people, or the Nazi Holocaust at around seventeen million.
Only after the Taiping defeat did the Qing government turn their focus to putting down the other rebellions. The situation for the Nien began to change when Qing representatives started to gather intelligence about the Nien, and came to understand that the Nien actually had a homeland and did not simply move around constantly. Then the Qing began—in a process reminiscent of any counterinsurgency program from colonial Kenya to Iraq—to separate the insurgents from their base of support.
Early attacks on Nien territory emphasized destroying village fortifications. But the Qing strategy shifted to divide and conquer, as the governor of Anhwei (Ch’iao Sung-nien) explained: “The extermination of outlaws depends on whether the government is able to separate the wheat from the chaff, not on the destruction of earthwalls. While former rebellious earthwall communities have already been destroyed, loyal ones should be spared.”
The Qing rewarded villages for cooperation, especially when villages offered up Nien fighters for execution. Non-cooperative chiefs were punished (often killed) and replaced.414 (A related approach was used against the Muslim revolts in western China, with the state distinguishing between “good” and “bad” Muslims, and using mass violence to enforce cooperation.)
After the defeat of the Taipings, a massive number of troops were brought into Nien territory, far more than Nien fighters could have defeated in a pitched battle. The Qing troops drove out the fighters and occupied the villages. These enormous garrisons were stationary. Refusing to be lured by the false retreats of the Nien cavalry, the Qing garrisons simply waited, using their great numerical advantage.415
The Nien fighters made numerous attempts to return home, but were repelled by the same earthwalls that had once sheltered them. Without a base for supplies or recuperation—and facing the superior Western arms that had been freed up from battle with the Taipings—the isolated Nien fighters were mopped up or dispersed.416
Legacy of Rebellion
Despite their military defeat, mid-nineteenth-century rebellions laid the groundwork for more successful revolts and revolutions later on. As DeFronzo explains, the Nien Rebellion “provided the peasants of central China with a tradition that helped prepare them culturally to support and participate in the Communist-led peasant revolution of the twentieth century.”417 This culture of resistance inspired future revolutionaries in ways both subtle and overt. Sun Yat-Sen, the strategist and revolutionary thinker whose work was a cornerstone for twentieth-century revolts that would end the Qing dynasty for good, was inspired in part by a surviving veteran of the Taiping army.
One of the lessons I take from this history is that resistance efforts—even if they fail objectively—are never wasted. Even a smothered fire may contain embers to spark another flame. Veterans of a struggle can keep a culture of resistance alive until the “material conditions” make revolution more favorable, or until a more effective strategy is devised.
Twentieth-century uprisings in China—like the Republican/Kuomintang uprising that destroyed the Qing dynasty, and the revolution in which the Communists finally took power in 1949—won because they learned from the unsuccessful revolts of the past. Of course, neither the Republican/Kuomintang uprising or the Chinese Communist Revolution truly fulfilled their promises of liberation (which can be said of many revolutions). So we must learn from the ways revolutions succeed and the ways they fail.
The Kuomintang and the Communists achieved success through political and military organization that was superior to the Taipings and the Nien. But the crucial changes were ideological. The Kuomintang were nationalists, and nationalism can have much broader appeal than religious sectarianism. The Communists were even more effective in their efforts to forge a shared identity. They were able to combine some nationalism (especially against the Japanese occupiers in World War II) with class-based unity and the strong ties produced by common revolutionary sacrifice and struggle.
And the Communist emphasis on propaganda and connection with the grassroots made them highly successful at recruiting supporters and members. They appealed to people through abstract religious manifestos, but in a way that fused immediate and tangible goals (e.g., food and economic reform) with grander revolutionary and historical ideals. That is something we can learn from, despite their faults.
Some historians have argued that the Taiping and Nien and other rebellions could have succeeded, had they been able to unify or join their struggles. Certainly the geography was promising, with rebel territory at times almost totally separating the Qing capital (and homeland of Manchuria) from the rest of China. I don’t know if they could have won. The famine that motivated revolts in Eastern China and the intervention of foreign powers were serious obstacles to success.
But there is little doubt that they would have been more successful if they had been able to work together and to coordinate more effectively. There were ideological challenges to that goal, but such challenges can sometimes be overcome. History offers us lessons on how to build successful alliances and coalitions.
ALLIANCES AND COALITIONS
I’ve argued in this book that many parts of a movement can be complementary even if they aren’t formally working together. But sometimes clearer alliances and coalitions are called for. Coalitions—even temporary as they mostly are—have many benefits. They can build strong movements by strengthening ties between different groups and their members. They can allow those groups to share resources and information. And though they typically aren’t as militant as the most militant members would prefer, they can also help to radicalize participants.
Coalitions can help movements to avoid divide-and-conquer repression while generating greater political force than their constituent groups.
Not all coalitions are formal bodies with joint mission statements or board meetings. Indeed, some coalitions are loose networks bound by weak ties. Katja M. Guenther, analyzing feminist coalitions in Germany, found that weak coalitions have an important place and that “they are often built at the individual, rather than the organizational, level. The weakness of these coalitions is a condition for their success. Weak coalitions do not require full recognition and discussion of identities, ideologies, and goals.” Weak coalitions avoid the conflict that can emerge in more formal coalitions when strong ideologies and identities clash.
What makes a coalition successful in forming and doing its work? Decades of social movement research give us some pretty clear factors.418
Ideological alignment and shared goals. To succeed, coalitions must have a common purpose. And members must have enough ideological overlap to see themselves as on the same side, and to share some mechanisms for collaboration. Edwina Barvosa-Carter explains: “A well-functioning coalition requires organizers and members to find (or create) shared issues that will form the common ground for intra-group communication, decision making, and action.”419
She uses the example of the Spanish Coalition for Jobs, a Chicago coalition which formed in the early 1970s to campaign against racist anti- Latinx hiring practices by the government and by companies like Illinois Bell. Some of their component groups wanted to negotiate, and some to protest; the coalition allowed each group to use its preferred tactic, and the result was success.
A basis of shared culture or identity is helpful for coalitions, but sometimes that shared culture is developed through cooperation and joint action. In any case, it is diversity that makes coalitions strong, and effective coalitions have effective decision-making and conflict-resolution methods that allow differing perspectives to create some shared plan of action.420
Prior social ties and bridge builders. Just as people are more likely to join a resistance group if they already have social ties to its members, coalitions and alliances typically depend on preexisting relationships.
