—Gerrard Winstanley, 1649
—George Jackson, 1970
I wrote this book to try to answer a question: what makes resistance movements effective? I have found what I hope will be valuable lessons in movements of the past and present day. At the same time, I have only scratched the surface. The history of resistance is deep and broad and incredibly rich. Fortunately there are other books and—more importantly—other people.
“We’re never going to have a revolution just because everyone has read all the right books,” Peter Dundas, a longtime activist, told me. We can learn many things from books. But we can learn even more—and test those lessons—in action.
In the first chapter of this book I outlined some of the reasons we fight. Many of these reasons have only become more compelling in the time since I began drafting this book. Global capitalism continues to falter and increase human exploitation to compensate. And the not-so-slow catastrophe of global warming accelerates faster than anyone expected. Climate change has triggered conflicts around the world and created tens of millions of climate refugees. And many privileged countries have begun to veer toward fascism.
In the final chapter, I almost left out the discussion of the Taiping and Nien Rebellions. I wondered if I should stick to more examples like Site 41. Smaller, community victories that we can identify with now. I worried that readers would not be able to identify with the situation of Chinese rebels in the middle of the 1800s. I worried that people would not believe that resisters today could learn lessons from such an extreme situation of chronic food shortages, growing capitalist exploitation, and the looting of public treasuries by heartless (and violent) corporations. But every day that passes—every newspaper I read—the more I am glad I kept those stories.
We’d best avoid the millennialism of the Taipings, their belief that divine intervention would transform their society and grant them victory. But the sense of apocalypticism that also drove them—a sense of impending, sweeping, uncontrollable change—is growing in resonance.
Audre Lorde argued that we should always stand up for justice, “because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak.”
Stan Goff put it bluntly when he wrote about how the dominant culture destroys the things we need to survive: “And just as exterminist imperialism eats up its own social basis, it is eating up the biosphere, our very physical basis. Revolution is not a choice between capitalism and socialism. It is a choice between the violent overthrow of the existing order or our extermination by that order. Is that clear enough? Do we need a little sugar with that?”493
Of course, even Goff would note that there are many ways for resistance movements to generate force other than violence. But his point is clear: we fight or we die.
John Clarke of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty explained to me how global crises influence their fight against austerity. He explains: “This system is actually now in crisis. It’s in crisis at every level. I mean, it’s in crisis because the absurdity of producing with such technological complexity at such a scale, to enrich handfuls of families, is such a fundamental and absurd contradiction.” John adds:
It’s literally true that humanity is doomed under this system. And in fact, the planet is probably doomed under this system. That means that the period we are now entering, as the system goes on the attack to such a huge degree, is, I think, a really, really decisive period. The first thing that we’ve got to be able to do is to fashion movements of resistance that are strong enough to actually fight them to a standstill. That’s the first thing. I don’t know how we’re ever going to talk to people about changing society if we can’t even prevent them taking people’s welfare cheques away, or closing their factories. We have to be strong enough to win victories.
But, at the same time, any victory that you are going to win takes place in the context of a system that is going to regroup and come after you again, and in any event, is going to poison the world you live in. . . . Within the lifetimes of many people who are alive today, that struggle has to go to the point of revolutionary change. And I think that the work we’re doing, in a very practical sense, is about laying the groundwork for that revolutionary change. Because revolutionary change comes out of people’s consciousness and people’s practice. People have to learn to fight back before they can learn how to actually win. That’s the work that we are doing.
What John says here is very important. It’s essential that we understand how serious our situation is, how serious the consequences are if we fail to create effective movements. But at the same time, those movements won’t be created instantaneously. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the Roman Empire wasn’t defeated in one. We need to be motivated by the global emergencies we face—by the need for uncompromising action—but at the same time understand that we must build movements that can win smaller victories first to overcome inertia and cultures of defeat, as John points out.
