Looking back on a decade of pioneering activism to discern the future of protest.

From the critique of clicktivism to Occupy Wall Street, social movement warfare and electoral protest, here are Micah White’s most prescient and impactful interventions in the last decade of activism.

jump to: 2010 | 2011 | 2013 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020

2010

Clicktivism is ruining leftist activism

Reducing activism to online petitions, this breed of marketeering technocrats damage every political movement they touch

A battle is raging for the soul of activism. It is a struggle between digital activists, who have adopted the logic of the marketplace, and those organisers who vehemently oppose the marketisation of social change. At stake is the possibility of an emancipatory revolution in our lifetimes.

The conflict can be traced back to 1997 when a quirky Berkeley, California-based software company known for its iconic flying toaster screensaver was purchased for $13.8m (£8.8m). The sale financially liberated the founders, a left-leaning husband-and-wife team. He was a computer programmer, she a vice-president of marketing. And a year later they founded an online political organisation known as MoveOn. Novel for its combination of the ideology of marketing with the skills of computer programming, MoveOn is a major centre-leftist pro-Democrat force in the US. It has since been heralded as the model for 21st-century activism.

The trouble is that this model of activism uncritically embraces the ideology of marketing. It accepts that the tactics of advertising and market research used to sell toilet paper can also build social movements. This manifests itself in an inordinate faith in the power of metrics to quantify success. Thus, everything digital activists do is meticulously monitored and analysed. The obsession with tracking clicks turns digital activism into clicktivism.

Clicktivists utilise sophisticated email marketing software that brags of its "extensive tracking" including "opens, clicks, actions, sign-ups, unsubscribes, bounces and referrals, in total and by source". And clicktivists equate political power with raising these "open-rate" and "click-rate" percentages, which are so dismally low that they are kept secret. The exclusive emphasis on metrics results in a race to the bottom of political engagement.

Gone is faith in the power of ideas, or the poetry of deeds, to enact social change. Instead, subject lines are A/B tested and messages vetted for widest appeal. Most tragically of all, to inflate participation rates, these organisations increasingly ask less and less of their members. The end result is the degradation of activism into a series of petition drives that capitalise on current events. Political engagement becomes a matter of clicking a few links. In promoting the illusion that surfing the web can change the world, clicktivism is to activism as McDonalds is to a slow-cooked meal. It may look like food, but the life-giving nutrients are long gone.

Exchanging the substance of activism for reformist platitudes that do well in market tests, clicktivists damage every genuine political movement they touch. In expanding their tactics into formerly untrammelled political scenes and niche identities, they unfairly compete with legitimate local organisations who represent an authentic voice of their communities. They are the Wal-Mart of activism: leveraging economies of scale, they colonise emergent political identities and silence underfunded radical voices.

Digital activists hide behind gloried stories of viral campaigns and inflated figures of how many millions signed their petition in 24 hours. Masters of branding, their beautiful websites paint a dazzling self-portrait. But, it is largely a marketing deception. While these organisations are staffed by well-meaning individuals who sincerely believe they are doing good, a bit of self-criticism is sorely needed from their leaders.

The truth is that as the novelty of online activism wears off, millions of formerly socially engaged individuals who trusted digital organisations are coming away believing in the impotence of all forms of activism. Even leading Bay Area clicktivist organisations are finding it increasingly difficult to motivate their members to any action whatsoever. The insider truth is that the vast majority, between 80% to 90%, of so-called members rarely even open campaign emails. Clicktivists are to blame for alienating a generation of would-be activists with their ineffectual campaigns that resemble marketing.

The collapsing distinction between marketing and activism is revealed in the cautionary tale of TckTckTck, a purported climate change organisation with 17 million members. Widely hailed as an innovator of digital activism, TckTckTck is a project of Havas Worldwide, the world's sixth-largest advertising company. A corporation that uses advertising to foment ecologically unsustainable overconsumption, Havas bears significant responsibility for the climate change TckTckTck decries.

As the folly of digital activism becomes widely acknowledged, innovators will attempt to recast the same mix of marketing and technology in new forms. They will offer phone-based, alternate reality and augmented reality alternatives. However, any activism that uncritically accepts the marketisation of social change must be rejected. Digital activism is a danger to the left. Its ineffectual marketing campaigns spread political cynicism and draw attention away from genuinely radical movements. Political passivity is the end result of replacing salient political critique with the logic of advertising.

Against the progressive technocracy of clicktivism, a new breed of activists will arise. In place of measurements and focus groups will be a return to the very thing that marketers most fear: the passionate, ideological and total critique of consumer society. Resuscitating the emancipatory project the left was once known for, these activists will attack the deadening commercialisation of life. And, uniting a global population against the megacorporations who unduly influence our democracies, they will jettison the consumerist ideology of marketing that has for too long constrained the possibility of social revolution.

Originally published in The Guardian on August 12, 2010: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/aug/12/clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism

2011

Why Occupy Wall Street will keep up the fight

by Kalle Lasn and Micah White

On Tuesday, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg evicted the Occupy movement from its spiritual home near Wall Street. Soon afterward, a longtime Occupier sent us his testimony from the streets of New York:

“Lost my stuff, including power cord for my laptop, in the raid, something or someone cleared out my bank account, and it’s raining. I could just write a country song. I’ll tell you this: the resolve is still here. People I talk to are a healthy mixture of rage, comedy, resolve, and excitement. Also exhaustion. Maybe the raid was the best thing that could happen? Winning at last, winning at last, thank God Almighty, we are winning at last.”

