These dynamics are also evident in society at large. Think about the wave of populist movements that swept countries all over the world throughout the 2010s.77 When economic and social inequality skyrocket, people get angry because in their eyes the disparity in rewards undermines the fairness and legitimacy of the system.78 Societies then experience more social unrest as well as economic and political instability. Why? Because in such situations the power-disadvantaged will use any means at their disposal—whether a revolution (as in eighteenth-century France and America) or a referendum (as in modern-day Britain)—to reject a system that they perceive as blatantly rigged against them, even when such a rejection may be to their own detriment.
Allowing power imbalances to become so great that they undermine the legitimacy, the stability, and the sustainability of our social and economic systems is not only morally objectionable, but also unwise on the part of the powerful. In the long run, inequality results in less productive economies and lower rates of economic growth.79 As Nobel Prize–winning economists Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo point out, it would be in the interest of the rich “to argue for a radical shift toward real sharing of prosperity.”80 Yet, the short-term attraction of making an extra dollar (or an extra billion) often blinds the powerful to the long-term consequences of reinforcing massive imbalances in a social system in which we are all mutually dependent.
A few millionaires and billionaires, including Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, Warren Buffett, MacKenzie Scott, and Abigail Disney, have called for changes to the very system that got them to their position of economic dominance.81 But many ultra-rich and ultra-powerful seem to worry more about the survival of capitalism in its present form than about disrupting systemic inequities. As Anand Giridharadas has bitingly put it, “Today’s titans of tech and finance want to solve the world’s problems, as long as the solutions never, ever threaten their own wealth and power.”82
Sometimes, a wake-up call reminds the powerful of the many forms of mutual dependence that weave people together, and the risks that growing inequality poses for everyone in an interdependent system. In the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II in the United States, for example, industry captains and corporate executives accepted compensation packages that look like a pittance compared to what American CEOs are paid today. They also accepted (perhaps reluctantly, but still) the role of government regulations, and even unions, to guard the system from the excesses of completely free markets. By the same token, elected officials passed laws to provide good living standards and opportunity to many, though decidedly not all since segregation was still firmly entrenched. Partly because of these political and economic restraints, U.S. middle-class incomes rose at roughly the same rate as incomes at the top in the 1950s and 1960s.83 Wake-up calls can have a short shelf-life, however: By the 1970s, the tide had turned, and deregulation, anti-union sentiment, and inequality all began to rise quickly.84 The devastation of the Great Depression and World War II had faded from memory, and with them the awareness of interdependence and impermanence that makes the powerful less selfish and arrogant.
If it is so rare for the powerful to voluntarily relinquish some of their power, then change must be driven by those lower in the hierarchy. But how can people who have less access to resources build enough power over the higher-ups to make change a reality? In many situations, such as unionization movements, past and present, collective action has proven an effective way to shift the power balance by enabling individuals in the power-disadvantaged group to pool the resources they each control. Yet, for every story of successful collective action to achieve change, there are many stories of failure. How the power-disadvantaged use the resources at their disposal to influence others to disrupt the status quo is just as critical as their decision to join forces.
What exactly must collective movements do to pull off a seemingly impossible feat and successfully disrupt the power hierarchy? We turn to that question next.
Chapter 6 Agitate, Innovate, Orchestrate
Black Lives Matter, the Hong Kong protests, #MeToo, the French Yellow Vests, the Arab Spring: These are just a few of the social movements that have risen to prominence in the past decade, propelled by the sustained commitment of large numbers of people seeking social change.1 Perhaps because they were amplified by the ascent of social media they may seem like a novel phenomenon.2 They are not.
Collective movements have allowed nations to free themselves from the grasp of empires, citizens to topple dictators and monarchs, and people of different races, ethnicities, religions, and gender identities to assert their right to equality. Time and again, history has taught us that movements which combine the power of many can become a force strong enough to prevail over entrenched power hierarchies and transform society.3 No matter who we are or where we live, we owe much of our freedom and rights to movements such as those that fought against apartheid in South Africa, and British rule in India and for the civil rights of women, racialized groups, and LGBTQ+ people around the world. Their members suffered gut-wrenching defeats, often over generations, on the way to finally changing the status quo.
Yet, not all collective movements succeed. Why, then, do some triumph, while others do not?
AGITATION ALONE ISN’T ENOUGH
In July 2011, Micah White, an editor at Adbusters—a counterculture magazine in Vancouver, Canada—and his boss Kalle Lasn, the magazine’s founder, released a six-hundred-word tactical briefing urging “redeemers, rebels, and radicals” to pack a tent and occupy Wall Street. They released this call to arms at the tail end of the global 2008 financial crisis and the bailout of the big banks; on the heels of the Arab Spring and Spain’s anti-austerity Indignados movement; and one year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which canceled campaign spending limits designed to curb the political influence of corporations. Many who had lost their homes and jobs saw the system as utterly unfair; and they started to sense that they were not alone in their misery and anger. Messages condemning the greed and corruption of “the 1 percent” resonated. The Adbusters brief took off, spreading on blogs, the dark web, and in activist circles across the country and the world.