Reminiscing about lessons learned from the 1960s and 1970s, anarchist Michael Albert writes: “It seems to me that we should have conveyed the understanding that revolution isn’t apocalyptic. It doesn’t happen tomorrow. It’s a long process. One has to be in it for the long haul, and one has to carve out a space in which one can function, be productive, and live a life.”494
We have to build cultures of resistance, but also make them cultures worth living in. That doesn’t mean we have to be nice to everybody all the time. But it means we must come to understand—from history, hopefully, rather than experience—that an isolated movement is a defeated movement. And that our militant action will be most effective when launched from a large and diverse culture of resistance. Michael Albert writes: “We don’t need to eliminate our more militant tactics. Not at all. But we do need to give them greater meaning and strength by incorporating with them much more outreach; organizing many more events and activities that have more diverse and introductory levels of participation; creating more local means for ongoing involvement by people just getting interested; and especially by spending more time clarifying issues, aims, and the logic of our activity to new audiences who don’t yet agree with our efforts.”495
I argued in the last chapter that much of any movement’s power is implied. Michael Albert makes a similar argument in The Trajectory of Change, warning that even enormous mass movements can be contained and quashed if they reach a plateau (which has happened to several anti-war movements and the summit-hopping anti-globalization movement). He argues: “To win, we need to generate a trajectory of activism that elites cannot easily repress or manipulatively derail, and which they also can’t calmly abide. That is the logic of social change in the near and even middle term.
“But what threatens elites that cannot be readily repressed away or derailed? The only answer I know of is rapidly growing numbers of dissidents, varied diversifying focuses of their dissent, and steadily escalating commitment and militancy of their tactics.”496
History teaches us that such movements can be built. We can build them. If we learn from the lessons I have tried to illustrate in this book, It’ll be clear how to create movements that win.
Let’s recap: We know that militant movements work, and that militant wings make larger moderate movements more effective. Many movements—from suffragists, to the ANC, to Redwood Summer—have taught us that. That’s the Overton Window and radical flanking in action.
We know from the Deacons for Defense and grassroots civil rights organizers that resistance groups of many different kinds can form complementary movements. That militant and moderate approaches can strengthen each other, can use radical flanking to create change that would otherwise be impossible, and can combine outreach with direct action. That both push for, and consolidate, social and political change through a ratchet of progress.
“Settle your quarrels,” urged George Jackson. It’s very telling that the common factors behind successful revolutions, as identified by historians, are very similar to the factors that make for successful coalitions I outlined in the last chapter.497 Jeff Goodwin argues that successful revolutionary movements are multi-class movements, unified by a common enemy and some common values, along with radical leadership.498 Revolutionary movements can succeed when divide and conquer has been inverted; when social movements have been brought together by common causes and organizational links, while those in power are divided and some people of privilege begin to align themselves with the oppressed.
Diversity makes movements strong, just as it makes ecologies strong. A robust and effective social movement, as Jo Freeman argues, is “one that has several organizations that can play different roles and pursue different strategic possibilities.” Such groups build solidarity and strong connections, synthesizing common ideas and building common ground.
As Audre Lorde argued: “Without community, there is no liberation . . . but community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.” Successful resistance groups work against many kinds of internal oppression—racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and the like. They look outward to overcome the iron law of involution that Jane Mansbridge warns about. Indeed, Suzanne Marilley inverts the iron law of involution to argue “that social movements are more likely to succeed when they construct inclusive ideological appeals that promote political alliances.”499
An effective movement must also balance the danger of being too diffuse (the tyranny of structurelessness) with the risk of becoming so conventionally organized and resource hungry that it falls into the orbit of larger powers (the liberal class, the Nonprofit Industrial Complex) or loses its strategic capacity.
But movements that win don’t simply appear out of nowhere. They aren’t miracles that spring fully formed from some inevitable tide of history. Successful movements from the PAIGC to anti-apartheid coalitions to the Mississippi Summer show the importance of recruiting and training new people, and of moving people through a radicalizing trajectory by action, and not merely by ideas or literature.
