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“My fellow radicals who were supposed to pass on the torch of experience and insights to a new generation just were not there.”

—Saul Alinsky2

Late to the game

“Do you ever think we came to the game too late?”

Carmen Trotta has a heaviness about him. Burdened. He is also charming and always sincere, but he doesn’t pose questions like this one for the sake of making conversation. He thought that there was a very good chance that we had literally been born too late to do anything to stop humanity from destroying itself ­completely.

Maybe the social movements of the 1960s, or those of the 1930s, could have corrected the course. Carmen wasn’t about to argue that these movements had accomplished nothing important. But they had fallen short in important respects—and he wondered if the damage could be remedied at this point. A dozen years my senior, he had barely missed the wave of social movements—from civil rights to feminism, from student protests to anti-colonial revolutions—that had shaken the world, but that had by now, only about a quarter century later, become an almost unbelievable distant memory. Carmen came of age in the 1980s, an era that seemed to be inoculated against the memories and ideas of “the 60s.”

Carmen, Jeremy Scahill, and I were discussing politics in a bar in New York City’s Lower East Side, just two blocks from the Saint Joseph Catholic Worker house, where they both worked and lived. It was the spring of 1997. Bill Clinton had just been inaugurated for a second term and the Dow had just broken 7,000 points for the first time. At that point, Carmen had lived at the Worker for more than ten years—he still lives there today—splitting his time between serving meals to poor and homeless people, working on the Catholic Worker monthly newspaper (which still costs a penny a copy), and engaging in protest against social injustices—from opposing New York slumlords to US wars of empire. A practicing Catholic, Carmen found a political home in what remained of the Catholic left, taking action alongside people like Liz McAllister, Phil Berrigan, and Dan Berrigan (the ex-nun, ex-priest, and priest, respectively, who famously burned draft board files and broke into US military bases to hammer on weapons, “turning swords into plowshares”).

Carmen’s day-to-day routine of service and sacrifice points to an interesting thing about the question he posed: its answer didn’t make a difference to how he lives his life. Whether or not there’s any realistic reason for hope, he would continue to live with and serve the poor and to put his body on the line to oppose injustice—even if failure were assured—because it was the right thing to do. Carmen is one of those rare people who do not need hope in order to take costly moral political action. That did not mean, however, that outcomes were unimportant to him. He wanted to believe that our actions could make the world a better place. That is why he was asking us this question—he sincerely wanted to know what Jeremy and I thought about humanity’s realistic prospects.

“Maybe it is too late,” I answered soberly. “I really don’t know.”

We were living at “the end of history”3—the Cold War was over and capitalism had won, so the story went. Carmen, Jeremy, and I certainly did not believe the claim that “There is no alternative,”4 but neither did we see anything on the horizon resembling a threat to capitalism’s hegemony, or a prospect for a world with more social justice. Those who had stayed active in the remnants of the movements of the long 1960s seemed to be perpetually up against the culture. Ronald Reagan’s popularity—and all that went along with it—had a deeply demoralizing effect (not to mention the consequences of actual policies, from the PATCO5 strike to intervention in Latin America). As the millennium came to an end, everything felt hopeless and apocalyptic for young social justice–oriented radicals like me, who were new to the scene.

Protest and politics were still so new for me then. I had met Jeremy in Cuba the summer before. He was as charismatic as he was politically astute, and I liked him immediately. He had just served a month in jail for civil disobedience at the Pentagon. I was inspired to meet someone who was willing to make sacrifices for what he believed—to put his money where his mouth was. We bonded by making wisecracks about all the Socialist Workers Party members who made up about a third of our youth delegation to Cuba. We viewed them as do-nothings who only wanted to sell their newspaper, The Militant—we called it The Hesitant—at the periphery of protests that other people organized. Upon our return to the States, Jeremy introduced me to Carmen, and soon the two of them were mentoring me as I organized a campaign against Walmart’s grand opening in my hometown.

Righteousness and agency

My unlikely trip to Cuba, at age 18, had been made possible in large part by the fundraising efforts of the Philadelphia-based Cuba Support Coalition, and in part thanks to my parents’ present to me for (barely) graduating from high school. My parents’ sponsorship of an illegal trip to Cuba may make me sound like a “red diaper baby,” raised by radical communists. That’s nowhere close to the truth. I grew up conservative and relatively sheltered. I was brought up Mennonite on a farm outside of the tiny town of Bird-In-Hand in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Bird-In-Hand’s economy was based on agriculture and tourism. Tourists from New York City and around the world would come and stare from their cars at the Amish as the latter worked the land. The Amish were our neighbors, friends, and relatives, perfectly normal and boring—what was strange to us was why anyone would find them so interesting. As a Mennonite, my life revolved around church and family. I attended worship services at least twice a week, and attended Mennonite school, from Kindergarten onward.

Lancaster County was only a three-hour drive from that bar in the Lower East Side. Until only a few months prior I had lived my entire life in Lancaster. But now it seemed like a different universe and an eternity away. Though nowhere close to being a radical, my father had briefly flirted with the counter-culture at the tail end of the Vietnam War. The draft ended just one month before he would have come up for the lottery. When he was a high school senior, in 1971, he took an unauthorized “field trip” to Washington DC with his older brother for the May Day mass civil disobedience against the war. He and his brother even broke through a police line in order to avoid arrest. That was only seven years before I was born, the youngest of three children—but it probably seemed like an eternity away to my father by then. He and my mother, by age 25 and 23, respectively, had to provide for a family of five. Both of their families were poor, and neither of them had attended college. Economically, they had little choice but to settle down in their conservative community of origin and to forget about whatever alternative notions they may have briefly entertained. While they had no love for Ronald Reagan, they also hardly had a developed political analysis—or encouragement from anyone around them to pursue such a thing. My father took over managing a delicatessen stand at the Allentown Farmer’s Market, and my mother worked various odd jobs. Whether or not he made a conscious decision to do so, Dad’s social and economic survival strategy entailed shutting the hell up about his brief adventure in the counter-culture—so much so that all I ever caught wind of while growing up was seeing photos of him with long hair at age 19 working on a sail ship, and hearing a few stories about his hitchhiking adventures in Europe.

Indeed, the way I learned more about my father’s short-lived radicalism was from my conservative uncles, who brought it up when I started inarticulately questioning the status quo myself. Their intention was not encouragement, but rather to dismiss my newfound politics as a passing phase.

“Yeah, your dad used to go to protests too. Don’t worry, you’ll grow out of it—just like he did.”

I was afraid that time would prove them right. The truth was, other than the deep intuitive sense of social justice that I had acquired, I had no idea what I was doing. Only a few short years before, I had just been a more-or-less “normal” kid in rural America. I spent way too much time watching television and playing video games. I was always trying to make a few bucks selling contraband at school, like noisemakers and bubblegum. I was not scholastically inclined—a few times I had to take summer classes to not repeat a grade. I was not remotely well-read. I had a weak sense of history and politics, let alone cosmopolitan culture. Looking back, my “not knowing any better” sometimes played out in comical ways. I remember sitting in the back of the car listening to adults discussing poverty, when I was in sixth grade. A light bulb went on in my head and I butted in enthusiastically with my surely original idea:

“What if everyone just took everything that they made together and shared it?”

“There’s a name for that!” my aunt snapped back at me, “It’s called communism!”

I didn’t know what that meant, but it seemed really bad. Two years later, after a childhood of Mennonite education in which I had to memorize assigned Bible verses every week, I started to read the Bible on my own—less selectively than how it had been taught to me up until then, it turned out. Very soon I discovered that neither myself nor Karl Marx had invented the idea of sharing in common the product of everyone’s labor; Jesus Christ had spouted off about it two thousand years ago. And apparently it got him killed.

I became disillusioned as I read the Bible and discovered that the theology of individualistic salvation from eternal damnation had little basis in the scriptures, while social and economic justice was a central theme. I studied the gospels and the prophets and began reading about the global economy at the same time, applying the message of the former to the contemporary world in which I found myself awakening. I hadn’t yet heard of liberation theology, but I was deeply inspired by the prophets and how they stood up, sometimes all alone, on behalf of the poor and oppressed, to admonish the rich and powerful—often at great personal cost. I wanted to be like them. I felt myself called to the wilderness. At age 17 I told my parents that I was leaving home to follow that calling.