For two heady months, the amorphous encampment in Lower Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park had been the symbolic heart of Occupy Wall Street, the birthplace of the greatest social-justice movement to emerge in the United States since the civil rights era. This primal cry for democracy sprang from young people who could no longer ignore the angst in their gut — the premonition that their future does not compute, that their entire lives will be lived in the apocalyptic shadow of climate-change tipping points, species die-offs, a deadening commercialized culture, a political system perverted by money, precarious employment, a struggle to pay off crippling student loans, and no chance of ever owning a home or living in comfort like their parents. Glimpsing this black hole of ecological, political, financial and spiritual crisis, the youth and the millions of Americans who joined them instinctively knew that unless they stood up and fought nonviolently for a different kind of future, they would have no future at all.

The Occupy Wall Street meme was launched by a poster in the 97th issue of our international ad-free magazine, Adbusters, the hash tag #OCCUPYWALLSTREET and a “tactical briefing” that we sent to our 90,000-strong “culture jammer” global network of activists, artists and rabble-rousers in mid-July. The movement’s true origins, however, go back to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. That was when the world witnessed how intransigent regimes can be toppled by leaderless democratic crowds, brought together by social media, that stand firm and courageously refuse to go home until their demands for change are met. Our shared epiphany was that America, too, needs its Tahrir Square moment and its own kind of regime change. Perhaps not the hard regime change of Tunisia and Egypt, but certainly a soft one.

Only a soft regime change can end the pervasive corruption at the heart of our political system, in which corporate money wins elections, drafts laws and trumps citizen desires. Only the plural voices of everyday Americans, the 99 percent, have the capacity to wake up the 1 percent to their greedy, self-serving ways, and to dismantle the global casino in which $1.3 trillion worth of derivatives, credit default swaps and other financial instruments slosh around every day without a hint of concern or regard for the millions of lives that such speculation can destroy.

Occupy was born because we the people feel that our country and our economy are moving precipitously in the wrong direction; that America has evolved into a kind of corporate oligarchic state, a “corporatocracy”; and yes, that what is needed is a regime change — a Tahrir moment of truth in America.

For several weeks Occupy Wall Street had a rare magic going for it. We held the high ground, stuck doggedly to our Gandhian, nonviolent ways and blindsided the cynical world with our optimism, our camaraderie and our determination to forge a way forward. It was a passionate, hopeful, democratic upsurge. Anyone who walked into Zuccotti Park was immediately captivated by the idealism of youth. Spectators of our direct-democracy process were drawn in and became politically engaged participants in our general assemblies. With nothing more than a commitment to consensus-based transparency, twinkling fingers that signal assent, “mike checks” that amplify our voices, an ethos of mutual respect and hope for the future, Occupy sparked a global democracy moment.

By mid-October, there were occupations happening in 1,000 cities around the world. Hundreds of thousands of us, mostly young people, were suddenly vibrantly alive, politically engaged and living without dead time in a way that the world had not seen since 1968. That was the year that an insurrection in Paris’s Latin Quarter suddenly exploded in cities and campuses around the world. The viral speed of that movement was uncannily similar to the way that general assemblies ricocheted around the Earth from Zuccotti Park. But whereas in 1968 we lost the thread and the movement fizzled out, this time the horizontal, open-source, peer-to-peer ways of the Internet-savvy generation, living in a much more dangerous era of multiple synergetic crises, just might be able to succeed.

Why didn’t Bloomberg come down to talk to us? Or Goldman Sachs chief executive Lloyd Blankfein? Why didn’t President Obama acknowledge the protesters — largely the people who elected him — and mingle in the open-air town halls? What a grand gesture that would have been. How come our political leaders are so isolated, our discourse so rigid? Why can’t the American power elite engage with the nation’s young?

Instead, they stayed aloof, ignored us and wished us away. We wanted a Tahrir moment, an American Spring, a new vision of the future, and they attacked us in Zuccotti Park in the dead of the night.

Bloomberg’s raid was carried out with military precision. The surprise attack began at 1 a.m. with a media blackout. The encampment was surrounded by riot police, credentialed mainstream journalists who tried to enter were pushed back or arrested, and the airspace was closed to news helicopters. What happened next was a blur of tear gas; a bulldozer; confiscation or destruction of everything in the park, including 5,000 books; upward of 150 arrests; and the deployment of a Long Range Acoustic Device, the infamous “sound cannon” best known for its military use in Iraq.

When the youth in Tunisia rose up demanding change, Ben Ali scoffed. When they occupied Tahrir Square, Mubarak resorted to paternalism and mob violence. In Syria, Assad’s troops fire daily into the crowds. This kind of military mind-set and violent response to nonviolent protesters makes no sense. It did not work in the Middle East, and it’s not going to work in America, either. This is the bottom line. . . you cannot attack your young and get away with it.

Bloomberg’s shock-troop assault has stiffened our resolve and ushered in a new phase of our movement. The people’s assemblies will continue with or without winter encampments. What will be new is the marked escalation of surprise, playful, precision disruptions — rush-hour flash mobs, bank occupations, “occupy squads” and edgy theatrics. And we will see clearly articulated demands emerging, among them a “Robin Hood tax” on all financial transactions and currency trades; a ban on high-frequency “flash” trading; the reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act to again separate investment banking from commercial banking; a constitutional amendment to revoke corporate personhood and overrule Citizens United ; a move toward a “true cost” market regime in which the price of every product reflects the ecological cost of its production, distribution and use; and with a bit of luck, perhaps even the birth of a new, left-right hybrid political party that moves America beyond the Coke vs. Pepsi choices of the past.