For example, Jerold M. Starr, learning from Pittsburgh’s Alliance for Progressive Action (founded in 1991), explains that the alliance’s “organizers approached the task more from an interpersonal than an ideological perspective. Rather than seeking to build coalitions around issues that share certain principles or a common target, these organizers emphasized recruiting organizers who were practical and easy to work with. And they focused their strategy on long-term base building in which trust slowly was earned by helping with others’ actions.”421
This makes sense, since a single really difficult person in a position of power can ruin a whole coalition. The North-West Rebellion might have succeeded, after all, if Riel hadn’t wielded so much control.
Zoltan Grossman, who studied environmental coalitions between Indigenous people and rural settlers, observed: “The initial contact between two communities is almost always made by key individuals whose social position or family history has brought them into contact with both groups.”422
These people are called “bridge builders.” The term is used by Fred Rose, who found “bridge builders played a critical role in helping environmental, labor, and peace organizations overcome class divides that made it difficult for them to collaborate.”423
Benita Roth summarizes that bridge builders “moved not just between social movement organizations and unorganized constituencies, but also among different movements in one locale. Rose found that bridgebuilding activists tended to be older and experienced in both movement and local electoral politics; that had additionally mastered various styles of communication and were able to adjust their discourse to the appropriate (class) setting.”424 Judi Bari is a perfect example of a bridge builder.
The Taipings and Nien didn’t have these strong social ties, but they did benefit from the next factor.
Crisis and tangible goals. An emergency—and ideally, a common enemy—is very important for forming alliances and coalitions. Dina G. Okamoto observed that Asian American panethnic coalitions after the civil rights era were driven in part by an apparent increase in anti-Asian violence.425 Elizabeth Borland observed similar effects for the women’s movement in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during the 1980s and 1990s. She explains that “faced with economic crisis and the possibility of losing ground in its long-standing battle to address gender inequalities, external threats brought activists and groups together. But in addition, three related internal elements—bridge builders, prior social ties, and common ideology—were activated in this period.”426
Borland adds: “The external crisis acted like a catalyst, activating those internal elements by making cooperative activism seem both more necessary and more feasible.”427 (This has much in common with what Jo Freeman suggested about resistance communications networks that could be activated by crisis.) Borland warns, however: “Crises alone do not create coalitions or other kinds of alliances. Activists seeking to cooperate must translate the crisis moment into fertile ground for a coalition, and this process is fraught with difficulty.”428
In other words, a crisis can help us mobilize, but we still need to organize; and a crisis is most useful when we have organized in advance.
The threat or emergency is often something concrete and tangible. Zoltan Grossman analyzed several examples of Indigenous groups aligned with rural settlers (such as farmers, ranchers, and anglers) who fought against a common enemy such as mining, development, and military weapons testing, with a fair amount of success. Prior to the danger the Indigenous people and settlers had been involved in tense disagreements over land use, but their relationships “gradually evolved into successful coalitions to protect the same natural resources from an outside environmental threat. In short, the users of the natural resources ultimately felt that if they continued arguing over fish, there would be none left to argue about.”429
Site 41 was another illustration of that phenomenon. Linda Bruce and Kate Harries explain: “Local ministers came with their congregation members for prayer circles, combined with traditional Anishinabe prayers. Tolerance and acceptance of others became the unexpected lasting byproduct of the common goal to protect the water.”430
Political opportunity. Coalitions can form to fight a common threat, as above, or they can form because they see a common opportunity, such as a weakness of those in power. A number of the groups I discussed back in the organization chapter benefited from periods of broad crises like wars and economic instability to push for political changes that would have been impossible during “stable” times.431
Plentiful resources. Some researchers and historians found that coalitions can be more successful when member organizations have adequate resources. That is, they aren’t competing for resources—especially funding—with each other.432
Plentiful resources can certainly be helpful creating cooperative, rather than competitive, relationships between groups. Such resources can also help groups to set up joint organizational or conflict resolution capacity. That said, excessive reliance on outside resources can be harmful to a group’s community accountability (the Nonprofit Industrial Complex) and to its strategic capacity (as discussed in the next section). And of course, there are plenty of cases of successful coalitions which operated on a shoestring, without ample funding.
Coalitions and alliances are not always appealing. The time is not always right. Sometimes the requisite factors—or mutual trust and respect—are not present. But sometimes the obstacle is a matter of identity.
Benita Roth argues that, dating back to the 1960s, many leftist groups have avoided joint organizing for ideological reasons. Rather than reaching out, they have been motivated by what she calls the “ethos of organizing one’s own.” She cites an early occurrence in the decision by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to kick out white activists. This choice, she explains, “the result of the influx of white volunteers into the organization in the wake of Freedom Summer, were (and still are) seen as sanctioning the New Left idea that the most authentic, and therefore most radical, forms of activism involved fighting one’s own oppression.”433
Roth argues that “in the 1960s and 1970s, brakes were put on coalition formation by feminists across racial/ethnic lines by activist notions of good politics. Despite elements of an overlapping feminist agenda, coalition formation was not prioritized. Indeed, as feminists organized in different racial/ethnic oppositional communities, coalition was deemed to be inauthentic and unwise strategy; cross-racial feminist organizing was seen as simultaneously impossible and, if possible, dangerous to the cause.”434
This idea became commonly accepted in left milieus. “Within a cycle of social protest, ideas may be current that are irresistible to activists, whether or not they are well suited to their ultimate intentions.”435 Roth speculates: “The ethos of organizing one’s own may have also represented a way of managing competing demands on their time and loyalty as activists, but subscribing to it was not, I argue, primarily a matter of strategy; subscription was a matter of belief, of wisdom received from previous experiences on the left. Focusing on organizing one’s own meant that efforts toward coalition were at the very least downplayed, and at the most held to be politically suspect. The failure of emerging feminists to form coalitions across racial/ethnic divides was due to extrarational calculations—that is to say, ideas about the truly authentic way to organize as radical women.”436
So the anti-coalition attitude was not so much about weighing the pros and cons of coalition organizing; it was about radical identity. It was about prioritizing identity over long-term strategy. And, Roth explains, “coalitions represent challenges to activists’ identities.”437 She notes: “The disparagement of coalition formation was not the result of strategic decision making, but resulted from activists holding to a set of ideological directives about how to do politics the right way. Instead of working together on shared political goals, feminist women in different racial/ethnic communities invested in forms of organizing that highlighted the perceived necessity of maintaining difference in organizing.”438
On some level this “ethos of organizing one’s own” is perhaps also a response to growing fragmentation of social movements. It’s also an expression of strategy follows structure; that assumptions about how to organize can curtail a movement’s options before it has even decided on its goals.