I left with $200, a backpack, and no plan other than to zealously seek whatever I might find. I hitchhiked from Pennsylvania up into New England, and then across the Midwest, camping in fields and forests and relying on the generosity of strangers. I prayed and fasted and read the Bible, while taking a month to circle Lake Michigan. I didn’t have any of the mystical visions that I may have been hoping for. But I worked through a great deal of fear. It wasn’t hitchhiking or strangers or sleeping alone in the woods that frightened me—all of these things delighted me. What scared me to my core were the unsettling feelings I increasingly felt the more I learned about the structures of society, the economy, and the United States government. This new knowledge defied the common sense that I had been learning over the whole course of my childhood. I was deeply distressed that my emerging beliefs seemed to contradict the version of Christianity that I was raised to believe. Reading the gospels, I found a front-and-center emphasis on social justice in the here and now, but at church I heard mostly about individual salvation for a select few in the hereafter. I experienced this as a profound break from the doxa of the only community I had ever known—a community that I loved. I wanted God to speak clearly and audibly to tell me that my new and nascent beliefs were, in fact, Truth. If I could have absolute certainty about my beliefs, then I would be willing to do anything for them—to be ostracized, even to die. I prayed and prayed, asking for this certainty. And finally one day, alone in the American wilderness, in the silence, a strong sense suddenly came over me—a feeling that God was about to answer my prayer.

There was no audible voice. There was only a thought, like a whisper:

“If I answer, you will stop asking.”

In that moment it suddenly dawned on me that one should never know for certain that their partial truth was God’s universal truth—or whether or not God was on their side. I thought of all the horrors that have been committed by people who entertained no doubts about the rightness of their actions, and I decided right then that I would always maintain a healthy measure of self-doubt. I would embrace a life in which questions were more important than definitive answers.

At the same time, however, I knew that a lack of certainty was no excuse for not taking decisive action on the moral issues of my time. I felt that I had to figure out a way to take bold action on the social justice issues that had captured my attention. I knew intuitively that there would be costs to speaking or acting upon my emerging convictions. I was quite familiar with the story of the righteous person who speaks truth to power. That story ended on a cross.

Like Carmen, I had come to the point where I did not need to believe that my efforts would achieve successful results in order to proceed. I returned home at the end of the summer in order to finish my last year of high school. This was the concession my parents had won from me when I left home, along with my promise to call twice a week—in exchange they had agreed not to report me as a runaway. Upon returning home, I knew what I had to do. At Lancaster Mennonite High School each day began with the approximately 800 students, plus faculty, gathering for chapel—a kind of mini-worship service. I signed up to lead one such service. I wrote myself a script. Half of it was scripture, the other half was information about the global economy: exploitation, sweatshops, union-busting, ecological destruction, death squads, imperialism, empire, and so on. We were all implicated, I argued, as complacent beneficiaries of an oppressive global order. I read verbatim the script I had written, my heart beating hard. Summarizing the Exodus story, a 17-year-old me, timid and shaking, said into the microphone to 800 fellow students: “A struggle is taking place; a struggle between the Egyptians and the Israelites; a struggle between oppressors and oppressed; a struggle between rich and poor. That’s right, it’s a class struggle. An economic class struggle is taking place. So it is no wonder that God sides with the Israelites. God always sides with the poor and oppressed, and is therefore against the rich oppressors.”6

I could feel the disapproval of the Vice Principal, Mr. King, who sat on the bench on the stage behind me. Anticipating the possible content of my chapel, he had stopped me in the hall the afternoon before to advise, “You know, Jesus said that the poor will always be among us.” As I read on, I kept wondering if he would interrupt me and put an end to my intervention. Silence in the auditorium. Except for my trembling voice. I looked up from my papers on the podium to see my dad at the back of the chapel, appearing to be following my words intently, deep in thought. He had come to see me speak, but he didn’t know what I was going to say.7 Then I saw Mike, who was both the student council president and my neighbor, rising from his seat and walking out defiantly. Several other students followed him. This was precisely the kind of thing I had been expecting. No normal classes would be held at LMH that day. Teachers had to facilitate heated discussions about my remarks the whole day long. In that sheltered environment, my message was the bombshell that I thought it would be. It was only a matter of time before I would be stoned to death or hanging on a cross, all alone.

What I had not anticipated was the number of students who would resonate with the message and who would want to find out more. They even wanted to do something about the situation I had spotlighted—to take some kind of action. Nor had I anticipated how many teachers and faculty members would agree with the social justice message. Teachers, it turned out, had to be careful to not appear too “liberal,” lest they become the next victim of the periodic witch-hunts that conservative parents were known to take up. My act had given teachers cover to open up space in their classroom to candidly discuss social and economic justice issues, as they could not be accused of initiating the conversation. Starting the conversation was my part to play.

At the end of the school day, I went promptly to Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), an organization whose headquarters are in Lancaster County. It was at MCC’s alternative resource library where I had first paged through publications like New Internationalist, Multinational Monitor, and The Catholic Worker—my initial sources for self-education about the global economy. This time I walked into the main office and I asked for help. I told the first folks I saw what I had done that morning. News travels fast in tight-knit Mennonite communities—they had already heard. I also told them about the response, especially the students who wanted to find out more. One of the two people I encountered there was Dave Schrock-Shenk, who just so happened to be working on a curriculum for a 30-day educational experiment for groups called World of Enough. It wasn’t ready yet, but we soon made plans to pilot the draft curriculum with 70 interested students at Lancaster Mennonite.

This was my first small taste of political hope. I had psyched myself up to play my part in a story of the righteous few. I had expected that by speaking my truth, I would be rejected by everyone. It’s not that there was nothing of value about the process I had gone through to psych myself up. After all, I had faced my deepest fears and overcome them. And I had found my voice—it was shaking, but it was audible and I could sense the power of saying aloud what I felt needed to be said. I wasn’t totally off base in my prediction of the reaction: the social justice message was, indeed, rejected by many in the audience—violently so by a few folks later on. However, for others, the message had resonated and served as a spark.

In telling myself a story of the righteous few, I had assumed that dominant beliefs were held more enthusiastically by more people than was actually the case. Because I didn’t see blatant, visible signs of a social justice paradigm, I assumed that meant that no one around me held these values. When I was a kid my mom was fond of saying, “It’s not going to jump out and bite you!” whenever I was looking for something (like a missing toy) in a half-assed manner. She was teasing me for the ridiculousness of how I would impatiently glance around a room, not see the thing I wanted, and immediately give up. What I came to realize from the positive responses to my chapel talk—and from the 70 students who participated in the World of Enough campaign that followed—is that social justice values are always all around me, even if I can’t see it at first glance, even if I have to dig around to uncover them. And my role isn’t to mope about how I can’t find what I’m looking for—let alone to condemn the whole scene, while fancying myself some kind of righteous prophet whom the world isn’t ready for. There’s nothing righteous about standing alone, impotently—at least not as long as I have other avenues to pursue. My role instead, I started to understand, was to dig in, to look under the surface, to find and to help cultivate and activate social justice values. I came to realize that dominant ideology is not believed by everyone—sometimes it is not even believed by the majority. Years later I came upon a passage by Brazilian educator Paulo Freire that nicely sums up my initial error: “Sometimes, in our uncritical understanding of the nature of the struggle, we can be led to believe that all the everyday life of the people is a mere reproduction of the dominant ideology. But it is not. There will always be something of the dominant ideology in the cultural expressions of the people, but there is also in contradiction to it the signs of resistance—in the language, in music, in food preferences, in popular religion, in their understanding of the world.”8

My experience of connecting with others on social justice values and then of figuring out together a way to take collective action produced in me a feeling of efficacy—like I could help to make a change in the world.

Immersion

At the same time, I also felt exhausted. In Lancaster I was something like a “political orphan,” making it up as I went.9 Jeremy and Carmen were my only mentors, and they lived in New York. After the Walmart campaign in Lancaster, I decided to move to the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington DC—just for a little while, I thought, to learn and to rejuvenate. I was so happy to find a deep sense of community there and to be able to protest alongside people who already “got it”—folks who I didn’t have to organize to get them to come to the protest. We protested sweatshops in Haiti, oil drilling in Nigeria and Colombia, US sanctions and escalation against Iraq, human rights abuses around the world, the death penalty, the drug war, the military industrial complex, imperialism, racism, sexism, bigotry, and on and on. I spent two years at the Catholic Worker. Each protest and campaign led to the next. In no time I was fully plugged into the radical subculture. By the end of the 1990s—after just a few years—I had been involved in numerous campaigns and had been arrested 20 times for protest and civil disobedience.