In this visceral, canny, militantly nonviolent phase of our march to real democracy, we will “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.” We will regroup, lick our wounds, brainstorm and network all winter. We will build momentum for a full-spectrum counterattack when the crocuses bloom next spring.

Originally published in The Washington Post on November 11, 2011: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-occupy-wall-street-will-keep-up-the-fight/2011/11/17/gIQAn5RJZN_story.html

2013

Blue/Green/Black

We are players in the game of Revolution: the long cat-and-mouse game between Power and The People that has been raging since our side first demanded democracy in antiquity. Over the many centuries of civilization since, sometimes our progress has been slow and sometimes great leaps have been made in a week when just the right spark comes along... but through it all the guiding dream that unites us in a great historical chain has been the same: a people's democracy constituted by liberty, equality, and community.

The world is a dark place now. Maybe we are in the Iron Age or the Kali Yuga or just the last gasp of a dying species. But I saw something magical emerge during our insurrectionary storms of 2011-2012 that gives us reason to keep living and fighting until the bitter end. I saw that you and I are now closer than ever - closer than any previous generation of humanity has ever been - to achieving the dream of people's democracy. And not just in my country or your country but in every country. A people's democracy on a global scale is within reach... if only we have the courage.

I say courage because all too often it seems that The People shies away from its historical destiny. We get scared as a movement both when we fail and when we succeed. We look back on our past victories (The French Revolution, The Defeat of Fascism, May '68, Occupy Wall Street, etc) and instead of seeing an inspiring proof that we can do it again and better, we accept cynicism and see only our excesses or the ways we failed to live up to our Ideal. We don't see how close we've come; we only see how far we still have to go. And looking back on history, it seems to me that most of the time The People have failed to take Power only because we let the status quo rule out of deference to their elite and fear of their police.

Revolutionary politics progresses through spurts and experiments... the lessons of failed revolutions are internalized by one generation and new tactics are tried out decades later by the next... it is a slow game but every so often breakthroughs happen.

In the middle of the chaotic whirlwind that was Occupy, those of us participating in egging on the storm saw a sublime possibility emerge: mirage-like on the horizon a tantalizing political vision appeared that used peer-to-peer technologies to connect the 99%’s revolutions from Egypt to China and America to Spain into a single social organism. If only for a brief moment, the Internet gave us the ability to think, learn and act together at the same time everywhere at once. Hashtags became wormholes that collapsed space and time because it didn't matter if a jammer was in Madrid or Oakland, they were playing into the same Revolutionary Game. A united front became possible the moment we started fighting for a shared platform that was struggling to articulate itself...

That project was never completed. Occupy's intensity was not sustained long enough to achieve the next step: acting together at the same moment to target the same enemy everywhere-at-once... to take down a global enemy of The People like Goldman Sachs, who has 72 offices worldwide, and send a chill down the spine of every other megacorp in the world. Now the next step in The People's long march to democracy is clear... and there is just enough time to pull it off.

Our greatest task as a species is to find words in our language for and fight in our own way for this new universalist-leaderless politics – a hybrid blue-green-black politics that mobilizes The People in Cairo as well as it does in Beijing and New York City toward liberty, equality, and community.

Blue - the color of Intellect and Imagination - stands for mental environmentalism and our party's commitment to the vision of internet democracy championed by Anonymous, WikiLeaks and the Pirate parties of Europe. Blue is about the spiritual insurrection: the revolution in our mind and inner-reality. It is our quest to steward the mental environment by balancing the rational (Intellect) with the irrational (Imagination) in politics and life and culture. A distinctly Blue psycho-politics gels a range of Left and Right organizations and concerns into a fighting force. Equally proponents of banning advertising in schools, protecting open source software, circumventing censorship, ensuring transparency of government, upholding public anonymity, liberating and de-commercializating information... the umbrella concern is with restoring our cultural and psychological health. Blue warriors vow to change the way information flows and to shake up the production of meaning in our society.

Green - the hue of Earth and Immortality - stands for the four-decade-strong resistance movement against environmental degradation which we must win for a sane, sustainable future. Green is our collective project to find meaning in an eternal political act... our will to overcome mortal finitude with a multi-generational struggle to save the Earth, and our children's children. Green politics is as much a response to death and life (and the terror of living through the ecological endtimes) as it is a rejection of authoritarian-consumerism and ecological-fascism.  Philosophers Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek have said that ecology is the opium of the masses because governments can use the environmental crisis as an emergency excuse for totalitarian rule. And it is well-documented that Australia and America’s militaries are already training for an environmental apocalypse while others like Pentti Linkola and James Lovelock are opening calling for authoritarian environmentalism. We must tread a course between the need to implement some kind of global egalitarian environmental regulation – whether it be carbon rationing, emission limits, or maverick initiatives funded by a Robin Hood Tax – and the danger of force and impatience. Green requires that we think and act globally... a very dangerous thing.