But joint organizing, alliances, and coalitions have many potential benefits in the right situations. Among them, the ability to greatly enhance a movement’s strategic capacity.
STRATEGIC CAPACITY AND THE UFW
In the 1960s there were 400,000 farmworkers in California, many of them migrant laborers working under harsh and sometimes dangerous conditions without job security or unions. The highly seasonal nature of harvesting made it difficult for these farmworkers—many of whom belonged to marginalized groups and were not US citizens—to organize. There had been attempts to unionize them for sixty years. But those efforts failed, even when run by well-established unions with ample resources.
Things changed because of the United Farm Workers, a small, upstart union which rapidly gained traction and members in the early 1960s. By the 1970s, they had more than fifty thousand dues paying members, and established legislation in California giving farmworkers collective bargaining rights.439 The United Farm Workers succeeded at the same time as the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC, an offshoot of the large AFL-CIO) foundered.
“Why did the insurgent United Farm Workers (UFW) succeed while its better-resourced rival [AWOC] failed?” asks Marshall Ganz. Ganz (who was also responsible for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign strategy) participated in the UFW organizing at the time and wrote about it decades later. He argues that conventional explanations for why social movements succeed are woefully inadequate.
“Social scientists tend to account for these events,” he notes, “by arguing one version or another of ‘the time for change was right’ while many historians attribute success to the intervention of gifted, charismatic individuals.”440 Certainly charismatic people are often present; in the case of UFW, people like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. But that explanation is not enough.
Ganz writes: “Students of strategic leadership . . . even in management, military, and political studies, focus more on what leaders do and how strategy works than on explaining why leaders of some organizations devise more effective strategy than others. Popular accounts of insurgent success attribute effective strategy to uniquely gifted leaders rather than offering systematic accounts of conditions under which leaders are more or less likely to devise effective strategy.”441
Some groups are intrinsically better at coming up with good strategies. Ganz calls this “strategic capacity.” According to Ganz, strategic capacity is critical to resistance victories; it is what allows marginal groups with limited resources to flourish and win. Ganz identifies specific factors responsible for strategic capacity. But the lessons he learned will make more sense if we first take a quick look at the early victories of the United Farm Workers.
Origins and Leadership
The two main unions active in farmworker struggle in the 1960s had very different structures and approaches. The Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC) was created by the AFL-CIO in 1959. It used a top-down bureaucratic approach with traditional tactics focusing on short-term wins. Ganz explains: “Its principle tactics—organizing at early morning pickup sites . . . for wage strikes, exercising insider political pressure, and recruiting through labor contractors—extended a familiar repertoire of conventional labor union tactics that had served in quite different historical settings.”442 AWOC’s first phase ended when it threatened violence against nonunion migrant workers brought in through the Federal Bracero Program. Several AWOC leaders were arrested. The committee was officially shut down when AFL-CIO auditors found other problems on the books.
The second AWOC phase was a brief, unofficial team which organized in the aftermath on the grassroots level. They convened area councils around local community concerns and networked with farmworkers and supporters. Their success, ironically, meant that in 1962 the AFL-CIO sent in another “professional” team to take over and return to the old-school organizing style.443
The UFW had a much different history, rooted in a predecessor movement called the Farm Workers Association (FWA, founded in 1962). Emerging from the grassroots, FWA organizers believed that previous direct action efforts had failed because they lacked a long-term organizational base. Rather than focusing on dramatic but ephemeral action, they decided to build their support and organizational capacity for five years before engaging in large-scale confrontational direct action. In their first three years they built up social services (including a death benefit), a newspaper, a credit union, and a small staff along with a membership of some 1,500. (They also engaged in occasional rent strikes and small work stoppages, demonstrating a good grasp of a diversity of tactics.)444
The two unions had very different approaches to leadership and strategy development. Marshall Ganz summarizes the AWOC leadership: “All were white men, age 52 or over, with extensive union backgrounds and experience at ‘insider’ politics. . . . A generation of ‘union men’ who valued ‘legitimate’ ways to do union work and had little understanding of workers different from themselves or of a public whose support they would need. They had no biographical experience of the farmworker community, few sociocultural networks reaching beyond their milieu (much less into the farmworker community) and tactical repertoires learned by organizing people like themselves in circumstances far different from those they now faced.”445
Ganz observes: “The composition of the FWA leadership team was far different from that of the AWOC, combining insiders and outsiders, those with strong and weak ties, and a diversity of salient repertoires. The FWA strategy was developed by leaders who were Mexican and Mexican American men and women mostly under 25, whose lives were rooted in the farmworker community but extended well beyond it—such as Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and Gilbert Padilla. . . . FWA leaders thus drew on life experience that combined ‘local knowledge’ of the farmworker world with experience in military service, college, small business, and professional organizing. . . . The leadership of the FWA also had a deep personal interest in finding ways to succeed at what was a personal mission. Not only had they come from farmworker backgrounds, they had given up secure jobs and other opportunities to risk building a new organization from the ground up.”446
The FWA developed creative and inclusive approaches to strategic discussion. They had regular board meetings with clear agendas, as well as separate strategy sessions. They used their social ties—along with advisory councils—to gather input and ideas from many different sources, especially farmworkers and allies. The AWOC, in contrast, had irregular closed meetings without agendas and did not set aside time for strategic visioning.447
The two organizations were also structurally different. The AWOC was funded from the outside by the AFL-CIO, while the FWA was supported by dues and volunteers from the membership they had cultivated. Ganz explains: “Resources flowed from the top down within the AWOC, motivating the development of strategies that would satisfy those at the top, while the FWA’s financial and human resources flowed upward, motivating the development of strategies that could yield the needed resources.”448
Because AWOC did not rely on dues from the people it was attempting to organize, it was not accountable to them. And so the leadership had little motivation to build a strong organizational base or effective strategy. “AWOC leaders had the resources to keep making the same mistakes, as long as the people at the top were satisfied.”449
The Delano Grape Strike
The FWA’s original plan to focus on organizing for the first five years was interrupted by an unexpected opportunity in 1965. A small strike among Filipino workers (supported by AWOC) created excitement and potential for mobilization among Mexican workers. The FWA was worried about committing to a lengthy strike because of its limited resources, but decided to take the risk of a strike, anyway.