I had acquired an empowering sense of agency through the experience of taking action and seeing directly how my actions made an impact. However, that impact seemed to be limited to the level of mobilization itself. In other words, I could get people to come to actions, and I was becoming adept at action logistics, but our actions seemed to consistently fall short of influencing political outcomes. In Lancaster I had stirred things up, but I hadn’t come even close to stopping Walmart or effecting any changes in the government policies and corporate practices I protested. My sense of agency in local mobilization and logistics was at odds with the deep resignation I felt in the face of a very bleak larger political reality. Carmen’s question of whether it was too late for us to make a difference weighed heavily on me.

I felt a deep sense of fulfillment in joining with others to put our bodies on the line and speak truth to power. Power, however, did not seem overly concerned with our truth. Power is concerned with power. And we didn’t seem to have very much of it. Over time I started to understand that a “slogan doesn’t threaten anyone”10; that those of us who wish to “speak truth to power” have to arm our truth with power too; that “truth” and social justice, in the world of politics, are only particular agendas in a sea of possible outcomes. The universe was not somehow bent toward their eventual automatic realization. We would have to fight.

That much was already obvious. We were fighting. The problem was that our fighting seemed hopeless; our resistance, futile. Our opponents seemed to hold all of the advantages. At most, we might be capable of being a nuisance. All the evidence pointed toward the harsh reality that idealistic social justice-oriented young people like me had indeed arrived “too late to the game.” We were up against the culture itself, it seemed, swimming feebly against a powerful tide.

This is what troubled Carmen so deeply: the idea that he could devote his whole life to an activity that, in the end, might make no difference at all—like Sisyphus, condemned to push a boulder up a hill only to see it roll back down, time and time again. Yet Carmen wouldn’t live his life any other way. He couldn’t look away from the suffering of the poor and oppressed. He couldn’t carve out a comfortable niche for himself within a system that caused so much suffering and injustice. And it’s not as if such a life was all doom and gloom. There was tremendous joy to be found in the struggle. There was a depth of community and meaning that seemed to be in short supply in contemporary American society. Sure, people like Carmen and Liz and Phil would sacrifice and risk a great deal for the sake of the struggle, but they would be the first to tell you that the life they chose was abundantly full of joy.

I felt the same way. One night, following an especially spirited protest, I wrote in my journal, “I have found my church. I have found my family.” Carmen, Jeremy and I went back and forth at that bar about the potential for long-term, large-scale political opportunities—grand recalibrations—but, for ourselves, we knew that we would keep on keeping on either way. This is how, despite a bleak assessment of the prospects of social justice movements, I stuck with it. I plodded on in the small and marginal social movement groups that I had stumbled upon in my neck of the United States in the 1990s. In a moment that felt hopeless, I was able to find others who held out hope—or who at least acted, even without hope. I realized, however, that we would have to figure out some as yet unknown game-changing intervention, if we were ever to shift the odds in our favor.

A taste of potency

Then one day it happened.

On the morning of November 30, 1999, heads of state, trade ministers, and official delegates from around the world gathered in Seattle, Washington for the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization. More accurately, these delegates attempted to gather. They were greeted instead by ten thousand people—mostly young—who had successfully blockaded all the intersections leading to the convention center where the meetings were to be held. This was a major tactical coup that no one in power had expected. Groups I’d been involved with in the two years prior, like the Direct Action Network, The Ruckus Society, and Art & Revolution had been working in the months leading up to Seattle to train people in the use of lock boxes for “hard” blockades (where blockaders locked their arms into hardware, like chains and welded-together metal apparatuses, to make it very difficult for police to disperse them). These direct action–oriented organizations created a plan wherein specific affinity groups took over each of the intersections and entry points.

The affinity groups were trained not only to erect blockades, but also to respond to the contingencies that would follow. How do you de-escalate a charged situation with police or with hot-tempered vigilantes? How do you stay calm so that you can think clearly? What will you do if the police start pepper-spraying people or using pain-compliance holds? How do you alleviate the painful sting of pepper spray and teargas after the fact? What will you do—and who in the group has relevant expertise—if there is a medical emergency? Who in the group will talk to reporters if they approach? Who will explain the reasons for the protest to passersby? Who will keep track of folks who get arrested, and provide support from the outside? How will the group make the kind of quick decisions that are often necessary in street scenarios? The affinity groups were prepared. The police and city government of Seattle were not.

As the hours passed on that fateful morning, the police escalated. They used teargas, pepper spray, pain compliance, and other aggressive tactics. Donning gas masks and riot gear, they looked like Imperial stormtroopers. The governor declared martial law and deployed the National Guard. As news spread of what was going down, the affinity groups were joined by tens of thousands of unionists who had also turned out in larger-than-expected numbers for a permitted rally against the WTO. Thousands of Seattle residents also joined the fray spontaneously—outraged that their city had suddenly been turned into a police state.

The next day the delegates were able to convene. But no regular business could be conducted. What had happened the day before was on the front page of every major newspaper around the world. The images clearly depicted a strong mobilized opposition in the streets of a major US city. The images showed peaceful civilians engulfed in clouds of teargas and a melee of rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and unrestrained police batons. The world was both shocked at the sight of the “gloves coming off” in America, and inspired that people in the United States were visibly joining with movements in the Global South that had been protesting against neoliberal policies for decades. Inside the convention center, official delegates from Global South nations seized the platform that this dramatic intervention had provided them. They spoke against the brutal treatment of nonviolent protesters and against the WTO and neoliberal policies that benefited the few against the interests of the many. The ministerial meetings collapsed and were declared a total failure. The WTO, which most Americans had never heard of before November 30th, suddenly became a household name. Most Americans might have had only a very vague idea what it was, but the optics of the situation provided a strong impression that, whatever the hell it was, it wasn’t very democratic.

For young radicals in the United States at the turn of the century, Seattle was our “coming out party.” We were “coming out” not only to the nation and to the world, but also to ourselves—realizing our own existence as a force. Overnight, the game had changed. Margaret Thatcher’s claim that There is no alternative had suddenly been replaced by the new slogan of the global justice movement: Another world is possible.

I threw myself into the new global justice movement with a renewed spirit. I got myself to Washington DC in early 2000, two months before the meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank—which would serve as the site of our next battle against neoliberalism and the global capitalist elite. For two months I worked with Nadine Bloch and Madeline Gardner in a hole-in-the-wall office that Greenpeace had graciously lent to the effort. I dove headlong into a half-dozen working groups, especially the direct action, training, and public relations working groups. Considering myself an anarchist at the time, I also did a great deal of informal diplomacy between fellow anarchists and more established organizations, like labor unions and environmental organizations. On April 16 and 17 we pulled off another strong mobilization of tens of thousands of people, drawing public scrutiny to global financial institutions that had managed to operate behind the scenes for decades. After that, we targeted the national conventions of both political parties, the Republicans in Philadelphia and the Democrats in Los Angeles. Then there was the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting in Quebec City. There was the G8 meeting in Genoa, Italy. The list goes on. Each city provided a site for dramatic skirmishes between protesters and police at the perimeters of the secured fortresses of the global elite.

We were never able to repeat the incredible tactical success of Seattle. And there were all sorts of problems along the way, including the diminishing returns on our tactical repetition. The media called us “summit hoppers”—as if the same exact group of people descended upon each city. And the negative optics of “protesters vs. police” was eclipsing the much more advantageous juxtaposition of “the people vs. the global elite.” These problems aside, the approximately two-year window of the global justice movement provided an amazing shot in the arm. I was thrilled by our success. By subjecting global elite institutions like the WTO, IMF and World Bank to public scrutiny, the movement was able to set some measurable limits on their policies and their agenda. Many of the changes were rhetorical, where the institutions started to emphasize fighting poverty and so on. But a rhetorical shift is a start; it sets the stage for potential policy and structural changes.

