Читать книгу Hegemony How-To - Jonathan Smucker - Страница 5

by janice fine

I have a good friend who is wary of social movements. He isn’t a right-winger. He is a brilliant community organizer who has built major organizations in New York, New England, and the Midwest. Even when Occupy Wall Street was at its height, spreading from city to city, and attracting enormous media attention to the problem of economic inequality, my friend was unmoved. In his eyes, the encampment at Zuccotti Park was not an oasis, prefiguring a new society. It was a mirage, evocative of some of the worst pathologies of the American left and a distraction from the real work of organizing: recruiting a base, developing a strategy, formulating demands, expanding the scope of conflict, taking action…building power and lasting institutions.

As it turns out, my friend and Jonathan Smucker, a talented organizer who was a core participant in Occupy Wall Street, would have more to say to each other than I would have thought. Smucker has spent much of the past five years reflecting on the lessons of Occupy. Hegemony How-To is an insider’s attempt to mine the sociological canon to wrestle with why Occupy sputtered and explore what it takes to more effectively organize and build power with the 99%. Smucker pays special attention to Occupy because it is emblematic of problems that he has experienced in his two decades of organizing work with a variety of social movements; the book is much more than a critique of this particular “movement moment.” Through the questions he poses and the literatures he brings in, Smucker provides a fresh and insightful look at an old and vexing problem.

I particularly appreciate the book’s deep examination of left “movement culture” and the light it shines on our tendency toward insularity and self-enclosure. Smucker observes that oppositional groups, as they struggle to create their own safe spaces, narratives, rituals, and distinctive communities, often have a penchant for developing in self-referential directions—sometimes coming to choose the comfort of their clubhouses over the scrum and the inevitable compromises of politics. Along these lines, he holds the emergent culture of Occupy responsible for its demise.

But Smucker’s agenda isn’t finger-pointing or blame. He urges us to take a hard look at patterns of internal dysfunction in order to better seize the abundant organizing and mobilizing opportunities before us today. Occupy’s premature unraveling is a tragedy for Smucker precisely because of the radical potential its early success seemed to promise. Occupy wildly, thrillingly succeeded at “reframing a potent and popular class conscious narrative” and the mainstream media was shockingly open to carrying the message and covering the novel movement. But in its resistance to uniting with existing groups, social blocs, and institutions that were key to expansion, Occupy ultimately sabotaged itself. To partially explain the origins of these self-destructive inclinations, Smucker puts forward the notion of the political identity paradox: in order to succeed, social movements need to foster the deep group identity that leads a dedicated core to make extraordinary commitments of their energy and time, but this same strong internal cohesion can lead to isolation that will prevent organizations from acting effectively to achieve their political goals. I think he’s spot on.

One of Smucker’s most incisive observations about Occupy is that over time the rituals that grew up around the movement’s process of decision-making came not to facilitate the development of strategy, but to stand in for strategy itself. While viewing the hyper-democratic General Assemblies at Zuccotti Park as brilliant theatre and an important part of the public message that “juxtaposed a visibly participatory people’s movement against a rotted political system,” Smucker nonetheless came to the conclusion that it was nearly impossible to get anything done through this forum. “Because they were so cumbersome and easily derailed, many of the most active Occupy organizers…eventually stopped attending with much frequency. We were too busy attending to tasks to be able to sit through hours upon hours of exasperating do-nothing meetings. Thus much of the real decision-making was pushed … into underground centers of informal power.” Anyone who has worked inside organizations, coalitions, or movements with hyper-democratic processes but no formal structures is sure to recognize the hard truth of Smucker’s words.

In the existential and intellectual wrestling match between movement and organization that has been going on inside the American left for generations, this book reaches for synthesis. If our ambition is to be a hegemonic actor, Smucker argues that we should embrace the Gramscian concept of articulation where there is a fusion of the institutional contest —“the strategic capacity to maneuver through the minutia of political terrain to shape structures, laws, policies, distributions of wealth and relationships of power,” which is the realm of organizing—with the symbolic contest—“the capacity to shape narrative, symbols, meaning, and common sense,” which is the realm of movement. Our desire for such synthesis is the reason why the civil rights movement is every community organizer’s favorite—because it was a movement that incorporated institutions while it also catalyzed challenger groups and included tactics and messages (e.g., lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides, etc.) that compellingly prefigured the movement’s vision of a more racially just society.

The subtitle for this book is “A Roadmap for Radicals.” Smucker understands that to contest power, grassroots organizations and social movements must have more than a vision of a better world; they need some sense of how to get there. In his words, “knowledge of what is wrong with a social system and knowledge of how to change the system are two completely different categories of knowledge,” and this book focuses first and foremost on the latter, thus serving as a twenty-first century organizer’s toolbox for the day-to-day work of building and wielding collective power: how to build organizations, how to provide entry points and ladders of engagement, how to develop strategies calibrated to move more individuals and organizations from passive support into the active allies column, and how to put forth a set of ideas, narratives, and memes that are situated within American cultural tropes rather than outside of them.

I so appreciate Smucker’s willingness to tell us what happened on the inside of Occupy, amongst other movements, from his perspective—to air his frustrations and mine the scholarly literature for insights into the predicaments, peccadillos, and contradictions of the US left. He says that when he first got involved in social movements, he felt like something of a “political orphan,” not finding many mentors or resources to guide him toward thinking more strategically about social change. I hope that this book will find its way into the hands of many of the dedicated young people who may find themselves in a similar situation today. So much depends upon the new social movements that are emerging today to confront the multiple crises we presently face. In the right hands, this book might just contribute to these important movements’ success.

Janice Fine is Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at the School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University, Director of Research and Strategy at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization (CIWO), and author of the book Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream published by Cornell University Press and the Economic Policy Institute.