The AWOC relied mostly on stationary pickets; striking farmworkers would picket only the farms they worked on. The FWA (now renamed the National Farm Workers Association) did not have the resources for a strike fund and so could not afford to adopt stationary, defensive tactics. Indeed, the first day of the NFWA strike “only 100 to 200 activists reported to begin picketing. Realizing that an effective strike would require the participation of many more workers than these 200, the NFWA devised the ‘roving picket lines’ tactic.”450
Which is to say, they seized the initiative with mobile and short-duration actions. “Car caravans of pickets arrived at grape fields waving flags and banners, called the workers out of the fields, and then moved on to the next location. With the ‘roving picket line,’ a relatively small core of NFWA activists could sustain the strike longer—and with less money—than anyone expected. They became the core of a full-time activist cadre, many of whom would become organizers.”451
Specifically because the NFWA lacked a strike fund, they had to reach out and build strong relationships with other organizations to provide funds and volunteer assistance. (The AWOC, with its own “legitimate” funding sources, did not deign to do this.)
The fact that the NFWA was so poor in financial resources forced organizers to take a creative and aggressive approach to expansion and organizing. And because their movement was run on a shoestring, expansion of members was cheap. As Marshall Ganz explains: “To retain the support of the strikers, NFWA leaders believed they had to share the strikers’ level of sacrifice, which meant strike benefits of $1.00 per week (later $5.00 per week) and food orders from a strike ‘store.’ . . . Because of their depth of personal commitment, NFWA officers moved to Delano, became full-time volunteers, and supported themselves as strikers—which, in turn, deepened their commitment to winning the strike and made it easier for them to claim similar levels of commitment from others.”452
Ganz adds “because the cost per person was so low (food, a bed, $1.00 per week), the NFWA could relatively easily add full-time volunteers, and it began accepting students and religious activists who came to Delano to join the strike on the same terms. By enabling large numbers of people to volunteer, the NFWA developed a new talent pool on which it could draw for the myriad new responsibilities that had begun to emerge. Expansion of this cadre . . . made it possible for the NFWA to field large numbers of full-time ‘troops’ for strike, boycott, and political activities.”453
Making the NFWA relatively open to new people “facilitated the emergence of new leadership that, in turn, expanded, enriched, and altered the composition of the original NFWA leadership group, in ways that further enhanced its strategic capacity.”454 And finally, “these choices led to the emergence of a ‘charismatic community’ based on ‘vows of voluntary poverty’ that shared an almost religious commitment to winning the strike.”455
As the strike proceeded, the courts and police cracked down on organizers, passing injunctions against strikers. The NFWA treated these injunctions as opportunities for civil disobedience and outreach, openly violating injunctions in ways that got attention and echoed the nonviolent strategy used by many in the contemporaneous civil rights movement. The AWOC did not participate in such actions on “the advice of its AFL-CIO lawyers to avoid costly legal entanglements . . . The NFWA, in contrast, based its response on the advice of volunteer civil rights lawyers, a far wider tactical repertoire, and great willingness to take risks.”456
The NFWA’s growing media profile and effectiveness also helped to raise funds. But as the end of the harvest season approached without clear victories, there was clear danger for the young organization. Once the grape harvest was over, and their labor was not needed, the seasonal workers couldn’t create leverage through strikes. So they decided to diversify their tactics even more, and to escalate.
Boycott and March
To increase the amount of political and economic force they could mobilize, the NFWA needed to bring new tactics into the mix, tactics that would still be effective after the harvest season. They decided to call a boycott against Schenley Industries, a liquor company which owned thousands of acres of grape fields in the Delano region.
The boycott required that they expand their scope of action beyond the agricultural core in California. To be effective, a boycott requires large numbers of participants (and, ideally, the threat that even more people will join in). And so in 1966 the NFWA sent organizers to major cities across the United States to stage pickets of liquor stores. Those organizers had few resources—they had to raise funds and mobilize once they arrived—but they were strongly motivated.
The NFWA knew that they lacked adequate political force to target Schenley directly, so they went after secondary targets, similar to SHAC. They picketed liquor stores in major cities until those stores agreed to remove Schenley products from the shelves. (Once again, the AWOC didn’t participate in the boycott because of legal concerns.)457
Simultaneously, the NFWA organized a march in California where they had the greatest numbers. The march route wound its way from Delano through a number of small farmworker towns to the state capitol in Sacramento. (There they intended to push for state intervention against grape companies.) Along the way they gave talks, mobilized workers, and agitated both for the strike and for broader issues of social justice for farmworker communities. Again, the AWOC declined to participate because they saw the march as an unconventional tactic and because they felt it too broad in its inclusion of religious, civil rights, and revolutionary themes.458
A week before the march arrived in Sacramento, Schenley Industries caved and agreed to recognize the NFWA as a union. The marchers completed their route, anyway, arriving in Sacramento with an amazing 10,000 participants.459
Instead of being destroyed by divide and conquer like many upstart groups, the NFWA was able to build movement alliances while simultaneously pitting elites against each other. Ganz writes: “Because of the strategic capacity it had developed, the union had learned to keep finding ways to turn meager resources into effective economic weapons. The world of agribusiness turned out to be less monolithic than had been thought as divisions emerged between local agricultural corporations, whose entire business was farming, and national corporations, with major investments in brand names. It made little sense for large corporations to risk compromising their brands for the sake of minor farming operations, especially when they had union contracts elsewhere.”460
How to build strategic capacity
In his writings, Marshall Ganz identifies a number of key factors that give a group strategic capacity. Three of those factors are characteristics of the leadership team—that is, of the group developing strategy for an organization. He argues that for any given group, the “likelihood their strategy will be effective increases with their motivation, access to salient knowledge, and the quality of the heuristic processes they employ in their deliberations.”461 Let’s break that down.
Strong motivation. Ganz explains: “Motivation influences creative output because it affects the focus one brings to one’s work, the ability to concentrate for extended periods of time, persistence, willingness to take risks, and ability to sustain high energy.”462 Motivated people are willing to strike out in new directions, learn new skills and acquire new information, and go outside the routines of an ineffective status quo. People who are not expecting to win—or people who are just “phoning it in”—do not do those things.
As we saw, members of the UFW and its predecessors had incredibly strong levels of motivation derived from their strong relationships, their grounding in the community, and a very strong will to succeed. For the AWOC the fight was just one more labor dispute among many, the outcome of which would have little effect on the executive of the union.