During these years I put a lot of intention and effort into building up my grassroots organizing experience and skill set. I wanted to learn as much as possible, so I could be as effective as possible—and to try to help this budding movement to be as effective as possible. While Seattle and the burst of momentum that followed felt amazing, I viewed our tactical maneuver of actually shutting down the WTO ministerial meeting as an anomaly and thought that we had to get more creative than simple repetition. Moreover, I saw the value of our intervention in Seattle as mostly symbolic and believed we would need to increase the capacity of our operation many times over if we were to ever achieve any political outcomes worth writing home about.11 But Seattle provided the all-important taste of victory that made such a trajectory seem possible. I committed to developing my own political skill set, and to doing what I could to spread organizing, mobilizing, and campaigning skills among my fellow movement participants.

Second break

In addition to leading skills trainings, I kept finding myself in communications-related roles—in the global justice movement, with various local organizing efforts, and then later in the post-9/11 antiwar movement.12 Roughly half of this communication work was directed externally, i.e., “public relations”: developing campaign messages, writing press releases, training spokespeople, and so on. This would remain one of the ways I would contribute to movements and campaigns for years to come—up through the present—from serving as communications director of School of the Americas Watch, to managing the PR operation for the Chelsea Manning Support Network, to plugging into the PR working groups of mobilizations like Occupy Wall Street. The other half of my communication-related work was internally directed, and it often took priority. It turns out that contentious movements can be internally contentious as well. I spent a great deal of my energy attempting to build consensus. Sometimes this required delicate diplomacy between coalition partners, sometimes strong facilitation of heated meetings, sometimes long one-on-one conversations over coffee, and sometimes more formal mediation processes. The role became something of a niche for me, and I found it fulfilling in a number of organizing contexts. I was good at helping people to understand each other better—to make peace and play nice with each other. I had had to do so much “translation” work in the first place, for myself, in order to transition from a rural conservative religious working-class background and assimilate into social movements that often drew participants from more educated, affluent, secular, and liberal-leaning backgrounds. Perhaps as a result, I tended to hear all of the movement messages from several standpoints at once, often thinking about whether and how a message could be made to connect with the values of “unlikely allies,” like I myself had been.

And perhaps that’s also why the internal consensus-building role I played sometimes bothered me. It felt like navel-gazing. My diplomatic efforts were not in the service of bridging across great divides, but rather across marginal distinctions between individuals and groups that all scored well above the ninetieth percentile on the lefty-land spectrum. On the one hand, I felt myself effective at building working consensus. I could facilitate marathon meetings—often eight, ten, or twelve hours long—and my patient touch sometimes seemed to do the trick in moving different factions forward in a common direction. I got a lot of positive feedback, and that felt really good. At that point in my life the discovery that I had something useful to contribute was important for my own development and self-worth. Not very much time had passed since I had nearly flunked out of high school—with a Grade Point Average so low that college would not even become an option, had I been interested, until several years later. So that all felt positive. On the other hand, over time I started to think that the decisions we arrived at were often not very good decisions. The heated disagreements seemed self-referential and far removed from my sense of what might reach broader audiences or measurably impact the issues we cared about. The groups that I was working hard to get to play nice with each other were often very small, lacking a social base. I wondered what difference it made if they worked together or not. It felt like the difference between one or two drops in an otherwise empty bucket. After the fleeting moment that was the global justice movement had passed, we had again become so small. Even at the apogee of the global justice movement, we were really only at the point of “getting started”—in terms of the numbers needed to actually make a substantial impact on political outcomes. Without a growth trajectory, I did not see how we would attain the collective power needed to make the changes we imagined.

Rather than strategize together about how we might tap into a broader social base of power, we would waste enormous amounts of time in esoteric debates. During the lead-up to the IMF and World Bank protests in DC, I remember the Direct Action working group spending more than half of our meeting time—for five consecutive weeks—debating the wording of the mobilization’s mission statement.13 It wasn’t that a mission statement was totally unimportant to me, but there was an enormous amount of practical work that still had to be done—first to mobilize people to come to DC, and then to work out the overwhelming logistics (e.g., housing, food, training, meeting spaces, and legal support) for when they would arrive by the thousands. Critical tasks were being sidelined because of an excruciating collective editing process of text that had probably been good enough the first time around. Besides, there were so many ways that we were getting our messages out daily that were far more impactful than a one-paragraph mission statement that would be posted on our website. We wheat-pasted posters all around DC, mailed an informational broadsheet to hundreds of organizers and organizations across the country, and held press conferences and countless interviews with reporters in the lead-up. Our press work was reaching millions of people. So why all the fuss about a damned mission statement?!

Then one day an explanation suddenly dawned on me. The mission statement was contentious because it was an expression of our identity. It was about who we were as people—what we stood for and believed and how we expressed ourselves—much more than it was about our instrumental purpose and political goals as a mobilization. Our debate about the mission statement was qualitatively different than navigating and negotiating legitimate disagreements over political goals or strategies and tactics for their achievement. This was about how we conceived of ourselves and projected our identities. That made compromise very difficult.

This epiphany provided a new lens through which I could examine a lot of behaviors in the groups I was part of, including my own actions. How many times, I wondered, had I favored a particular action or tactic because I really thought it was likely to change a decision-maker’s position or win over key allies, as opposed to gravitating toward an action because it expressed my activist identity and self-conception? How concerned were we really, in our practice, with political outcomes? We often seemed more preoccupied with the purity of our political expression than with how to move from Point A to Point B. It felt as if having the right line about everything was more important than making measurable progress on anything.

I took to questioning more and more, not only the injustices of “the system” and the status quo, but also myself and the righteous social justice movements to which I felt a profound sense of loyalty and belonging. Looking back at my brief time organizing in Lancaster County at age 17–18, before I really even had a concept of what organizing meant, it struck me that in important ways I had been better at it back then, before I assimilated into radical subcultures. Back then I wasn’t living in a magical universe composed mostly of ideologically driven self-selectors. I was engaging the people in my day-to-day life. It was really challenging, but I was oriented to persuade the people around me—to find words that would connect with their values and reference points. This was my orientation during the campaign I had organized to oppose Walmart’s arrival in Lancaster County. The campaign generated a lot of involvement from people who had no prior experience with collective action, and it generated a lot of negative media coverage for Walmart. Sure, we lost the campaign, but I was only 18 years old—I was just getting started!

I thought back on how when I moved into the Catholic Worker I had intended for it to be a temporary move—eventually I would return to where I was from, rejuvenated and more experienced, and I would make change there. Instead the Catholic Worker had served as a diving board into the deep waters of subculture. Somewhere along the way I had lost myself to a subculture whose first point of reference often seemed to be itself. I suddenly felt as if I had checked my own good sense at the door. And for what? I knew that it was because I longed to belong in a community that centered explicitly around social justice values. That was an understandable and worthy goal. But now I felt like I had carved out this identity at a cost of connecting with everyday people—“non-activists”—which also meant a severe cost in political impact.

During my initial politicization in high school, I had experienced a jarring break with the doxa of my community of origin. I had become disillusioned as I began to detect a gap between my community’s stated beliefs and the economic structures that shaped our objective relationship to other people in the world. As I developed this political analysis, I found others who shared it, and soon I dove headlong into subcultures whose bases were (varieties of) this analysis. But now I was experiencing a second break. I was starting to see how the subcultures I was part of were maintaining their own kind of doxa. We were righteously narrating our actions and intentions in ways that hid—mostly from ourselves—the ways that social, identity, community, and ego motivations were driving much of our behavior. It’s not that these motivations are inherently bad. Building community, for example, is a worthy pursuit. But these motivations become a problem when they trump our motivation to accomplish our ostensible political goals. The gap between what we said we were trying to do and the likelihood that our actions would produce such an outcome became glaringly apparent to me.

