The Recipe For a Winning Movement

You must meet people where they are.

“A Note on the Role of Protest Leadership”

Both the limitations and opportunities for mass protest are shaped by social conditions. The implications for the role of leadership in protest movements can be briefly summarized.

Protest wells up in response to the momentous changes in the institutional order. It is not created by organizers and leaders.

Once protest erupts, the specific forms it takes are largely determined by features of social structure. Organizers and leaders who contrive strategies that ignore the social location of the people seek to mobilize can only fail.

Elites respond to the instituional disruptions othat protest causes, as well as to other powerful institutional imperatives. Elite responses are not significantly shaped by the demands of leaders and organizers. Nor are elite responses significantly shaped by formally structured organizations of the poor. Whatever influence lower-class groups occasionally exert in American politics does not result from organization, but from mass protest and the disruptive consequences of protest.

Finally, protest in the United States has been episodic and transient, for as it gains momentum, so too do various forms of instiutional accomodation and coercion that have the effect of restoring quiescence. Organizers and leaders cannot prevent the ebbing of protest, nor the erosion of whatever influence protest yielded the lower class. They can only try to win whatever can be won while it can be won.

In these major ways protest movements are shaped by institutional conditions, and not by the purposive efforts of leaders and organizers. The limitations are large and unyielding. Yet within the boundaries created by these limitations, some latitude for purposive effort remains. Organizers and leaders choose to do one thing, or they choose to do another, and what they choose to do affects to some degree the course of the protest movement. If the area of latitude is less than leaders and organizers would prefer, it is also not enlarged when they proceed as if institutional limitations did not in fact exist by undertaking strategies which fly in the face of these constraints. The wiser course is to understand these limitations, and to exploit whatever latitutde remains to enlarge the potential influence of the lower class. And if our conclusions are correct, what this means is that strategies must be pursued that escalate the momentum and impact of disruptive protest at ach stage in its emergence and evolution.

5 Lessons for Activists

1. You must meet people where they are. Organizing and promoting opportunities for protest and disruption must be tailored to what potential activists believe they can do.

2. The working class exerts its power by disrupting the social order. This is why strikes are so effective. Workers make the whole thing go brrr! And when they stop working, the entire order stops working.

3. Decentralization is a key element of successfully disrupting the social order. Too much centralization of power prevents spontaneous disruption. Unpredictable disruption provides the working class with maximum power.

4. Protest energy ebbs and flows. When energy is ebbing, build disruptive structures that can scale when the protest energy flows again.

5. The meta-lesson of the whole passage is contained in its final line: Strategies must be pursued that escalate the momentum and impact of disruptive protest at each stage in its emergence and evolution.