Black - the tenor of Struggle and Justice - stands for our party's promise to abolish corporate personhood and institute a new post-capitalist global world order in which corporations bow to the will of the people. Black is the color of Occupy and anarchism: nonviolence, horizontalism and innovation... the qualities that make our movement great. Black is our militant-edge but it is also our belief that no modern revolution will be successful without a steadfast promise to virtue - especially nonviolence and charity - in pursuing Justice. Guided by the light of Fidelity and Patience, Black stands for our commitment to humility, goodness and wisdom in pursuing our long-term goals.  Fidelity is about never giving up hope. And it is also about resisting the temptations and distractions that are thrown in our path to lead us astray.

It may take years or decades or centuries to finally realize the #BLUEGREENBLACK vision... We do not know what the future holds. To enter a fight not knowing if you will see the final victory takes courage. But like the North Star that guides lost travelers, #BLUEGREENBLACK is a vision that gives our long march a direction. So wherever you are, look up and look around, and join the fight for people's democracy.

Originally published in Strike! magazine in Spring 2013: https://www.strike.coop/magazine/issue-2

2015

Social movements will put an end to war as we know it

Could social movements replace conventional warfare?

The idea might sound far-fetched. But President Obama’s steadfast refusal to send occupation forces to fight the Islamic State in Syria may be evidence that the old methods of regime change—boots on the ground—are being rendered obsolete.

Going forward, governments will increasingly rely on catalyzing contagious social protests to topple terrorist states and influence autocratic regimes. Russian military theorists were the first to openly discuss this shift in the art of war—and to accuse America of pioneering techniques of fomenting viral protests abroad. Whether or not their accusations hold water, social movement warfare may well be the wave of the future.

Last year, defense ministers and high-ranking military personnel from several less-than-democratic societies, including Belarus, Iran, Egypt, Myanmar, Vietnam, Syria, the United Arab Emirates, and China, gathered in an opulent Stalinist-era hotel in Moscow to discuss a grave threat to their governments. The occasion was the third annual Moscow Conference on International Security (MCIS), an event hosted by the Russian Ministry of Defense. Unlike previous years, not a single military officer or official representative from a NATO member country participated in the two-day event.

The reason for the conspicuous absence of NATO representatives became apparent during the opening speech by Russia’s minister of defense, army general S. K. Shoygu. He announced that the focus of the gathering would be “on the problems of how so-called ‘color revolutions’ … affect global security.”

Pointing to the social protests that rocked the world from 2011 to 2014, beginning with the Arab Spring and continuing through Ukraine’s Euromaidan Revolution and Hong Kong’s Occupy Central, Shoygu argued that Western powers are deploying social movements as a technique devised “according to the rules of the art of war” for overthrowing unfriendly governments.

Shoygu’s allegations are a prescient vision of the future. Similar accusations of engineering protests have been made in the past against, and variously denied by, non-governmental organizations such as George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, Gene Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute and the Serbia-based Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies (CANVAS). What is different today is the implication that state militaries could shift toward creating, training and deploying civilian activists in a bid to create disruptive movements.

A turn toward social movement warfare could be a strategic response to the impracticality of direct confrontation, or conventional war, against great militaries and nuclear-armed states. As one scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies explains, the Russian military now considers social movements to be “a new US and European approach to warfare that focuses on creating destabilizing revolutions in other states as a means of serving their security interests at low cost and with minimal casualties.”

The idea that seemingly disparate social movements involving millions of people around the world could be manufactured—or “staged and managed,” as one Russian general puts it—to influence geopolitics will probably dismay many movement participants. Most protestors experience uprisings as organic phenomena. However, rather than rush to ignore or refute the accusations levied by Russia’s Ministry of Defense, activists would be wise to understand the implications of casting social movements as a new form of warfare, and the impact this shift will have on the next generation of protests.

At the very least, we might assume that, as philosopher Jacques Ellul once proposed, “The accusation … clearly reveals the intention of the accuser.” In other words, Russia’s accusation might reveal its own intention to manufacture social movements in America and beyond.

If true, this would explain the hyperbolic coverage that Russia Today, a government-funded station, lavished on Occupy Wall Street. It went so far as to fly prominent Occupiers from New York City to London for a televised interview with Julian Assange.

So is this good or bad for social justice? Placing social movements within the context of military science contains two dangers—and an opportunity—for activists worldwide.

The first danger is that authoritarian societies will use the excuse that protests are a form of war to justify cracking down on domestic dissent with military force.

However, democratic and repressive regimes alike are already responding to protests as if they are a form of social movement warfare. Witness, for example, the conspicuous deployment of a Long Range Acoustic Device, the notorious sound cannon often used in war zones, during the eviction of Occupy Wall Street from Zuccotti Park in 2011 and during the protests in Ferguson in 2014. Activists who understand, rather than deny, this change in how their protests are being interpreted by authorities will be better equipped to develop effective counterstrategies.

The second danger is that repressive societies may try to create social movements in a bid to negatively influence democratic societies.

Every new protest invention is ultimately a double-edged sword. Jihadists use hashtags to spread extremism. Anti-immigrant movements in Germany co-opt the “We are the people” slogan that toppled the Berlin Wall to push a negative agenda. The leaderless organizing style of Black Lives Matter might one day too be appropriated by reactionary forces.

It is worrisome to consider how repressive authorities could use nonviolent popular protest tactics. But even this is preferable to destructive conventional warfare that relies on brute force.