Movements that win take isolated people and join them into effective groups with strong ties. Not insular communities in which to hide, but havens from which to reach out and take action. Movements from the Industrial Workers of the World to ACT UP show the power of organization. They show the need for organizational style to match strategy and tactics, and the victories that can be won when that happens. And they show the need for many groups with complementary strategies and styles to form strong and beautiful ecologies of resistance.
Movements that win must learn all the other lessons of movement capacity. The importance of security and safety that comes from reasonable precautions combined with support and relationship building, rather than paranoid self-isolation. The need for communications that avoid the distorting effects of the mass media while allowing movements to reach out, coordinate, propagandize, and discuss.
Movements that win understand the importance of intelligence capacity in helping a movement find its targets and prioritize finite resources and of counterintelligence that protects movements while actively fighting divide and conquer repression. They understand the necessity of logistical support systems that make it possible for people to fight in the long term without watering down their politics or starving themselves of the resources they need.
And of course, they need tactics that are smart and well targeted with achievable goals. They need diverse forms of direct action to use the principles and patterns that have made such action effective through history. They need strategies that escalate smartly from short-term achievable goals that strengthen movements and build capacity, all the way through to grand strategies of liberation. They need to build diverse groups with strategic capacity. And they need to ally with other groups when they can to advance common goals.
I have often argued for the necessity of militant action, but diversity of tactics goes both ways. Communications and logistical support and all these other capacities are terribly important. You could easily spend your entire life working on any of these fundamental support capacities, without spending a day on the front lines or in jail. And you could be just as much my ally as someone who put themselves on the front lines constantly, or who spent years in jail.
George Jackson and Martin Luther King Jr. would not have seen eye to eye on issues of pacifism and violence. But I will forever admire them both for their total commitment and for their willingness to give their lives for their struggles. In a speech delivered a few months before his assassination, King argued:
Ultimately you must do right because it’s right to do right. . . . You must do it because it has gripped you so much that you are willing to die for it if necessary. And I say to you this morning, that if you have never found something so dear and so precious to you that you will die for it, then you aren’t fit to live.
You may be thirty-eight years old as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause—and you refuse to do it because you are afraid; you refuse to do it because you want to live longer; you’re afraid that you will lose your job, or you’re afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity or you’re afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house, and so you refuse to take the stand.
Well you may go on and live until you are ninety, but you’re just as dead at thirty-eight as you would be at ninety! And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice.500
We can frame the same idea in a positive light, as United Farm Workers cofounder Dolores Huerta did when she said: “Every moment is an organizing opportunity, every person a potential activist, every minute a chance to change the world.” To live is to seize those opportunities.
When George Jackson wrote the passage I used as an epigraph for this chapter, he warned of the generations that would die or live butchered half-lives if we fail to act. In the decades since he wrote that, industrial capitalism has introduced whole new methods to enact that prophecy.
When he urged the reader “give up your life,” Jackson didn’t mean all revolutionaries literally had to die. Certainly he died for the people, but he meant we should dedicate our lives. To set aside things that are less important for the greater good. To work hard, and to fight, even when it is not fun. When it is difficult, dangerous, exhausting.
When we give up our lives to do this, our lives do not become smaller. They become bigger. We become a part of a greater collective life of struggle, which spans the continents and lasts through centuries past and future.
Which is exactly what’s needed. Because George Jackson is right, and his warning seems ever more prescient. If we have any hope of a future worth living in then a great many people—a great many of us—must dedicate our lives to that purpose. And must dedicate it in a million different ways.
That’s something I’m willing to do. I hope that you, dear reader, will make that choice also. Perhaps you have already. Perhaps we will be comrades. Perhaps I’ll see you on the front lines. However you struggle, let us fight together for a future worth living in.
For more great resources that wouldn’t fit in the book, visit
FullSpectrumResistance.org.
You’ll find extra information about things like:
■ Resistance codes of conduct
■ Movement recruitment
■ Stopping abusive behaviour
■ Counter-surveillance
■ Coping with prison
■ Strategic heuristics problem-solving And more.