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.”