Fortunately, social movement warfare also offers reason for genuine optimism. Any government that tries to spark social movements abroad while suppressing protests at home is in for a nasty surprise. In our hyper-connected world, revolutionary events are akin to a tsunami that crashes against every shore. Movements have a tendency to spiral outside the control of their creators, spreading across all borders and swerving in democratic directions where participants dictate the outcome.

Ultimately, the ascendancy of social movements, and their coming adoption by militaries as a method of social change, gives me hope that this is the end of war as we know it. And it could be the beginning of a planetary uprising for democracy that the people have been dreaming of. A revolution anywhere brings us one step closer to a revolution everywhere. So any repressive governments that choose to create social movements abroad are digging their own graves.

Originally published in Quartz on December 22, 2015: https://qz.com/578544/social-movements-will-put-an-end-to-war-as-we-know-it/

2016

The End of Protest: A New Playbook for Revolution

You are needed

You may long for the protest to end all protests, a final revolution that eradicates injustice and transforms society. You dream of a better world in which protest is no longer necessary. You wish to make protest effective so that the ideals you hold become manifest. For you the end of protest is a consummation of activism, the completion of your work and objective of your struggle. You understand that the end of protest is in itself revolution.

This book will offer you tools for hastening social transformation. Recognizing that protest is one tool among many for creating social change, grab what works and discard the rest.

And if you are threatened by revolution, fearing or disdaining movements like Occupy, and you’ve come to this book from a desire to end protest—to foreclose dissent—know that this book is for you, too. Uprisings always need people who convert to the cause from positions of power: police who switch sides, insiders who become whistleblowers, and politicians who heed the people’s demands. You may oppose us today but you will join us tomorrow. Our movement is even stronger when it includes the converted, who understand the errors of the old world because they embodied them.

You may be skeptical of those who take to the streets, considering them reckless. They seem to have nothing to lose, and you have worked so hard to achieve your position, wealth and prestige. You may not sympathize with their anger. You may believe that good society ought to have few disruptions. True, many aspects of upheaval are unpleasant. Revolutions are sometimes violent and always have unintended consequences. “In a society such as ours,” writes Herbert Marcuse, a leading twentieth-century social theorist and philosopher, “in which pacification has been achieved up to a certain point, it appears crazy at first to want revolution. For we have whatever we want.” He continues with a prescription: “[T]he aim here is to transform the will itself, so that people no longer want what they now want.”3 You desire the end of protest, but the fulfilment of your desire would be disastrous for you.

The lack of protest is perilous for society. Protest is a symptom of the need for social change, and the people in the streets are harbingers of greater democracy. The absence of effective protest is a warning sign of impending civil strife. Whether you support or suppress protesters, history shows that dissent is necessary for social growth and collective renewal. Revolution grants us the social freedom essential for humans to break old habits and reach their true collective potential.

Excerpted from The End of Protest by Micah White published by Knopf Canada on March 15, 2016: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/250299/the-end-of-protest-by-micah-white/

2017

Without a path from protest to power, the Women's March will end up like Occupy

Social activists have succumbed to one of the most enduring myths of contemporary American protest. It’s time to consider what happens the day after

Shortly after Donald Trump’s shock election victory, I received an urgent call from one of the co-creators of the Women’s March on Washington. She was concerned at a moment you might expect her to be ecstatic. Hundreds of thousands of women in 17 countries had already signed on in solidarity, and the numbers kept growing. Yet despite the tremendous momentum, she confessed a nagging skepticism about the effectiveness of the protest.

“I’m not that interested in the march itself but in what comes afterwards,” Fontaine Pearson confided to me. I admire her candor because I know it takes courage to voice such a concern. It is her difficult question – what comes the day after? – that every supporter of the Women’s March should be earnestly figuring out today.

Without a clear path from march to power, the protest is destined to be an ineffective feelgood spectacle adorned with pink pussy hats.

It is exciting when a protest meme leaps from social networks to the streets, capturing the imagination of millions, prompting this very website to proclaim that the forthcoming protest could be among the biggest in American history and Vogue to commission glitzy photos of the core organizers dressed up like Eileen Fisher models. But it is all too easy to succumb to the false hope that a big splash is a transformative tsunami.

Don’t be fooled. It is not. I’ve been there, as the co-creator of a raucous pro-democracy meme that inspired months of Occupy protests in 82 countries. And I can tell you that raising awareness and getting media attention is never enough. Frankly, neither brings the people closer to sovereign power.

For all those who want the Women’s March to be the start of an enduring revolutionary movement, here is my advice on how to increase the odds.

Know your history: let’s go back to 1789

On 5 October 1789, during the earliest days of what would become the French Revolution, a mob of women materialized on the streets of Paris. Some historians say it was spontaneous, others that it was planned. Regardless, we know that the furious women, desperately hungry from bread shortages in the city, descended on the Hôtel de Ville, the seat of municipal government, and demanded to speak to the mayor. The national guard refused them entry but also refused to fire on them and so the women burst through the police line, ransacked city hall and raided the armory.

Now armed with swords and cannons, the crowd of protesters grew to more than 7,000 female insurrectionaries. Suddenly a far more revolutionary goal was adopted: a Women’s March on Versailles, where King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette where hosting a series of lavish banquets for royalist soldiers.

It the first protest march of women in modern history, and it was also the most effective. When the revolutionary women arrived at Versailles, they broke into the palace, murdered two guardsmen and attempted to enter the queen’s bedchamber before ultimately forcing King Louis XVI and his entourage to march with the crowd – now 60,000 strong – back to Paris.