This second break felt in many ways just as jarring as the first. I questioned and shattered the assumptions I had been working under, one after another, until my own identity seemed to me like the dissected frog from high school biology lab, mercilessly cut open, pulled apart, pinned down and labeled. With my overlapping and competing motivations unearthed, I found myself unable to fulfill some requirements of membership in the radical groups and subcultures in which I had been submerged. I felt conflicted about playing my part in maintaining the group narrative. I stopped ignoring my own better judgment. Now I could see how the flyer decrying US imperialism—with its raised fist and edgy font—was designed to reflect our narrative and identity back to us, not to reach beyond our small insular circle. Our tactics were not really tactics, in the sense that a tactic is one step to move forward a strategy to achieve a measurable goal. More so, our actions were collectively performed rituals to express our values and ourselves. I remembered how I had written in my journal that I had “found my church.” Yes, the movement reminded me a lot of church. Going to a protest felt a lot like a worship service. Getting arrested for civil disobedience was something like baptism; a rite of passage; an assertion of one’s rightful place in the group. And, similar to my childhood experience of indoctrination in a conservative version of Christianity, some information was emphasized and spotlighted, while other information was downplayed, ignored, or attacked. The narrative acted as a powerful meaning-making filter. The same way a stained glass window depicts a static story at the cost of preventing parishioners from seeing outside, our narrative filter prevented us from accurately assessing reality.

We would all refer to “the movement.” We were all part of the movement. I started asking, Where? Where is there a movement? Show me something that fits the minimum requirements of what most people mean by the term movement. Where were there masses of people in motion to advance any of our causes? The moment of the global justice movement had passed. In the peace movement, I did not see the depth or breadth of a movement, aside from the brief window leading up to the 2003 military invasion of Iraq. I have given years of my life to this cause, and those who have stuck it out through decades when the whole culture seemed against them include some of the most dedicated people I have ever known. But the perseverance of a righteous few does not a movement make. What we had was not a movement. Perhaps it could have constituted itself as the core of a movement, but, as it was, it seemed more like residue from when there had been a movement, once upon a time. It often felt like we were gathering to perform historical re-enactments of scenes from an era we wished had not ended.

I wondered why I had devoted so much time to such small and insular circles of people. Was it simply because they were the ones waving the banner of radical change most visibly? Dedicated as we were, I started to see our grip on that banner as a kind of disadvantageous monopoly. Somehow in our society, the project of grassroots collective action had been transformed from a means toward social and political change into a negatively branded niche identity called “activism” that most of the public was effectively inoculated against. Many people in society, including people who were sympathetic on the issues, seemed to view this enterprise—to which I was devoting my whole life—as a foolhardy phase that college students pass through before they grow up.

The relatively recent invention of activism

This was one young radical’s experience coming of age in the lonely decades of a weak and fragmented political left in the United States at the turn of the 21st century. It is this experience with political challenger groups and social movements that serves as the basis for the reflections, concepts, and syntheses that fill the pages that follow.

My organizing and campaigning experience over the past two decades spans many issues, including economic justice (global, national, and local), racial justice, indigenous rights, labor, environmental and climate justice, human rights, US foreign policy, veterans’ issues, and health care; and I have been an active supporter and occasional collaborator on many other issues, including feminist causes and reproductive rights, immigrant rights, prison abolition, and student organizing. I have felt both proud and humbled to work alongside so many dedicated people from so many walks of life, to try to make the world a better place. It is a tricky thing to critique projects that one is part of—perhaps especially in written form. It’s not hard for me to critique my political opponents—I have much more difficulty critiquing things that I love. In this work, my critiques may at times seem harsh, but I hope readers will see this more as self-critique than finger pointing. I hope readers will see that these reflections come from a place of love. I use the pronoun “we” without hesitation throughout the book, to refer to groups and movements of which I am a part, and also to refer to a far larger “we”: the project of society itself.

A central argument of this book is that the larger social world (i.e., society) must always be our starting place and our touchstone. We have to meet people where they are at. The other side of this coin is that underdog groups have to vigilantly resist the tendency of insularity and self-enclosure. There are many factors that contribute to political groups constructing barriers between themselves and society (patterns that I explore at length in the first part of this book). One important contributing factor that has emerged in the United States over just the past few decades is the construction of a new category called activism. You read that right.

Over the years, people have constantly introduced me to others as an “activist.” And let me tell you what a buzzkill dropping that label can be! Of course some people are glad to meet a real live activist, or a “fellow activist.” Such sympathetic or curious persons have asked me countless times over the years how I became an activist. The question of how individuals as individuals become activists, fascinating as it may seem, carries equally fascinating assumptions about activism itself. It tends to imply a voluntary and self-selecting enterprise, an extracurricular activity, a realm of subculture, and a generic differentiating label; that an activist is a particular kind of person. When people refer to me as an activist, I have taken to correcting them: “I dislike the label activist,” I politely explain, “It lets everyone else off the hook!”

The label activist marks a content-less distinction between the active social change participant and the society. It gets in the way, while adding zero value. Moreover, people haven’t always used this word as they do today. Indeed, until half a century ago, people didn’t use it at all. Activism is a surprisingly new word and a new social category. It is tempting to look back at past movements like the abolitionists, suffragettes, or union movement and think of the participants as activists, but the words activism and activist did not even exist during the time of these movements. The word first appeared about a century ago. It had an entirely different meaning for its first couple of decades.14 With (at least elements of) its current meaning, the term only really started to enter into the English lexicon in the 1960s. It hit a plateau at a relatively low level in the 1970s, and then it resumed its ascent in the 1980s and 1990s.

Figure 1: Google Ngram Viewer search of “activists, activist, activism” 1900-2000.15

So what? Weren’t there other words that were more or less equivalent? Isn’t activism just a relatively new label that describes old phenomena? While this is true to an extent—i.e., some characteristics of what is today called activism were certainly present in collective action that predated the existence of the word—there is a great deal of evidence that suggests the word activism also carries important new meanings that were absent in earlier manifestations of collective action. I believe many of these new meanings are detrimental.

Labels are certainly not new to collective political action, but classifications like abolitionist, populist, suffragette, unionist, or socialist all referenced specific contents. These labels were often polarizing, but each polarization constituted its own contest of meaning in the popular imagination. Activist, on the other hand, is an apparently “content-less” label that now traverses political issues and social movements. Negative general stereotypes about activists deter popular support for particular political projects and can even negatively impact people’s opinions about a given political issue once it has been associated with generic “activists.”16 The activist strawman repels many people, cognitively blocking their entry into collective action.

Yet some are attracted to activism as such. Privy to a particular constellation of shared radical meanings and reference points, many activists take pride in activism partly because of their willingness to do something that is unpopular; some come to see their own marginalization as a badge of honor, as they carve out a radical oppositional niche identity. My own story provides texture to this “temptation”—this social pattern—which I had to develop a conscious awareness about in order to not succumb to it.

The likeminded clustering of activists fits into a broader trend in advanced capitalist nations: individual self-selection into values-homogenous communities, especially apparent within the expanded middle class of post-WWII American society.17 Thus, it is a relatively recent phenomenon, partly the result of tectonic cultural shifts in patterns of identity and social organization over the past half-century (atop major structural and economic shifts). In broad strokes, society has become more individualistic and self-expressive,18 as civic involvement has declined.19 With this backdrop, it is as if activism has morphed into a specific identity that centers on a hobby—something akin to being a skier or a “theater person”—rather than a civic or political responsibility that necessarily traverses groups and interests. In a society that is self-selecting into ever more specific micro-aggregations, it makes sense that activism itself could become one such little niche; that activism would become its own particular community of interest, which self-selecting individual activists join. The problem is that, when it comes to challenging entrenched power, we need more than little niches and self-selectors. We need much larger swaths of society to get involved.

A fledgling movement that attempts to attract only individuals as individuals, one at a time, will never grow fast enough to effect big systemic change. Powerful political challengers have never built their operations entirely from scratch, but rather by means of politicizing, activating, and aligning existing social blocs and institutions. Participation in the civil rights movement, for example, was hardly an individual matter; it tended to arise in relation to already established membership in communities and institutions—especially membership in black churches, historically black colleges, and chapters of the NAACP. This is the basic “formula” for how movements gain the kind of leverage they need to contend politically. In the 1980s Ralph Reed and other leaders of the emergent so-called Christian right studied the civil rights movement and emulated components of its approach, as they organized whole congregations and denominations—far more effective than waiting for individual self-selectors to join a movement because they happened to see a flyer. In this way, conservative congregations, especially in white suburban areas, became a major base of power that has been profoundly important for establishing and maintaining the hegemony of a conservative alignment (of Wall Street and social conservatives, in broad strokes) for the last few decades. The right seems to have learned more lessons of political strategy from the civil rights movement than the left has. While some important left campaigns did engage progressive religious congregations (e.g., the Central America solidarity movement), overall the left did not do anything comparable in the 1980s that was remotely at this scale. Instead the liberal left professionalized, producing a plethora of single-issue non-profit organizations (501-c3s), whose memberships were, by and large, passive—useful mostly for donations—if the organizations even had members at all, let alone local chapters that met face to face.20 At the same time, the radical left dramatically imploded and contracted. Many movement veterans were understandably traumatized by the repression and intensity of the 1960s and 70s. The active remnant narrated a common radical constellation of shared meanings and reference points. Newcomers would then orient themselves toward the center of the radical constellation, learning the radical lingo, which was profoundly out of touch with the language, worldview, and social practice of most Americans. Over time, this alienation and marginality vis-à-vis American society became deeply internalized in the practices and psychology of many radicals.

