Expecting more from our movement

collective versus positional power (part 2)

“Liberals and most progressives don’t do a full power-structure analysis because, consciously or not, they accept an elite theory of power…they assume elites will always rule.”

These are the fiery words of Jane McAlevey. What does she mean?

A story. Recently, our union faced a decision that every activist organisation faces at some point. We wanted change. We wanted visa sponsorships, a modest 35-hour week and better pay. Workers were struggling to pay rent, being overworked on sick leave or were at risk of deportation. To get this change we could do two things. We could find out who amongst the workers had good relationships with the higher-ups and ask them to use their position to pressure them. Or we could spend hours talking to other workers, build support for our issues, organise actions to maintain pressure and threaten to strike. For already overworked staff, facing rent rises and needing visas, the first option was more alluring. It promised quick, frictionless change. The second on the other hand, promised tension, conflict and risk.

These two routes to change (which, as we’ll see, aren’t mutually exclusive) rely on different theories of power. One assumes that as long as good people climb the rungs of hierarchy, everyone will benefit. The other wants to flip the ladder.

Another story. Working on a campaign to get our local council to give over more land for community food growing, I spent a few months asking for advice from people working on the same issue across the country. All of them told me a similar version of this: you need to build relationships with allies in the council, work with them to pressure others in the council, and be careful not to appear oppositional. What I didn’t hear from anyone is that we should build a highly participatory campaigning organisation capable of developing the capacities of hundreds of people to organise and demonstrate bigger and bigger public support. And you have to wonder, why?

Maybe it seems too hard, maybe we don’t believe people actually care about this issue, or maybe it’s just not part of our DNA as campaigners anymore.

This makes sense, given our recent history. It’s been well documented that since the 1970s advocates, activists and campaigners have been seduced by a hollow version of social change. The ‘smart’ politics of the Blair, Clinton and Obama years meant capitalising on easy-wins and efficiency gains, nudging people to make the cogs turn smoother rather than changing any of the machinery. ‘Civic engagement’ has been confined to four-year bursts of electioneering. NGOs have opted for cheaper, digital campaigns supposedly getting more bang for their buck. Unions have been on the backfoot and opted to defend their gains rather than expand their bases. They both have shrunk their role to mobilising people who were already convinced of their cause, rather than trying to change anyone's minds about anything. Capitalist realism has taken hold.

Before she died last year, McAlevey, an American union organiser raised in the tradition of socialist community organising, railed against all this. She understood power differently. She understood that power comes from collectives, from large groups of people, committed to taking action together, and that, in the long run, there are no shortcuts to building this power. She learned this through decades of work, successfully building worker-led local organisations. Against the twin obstacles of union-management shortsightedness and low morale among workers, she raised expectations, and often, she won.

This type of power -collective power- can take many forms. It can win elections. It can produce autonomous community infrastructure. It can shift the mainstream understanding of the world. It doesn’t assume that “elites will always rule”. And it doesn’t fall into the heroic individualism of ‘campaigners’ ingratiating themselves within bureaucracies and amongst elites to try and change things. A strategy that depends on luck and makes activists miserable.

Of course, in our real lives, organising in our workplaces and our communities, we need to figure out how to get the most from both approaches to power.

Sarah Schulman’s account of ACT UP New York, Let the Record Show, is a parable of how hard this is to do. Fighting for recognition, legislative change and destigmatisation during the AIDs crisis, on the one hand, these activists developed relationships on the ‘inside’ with healthcare legislators, while at the same time staging dramatic public actions and building grassroots forms of mutual aid. Problematically, it was mostly white gay men who suited up for meetings and fielded press conferences, and as individual activists’ situations became more urgent, they lent more on this positional power in desperation. Meanwhile, the media was happy to portray the movement as run by these few key individuals. This approach saved lives and it led to feelings of betrayal from those organising existing networks of queer, low-income and black communities. People moved on, and the radical ideas of mutual aid and publicly funded healthcare emerging from the movement’s grassroots failed to break through.

This dynamic is a tale as old as social movements. It is precisely the same as when union officials develop relationships with their corporate counterparts in negotiations, and workers get sold out. It is a small iteration of the big paradox: we need to engage with existing structures of power to transform them, but in engaging we risk being subsumed. The questions for us are, how do we keep the radical imaginations of our movement leaders alive? How do we wisely use both forms of power to advance our aims?

One of McAlevey’s signature tactics points a way through. In the negotiating room, she insisted on training her workers to lead the conversation. She would gather dozens of other workers to stand behind the negotiators, showing the bosses the scale of their commitment, and reminding the negotiators who they are speaking on behalf of. Turns out people are less likely to sell out their fellow workers, especially if they’re in the room with them.

Will this work for my union or my campaign? It’s too early to say. What is more useful than the tactic is the awareness that positional power is a thin tool that can only really work if, underneath it, there is organised collective power. Knowing that this kind of power can exist without corruption, bureaucracy and fragmentation, that there is a method and a discipline to making it work, these reminders from McAlevey and others makes us set our sights higher and expect more from our movement.