Inspired by the encampments in Tahir Square during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, Occupy protesters held demonstrations in an estimated 950 cities across the globe over the course of three weeks. “The thing about Occupy is that it really brought together the wildest mix of people. I think that’s part of what drew people in, too. It felt like you were part of something that was so refreshing,” Micah told us.4 General assemblies, venues for democratic and consensual decision-making in the camps, reinforced these diverse participants’ self-esteem by giving them a sense of autonomy and belonging. But the leaderless movement did not generate clear demands; and the general assembly voted out the initial Adbusters’ ask for a presidential commission on money in politics.5 While the movement remained vibrant for three months, little concrete change came of it at the time. Micah, Kalle, and so many others who occupied their cities had hoped that this would be the protest that led to the rise of a radically new social and economic system. Yet, the capitalist system did not change much, if at all, in the following months. What went wrong?
Some may jump to the conclusion that the movement came short because it lacked an exceptionally charismatic leader, like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., or Nelson Mandela. But a single iconic change maker, no matter how remarkable, rarely changes the course of organizations or society on their own, because an isolated individual’s call to action is far too easy to disregard. These iconic figures used their power to inspire and influence thousands, sometimes millions of individuals to step out of their routine and join a movement to bring about the changes they envisioned. Collective movements make change possible by making it impossible for public opinion and public authorities to ignore the problem at hand.
Occupy Wall Street succeeded in galvanizing a movement to agitate against the status quo—a critical
role in social movements. Agitators articulate the grievances of specific individuals or groups and bring them to the forefront of public awareness so that others will become indignant, too, and want to push for change. Occupy’s actions, including its media and social media coverage, helped put inequality and the influence of money in politics on the agenda. But it fell short on the other two requisites of effective social change: innovation and orchestration.
Movements need innovators and orchestrators as well as agitators.6 Innovators are the ones who create actionable solutions to address the grievances identified by agitators. They are able to think out of the box to come up with an alternative to the status quo. Orchestrators are the pollinators of social movements. They coordinate action across diverse parties to put in place the changes that allow the solution envisioned by the innovators to be adopted at scale. Without them, the final act never comes.
Although all three roles are critical for the success of a social movement, the same person need not play all three; nor do the parts follow a set timeline or sequence of activities. Social change is a complex and at times messy process. Movement participants often need to perform each of the three roles multiple times, switching among them depending on what the situation requires. Sometimes the division of labor among participants is strategic, with individuals or allied organizations taking on different roles in the public eye—some adopting more radical stances to agitate, for instance, and others behaving more moderately to innovate or orchestrate.7 But ultimately all must work together toward a shared agenda.
To illustrate the process of social change and the role of power in it, we will draw on the experiences of three activists who are playing or have played pivotal roles in contemporary movements. For narrative purposes, we will consider each of the three roles independently. But remember, agitation without innovation means complaints without ways forward, and innovation without orchestration means ideas without impact.8
PUTTING AN ISSUE ON THE PUBLIC AGENDA
In August 2018, Greta Thunberg, the teenager who has since become the face of the youth climate movement, drew the now-famous words “Skolstrejk för Klimatet” (School Strike for Climate) onto poster board and started skipping school, first every day and later every Friday, to protest her government’s inaction on climate change on the steps of the Swedish Parliament. Two months later, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report stating that, without major steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth’s temperature would increase by 1.5 degrees Celsius between 2030 and 2052, causing extreme weather events unlike anything we’d ever seen before.9 Emboldened by Greta, and alarmed by the IPCC report, teenagers around the world were inspired to participate in Fridays for Future, the international coalition started by Greta and other students. Xiye Bastida, a sixteen-year-old student at Beacon High School in New York City and the president of the school’s environmental club, was among them.10
Xiye had moved to New York when her parents’ work as advocates for the values and wisdom of Indigenous people brought them to the United States. She had witnessed the effects of climate change in her hometown of San Pedro Tultepec in Mexico, where floods had wiped out people’s homes and sent the price of food skyrocketing. Now, two years later, she was working for environmental justice with young organizers across the city. She joined the core organizing committee of Fridays for Future NYC, and these initial organizing efforts would become Xiye’s training wheels for co-leading, only months later, one of the largest environmental protests in the United States: the September 20, 2019, global climate strike in New York City.
The youth involved in Fridays for Future had to build power, effectively from scratch. They had no easy access to financial resources or mainstream media that could capture the public’s attention and convince them that the status quo was unacceptable. Nor were they old enough to vote, which meant they lacked a key source of power to convince public representatives to act. How, then, did these teenagers pull off one of the largest environmental protests in history and galvanize a movement of millions worldwide? They did what movements must do when they lack formal authority and resources: identify what the people they are trying to influence value and find creative ways to control their access to it.
