Indigenous peoples from all regions occupy Brasília from 22 April 2024, the 20th anniversary of Acampamento Terra Livre (ATL) – the largest indigenous mobilisation in the country. Image: Agência Senado.
The movement power model of civil resistance can only succeed when its strategy informs and magnifies its tactics – its front line actions
Reposted from the Ecologist
The movement power model of organising mass protests on issues of major concern such as climate change provides a lot of high-level theory, but what can it tell us about actual grassroots campaigning? The answer is: quite a lot.
Paul Engler and Carlos Saavedra explain how the best aspects of street level campaign planning from both structure and momentum can be harnessed in their YouTube training series first posted a decade ago. The same model is presented in Movement Power: A Toolkit for Building Power in a Time of Crisis, published by Tipping Point UK.
This is the eighth article in the Movement Power series from The Ecologist.
The novel features of the hybrid method include the foregrounding of prophetic promotion and the centring of polarisation as the ultimate goal and moving force of any campaign. Prophetic promotion could be reduced to the American aphorism ‘fake it ’til you make it’ but is both more authentic and more complex.
Relationships
Polarisation is subdivided into four key factors: the demand, levels of sacrifice, movement ambassadors, and public relations. This provides a clear framework for activists to design their interventions – from petitions to mass nonviolent direct action street protests.
Activists are encouraged to develop a detailed plan for a cycle of momentum that moves through trigger events to moments of the whirlwind, in order to secure active popular support. The cycle of momentum is turbo-charged by the dual processes of prophetic promotion and polarisation.
Jim Collins is quoted as advocating for a “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (BHAG) for each proposed event: “The power of the Big Hairy Audacious Goal is that it gets you out of thinking too small. A great BHAG changes the time frame and simultaneously creates a sense of urgency.” This can otherwise be understood through the activist saying, “Build it, and they will come.” This is the heart of prophetic promotion.
Engler explains: “Prophetic promotion is talking about creating trigger events that occasionally lead to a moment of the whirlwind. These would include Seattle, Occupy and Black Lives Matter. There is so much polarisation that it creates a critical mass that means there is activity all around. You cannot control if you create a moment of the whirlwind.”
The use of prophetic promotion is described as a departure from the structure tradition of organising public campaigns. A trade union, as the classical example of a structure organisation, will develop relationships with its members and with partner organisations. This network will be activated for specific campaigns.
Union
Engler recalls: “The structure organisation was a machine. You could predict the number of people who would attend an action through these personal contacts. But the strength of the union was very much dependent on the enthusiasm and strength of the leadership at any time.”
This is contrasted with the more movement orientated tradition, more prevalent among student, environmentalist or anarchist circles at that time. Engler tells of his surprise when becoming engaged in student activism: “In the student activist and global justice movement mobilisation was done more like music or cultural promotion. There would be hype, there would be media stunts, and there would be actions. There were few interpersonal relations.”
Saavedra describes how the DREAM Act campaign adopted prophetic promotion for its 2006 mobilisations. “We billed it as the largest civil disobedience in Los Angeles history for immigrants’ rights. We found ourselves in conflict with the unions and the established migrant organisations because they did not want to do prophetic promotion.”
The approach proved a success. In March that year, 1.2 million people marched, and there was a general strike in May. “The amount of people we mobilised was insignificant compared to the ocean of people. Our red union shirts were just tiny little specks in a sea of white protester shirts.”
The campaigners held strategy meetings and foregrounded the question, “How do we keep the momentum alive?” Saavedra recalls: “We developed an action, to mobilise outside the structure. When we announced the action – to shut down the corridor to the airport – with immigration and union leaders, the media we got, just to announce this action, was greater than we usually get for an action itself. Ben Harper and Tom Morrello held a concert in the city.”
Consciousness
Saavedra adds: “The press was extreme. We had people coming to get arrested that were not from a structure. There was so much fear of it escalating too fast, how it might impact political relationships, that it was the first time where the union was calling people telling them to end the mobilisation. The mayor, the police, were scared we would create a city wide crisis and they would have to call the National Guard.
“This puts you into the history books as one of the most epic actions not just for LA but for the entire nation. There were legitimate concerns that the actions would undermine political relations – but this was a huge accomplishment. There were 325 people who were arrested. We refused to let Ben Harper get arrested.”
Activists should organise trigger events and invite the media. The times and dates of a future mass action should already be agreed. These can be promoted to the attendant reporters so that they form part of the reporting of the smaller initiating press stunt. “The trigger event can be small, and the movement can act to make it much bigger.”
A trigger event can also be based on actual natural or political moments, or even just organised to coincide. Political events might include election campaigns, legislation, or scandals. Medicare for All and Obamacare became weather moments for health campaigns, and could also be extended to migration campaigns. This is especially true for environmental campaigns where, for example, extreme weather events will take place, which will get the attention of the media, who in turn will want to interview people on the ground.
