The Strategy of Protest and Revolution 1: Basic Elements
Hi, and
welcome to Strategy Stuff. This is a video series on “The Strategy of Protest
and Revolution”, where we’ll look at how successful revolutionary and protest
movements have strategized to achieve their political goals. To do that, we’ll
be focusing on the following questions:
- First: How do activists turn
public discontent into a political movement?
- Second: How do movements plan
their action out to achieve their political goals?
- And third, how have successful
strategies changed with time?
Over this
series, we’ll answer these questions by looking at various historical
movements. But before we do that, let’s first structure our thinking by examining
the basic elements within a strategy of protest and revolution.
Definitions
Protests and
revolutions are both what sociologists call “social movements”. The key
characteristic they share is “collective action”, where ordinary people band
together to push political demands against establishment interests, which are
usually backed by state power. Members of the establishment may lead a
movement, but it is ordinary people who ultimately provide the driving force,
and that’s what differentiates social movements from coups, which are
completely driven by members of the establishment.
There are
many ways to explain why a social movement succeeds, but since this is a
strategy channel, we’ll focus on the process of protest and revolution, looking
at how movements took what they had and turned it into victory.
At the most
basic level, the social movement process takes the input of public
participation and converts it into the output of political power. The
establishment looks at that power and has two options: it can decide that it’s
not possible or worth it to match that power, leading to negotiation and
compromise; or it can increase its own power to outmatch the movement, leading
to suppression or, in the event of complete failure, a revolution. Either way,
the more power a movement has, the higher its chances of success.
So how can a
movement increase its power? Looking again at the social movement process, we
see two ways to do so: we either increase the amount of input, or we increase
the rate of conversion into output. In practical terms, this means we either get
more of the public to participate, or we get our existing participants to
contribute more political power. These two fundamental options form the
skeleton of a social movement grand strategy.
Grand
Strategy: Issues vs Organization
Movements
don’t have unlimited resources, so they have to make choices on what they will
prioritize to maximize power. At the highest, most abstract level of grand
strategy, movements look at the social movement process and choose whether they
want to prioritize participation, or prioritize contribution. This corresponds
to the two basic elements within a social movement: Issues and Organization.
Issues focus
on participation. An issue is a problem-and-solution combo: the movement
highlights a problem, proposes a solution, and sells the package to the public.
Because issues are ideas, they can reach people who are normally beyond a movement’s
social or geographic environment. A good issue turns those people into
participants, allowing a movement to rapidly gain scale and establish a large
base of support that establishments will find hard to ignore.
So what’s a
good issue? The best problems tend to be things that the public actually
recognizes as a problem, and an urgent one at that. This combination usually only
happens when there is some dramatic failure that focuses attention on the issue
at hand. Examples could be the Stonewall Riots for the US gay rights movement,
or the Shah’s violent suppression of religious students in the Iranian
Revolution.
A good
solution is a bit more complicated. One hypothesis is that the public compares the
movement’s policy position with what the establishment is offering, which is
usually the status quo. If the movement’s solution isn’t that different
to the establishment position, people won’t see enough benefit to overcome the
costs of fighting the establishment. On the other hand, if there is too much
change, people will also worry that the result will wipe out the benefits they
do get from the status quo, and again they won’t join. So in the end,
the most attractive solution is usually one that offers a moderate amount of
change from the establishment position.
This is, of
course, not what ideological purists want to hear. But there are ways for them
to win on issues. They can, for example, radicalize in phases like the French
Revolution, shifting into major changes one moderate step at a time; or they
can frame their demands in moderate terms: Lenin’s “Land, Bread and Peace”
instead of the Communist Manifesto. Cynical, perhaps, but in the end, it’s all
to maximize public participation, and that’s what issues are all about.
*
Let’s now
turn to Organization, which focuses on the contribution part of the social
movement process. The idea of contribution works like this: a movement can
attract a million participants, but if all they do is give verbal support, then
that’s no real threat to the establishment. It’s certainly less of a threat
than 10,000 participants that reliably vote or strike or bomb if their demands
are not met. So contribution is basically how much and how far participants will
act for the movement.
But action
is inherently costly, whether in terms of sacrificing leisure time or facing
down state suppression, and the average participant is generally not fanatical
enough to bear this cost by themselves. Organization helps by pooling, coordinating
and distributing the collective resources that participants bring to the
movement. Good organization lowers the cost of action, which increases the
frequency and extent of action and, in the end, the power that the movement
generates per participant.