Ganz suggests: “In the group work setting of a leadership team devising strategy, individual motivation is enhanced when people enjoy autonomy, receive positive feedback from peers and superiors, and are part of a team competing with other teams. It is dampened when they enjoy little autonomy, get no feedback or only negative feedback from peers and superiors, and face intense competition within the team.”463
Salient knowledge, including skills and intelligence. One part of salient knowledge for Ganz is “possession of domain-relevant skills, mastery of which is requisite to developing novel applications.” Ganz uses the example of jazz pianists, who must become proficient piano players before they can improvise well. Or to put it another way, you have to know how to plan a direct action before you can be genuinely flexible and creative in how you apply direct action.
Another aspect of salient knowledge is good intelligence, including “access to local knowledge of the constituencies, opponents, and third parties with which one is interacting. We expect effective military strategists to have command not only of the art of strategy but also of an understanding of the troops, enemy, battlefield, and so forth.”464
The UFW organizers, many of whom were relatively experienced and deeply embedded in the community, had this knowledge. They also had a knowledge of other struggles that had happened for farmworkers and in their cultural past. (During the Delano Grape Strike, for example, graffiti might feature Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.) This meant that UFW organizers were not simply fumbling around or operating on trial and error. They drew on a culture of resistance; they knew which tactics had worked and which hadn’t, and they could draw on personal and historical experience to solve strategic dilemmas and to inform innovative approaches.
Heuristic processes. Strategic thinking is about creative problem solving; about using information we have in new and creative ways. Ganz cites the Biblical story of David and Goliath: “David found his skill with stones useful because he could imaginatively recontextualize the battlefield, transforming it into a place where, as a shepherd, he knew how to protect his flock from wolves and bears. An outsider to the battle, he saw resources others did not see and opportunities they did not grasp. Goliath, on the other hand, the insider, failed to see a shepherd boy as a threat.”465
The notion of “heuristics”—meaning a logical shortcut or practical rule—is not something most people are familiar with, but it is important. (I’ll come back to it in the next section.)
Ganz also outlines leadership and organizational factors that tend to give a group better strategic capacity.
Diverse leadership. The single most important characteristic of good leadership teams is diversity. Ganz explains: “Teams composed of persons with heterogeneous perspectives are likely to make better decisions than homogeneous teams, especially in solving novel problems, because they can access more resources, bring a broader range of skills to bear on decision making, and benefit from a diversity of views.”466
Teams with good strategic capacity tend to have committed people from many different backgrounds with different experiences. And a variety of studies have shown that the more women are present in a group, the better that group will be at problem-solving in general.467
Teams with high strategic capacity have both strong and weak ties to different communities and networks, and they can employ a diversity of tactics. But diversity isn’t enough; there are organizational factors needed to ensure that good strategy emerges from discussion.
Good organization. Ganz repeatedly emphasizes the importance of a good deliberation process that includes regular meetings and separate strategy sessions, open to diverse perspectives.468 He advises: “Regular deliberation facilitates initiative by encouraging the periodic assessment of activities, regardless of whether or not there is a crisis. And deliberation open to heterogeneous points of view—or ‘deviant’ perspectives—facilitates better decisions, encourages innovation, and develops group capacity to perform cognitive tasks more creatively and effectively.”469 In other words, making sure that everyone has a chance to speak is key; and other research shows that groups are better at solving problems when speaking time is shared fairly among the members.470
Diverse perspectives can’t be incorporated into the strategy if people are afraid to express themselves, or if the group process requires conformity or an authoritarian approach. The group process must facilitate both divergent thinking (to express different perspectives) and, eventually, convergent thinking (to arrive at joint action). “For this purpose, conflict resolution by negotiation, accompanied by voting, may be preferable to either fiat or consensus because it preserves difference yet makes collective action possible.”471
The source of the group’s resources is also strategically important. Dues and donations from the constituency are good for strategic capacity. In contrast, as Ganz explains: “Reliance on resources drawn primarily from outside one’s core constituency—even when those resources are internal to the organization, such as an endowment—may dampen leaders’ motivation to devise effective strategy. As long as they attend to the politics that keep the bills paid, they can keep doing the same thing ‘wrong.’”472 Diverse sources of resources can grant “the strategic flexibility that goes with greater autonomy of greater room to maneuver.”473
And lastly, accountability is crucial. Unaccountable leadership has little incentive to respond to group needs. Ganz explains: “Leadership teams that are self-selected or elected by constituencies to whom they are accountable have more strategic capacity than those selected bureaucratically.” 474 He mentions self-selected leaders because they are often skilled and strongly motivated, which matters a lot strategically. “Although elective and entrepreneurial leadership selection processes may be in tension with one another, either is likely to yield more strategic capacity than bureaucratic leadership selection.”475
Final Factors
Older, established organizations tend to have more resources, but diminished strategic capacity. Ganz argues that older organizations may become “senescent,” strategically dysfunctional, adapted to obsolete conditions, and inhibited by inertia. “Leaders of the newer organizations were recently selected, have more organizational flexibility, and work in closer articulation with the environment. Leaders of older organizations were often selected in the past, are constrained by institutional routines, and may have resources that allow them to operate in counterproductive insulation from the environment.”475
He adds: “Changes in organizational structure that reduce leaders’ accountability or need to mobilize resources from constituents—or changes in deliberative process that suppress dissent—can diminish strategic capacity, even as resources grow. . . . Older organizations are likely to have less strategic capacity than new ones.”476
Of course, there are ideological factors that can suppress strategic capacity. An insistence on ideological homogeneity among decision-makers will limit a group’s ability to come up with new or unorthodox ideas. And a lack of diversity also means a lack of social ties to draw on. As I’ve argued throughout this book, for a resistance group to become isolated—for it to separate itself from potential allies along rigid ideological fracture lines—is a major strategic and organizational liability.
Further, it is in turbulent conditions where strategic capacity is most valuable. When the situation is stable and predictable, the groups with the most resources are more likely to win.
The UFW’s strategic capacity had major long-term benefits for communities of resistance across the whole region. As Ganz explains: “The UFW had also played a major role in the emergence of a Chicano movement in the Southwest, had recruited and trained hundreds of community activists, and had become a significant player in California politics.”477
The contrast that Ganz illustrates in the California farmworker struggle echoes the contrast of the cathedral and the bazaar. The centrally organized AWOC, with its cathedral-style of organizing, was too rigid, too slow, and too isolated from the grassroots to adopt an effective strategy. But the UFW and its allies—with their bazaar-style low-overhead, regular short actions, and inventive use of diverse tactics—were able to intelligently build a winning strategy as they went. Crucially, the UFW was not isolated, nor was their approach entirely ad hoc. They were able to implement and adapt their strategy as they went because they had spent years doing recruitment; they had laid the organizational, social, political, and strategic groundwork they knew they would need.