The Women’s March on Versailles was a literal and forceful assertion of the people’s sovereignty over the king. It was a defining moment in the revolutionary history of democracy. As the historian William Doyle explains: “Louis XVI never returned to Versailles … All open attempts on the king’s part to resist the reform of France now came to an end.” The National Assembly was led to Paris shortly after and legislative decision-making power was eventually fully captured by the people. Democratic revolutionaries executed King Louis XVI by guillotine less than four years later.

The day after the women marched on Versailles was the definitive point of no return for the French Revolution. And let’s not forget that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was also initially sparked, as Leon Trotsky recalls in his definitive history, by a defiant women’s protest.

The lesson here is that protesting grandmothers, daughters and mothers have the unique power to do what male protesters cannot – such as break through a line of national guard bayonets without being fired upon. And for this reason, women will always play a foundational role in the great revolutions to come, but only when they take matters into their own hands, act unexpectedly and viscerally, and focus their collective energy on the only target that matters: concretely establishing the power of the people over their governments.

Ignore repeated failures and change tactics

The original Women’s March on Versailles involved women using direct action to force the king to listen to the people’s demands. Today’s Women’s March is entirely symbolic.

No one would ever dare to call for an insurrectionary march on Trump Tower with the goal of physically dragging the president-elect and his family out of their penthouse. No one says the Women’s March on Washington should ransack the White House or occupy Congress and appoint themselves legislators. Instead, we organize a well-publicized spectacle and hope he will listen from within his palatial accommodations.

If you’re showing up at the Women’s March on 21 January in the hopes that the world will be different on 22 January, then you need to think seriously about the goal of marching.

As a general rule, before you protest, ask yourself why this is one of your chosen forms of action. Question your tactics, not your motives. In this case, the obvious first question for any activist ought to be: why deploy a communal march in the streets as a form of protest?

Sometimes, the people march. Other times we hold general assemblies, tar and feather opponents, occupy pipelines, go on strike, dance in a circle, riot in the streets or pray together. In each case, behind every act of protest is an often unarticulated theory of social change: a story we tell ourselves about why the disobedient behavior we’ve chosen will usher in the change we desire.

So why are women marching the day after Donald Trump becomes president? It all comes down to a false theory of how the people can assert sovereign power over their elected president in 2017.

Today’s social activists have succumbed to one of the most enduring myths of contemporary American protest: the comforting belief that if you can get enough people into the streets from diverse demographics, largely unified behind a clear message, then our representatives will be forced to heed the crowd’s wishes.

If this story has ever been true, and I’m not so sure it has, then it hasn’t been the case since 1963, when 250,000 people marched on Washington for “jobs and freedom” and heard Martin Luther King Jr deliver his I Have a Dream speech. Less than a year later, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned discrimination based on “race, color, religion, sex or national origin” in employment and housing.

But let’s be real: there are countless counter-examples of marches on Washington that failed: the 1913 march of women to demand the right to vote, the 1978 march for the Equal Rights Amendment, the 1986 Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament, the Million Man March of 1995, the 2004 March for Women’s Lives, the inauguration protests against George W Bush’s second term in 2005 … the list is practically endless. Activists have a tendency to ignore repeated failure in favor of overemphasizing one or two anomalous minor victories.

The absolute failure of the 15 February 2003 anti-war protest, the largest synchronized global march in human history, was the last gasp of this tactic. Today’s nominally democratic governments would be more concerned by the absence of our marches, as that might suggest something darker is in the works.

The only way to attain sovereignty – the supreme authority over the functioning of our government – is to use social protest to win elections or win wars. Either we can march to the ballot box or the battleground; there is no third option.

To the ballot box, then: prepare to govern

That Trump was elected demonstrates that an anti-establishment outsider can sweep into power through elections – a fact activists should learn from and begrudgingly celebrate.

Before Trump’s victory, it was widely assumed that a candidate without the backing of the establishment could not possibly win a presidential election. Good news: now we know that it is possible. It is finally conceivable that a revolutionary movement beholden to the people could take power in America by winning elections and without violence.

I suspect the Women’s March on Washington has a role to play in this unfolding drama, but only if we cultivate a few moments of detachment from the thoughtless excitement to truly take time to consider this question: what happens on the day after the women march?

Right now, in America, there is no pro-democracy anti-establishment party that is capable of stepping forward, seizing power and governing. America needs a protest movement like Spain’s Podemos, Iceland’s Pirate Party or Italy’s 5 Star Movement. These populist democratic movements are the prototype for the future of protest. Each has achieved surprising electoral victories in a short time, but what is more important is how they are changing the way power functions.

Consider, for example, what happened when Virginia Raggi, a member of the anti-corruption 5 Star Movement, was elected mayor of Rome in 2016 only to be embroiled in her own corruption scandal. The movement didn’t make excuses. Instead, the Five Star Movement very swiftly asserted its sovereignty over its candidate and stripped Raggi of the power to make appointments and other “important decisions” without the movement’s approval. This represents a leap forward in people power: a concrete example of a social movement winning elections while still retaining a firm grip on decision-making power. Bravo!

The number one challenge standing in the way of an effective protest in America today is the inability of our social movements to actually govern. There might be a slight chance our protests could oust Trump, but there is no chance that our present-day movements could govern at all, let alone effectively.