Engler states: “You want to work with the weather. There are already trigger events that are happening in the environment. There are political, natural, social trigger events. Those things can be very influential to your movement. Katrina, Sandy had huge effects on the public consciousness of climate breakdown. But the most influence happens to the movements, when people capitalise on such events to funnel it into activity and structure.”
Epic
This is one reason the Seattle protests in 1999 proved so successful. The World Trade Organization (WHO) was already meeting in the city, and this would have generated significant coverage in the national media on its own. The fact that thousands of activists were planning to converge on the site and try to shut the conference down both leveraged and extended this media event.
Engler recalls: “The WHO summit in Seattle – that would be a New York Times national story. Because the spotlight was already on the summit, we would already get media coverage. We organised people to shut down the conference, and it worked. This then became a moment of the whirlwind because protests at international summits followed for years to come.”
Activists need to always develop action scenarios for a trigger event, and plan for any one to suddenly become a moment of the whirlwind. The concrete action plans should form a coherent real world manifestation of the movement DNA – the theory of change and the grand strategy – and those who take part should know and respect the principles. “The activists need to think about the action scenario, talk about the action scenario and explain how the action forms part of grand strategy and a clear theory of change.”
The fundamental point is to capture the imagination of the public. Engler adds: “We need to design actions that will mean people want to be involved. Form your swarm around a provocative idea – put your stick in the ground. Announce your goal. When you provide such a focus point, a swarm intelligence emerges.
“Your goal must be tangible, credible, inclusive and epic. It needs to be epic, it needs to energise people, it needs to electrify people. Shoot for the moon. On second thoughts, don’t shoot for the moon, we have already been there. Shoot for Mars. You can only form a swarm around something that is epic.”
Wizard
Prophetic promotion must always be deployed alongside the strategy of polarisation. As discussed earlier in this series, the measures of success for the hybrid model of organising are “polarisation – how much public support; and organisational development – how are people engaging with the movement, and is the movement capacity increasing?” Engler argues: “Polarisation is the exact opposite of triangulation. You should be able to predict polarisation. You can become a wizard at this – if you know the secrets, you can predict how polarisation would happen.”
A good action therefore generates good polarisation around the issue of concern. “The actions should make people choose sides, and those that choose our side should be engaged and then moved up the ladder of engagement.” This means a good action will often involve high levels of commitment, risk, and drama.
Saavedra observes that there is very often a fear of escalation in structure-tradition organisations, and a fear of polarisation. “Holy crap, is the public going to like what we do?” There is of course also bad polarisation. This is most obvious when the membership itself becomes alienated from a campaign. He explains: “Some people are going to move against the movement. We need to make sure we can get the majority of the people to support us. At the same time, the movement must build and deepen its base support.”
Polarisation can be achieved using those four factors: the demand; levels of sacrifice; movement ambassadors; and public relations. We will describe each briefly in turn.
THE DEMAND
Cesar Chavez, the American labour and civil rights activist who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association, would say: “We have another kind of power that comes from the justice of our cause.”
The first major concept of polarisation is framing of the goal, setting a clear and achievable demand. People associate with the movement first and foremost because they identify with the cause. Activists supported Occupy Wall Street because it was fighting for the rights of the 99 per cent, and for equality. Most Latinos in the United States were in favour of the DREAM Act, as the benefits to millions within these communities were straightforward and obvious.
Polling allows you to see whether the public is going to support the cause. The question needs also be asked how deeply they support the cause. Frank Luntz, a right wing strategist, uses “micropolling”, which measures attitudes of people within the base, the middle and the opposition to the campaign. Engler concludes: “You need to measure support, but you also have to measure how deeply they support you.”
Activists should not abandon causes where there is little public support. Engler states: “The anti-war movement was actually unpopular and was under attack, for example for being unpatriotic. The public also likes spending money on the military. What you can do, even on such issues, is pick specific things that the public will support – for example, a campaign against waste or corruption in the military industrial complex. You can take an unpopular goal and break it down into demands that will be more popular.”
SACRIFICE & DISRUPTION
“Full effort is full victory,” Mahatma Gandhi said. Engler interprets Gandhi’s message as “With an endless capacity to suffer, victory is inevitable.” High sacrifice is, in the Gandhian school of nonviolence, one of the most important tools at the disposal of the activist. “What we sacrifice for, we elevate.”
When people make deep sacrifices and they suffer – being beaten up or going to prison – they will gain popular support. In the civil rights movement, it was when people were being beaten by the police and this was being reported globally that people related to it. “If I go to prison, my mom instantly becomes an activist for the cause,” argues Engler.
The grounding assumption is that every time the participants in the movement are seen to make sacrifices for the cause, more people will want to join the movement. This is seen as an inevitable positive feedback loop. The aim of the action is to demonstrate high levels of sacrifice, or, as in the teachings of Martin Luther King, to “create a moral crisis”. This also feeds the media appetite for drama: “If it bleeds, it leads.”