We fight to win, but even a loss can be educational for a thoughtful group with a desire to develop strategic capacity. We can often learn more from failure than from success, provided we are willing to think critically and strategically, and to face hard truths when they arise.
We resisters have fewer resources. Whether we win or lose depends on whether we have the strategy to employ those limited resources effectively. One of the fundamental factors that determines whether a movement succeeds is whether it can learn and adapt faster than those in power—whether it can create new movement cycles, and prolong the effectiveness of new tactics and methods of organization.
Stan Goff argues that the left has been unsuccessful in recent decades because leftists “have failed to interrogate the premises of their own notions of strategy” and so continue to pursue strategies that are obviously not working. He adds: “Developing the ability to conduct this interrogation is the essential first step for getting out of the dominant feedback loop of daily practice and understanding and positioning oneself to really challenge the system.”
“Falling back on my own experience as a member of the armed forces and the combat arms, I can conclude that every failure of strategy is at bottom a failure of plans to conform to reality. In effect, every strategic failure is a failure of intelligence . . . information that is interpreted to make sense of an overall situation.”478
Agility is important; that doesn’t mean resistance movements win through complete spontaneity, however, or that strategic planning is irrelevant. As Dwight Eisenhower said: in war, plans are useless, but planning is essential. It is what allows us to explore future contingencies and prepare for them. Any skilled strategist, whether a chess player or a Zapatista subcommandante, thinks several moves ahead.
Successful resistance movements employ careful planning in addition to the other tactical precepts already discussed. Writing about the Việt Minh, George K. Tanham observed: “On the strictly military plane, a study of the Vietminh’s successes suggests that they rest chiefly on three interrelated factors: (1) a set of simple tactical principles; (2) full, accurate, and up-to-date intelligence; and (3) detailed planning.”479
But Goff suggests that developing strategic capacity in leaders is more important than assembling a “playbook” of formulae and rigidly adhering to them. Rather, he draws on the work of military strategist John Boyd, explaining: “The centerpiece of Boyd’s theory is that one’s adversary is always human. . . . To defeat the leadership (a perceiving human) is the goal, according to Boyd, and that is accomplished by maintaining the initiative through audacious, often uncoordinated, rapid actions until the adversary is overwhelmed by the ‘mismatches’ between perception and reality. These mismatches are not the result of your ‘plan.’ They are an outcome of your agility—your superior ability to accept chaos and adapt rapidly to changing patterns. Improvisation.”480
He observes that “[t]his type of agility can only be achieved in a decentralized milieu” because in a rigidly hierarchal system it simply takes too long for information to flow up the hierarchy and then back down again.481 Having clear long-term goals is important, but day-to-day strategy is more about adaptable decision-making loops. Being smart, quick, and persistent is more useful than a rigid long-term plan. Goff suggests:
Constants in any adversarial struggle—be it a community issue fight or guerrilla warfare—include effective logistics, well-developed intelligence (which is information plus analysis), and a culture of self-discipline and leadership development. Organizational forms must adapt. There is no one-size-fits-all.
The twin focus must be on developing leaders who can inspire cooperation for action, and have well-developed tactical skills (the bag of tricks), but most of all, finely honed strategic intuition combined with the ability to quickly and seamlessly adapt to change and to be decisive about what trick to pull out of her bag.482
DEVISING STRATEGY
How can we devise effective strategy? Some methods are discussed by Gene Sharp and Jamila Raqib in their short book Self Liberation: A Guide to Strategic Planning to End a Dictatorship or Other Oppression. Having directly and indirectly advised a number of (largely successful) movements, Sharp writes from experience.
He warns that people cannot gain advanced strategic knowledge, or develop strategic analysis, merely from lectures and workshops (even if the presenters are excellent). While short tactical trainings before particular events are helpful, he found that “groups that received the lectures, courses, and workshops appear to have remained unable themselves to plan grand strategies for their conflicts. Those groups have usually been unable even to prepare strategies for smaller limited campaigns intended to achieve modest goals.”483 The body of knowledge needed for struggle, they observed, was too large and complex to be communicated merely by speech.
What knowledge is needed? Sharp and Raqib (writing about nonviolence specifically) suggest that three kinds of knowledge are required for successful struggle:
- 1)
Knowledge of the conflict situation, the opponents, and the society and its needs. [i.e., strategic intelligence.]
- 2)
In-depth knowledge of the nature and operation of the technique of nonviolent action. [i.e., tactical knowledge and competence.]
- 3)
The knowledge and ability required to analyze, think, and plan strategically. [i.e., heuristic processes.]
A group with good strategic capacity has these kinds of knowledge. But Sharp and Raqib warn that simply bringing together different people, each of whom has one type of knowledge, is insufficient. Planners must have overlapping knowledge and the ability to synthesize the three types to come up with a “wise grand strategy.”
For strategic knowledge, they suggest “it may be useful to prepare an assessment of the absolute and comparative strengths of the oppressive system and of the existing and potential democracy movement. Where are the opponents strong and where are they weak? Where are the resisters strong and where are they weak?”484 (I discussed these ideas in the intelligence chapter.)
“The main point is to know the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, their sources of power, and the likely impacts of the use of the power of both sides in an open conflict. How do those strengths and weaknesses compare with each other? Also, how might the respective strengths and weaknesses of the two sides be changed? . . . Consideration must also be given to psychological, social, economic, and political countermeasures that may be employed by the opponents. The capacity and willingness of the resisting population to persist in their struggle for liberation despite repression, and other counteractions by the opponents, also need to be assessed.”485
Sharp and Raqib have advice on selecting people to draft strategy:
The personnel of a drafting group need to be considered very carefully, because not everyone who is eager to participate may be the most wise and skilled. Persons who have failed to carry out the essential readings on this subject will not be suitable. Outsiders, who cannot know the country and society in-depth, should not be included in the drafting process.
The participation of poorly informed, dogmatic, or self-centered persons in the planning of a future nonviolent struggle can produce disasters. Additionally, it is important that the planners not be individuals with personal agendas that can interfere with the planning process.
Positively, the drafters must be persons who have demonstrated the capacity to think and plan strategically. Most people do not at a given moment have this capacity.486
Once selected, drafters must identify good intermediate goals for a campaign. Sharp and Raqib suggest: “The issues for limited campaigns should be ones that can arouse wide support throughout the population.”487 Resistance movements don’t always need to have majority support. But they benefit greatly from having—at the very least—common intermediate goals with potential allies or supporters.