That is because leaderless protesters don’t know how to make complex decisions together as movement. Occupy couldn’t even come up with its one demand.

Now we are seeing this capacity slowly develop among protest movements in Europe. However, until we can replicate their successes in America, the people will never be able to take back sovereignty and our protests remain an exercise in infantile futility.

And that is the great gift that the Women’s March on Washington could give us. May the angry women return home the day after the march to lead us toward a women-led hybrid movement-party in every state that is disciplined enough to govern, militantly local and single-mindedly devoted to actualizing a force capable of seizing control of city councils and mayorships during midterm elections across America in preparation for an electoral coup against the presidency in 2020.

Now that would be a goal worth marching toward.

Originally published in The Guardian on January 19, 2017 at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/19/womens-march-washington-occupy-protest

2018

Activist Graduate School

A new educational model for the next generation of activists. 

Whether we are campaigning on civil rights, environmental justice, refugee rights or LGBTQIA and women’s rights, the first prerequisite to success is a theory of social change that guides the methods we employ as activists. The range of potential protest tactics is so plentiful—from direct action in the streets to silent prayerful vigils and self-organized worker cooperatives to electoral ballot initiatives—that every activist, whether consciously or not, relies on a theory of change to decide their actions. If the theory of change underlying our activism is false then our protests are bound to fail. This is precisely the precarious situation activists find themselves in today. 

The difficulties faced by recent social movements in achieving immediate change, despite their tremendous speed and overwhelming size, is a sign that activism as a discipline must embark on a period of paradigmatic reevaluation. What is needed now more than ever is an educational institution that is designed specifically with the needs of experienced activists in mind: an environment where activists can collaboratively study history, theory and strategy in search of the next theory of change that will spark a successful transformative social movement. 

The pressing social issue that Activist Graduate School endeavors to solve is the declining effectiveness of contemporary activism. Our goal is to create a safe educational environment for the practical, urgent and important task of addressing the deep theoretical and strategic challenges facing social movement creators.

Activist Graduate School received start-up grants in 2018 from the Roddenberry Fellowship and the Voqal Fellowship.

2019

Protests are everywhere. The world is rising up. So can humanity

Activists learned a tremendous amount from successes and failures of the previous cycle of protest movements. As did governments

It’s happening again: Revolutionary fever is infecting the social body. The people of Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Iran, Iraq and beyond are mobbing the streets in massive numbers. These movements are achieving a level of militancy not seen in a decade.

Spectacular street violence has toppled Bolivia’s former president, Evo Morales, while elsewhere governments hang on, deploying riot police in Iraq, closing the border in Colombia, disabling the internet in Iran. The frenzy of protest appears contagious. Elites and activists in stable countries are rightly wondering if the virus might infect their neighbours, too.

At first glance, today’s unrest is remarkably reminiscent of the events of 2010 and 2011, when the Arab Spring initiated a wave of global protest culminating in Occupy encampments in 82 countries.

History, however, never repeats itself in exactly the same way and it would be naive to assume that this new wave of protest will play out like the one before it, which ended with the paramilitary eviction of Occupy’s encampments and a deeper entrenchment of autocracy in the Arab world.

Activists learned a tremendous amount from successes and failures of the previous cycle of protest movements. As did governments.

So, what should we expect in the months ahead? Will the protests morph into something bigger or will police countertactics – for example, an escalation of force leading to live ammunition – prevail? Will activists get it right this time? And what would success for the people in the streets look like, and mean, for the rest of society?

The only thing that is certain in these moments of contagious social protest is that no one knows with certainty what will happen next.

When the status quo is faced with vehement demands for change, many previously dormant (or restrained) forces actively vie to influence the course of events. The outcome is always unpredictable.

We can, however, increase our odds of correctly anticipating how the protests will unfold by being attuned to the ways in which society has changed, and what activists have learned, in nearly a decade since the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street.

I’ve been keenly following the various protests around the globe for several weeks. My interest was initially piqued in July by footage of activists in Hong Kong storming the government headquarters using a sophisticated protest tactic that combined hand gestures with a human chain to rapidly deliver supplies from a depot to activists at the front lines. The ingenuity of the tactic, which required a high level of crowd participation, suggested we were entering a new era of protest. Since then, monitoring the unrest spread to other countries, I’ve thought a lot about what’s shifted since the start of the decade, when I, along with my collaborator at Adbusters, publisher Kalle Lasn, called for Occupy Wall Street, the spark that launched the Occupy movement.

Let’s focus on just three of the shifts that have the greatest bearing on what will come from the contemporary wave of protest: the evolution of social movements, the changing nature of power and the shifting role of activism in society.

The rise and fall of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and subsequent social protests ranging from Idle No More to Black Lives Matter and March for Our Lives has had a tremendous effect on our understanding of social movements as a social phenomena.

In the years leading up to 2011, social movements were typically understood to be the manifestation of popular discontent around a specific political issue. In a sense, protesters were taken at their word: If the masses were in the streets protesting against pre-emptive war on Iraq in 2003, for example, it was accepted that the root cause of unrest was an unpopular war. Governments had a simple choice of complying with, or disobeying, the explicit demands of the movement. Advances in riot control technologies, from sound canons to armoured vehicles, meant that governments less often complied.