Both the liberal professionalization track and the radical alienation track are part of the story of the relatively recent invention and emergence of activism as a label and social category.21 Idealistic social justice–oriented young people today tend to take for granted that activism as such has always existed—that it is the category they must step into in order to take collective action. Not understanding the history and structures that constructed activism, most “activists” do not question how this construction might constrain their actions and options.

When activists enter a special cultural space where activism takes place among likeminded activists, what happens is that some of the most idealistic and collectively minded young people in society remove themselves voluntarily from the institutions and social networks that they were organically positioned to influence and contest. While most activists may not fully extricate themselves from “non-activist” spheres of their lives (e.g., family, workplace, etc.), still the framework that activism occupies a special space unto itself—that it is an activity disembedded from the day-to-day lives, cultural spaces, and workplaces of most people in society—encourages activists to check their activism at the door when entering “non-activist” spheres. Alternatively, they may proudly and defiantly wear their activism on their sleeve, but more as self-expressive fashion that distinguishes them from the group—and likely inoculates others against taking them seriously—than as part of a genuine attempt at strategic political engagement.

The spheres of everyday life are certainly not easy to engage politically, let alone to organize into a political force. There are plenty of legitimate and understandable reasons why many social justice-oriented people gravitate towards spaces where we feel more understood, and why we choose the path of least resistance in other spheres of our lives. However, the slow work of contesting and transforming such messy everyday spaces is the essence of grassroots political organizing. When we do not contest the cultures, beliefs, symbols, narratives, and common sense of—and from within—the existing institutions and social networks that we are part of, we also walk away from the resources and latent power embedded within them. This is not a winning trajectory. In exchange for our own shabby little activist clubhouse, we give away the farm. We let our opponents have everything.

Should we then abandon the “activist” label? A better question would be: Is there any compelling reason to persist in using a label that inoculates so many people against us and our messages? If this word effectively functions as a cognitive roadblock that prevents most people from considering anything we do or say, while also excusing sympathizers (who don’t consider themselves “activists”) from joining us, then inertia is not a good enough reason to hold onto such a disadvantageous label.

Just abandoning the label will only get us so far, though. It is much more important that we break out of the contained cultural niche that the label has prescribed; that we also abandon a make-believe world of activism in favor of strategically engaging in the terrain of politics. Our work is not to build from scratch a special sphere that houses our socially enlightened identities (and delusions). Our work is, rather, to contribute to the politicization of presently de-politicized everyday spaces; to weave politics and collective action into the fabric of society.22

A caveat is important here. The category of activism is a product of social, political, structural, cultural, and linguistic processes. It’s not the activists’ own original invention. The critique of the category is not about hippie-punching. It is all too easy to parrot negative stereotypes about “activists” and “protesters” and to attribute blame only to the aspiring change agents for what they fail to accomplish. This principle extends beyond just the category of activism. It extends to social movements generally, in relation to their milieus. It is hardly fair to place all the blame for internal movement problems upon the movements themselves. Movements must be conceptualized in relation to the societies they spring from. If a society lacks social movements that are strong enough and strategic enough to function as drivers of meaningful political change, then culpability and responsibility for that lack is shared to some extent across the society. How absurd would it be to only scrutinize those who are visibly attempting remedial collective action when so much of the problem often has to do with those groups and members of society who make no such attempt, or who get in the way? Challenger movements are not conjured out of thin air. They emerge organically within larger social realms, in relation to and in tension with status quo structures, cultures, norms, and policies. Changes and developments in the larger social realm shape the character and content of emerging challenger movements. The same is true for the constraints that movements face, including constraints internal to movements’ cultures. Social movements are not fully autonomous subjective actors, neatly separable from the status quo they challenge. If a certain strategic error or pitfall is found to be recurring within challenger movements of a particular era, then we may be able to reasonably theorize a relationship between the common error and larger sociological patterns. To understand social movements’ internal challenges, we also have to study the broader social, economic, and political context in which they are situated.

On the other hand, because progressive social movements occupy such a unique symbolic place in the larger public imagination, and because they have played such an indispensable role in effecting historic progressive changes, it behooves us to focus a significant portion of our attention on their internal dynamics, in order to make the movements of our time as effective as possible, both as catalyzing symbols and as instruments of change. This is why I dedicate so much effort in this book to examining the interior of political challenger movements. It is not about blame. It is not about posturing. It is certainly not about making them more pure. The purpose of such an examination is to gain clearer understandings of our constraints, external and internal, structural, cultural, and even psychological, so that we might better navigate them.

Ultimately, it’s about taking responsibility for our future. Frederick Douglass famously said that “power concedes nothing without a demand.”23 We can righteously shout slogans at the halls of power until we’re blue in the face, but in the long run we have to take responsibility for constructing the collective power needed to make our demands potent. Social movements in the United States today do not have anywhere close to the capacity needed to mount sustained challenges to the entrenched power structures that we are up against, at least when it comes to issues for which change would threaten capital and the increasingly plutocratic order (e.g., progressive taxation, public education, universal public health care, cutting military spending, public elections, corporate personhood, financial regulation, or combating climate change). Given our weak state of popular organization over the past few decades, the emergence of Occupy Wall Street was a beacon of hope for many in the United States, as it provided a powerful, popular counter-hegemonic narrative that aligned overnight a hitherto fragmented left and created a political opening to connect to far more popular audiences and broader social bases than we had had access to in decades. However, as we have seen, momentarily seizing the national narrative did not send bankers and Wall Street executives packing. A much more massive movement is needed if we are to actually challenge the formidable power of capital. Fortunately for us, we know from history that such challenges are possible. Tremendously difficult, but not unprecedented. Possible, when enough segments of society can be mobilized as bases of power.

So how do we build such a movement? Digging into this question is the central purpose of this book. Hegemony How-To is an invitation to imagine a reality in which values of social justice do not need to be defensively guarded by a righteous few—because these values have been woven into the fabric of society itself. This book is an invitation to strategize together about how to make it so. I should qualify the word “roadmap” in the subtitle though: Even if someone managed to draw up the perfect “roadmap” or to write the perfect field manual for social movements, it would be outdated as soon as any politically active person read it—because changes in the strategic knowledge within a terrain will alter the terrain itself. There is no universal manual for such complex social problems. There is no silver bullet solution, no perfect formula, no tactic that works the same exact way twice, and no universal tool suitable for every particular problem. Does this mean that there is no useful knowledge that might help to prepare us for more effective engagement in political struggle? Of course not. We just need to be careful to always recognize our strategic knowledge as limited and as valid only insofar as its utility is empirically demonstrated on the ground, in real-life contexts. Useful knowledge of strategy, technique, and terrain does exist—and, to be clear, this book is filled with specific “tips and tricks”—but because the political terrain is constantly shifting under our feet, and with it the utility of any given technique or tactic, the most important thing becomes our ability to “think on our feet.” More than specific techniques, my focus is on conceptual structures that can help to clarify our thinking and action.

Right does not equal might

Today we face mounting social and economic problems, and a formidable ecological crisis to boot. These crises have common roots, and they also compound one another. The ecological crisis is already disproportionately damning the poor. And as class stratification increases, the potency of racism is renewed in important ways: e.g., the policing of poor and working class communities of color becomes a deadly line of scrimmage in a deepening but misrecognized class conflict. Add to the mix the alarmingly fast rise of right-wing authoritarian movements and political parties over the past five years, and it should be clear that we are seeing serious signs of trouble all around us. How do we begin to approach these daunting predicaments?