High disruption can force an issue onto the public agenda, and indeed force powerful actors in society to meet the demands of the campaign. However, it can also have an adverse effect on the campaign strategy of gaining active popular support. The key claim here is that “you can only have high levels of disruption if you have high levels of support for the demand, and you demonstrate high levels of sacrifice.”
A lesson that Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil would need to confront a decade later was already being addressed by Saavedra and Engler in their training videos: “If you disrupt people’s lives, a lot of times they are not going to empathise with you.”
An example given at the time was a public transit strike to protect pensions: “The strike created huge disruption and was pretty easy and people hated that.” This observation would have its echo almost a decade later when activists climbed on top of a train at Canning Town tube station in London with significant negative consequences.
An action can be low or high sacrifice. But it can also be low or high disruption for the general public – including those who do not actively choose to become engaged with the campaign and its issue of concern. This results in four possible modes of action: low sacrifice and low disruption, low sacrifice and high disruption, high sacrifice and low disruption, and finally high sacrifice and high disruption.
The advantage of low sacrifice and low disruption actions is that such activism can be adopted by many people. However, they are unlikely to have much direct impact or gain much media attention. For example, petitions tend to have few results even when they are a useful first step onto the ladder of engagement.
Even a high sacrifice act such as a short term hunger strike can lose its impact over time. “That action has been repeated so many times that no-one believes it’s really sacrificial,” Saavedra notes. There are actions that will create high disruption: a strike action or a protest closing down a highway will get the attention of the public, as it impacts their lives.
SYMPATHETIC PEOPLE
The movement needs representatives to take the message to the public, often through the media. A classic communications approach is to have ‘ambassadors’ from each demographic who can bring the campaign and its values to their own communities. For example, white people might be better placed to assure people in a majority white population that immigration is ethically right and also brings benefits.
Likewise, Extinction Rebellion has made extensive use of the fact that scientists are trusted by the general public and are self-evidently the right people to communicate on climate science. Saavedra and Engler advise on using “sympathetic people” to represent the movement. “Nurses presenting your arguments that will extend the reach of your message.”
People are generally empathic. “There are a lot of physiological studies about how people have what are called mirror neurons, in which they naturally empathise when they witness suffering, without them even choosing to do so.” Empathy is, for better and worse, easier when you identify with a person or community. “If they can ‘other’ that person, then the mind shuts off their ability to empathise. The power of Fox News is the enormous efforts it invests in ‘othering’ people as terrorists, communists, and hippies.”
Engler argues: “Rosa Parks was a very well respected person within the Montgomery community in the 1950s and a secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for a number of years when the bus protests started. Another young woman aged 16 was arrested for not giving up her seat, but it did not have the same impact.”
The corollary to the ambassador approach is to ensure that your opposition – those who refuse to make the change you are campaigning for, or are lobbying in the opposite direction – are presented as unsympathetically as possible. A venal, self-interested politician might cave to your demands rather than fight you and be exposed as venal to their electorate. “People hated Wall Street, so they were likely to support Occupy Wall Street.”
PUBLIC RELATIONS
All movements today need to have a clear public relations strategy. Therefore sufficient capacity and training should be made available from the very beginning. Areas of focus will be a) framing; b)relations with the mainstream media; c) capacity to create and distribute own (social) media. There are whole university departments talking about public relations. How can we change the way the media and the press relate to us, and to our demand? How can we distribute our message?
Do the movement and its representatives use the language of our movement or the left, or the language that most people understand? George Lakoff, a cognitive theorist, claims that people have frames about how they understand politics, and the actors and the movements within that. If the PR team does not have the right strategy then there is not a lot that they can do with that.
Engler recalls: “The healthcare campaign in the US had a debate about ‘single payer’ insurance, but no-one understood the policy or the language. Most people don’t know how to relate to it. We framed it as ‘Medicare for All’, because US citizens know Medicare. We had to go further because the media convinced people there was only public healthcare and private healthcare.”
Gaining mainstream media coverage, and therefore raising the profile of the campaign among the general public, is always a core activity for momentum tradition organisations. This can be achieved through “high levels of sacrifice and disruption”. Engler makes the point: “If you can get a couple of thousand people arrested, I can guarantee you are going to get front page newspaper coverage.”
However, this level of dedication can only be achieved if the founders of the movement assume or act as though it will happen. Escalating to high levels of sacrifice and disruption is how you get media attention. “If we do not think about building to get there from the beginning, we’re never going to get there.” Campaigns with millions of dollars never escalate to high levels of sacrifice and disruption, because they are risk averse and, as a result, “they never get a moment of the whirlwind.”
Brendan Montague is the editor of The Ecologist online.
COMMUNIST PARTY OF MAINE 