This naive understanding of movements proved to be untenable when faced with the first wave of social-media-driven protests, such as Occupy Wall Street, that were oriented around abstract concepts – the influence of money on democracy – or, Brazil in 2013, where massive marches against a public-transport fare hike were obviously about so much more than that. Later, we saw it with Brexit, where information was so distorted that people protested in favour of policies that resulted in changes some now oppose. Obviously, these movements were motivated by something deeper. The old joke that activists don’t really know what they are protesting against turned out to be true because the reasons given were never the real reason everyday people felt drawn to unite with the collective in the square.

There is ample historical evidence that protests have been happening since the dawn of civilization. The earliest record of unrest leading to the overthrow of a government can be found in the Ipuwer Papyrus from ancient Egypt, roughly 3,000 years ago. And waves of protests have been happening steadily since – and seemingly with increasing frequency since the end of the Second World War.

The new understanding of protest movements is that they are a complex social phenomenon whose cause remains mysterious, not the simple manifestation of a political demand. They are a recurring phenomenon that is intrinsically human. And yet, mass protests cannot be conjured at will. Waves of protest such as we’re seeing today come as a surprise both to their instigators and the rest of society because the emergence of a movement requires a favourable historical moment, such as high food prices or a sharp economic downturn.

The eternal recurrence of mass protest serves a useful social function: Protests initiate a period in which old truths are challenged and great social transformations can occur. Without unrest our societies would not progress. Protests play a social evolutionary role and the grievance that unexpectedly triggers unrest is the symptom, not the cause, of why people join social movements.

China’s insistence that the Hong Kong protests are actually caused by unaffordable housing, and not the five demands of the movement – which are, “full withdrawal of the extradition bill, an independent commission of inquiry into alleged police brutality, retracting the classification of protesters as ‘rioters', amnesty for arrested protesters [and] dual universal suffrage, meaning for both the Legislative Council and the Chief Executive” – demonstrates this evolution in the understanding of social movements by governments and gestures toward the future of how social protests will be dealt with in the future.

By using the momentum of the Hong Kong protests – which, let’s remember, started as a protest against the extradition bill – to instead advocate for aggressively solving the housing crisis by seizing idle land from developers, China is cannily harnessing the unique capacity of protest to usher in social changes.

Likewise, from an activist perspective, if periods of unrest are a recurring, inevitable and unpredictable social phenomena, then the challenge is not how to create social movements – or which injustices to organize around – but rather what to do when those moments arise.

In other words, the question for both activists and elites is now the same: How can we use the momentum of social protest to achieve grand social transformations that would have otherwise been impossible?

The evolving understanding of social movements coincides with a dramatic shift in the nature of power. In today’s increasingly fragmented world it is no longer sufficient to be the most materially, or militarily, powerful. It is now necessary to augment one’s power by demonstrating the capacity to rally the citizenry, a quintessentially activist task.

The United States National Intelligence Council anticipated this paradigm shift in power in its most recent Global Trends Report (2017):

“The most powerful actors of the future will be states, groups, and individuals who […] demonstrate ‘power in outcome’ […] by mobilizing large-scale constituencies of support, using information to persuade or manipulate societies and states to their causes.”

The awareness that the powerful need to mobilize common people in order to achieve their strategic objectives has had the effect of altering the dynamic between activists and elites, movements and states.

The art of social-movement creation, once the exclusive domain of activists, is being weaponized. It is commonplace now to see governments experiment with deploying social protest to influence geopolitics. The United States accuses Russia of creating fake activist groups in a bid to influence the 2016 election and China accuses the United States of doing the same in Hong Kong. Not every protest is an authentic, grassroots expression of discontent.

The upside for activism is that street protest is no longer perceived as an unequivocally negative force, a symptom of social disintegration that ought to be quashed, but instead as one of the key sources of power, an unruly and vital phenomenon that ought to be harnessed.

Ultimately, power needs protest because many of the problems we face – climate change, in particular – are existential, not political, and are unsolvable without a large-scale global mobilization. Consider, for example, that some scientists believe planting one trillion trees would erase a decade of carbon emissions. Imagine the mobilization that would be necessary to get that done. From this perspective, the insufficiency of global climate agreements alone is clear. Only a collaboration between the creative energy unleashed by mass protest and the resources of sovereign power has any chance of planting a trillion trees, or pulling off any of the other dramatic public works efforts that are necessary to avert climate change induced mass extinction.

Activists and elites are thus thrust into an uneasy alliance. Hong Kong protesters have a choice: Collaborate with China on pivoting the movement toward a radical solution to the housing crisis or risk being defeated and getting nothing at all. This is a difficult choice between social and political priorities. After all, Hong Kong is the world’s least affordable housing market and last year, there were protests in the country demanding affordable housing. But collaborating with China would mean giving up on the political demand for autonomy. Activists can’t have what we want but we might get what we need.

Governments hit by unrest are presented with a similar dilemma: Use the opportunity of mass protest to accelerate social transformation to solve the underlying cause of unrest, or violently repress the people and suffer a decline in the new form of power. Occupy’s repression under former U.S. president Barack Obama arguably contributed to disillusionment, and the weakening of the progressive establishment, that fuelled Donald Trump’s victory. Mr. Obama failed to understand Occupy’s emergence as a symptom of the millennial generation’s existential anxiety about the future. What we craved was dramatic change, in any direction.

The new wave of protest is an opportunity to chart a new course for humanity. Let’s not squander it.

Originally published in The Globe and Main on November 23, 2019: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-new-wave-of-protest-is-an-opportunity-for-humanity/