Analysts, pundits, and academics who approach facets of these problems often work with an unstated assumption that solutions will come from more accurate understanding. Global warming, for example, is often treated as more of a problem of information, facts, and beliefs, than of power and economics. In a way, this is a problem of “Enlightenment thinking”—the assumption that we live in a rational society whose “marketplace of ideas” will enable the best ideas to prevail by way of persuasion through rational and, one assumes, symmetrical debate. This belief is rarely acknowledged explicitly, as it stands so feebly against conscious scrutiny, but it functions nonetheless as a detrimental unexamined idea. With the problem framed as a lack of good ideas, the solution that arises intuitively is to focus our efforts on coming up with and educating people about better ideas—as if it were only ignorance, and not a profound power imbalance, that constrains us. Adding to and incentivizing this implicit naiveté is the academic orientation of so many intellectuals, which, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, causes them to “uncritically attribute political efficacy to textual critique.”24 When asked for prescriptions that pertain to political terrain—e.g., the audience member’s question, “What can I do about the problem?”—they cannot help themselves from offering, authoritatively, an answer that, more often than not, is well beyond the scope of their competence. They thereby extend the authority they have derived from their advanced knowledge of a particular issue into an entirely different realm—one that has little to nothing to do with their area of expertise: namely, political terrain. In other words, there is no reason to assume that an individual who possesses pertinent insights that could inform sound policy also has a clue about how to navigate the realm of policymaking itself (or the realm of building and wielding a collective force with enough power to intervene in policymaking and politics).

It is of course critical that scientists and scholars study and understand the details of complex problems like global warming. However, this expertise gets us nowhere if we fail to see that our central problem is one of power and will. Truth, unfortunately, is not its own arbiter. Here we have to invert the maxim that Might does not equal right. For our purposes it matters just as much that Right does not equal might. Of course it is important to continue refining our scientific understanding of global warming, but the pressing task at hand is to build a new alignment of power that can counter the entrenched power of the fossil fuel industries. In the case of economic inequality, we could certainly use a few more left-leaning economists, but, much more so, we need to construct a broad-based political alignment that has capacity to throw down in a protracted struggle.

Here we are making explicit a conceptual distinction that is as basic as it is elusive: that knowledge of what is wrong with a social system and knowledge of how to change the system are two completely different categories of knowledge. For shorthand, we might refer to these two types as knowledge of grievances (i.e., what’s wrong) and knowledge of political strategy (i.e., how to make change by political means). Too many critics fail to grasp that having the former does not automatically confer them with the latter.

The book that you hold in your hands is my attempt to give attention to knowledge of political strategy and the terrain of power, because I believe that such knowledge is immensely powerful. It creates the possibility that people who today hold very little power might tomorrow, with a lot of labor and a little luck, cohere into a force strong enough to threaten and reshape the established order. For elites to maintain possession of a vastly disproportionate share of wealth, power, and privilege, they must also hoard this knowledge of political strategy and the terrain of power. Functionally, such hoarding has much more to do with asymmetries between different social classes’ dispositions and educational access than calculated conspiracy.25 Power tends to appear magical to those who have less of it, and mechanical to those who are accustomed to wielding it instrumentally. This is why elites are sometimes incredulous—even morally indignant!—when challengers break “the taboo of making things explicit”26 by pulling back the curtain and sharing this knowledge with people who just might use it to effectively upset the order. From Machiavelli to Gramsci to Alinsky, this “pulling back the curtain” has never been merely a matter of exposing the crooked plots of the powerful—as if exposure ever accomplished anything on its own. Revelations of misdeeds of the powerful induce only popular resignation if there is no viable counter-power to seize the opening. The threat comes when, at a politically ripe moment, the terrain of power itself is revealed—when knowledge concerning how to contend effectively is made accessible to “the wrong people” at “the wrong time.”27

My hope for this book is that it might make even a very small contribution to this long-haul project of revelation. My focus throughout this work is on facets of the knowledge of political strategy and terrain, within the particular historical context in which I find myself. While I have no shortage of political opinions, this is not a book about issues and opinions per se. This is a book about how to join with others to act effectively upon your political opinions. Of course, I am not shy about sharing my own political positions. The stories and anecdotes woven into the pages that follow are of organizers, groups, and movements that are working to advance particular goals and political agendas with which I am politically aligned—whether to halt foreclosures, change immigration policy, end wars, oppose racist policing, fund education, or win a living wage. Yet, this is not a book that does much to elaborate those particular issues. The particulars of different issues and social systems become relevant for the purposes of this book insofar as these particulars show up on the terrain of power as constraints or opportunities. Capitalism, for example, is relevant here inasmuch as concentrations of wealth can stack the deck against political challengers by rigging the political system and by out-resourcing them in the fight. Racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, patriarchy, homophobia, and other social systems of privileges and exclusion are relevant here inasmuch as they hinder the solidarity that social justice movements need to cultivate in order to mobilize. I have strong opinions on all of these issues, and I make no effort to mask them, but the purpose of this book is not to comprehensively explicate any issue or social system of oppression. I am glad that there are many fine authors who engage in the hard work of researching for and writing such books. However, this work in your hands is not such a book. It is not intended for explaining why to care about any particular issue or why to hold any particular political opinion. This book is for people who already have a pretty good idea about why, to explore how and what holds us back.

As such, Hegemony How-To is also intended as an apologia for leadership, organization, and collective power, a moral argument for its cultivation, and a strategic discussion of dilemmas that challenger movements must navigate in order to succeed. I believe that such an apologia is profoundly necessary today. This work is situated a few years into a “moment” of global uprising, in which an anarchistic self-expressive “prefigurative politics” has emerged, initially at least, as predominant (dare I say hegemonic within many of the movements). The historical actor of Occupy Wall Street—within which this author was a core participant—performed an impressive intervention that shifted the common sense in the United States in a class-conscious direction. But Occupy was also a high-momentum mess that ultimately proved incapable of mobilizing beyond a low plateau of usual suspects. We were not merely lacking in our ability to lead the promising social justice alignment that our audacious occupation kicked off; many of the loudest voices were openly hostile toward the very existence of leadership, along with organization, resources, engagement with the mainstream media, forging broad alliances, and many other necessary operations that reek of the scent of political power. Having spent years submerged within anarchist currents of the contemporary US left, I am speaking to—and from—the best intentions of the anti-authoritarian impulse. I believe, however, that such a humanistic ambivalence toward power must mature; that its adherents must learn nuance and appreciation for the details of context and terrain—if we are to develop something that can accurately be called a political force.

If we fail to build such a force, then history—if there is anyone to tell it—may well conclude that our generation did, indeed, come to the game too late. I take no solace in the prospect of history listing me among the righteous few who denounced the captain of a ship that sank. We can and we must aspire to more than this. We must conspire to take the helm. This book is an invitation to join such a conspiracy.