Radicals are sometimes loath to identify even medium-term goals that fall short of the ultimate purpose. But Sharp and Raqib advise: “Liberation, not perfection” should be a guiding ethic behind intermediate goals. “Successfully bringing down a dictatorship, or other oppression, will not immediately produce a near-perfect new system. It will, however, be a major improvement over the past.”488
With potential intermediate goals in mind, they suggest applying “the test of whether each resistance campaign will weaken or strengthen the opponents’ power. This also applies to evaluating possible strategies and objectives that are intended for limited campaigns. The converse is at least equally relevant: Will the sources of the resisters’ power be strengthened or weakened by each limited campaign?”489 (For more questions like this, flip back to the “Planning an Action” section on page 555.)
A path to victory is not always clear, especially in the early stages of resistance. But if your group or movement can conduct a campaign that will increase your size or power—like the temperance movement’s local initiatives or the UFW’s roving pickets—you will open up new strategic possibilities and engage new comrades with whom to explore those possibilities.
Four-Part Strategic Planning
In the Second World War, a key decision made by the Allies was to concentrate their efforts first on knocking Germany out of the war. The United States would limit Pacific battles with Japan until the war in Europe was won. This meant—among other things—better odds in each fight: all of the Allies versus Germany, and then all of the Allies against Japan.
Here’s a good summary of the Allied strategy that came out of a conference in Washington after Pearl Harbor (as stated in Kent Greenfield’s American Strategy in World War II):
- 1)
Beat Germany first, meanwhile containing the Japanese.
- 2)
Wear down the strength of the enemy by [encircling] Axis-held territory [and tightening that encirclement] as fast as the resources of the Allies permitted.
- 3)
The means to be used: naval blockade; all-out aid to the Russians; strategic bombing; intensive cultivation of resistance in Nazi-occupied countries; limited offences with mobile forces at points where locally superior Allied forces, particularly forces strong in armor, could be brought to bear with telling effect—all directed toward the final knockout punch.490
It’s a solid expression of strategy: a clear primary goal, secondary priorities, and notes on the tactics, capacities, and alliances to be developed. Various contingency plans and timetables were prepared based on how quickly Germany could be worn down.
Simply agreeing on a strategy apparently did wonders for the Allied strategic staff. Before the agreement, in the closing days of 1941, a young Dwight Eisenhower wrote in his notes: “The struggle to secure the adoption by all concerned of a common concept of strategy is wearing me down. Everybody is too much engaged with small things of his own. We’ve got to go to Europe and fight—and we’ve got to quit wasting resources all over the world.”491 After agreement was reached, Eisenhower’s notes turned to jubilation: “at long last . . . we are all committed to one concept of fighting! . . . we won’t just be thrashing around in the dark.”492
The summary above encapsulates Allied strategy pretty well, partly because it answers four big questions that have to be answered to describe any campaign strategy:
- 1)
What are your primary goals?
- 2)
What strategies and intermediate campaigns (or operations) are needed to achieve those goals?
- 3)
What tactics can you employ to advance these strategies?
- 4)
What are the capacities and alliances you must cultivate to succeed?
This is a goal-oriented approach that works backward from the goals of a campaign: goals, strategies, tactics, and capacities.
You’ll notice that the Allied strategy above doesn’t explicitly include factors like communications, logistics, or intelligence (although they are implied). Generals can get away with this because they already have whole corps of people paid to handle those things. Resistance movements mostly have to build this capacity up from scratch.
Let’s use this four-part strategic plan to look at some examples of movements I’ve already discussed in this book. (I’ll simplify and generalize quite a bit here.)
Let me start with the North-West Rebellion, focusing on the differing plans of Riel and Dumont:
- 1)
Goals: Shared: Assert Indigenous and Métis self-government, stop or limit continued settlement, force the redress of grievances and negotiations with Canadian state on equal nation-to-nation footing.
- 2)
Strategies & Campaigns: Riel: Build local government council and declare self-government, request surrender from North-West Mounted Police in area, ensure favorable status in the eyes of God. Dumont: Build local council as well as militia organization, stage immediate attacks against local forts for supplies, guerrilla warfare against reinforcements, destroy enemy infrastructure. Use success to build alliances.
- 3)
Main Tactics: Riel: Lobbying and proposed negotiation, prayer and religious edicts, waiting for last stand at Batoche. Dumont: Surprise attacks and ambushes, seizures of supplies and battlefield recovery, train-derailments, destruction of rail and telegraph lines.
- 4)
Capacities & Alliances: Riel: Godliness and piety. Dumont: Organizational alliances with Indigenous warriors, scouting/intelligence and communications networks, logistical support.
Obviously Riel’s strategies, tactics, and capacity did not match his goal of contending with a well-armed colonial power intent on settling claimed territory. And Dumont was never able to fully implement his strategy.
A more internally consistent and coherent strategy would be that of SHAC, as discussed in the previous chapter.
- 1)
Goals: Disrupt (and ideally bankrupt) Huntingdon Life Sciences to stop HLS’s animal testing.
- 2)
Strategies & Campaigns: Research and identify secondary or tertiary targets; distribute information about those targets; disrupt and harass those targets until they cease doing business with HLS; publicize information about successes and actions to encourage more action.
- 3)
Main Tactics: Intelligence gathering, outreach to sympathizers, a wide variety of disruptive direct action.
- 4)
Capacities & Alliances: In central group especially: intelligence, communications, strategic planning. Allied and sympathetic action groups with reconnaissance, action planning, and tactical skills.
That strategy met with considerable success, and brought down a corresponding amount of repression.
A third strategy for comparison would be that of the Nien Rebellion in China, which looked something like this:
- 1)
Goals: Ensure adequate food supply for people; disrupt or neutralize Qing power in region.
- 2)
Strategies & Campaigns: Build up fortified villages in home area; encourage and protect agricultural production; raid Qing strongholds and convoys for food and supplies; harass and drive out Qing troops in vicinity.
- 3)
Main Tactics: Highly mobile guerrilla warfare tactics including surprise attacks and ambushes, cavalry action, scorched earth defense, raiding and scouting parties.
- 4)
Capacities & Alliances: Ally with and develop support base in earthwall villages and agriculture, maximize mobility and intelligence capacity, enhance security and safety in homeland.