In this case, the teenagers wanted to push adults to act. To enlist them, they called the adults out for doing little or nothing about climate change for decades;11 and they highlighted the cost of their inaction: endangering the safety and the survival of future generations, their own children and grandchildren. This public shaming took adults down a peg on the self-esteem ladder. To restore their self-esteem, and to protect their offspring from harm, they had to redeem themselves and act—although some adults preferred to restore their self-esteem by disparaging sixteen-year-old Greta, the movement’s public face. As we saw in chapter 3, we don’t like to think of ourselves as bad people, which can push us to either become more virtuous or turn the shame on others.
The next challenge was one all agitators face: being heard and standing out in the constant stream of news and noise. The youth organizers systematically documented and shared their progress on social media, just as Occupy had relied on memes and social media, from Twitter to Reddit, to recruit and spread its messaging years earlier. Social media is effective enough at mobilizing people that autocrats have taken to shutting down the internet to suppress popular uprisings and dissent.12 But the activists of Fridays for Future knew they could not limit themselves to social media if they wanted their message to be heard by the members of every generation. So, they partnered with “adult environmental organizations,” as they refer to them, to gain media lists they could use to promote the global climate strike.
In the days leading up to September 20, Xiye and her co-organizers were excited to see growing online momentum and press coverage around the event. By then, Xiye had drilled down her key messages. “We all knew the key statistics off the top of our head. But we also knew that people are twenty-two times more likely to remember what you said if you weave in a personal story. So we trained our activists in how to tell their personal story to the media.” Indeed, in a textbook act of organizing, Xiye ran weekly training sessions on a range of topics to equip her peers with the tools to be effective activists, including storytelling and media training. Without knowing it, she was using what the scholar and organizer Marshall Ganz has called “public narrative,” a leadership practice that motivates others to join a movement and act.13 Public narrative combines a story of self (where my values come from), a story of us (how these values tie our community together), and a story of now (why action now is urgent). The framework has helped organizers around the world translate their personal convictions and values into stories that mobilize people to take action. In the previous chapter, we explored the intricate ways in which stories are used to uphold, justify, and legitimize power hierarchies. So, it only makes sense that a critical part of a social movement’s work revolves around deconstructing these myths through counter-narratives.
Xiye’s “story of self” shared her experiences in Mexico, where she had witnessed firsthand the effects of extreme weather events and society’s dependence on fossil fuels. Her “story of us” spoke to New Yorkers: “12 percent of adults in the Bronx have asthma, while close to $19 billion dollars of our tax money was spent to rebuild our city after Hurricane Sandy.” Finally, her “story of now” framed climate change as a crisis, one that required swift and immediate action.14 This was her call to youth and adults that change was possible if they joined the march and the movement. Public narratives like this help to trigger outrage, which motivates action and resistance.15 As we saw in chapter 5, when anger is combined with a measure of power, it elicits a sense that something can be done to effect change.16
Xiye and her peers were hoping to rally at least twenty thousand people. On September 20, 2019, organizers estimated more than 200,000 joined them on the streets of New York City, with similar protests organized by
youth underway the same day in 163 countries.17 The protestors used their voices as children, youth, and students to call out adults contributing to climate change: the meat and dairy industries, ExxonMobil, politicians, the UN, the 1 percent, parents who were “stealing [their children’s] future right in front of their eyes.”18 No one was spared. Using rigorous science to support their statements about the urgency of acting to address the climate crisis, they positioned themselves as both victims of the status quo and leaders with moral authority.
They were also employing an organizing tactic used to agitate against the status quo long before they were born: nonviolent civil disobedience. The term was first used in an anthology of the works of American essayist, poet, and philosopher Henry David Thoreau.19 Thoreau believed that it was justifiable and indeed morally necessary for honest citizens to rebel against unjust and oppressive laws. He himself refused to pay a new Massachusetts poll tax to express his rejection of slavery and of the Mexican–American War. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. are among the many movement leaders inspired by his writing who have resorted to acts of civil disobedience and nonviolent protests.20
To assess the effectiveness of such protests, political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan analyzed data from violent and nonviolent resistance efforts around the globe between 1900 and 2006. They found that peaceable campaigns were effective 53 percent of the time, while violent ones succeeded only 26 percent of the time. Why the disparity? By lowering the barriers for participation, nonviolent resistance campaigns allow the movement’s membership to grow.21 At the September 20 New York City march, teenagers, parents and their toddlers, retirees, teachers, and students came together in solidarity. In addition to expanding the movement’s ranks, nonviolence attracts more diverse members, yielding more innovative tactics.22 Strategic nonviolence plays into our two basic needs: for safety, by shielding participants from violence (at least that’s the intention); and self-esteem, by garnering the goodwill of nonparticipants who often perceive the peaceful resisters as both dignified and just.
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