Overview

I want to make transparent to readers the challenge that I have had in the writing of this book, which I conceive of as two interlocking challenges: that of pedagogy and of style. In terms of style, this is a highly conceptual work that relies heavily on story, anecdote, parable, and metaphor. Throughout the book I oscillate between a plainspoken story-telling voice and a more detached theorization, which seeks to generalize, abstract, and distill lessons from experience, observation, and history. Add to this that Hegemony How-To is also something of a moral apologia for collective power, and this presented me with another stylistic element to have to weave into the work, all while attempting to minimize visible seams. Most authors, in my experience, make a choice between these stylistic options, and it is perhaps wise of them to do so. A book may be narrative-driven, and the concepts, “lessons,” or “point” remain under-developed and ambiguous, open to different readers’ interpretations. On the other end, a book may be highly theoretical, where the elaboration and specification of concepts is its purpose. The former option tends to be more readable and accessible, while the latter tends to be more dense, typically requiring of readers a prerequisite specialized vocabulary. For better or for worse, I have ambitiously attempted to merge these styles, and my reasons have to do with pedagogy. For the past several years, I have had a recurrent interaction with editors (usually of magazines), where they tell me that they themselves love my submission, but they hesitate because they think it’s too much “inside baseball” for their readership. They push me to “dumb down” the theory, and I push back to keep it in. The times when I have prevailed in the back-and-forth (to keep the heart of the theoretical argument intact, while gratefully accepting other edits), editors have been consistently pleasantly surprised by how much play these kinds of pieces get (usually measured in terms of traffic to the web page). It is my experience that there are many readers who want to know more than the specifics of the given issue; they want to gain a better understanding of the political “inside baseball” that can help to determine the outcome. This is the pedagogic project that I have been attempting with my writing and my training work in relation to the workings of collective action and social movements for the past decade. The reality is that all fields develop specialized or technical language in large part because they are dealing with more things than outsiders need to bother themselves about. It is enough for me to understand that my car has an engine; my mechanic had better have a more precise understanding of the component parts and how they interact. Unlike the field of automobile maintenance and repair, however, we as a society cannot afford to leave the workings of the political field to the specialists. Responsible citizenship requires some understanding of this field. More precise understandings often require more precise words. This is hardly a tragedy. Words are lovely and powerful things, and we should not be upset about having to learn new ones and new uses of them in order to gain a better understanding of something that concerns us. Nor should we assume that because a work engages with Gramsci or Habermas that a less formally educated reader (who is interested in the subject matter) will inevitably “get lost.” I myself nearly flunked out of high school and did not attend college until my mid-30s, and I hope this experience helps me to stay oriented both to making my language accessible and to not underestimating the intelligence of readers (e.g., readers who are, like myself, from working class backgrounds and interested in the subject matter). So, this is my pedagogic and stylistic challenge: I believe that a somewhat specialized theoretical vocabulary can help us to understand the “field” of social movements and political struggle, but I am committed to introducing and explaining terms; to building the theoretical apparatus from “the ground floor up.”

As for the progression of the book, this opening chapter partly serves to introduce myself to you the reader, and to situate myself and my work in relation to the concepts and frameworks that follow. While my own stories appear throughout the work, this chapter contains much more memoir than the rest of the book—which also includes anecdotes from other organizers, collected through interviews.

In chapter two I discuss the importance and the symbolic structure of Occupy Wall Street’s dramatic intervention, as well as its shortcomings and internal problems. This discussion sets up chapter three, where I focus on the interior and the social and psychological micro-dynamics of political groups and social movements. I examine what I call the life of the group, a term that includes a group’s internal workings, but especially speaks to its culture and motivational structure. I explore how the logic of the life of the group operates in tension with the logic of political instrumentality (i.e., the group’s potential accomplishments beyond its own existence), and the creeping tendency of self-referential formulas and fetishes to stand in for strategic action. I discuss the story of the righteous few, wherein some individuals and groups become invested in their own marginality vis-à-vis society, and how this story has gotten mixed up with the story of what it means to be “radical.” I then discuss a political identity paradox that challenger groups have to navigate: on the one hand, they have to cultivate a strong identity in order to mobilize in the first place; on the other hand, they have to be on guard against how strong identity can also create walls between them and potential allies—too much cohesion can lead them down a dead-end path of insularity.

In chapters four and five I dig into the deep ambivalence toward power that thrives in many pockets of the social justice left in the United States (and elsewhere) today. I look at contemporary movements through a lens of an ethic of responsibility versus an ethic of ultimate ends, as elaborated by sociologist Max Weber. While acknowledging the abundant good reasons for critiquing power, I discuss how the wholesale rejection of engagement in the terrain of political power is especially concentrated in advanced capitalist nations and correlates with relative economic privilege—and how it is, ironically, a product of neoliberalism. I discuss at length how these dynamics played out over the course of Occupy Wall Street’s brief run, where the dominant tendency within Occupy’s core rejected all forms of power and leadership, at least rhetorically, but another tendency struggled, with limited success, to build leadership skills and to develop clearer political goals and strategies. I make both a moral and a strategic case for why challenger movements must engage conscientiously in the terrain of power, by building and wielding a collective force. I argue that to eschew political power is to commit political suicide and to abdicate responsibility.

While chapters 1–5 deals as much with “how not to” (i.e., internal patterns that are presently holding us back) as with “how to,” in chapters 6–8 I explore the operations of a political challenger force that embraces the morality and the necessity of engaging in the terrain of power. In chapter six I explore the necessary growth trajectories of nascent political operations and social movements, discussing movements’ kinetic versus their potential force. In chapter seven, I look at how organizations, movements, and campaigns have to learn how to speak the language of the people they’re seeking to organize or mobilize. In chapter eight I examine how underdog challengers have to articulate a compelling “we” to serve as the basis of political alignment.

Throughout this book I discuss constraints and openings that are sometimes particular to the contemporary context in the United States, but that may nonetheless be of interest to readers in other parts of the world; given the current reality of American economic, political, and military hegemony across the globe, I think it is safe to assume that sympathetic readers all around the world will share an interest in the US social justice left figuring out how to pick up our game a few notches. I conclude with a discussion of what a new political zeitgeist—one in which radicals embrace a moral and strategic imperative to contend in the terrain of politics and power—might look like.

Already now there are signs that such a zeitgeist may be coming into view. Indeed, this book is positioned within what I see as an emerging tendency within the contemporary US left; a tendency whose strong moral sense is also oriented toward understanding, mapping, and effectively intervening in the messy terrain of political power. My hope is that some readers may wish to be part of this tendency, and to help it to mature and grow.

2 Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), xiii.

3 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992).

4 Margaret Thatcher, “Press Conference for American correspondents in London,” Margaret Thatcher Foundation, June 25, 1980, http://www.margaretthatcher.org/Speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid =104389&doctype=1.

5 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (trade union).

6 I should make clear for any readers who may be unfamiliar with the Exodus story of the Bible—and how it is a staple text in Liberation Theology—that the “Egyptians” and “Israelites” describe a relationship of economic enslavement and oppression, and thus serve as homology. God being on the side of the Israelites, in the story, is about their position as the oppressed and enslaved people. Egyptian and Israelite here in no way reference any specific present-day nation or “people.”

7 From that day forward, my father has been supportive of my political work, even if he was not ecstatic when I started getting arrested.

8 Paulo Freire, Ana Maria Araujo Freire, and Donaldo P. Macedo, The Paulo Freire Reader (New York: Continuum, 1998), 212.

9 I first heard this phrase from my friend and comrade Max Berger.

10 Tariq Ali, “Venezuela: Changing the World by Taking Power,” VenezuelAnalysis.com, interviewed by Jardim, Claudia and Jonah Gindin, July 22, 2004, http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/598.

11 By suggesting that the value of an action is mostly symbolic I do not mean that it is therefore unimportant. Symbolic contests are indispensable to changing structures and relationships of power and winning measurable gains. I will explore this theme in depth later in the book.

12 While I do lead some trainings on my own, I have mostly worked collaboratively with co-trainers through training organizations or campaigning organizations, including The Ruckus Society, Center for Story-based Strategy, School of the Americas Watch, War Resisters League, MoveOn.org, and many other local campaigns and ad hoc mobilization training working groups. Today my training work is through Beyond the Choir (see http://beyondthechoir.org).

13 I mean here the mission statement for the larger effort, which was dubbed the Mobilization for Global Justice.

14 At first activist was used to describe people in Sweden who advocated getting involved in World War I; it was intended as a counter to the label pacifist.

15 Google Ngram Viewer is a corpus tool that charts the frequency of words and phrases in books published from 1800–2012 (to date).

16 Nadia Bashir, Penelope Lockwood, Alison Chasteen, Daniel Nadolny, and Indra Noyes, “The Ironic Impact of Activists: Negative Stereotypes Reduce Social Change Influence,” European Journal of Social Psychology 43, no. 7 (2013): 614–626.

17 Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-minded America Is Tearing Us Apart (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008).

18 Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

19 Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

20 Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (University of Oklahoma Press: Norman, 2003).

21 The rise of neoliberalism is an important backdrop to both tracks.

22 I am borrowing language here from my friend and comrade, Beka Economopoulos, who I once heard advocate, informally at a meeting, that we must “weave ourselves into the fabric of society.”

23 Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass on Slavery and the Civil War: Selections from His Writings (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 2003 [1857]), 42.

24 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press., 1997), 108.

25 This is not to suggest that elites never conspire to maintain and expand their powers, privileges, and profits. Of course they do.

26 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press., 1998), 96.

27 “Wrong” from the vantage point of elites, of course.