So what’s
good organization? As this video series will show, it depends on the
circumstances. By themselves, top-town hierarchies with specializations and
command structures tend to use resources more efficiently, especially compared
with bottom-up networks of independent cells that duplicate processes and have
to negotiate with each other to get things done. That’s why movements in
tolerant political environments tend to become bureaucracies, like European
trade unions or the US National Rifle Association. But in an intolerant
environment, centralization would expose the movement to a crippling leadership
strike, and in any case, the establishment wouldn’t have let the movement raise
the resources to develop and maintain these expensive bureaucracies.
There is
also an ideological aspect to organization. Because bottom-up organization have
weak or no centralized leadership, decisions tend to reflect a more moderate and
flexible ideology that represents the majority of participants, which is, of
course, an ideologue’s nightmare. One thing to remember in social movements is
that activists don’t just fight the establishment, they also fight each other,
and that will be a recurring theme in this video series.
3 Types
of Grand Strategy
So, we’ve
seen how issues and organization influence the social movement process. Now, we’ll
use them to analyze the three stages of social movement grand strategy, each
exemplified by a major historical revolution.
The first
stage is “Spontaneous Uprising”, exemplified by the French Revolution. This is
a high issue, low-organization grand strategy, where the movement positions
itself on such a hot-button issue, that the public spontaneously and massively rises
up in an explosion of support. Because there is little organization, the
movement doesn’t have much control over how participants act. But if it works,
it’s a simple and cheap path to victory.
The second
stage is “Mass Agitation”, exemplified by the Russian Bolshevik Revolution.
This is a medium-issue, medium-organization grand strategy, where there is
general discontent, but the public isn’t motivated or organized enough to
deliver victory on the movement’s terms. So the movement invests in a small
‘vanguard’, whose job is to, first, raise the public’s motivation on the
issues; and second, to organize participants’ actions in a more effective
direction. What vanguards don’t do is order participants to act: instead, it
makes the public’s spontaneous action more likely, more powerful, and more in
line with the movement’s goals.
The final
stage is “Ideological Mobilization”, exemplified by the Chinese Communist Revolution.
This is a low-issue, high-organization grand strategy, in that the movement doesn’t
expect the public to act spontaneously on the issues. Instead, people are
brought into the movement for whatever reason, and only then will an extensive
organization politically educate them on the issues. This same organization
will also direct all movement actions, acting like a mini-bureaucracy or army
ready to pounce on the establishment whenever opportunity beckons.
Spontaneous
Uprising, Mass Agitation, and Ideological Mobilization: it’s easy to treat them
as evolutionary stages in movement grand strategy, and some sociologists do
indeed see it that way. But in practice, most successful movements, while focusing
on one grand strategy, still contained elements of the other two; this is
because each option has its own unique advantage, and anything that might make
the formidable task of defeating the establishment easier should probably be
pursued.
Action:
Elements, Goals, WUNC
Now that
we’ve discussed social movement strategy at the most abstract level, and the
decisions that have to be made within the social movement process, we can now
go one level of analysis lower, and examine what social movements should
prioritize when putting these decisions into practice. Specifically, we’ll be
focusing on the elements within social movement action.
A movement’s
grand strategy will naturally come with a set of actions that are best suited
to that grand strategy. Spontaneous Uprisings prioritize actions that get the
message out; Ideological Mobilizations, on the other hand, should leverage
their organizational strength to conduct complex or long-term action. Mass
Agitations fall somewhere in between, focusing on limited coordinated actions,
perhaps like a local strike.
We also need
to acknowledge that effective actions rely quite a bit on luck and opportunity.
Because social movements can’t usually match the full strength or longevity of
establishments, their success depends on having the right opportunities to
exploit, particularly those where the establishment somehow cannot draw on its
full power. The best opportunities tend to arise within a broader extended
window of opportunity, where the establishment’s power has already been on the
downtrend for some time.
So grand
strategy and opportunity structure what actions a movement should pursue and
how effective they can be. Within that structure, how can a movement ensure
that its actions are as effective as possible?
For this, we
need to take an abstract concept that we’ve been using so far – “power” – and
translate it into practical terms. When a movement overpowers the establishment
to achieve its political goals, that means two things. Either the movement has
coerced the establishment, by threatening costs on them if they refuse; or the
movement has coopted the establishment, by promising benefits to them if they
agree. As usual, movements can and have done both things simultaneously.