Again, a good strategy, which failed perhaps because it wasn’t ambitious enough—the Nien were focused on their own concerns and region, not on broader revolution, so they failed to join with other rebellions of the time to bring down the Qing dynasty. But, as good strategies do, the Nien approach involved goals, strategies, tactics, and capacities that were matching and complementary.
Practical Strategy Tools
How can you start devising your strategy? Remember, first of all, that strategy is an iterative process. You try something with the people and resources you can access, you see how it works, you reevaluate, and you try again.
If you wait for the perfect strategy you will be waiting until the seas rise up and the sun bakes the Earth to a cinder. Better to identify intermediate goals that can advance your strategy in the short to medium-term, and try to work toward them while developing your movement’s strengths and capacities over the long term. (These intermediate goals, as discussed in the previous chapter, are best if SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, and so on.) These goals should be things that can mobilize friends and allies. (Charles Dobson argues: “Intergroup cooperation is the engine of real progress at the grassroots.”)
Also, remember that while different ideologies and schools of political thought give various strategic templates for orthodox action, those templates—even when they are very good—rarely apply tidily to any local circumstance. They are no universal formulae for success; effective strategy will always require adaptation and strategic problem-solving.
I like the problem-solving approach taken by mathematician George Pólya, who argues that people approaching a problem they don’t know how to solve should start with a tool-based approach. That is, what tools do you already have that can help solve this problem? I’m not a mechanic, but I’ve fixed plenty of broken machines on our farm because I know how to recognize a bolt, where to find a wrench, and how to tell if some part is damaged and in need of replacement.
I hope I have given you a number of strategic tools through the course of this book to help you create and refine good resistance strategy. But let me conclude this chapter by outlining some of the practical strategic tools you can put to use:
Work forward with what you have. What can you accomplish now with the people and resources you already have? What is a concrete step forward you can make right now? Are there obvious first steps that will advance your campaign and build capacity without being too costly in time or resources? What tactics are you good at? What short-term projects are people excited about?
Envision the outcome and work backward. Clarifying your goal can help greatly. Indecision or conflict often come when there is no clear picture of success. What does your victorious outcome look like? What people or abilities or accomplishments do you have in the winning scenario? Working backward, how do you develop those things in intermediate steps? Break down big goals into smaller subgoals that are easier to accomplish. Maybe you can work backward and forward at the same time, and figure out where the two approaches meet to form a continuous trajectory.
Maximize your strategic capacity. Devising good strategy isn’t a solo endeavour. Both Ganz and Sharp offer insights on how to make a group with good strategic capacity. Set aside regular times to talk specifically about strategy with your comrades. Bring together a diverse core group of well-connected and strongly motivated people who have common goals (but who are not dogmatic or obsessed with personal agendas). Give them a decision-making structure that encourages them to express different opinions but allows them to converge on a common plan. And make sure they are connected and in some way responsible to a broader movement.
Use and develop your intelligence capacity. Strategic discussions can be greatly sharpened by good intelligence. All of the intelligence products—like target lists or political spectrum analyses—can streamline strategic development.
Analyze strengths and weaknesses. A good tool for this is the “SWOT” analysis. Divide a page into four quadrants, and label the quadrants strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Then, by yourself or with a group, answer in point form: What are our group’s strengths? What are our weaknesses? What opportunities do we have? And what threats do we face? You can also ask, about a campaign or tactic under discussion, will this strengthen or weaken those in power? Will it strengthen or weaken our movement?
Brainstorm tactics and operations. Make a list of different campaigns or actions you could carry out. Then start to evaluate them. Which tactics could you accomplish already? Which of them require more practice, people, or resources than you currently have? Which are exciting and essential, and will form a core part of the campaign? Which are impractical or unexciting and should be set aside for now? I like to write down favorite ideas on index cards and then shift them around, arranging them into a plausible, escalating campaign. Maybe a single campaign, maybe several simultaneous threads carried out by allied groups, or maybe a succession of campaigns that build on one another.
Learn your history and current events. You don’t have to know every single aspect of every historical struggle—or memorize every battle of every revolution—to come up with good strategy. No strategy will ever be perfect. But you do need some grounding in the past. To become a composer, a musician learns other people’s music first—to internalize those rhythms and chords—so that they can come up with something new.
Run scenarios and wargame it. As a resistance strategist, you are in a struggle of competing ideologies and strategies. You can never plan a strategy on paper and apply it perfectly to the real world, because those in power will always be trying to disrupt your strategy and destroy your movement. Simulate that by setting up wargames; divide your group into parts where one side implements a resistance strategy and the other side tries to suppress and disrupt it. Adjust accordingly. Or run through different scenarios and plan for contingencies. What if this happens? What if that happens?
Remember practicalities. High-level strategy and visioning are wonderful, but a movement’s success often comes down to basic questions of capacity. Who are your allies and how do you organize? What are your communication networks and considerations? Do you have the logistical capability to support the campaign you want? Can you make a list of the capacities you need and draft a rough timetable of support and tactics for your campaign?
Consider the unquantifiable. I’m a stickler for concrete elements of strategy, like building organizational capacity and practicing skills. But not everything about a resistance movement can be inscribed on a map or enumerated in lists. Many a campaign has pulled victory from the jaws of defeat by something unquantifiable: spiritual fortitude, or revolutionary zeal, or the ability to inspire extraordinary effort and commitment.
I’ve put more ideas and heuristics in Further Resources.
Unlike the Allies of World War II, resisters almost never create a single, unifying grand strategy. So our strategies should generate as much political force as possible while keeping in mind that our allies will often use very different strategies. I hope that—by using guidelines like those I suggested at the end of the third chapter—we can build complementary strategies even with people we don’t want to work with directly. That means, especially, the use of many different tactics.
This was another SHAC strength, as Rolling Thunder explains: “Rather than pitting exponents of different tactics against each other, SHAC integrated all possible tactics into one campaign, in which each approach complemented the others. This meant that participants could choose from a practically limitless array of options, which opened the campaign to a wide range of people and averted needless conflicts.”
Effective complementarity also requires finding good intermediate goals. Creating opportunities for smart, strategic cooperation with others in a larger grand strategy, rather than disparaging anyone who works for anything short of the immediate and complete transformation of everything. Rolling Thunder observes: “Overextension is the number one error of small-scale resistance movements: rather than setting attainable goals and building slowly on modest successes, organizers set themselves up for defeat by attempting to skip directly to the final showdown with global capitalism. We can fight and win ambitious battles, but to do so we have to assess our capabilities realistically.”
We can fight. And we can win.