A movement
imposes costs on the establishment by disrupting normal routine, upsetting the
process of daily life and forcing the establishment to take steps to restore order.
We all know how physical disruption looks like in the form of boycotting or
rioting, but disruption can also be non-physical, like how the MeToo movement
is forcing a re-examination of what was once accepted as part of work or life.
A few movements try and directly target the establishment for disruption, but
the vast majority tend to indirectly target the establishment by going after
its role as a manager of society, and disrupt the general public instead, in
the hopes of forcing the establishment to get involved.
An
establishment facing disruption has essentially 3 ways to respond. If it
believes that the costs of suppression don’t outweigh the costs of giving in,
it’s likely to try and shut down the movement action. But it can also believe
that the costs of the disruption don’t outweigh the costs of giving in, in
which case it might simply ignore the disruption.
What this
means for a movement is this: to successfully coerce the establishment to give
in – the third option – it’s not enough to just convince them that they will
pay a heavy price for suppression, which is already an accepted fact in most
political systems. Movements also have to convince establishments that giving
in is less costly than letting the disruption continue, which is probably the
harder task these days, because the disruptive effects of so many traditional
actions – protests, riots, boycotts – have been reduced, thanks to specialized
crowd control, PR and other such techniques which have been developed for this
very purpose. Disruptive actions that are repeated for too long become
normalized, and so movements have to constantly innovate and find new pressure
points against the establishment.
*
On the other
hand, a movement can deliver benefits to the establishment in two major ways.
The most obvious one is, of course, political support, but even then, movements
have to work to ensure that that support is actually valuable. Hundreds of
issues vie for establishment or public attention every day, so a large part of
co-opting the establishment is making the movement relevant in the first place.
Sometimes, this is about doing something to push your issue up the agenda;
other times, this is about strategically consolidating and positioning the
movement as a major voting bloc.
A less-obvious
benefit is policy support. Because establishments have a lot on their plate,
they usually like it when experts give them pre-packaged policies that they can
adopt and successfully sell to the public. So some movements instead try and
present themselves as an authority on their issue field: there are the think
tanks and the lobby groups, but the more interesting ones are those movements
who get the public to adopt a standard they themselves defined. An example of
this is the Organic Foods Movement, who successfully got the public to
distinguish between organic and non-organic foods, and so now have become an
authority in the realm of Genetically-Modified food labelling and even within
agricultural policy.
*
Whether the goal is on coercion or cooptation, there are several
characteristics that good action should have, which are summed up in the
sociological acronym of WUNC: Worthiness-Unity-Numbers-Commitment.
Worthiness used to be defined as ‘respectability’, as in social movement
participants should demonstrate to the establishment that they are worthy of
having their demands met, by for example being peaceful and deferential. But
even by the end of the 19th Century, social movements such as the
suffragettes were reinterpreting the meaning of ‘worthiness’ by engaging in
deliberately provocative and undeferential action, a trend that continues to
this day with movements such as Black Lives Matter. For them, the worthiness of
their demands are self-evident, and action here is more to highlight the
hypocrisy involved when the establishment criticizes their action, while
upholding the greater injustice that the movement is fighting against.
Unity and Numbers are self-explanatory, while Commitment is about
demonstrating the extent and the duration of the sacrifice movement
participants are ready to make.
This discussion of Commitment brings us to the final element that we’ll
discuss in this video, which is violence. Violence is often seen as a supreme
demonstration of the movement’s commitment towards disrupting the establishment,
and sometimes even as a grand strategic orientation where the movement decides
to sacrifice some of its public support in order to boost its power output. On
the other hand, as we’ll see in the video series, violence can also be used to
bolster public participation, by shutting down people and organizations who
voice contrary opinions. That’s assuming that the level of violence is actually
something that social movements can dictate, instead of it being a cycle of
escalation that is triggered by clashes at the local level. For what is
probably the most defining characteristic of action, the effect of violence is
probably one of the more ambiguous things within the social movement process.
All in all,
what we’ve done here, in this brief overview of the elements within a strategy
of protest and revolutions, is to separate out and describe individual aspects
within a movement, so that viewers can better understand how the process works
as a whole. But real life is never as neat as theory, and this is why we still
need to analyze actual history.
*
Thank you
for watching the video, please do give a like and subscribe. If you have any
questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in the comments section. Also check out
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thoughts regarding the video.
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