What do we need? Historical knowledge, vision, optimism, organization, and deep culture. When do we need it? Always.
For a very long time, whenever a social movement gets off the ground anywhere in the world that I've seen up close, and in pretty much all the ones I've read about as well, there has been an ongoing conflict between forces within the movement that are oriented towards effectively building it and actually reaching the goals it is aiming for, and forces that are more interested in other things, like being morally superior to others, winning arguments, rising through the ranks of the leadership, or incessantly criticizing comrades for not being dedicated enough to the cause.
What has seemed particularly evident since the Israeli-American genocide against the people of Gaza began, and then even more since the latest election of Trump, is that there are a lot of people out there trying to organize things who are desperately frustrated with the fact that despite their herculean efforts, the protests they're organizing generally keep getting smaller, and the vast majority of society seems to be disinterested, or at least they're not coming to the protests.
At the vast majority of protests I have been to in the US as well as some other countries in recent years, crowds are being berated by speakers who are at their wit's end with all the lack of serious opposition to the genocide, or to Trump's many horrible initiatives, and we're being told by people who are almost literally pulling their hair out while shouting with exasperation, that there are children being slaughtered in Gaza every day, and all kinds of people being abducted from streets of US cities and sent to gulags in Florida, and they're asking with an accusatory tone, why are there so few of us? Why are we not mobilizing the way we should be? Why is society not more outraged? What's wrong with us?
These are, of course, extremely good questions, that really need to be answered. And there are answers, I would humbly submit. There are answers that are very obvious ones, in fact -- obvious to many people in many places at many times in history, but not obvious to a lot of people in the English-speaking world these days, I can't help but notice, repeatedly.
It is, of course, tremendously discouraging that US society generally, the more dominant tendencies within what we might call the contemporary US left, as well as the dominant tendencies within the sector of US society that would self-identify as liberals, are currently in such a paralyzed state, so apparently incapable of rising to the current moment, at least according to my estimation and that of so many people speaking at rallies I go to. Their solution, generally, is to keep digging the hole they're in, and hope if they dig harder, the outcome will change.
I'll offer different solutions, and I'll contrast my solutions with the solutions that seem to be the agreed-upon ones in recent years that have so persistently failed to deliver the goods. I offer these thoughts with humility but with a lot of experience in the world of social movements, in many different countries. I offer these thoughts not to demonstrate my superior knowledge of anything, nor because I take pleasure in criticizing dominant trends in society and on the left, nor because I enjoy being called all kinds of wild names as a result of sharing my thoughts publicly. I offer these thoughts because I, too, am driven daily close to madness by witnessing the horrors that are happening, and bearing witness to my society's overwhelmingly passive response to it all, and I can only hope that I might be able to offer some analysis that might make one of those proverbial light bulbs flash above the heads of a few people out there.
There are so many other things to be said about how to grow a social movement, but I would say there are five pillars that pretty much all successful movements need to be standing on, in order to have any chance of getting very far at all. I'd categorize those pillars as historical knowledge, vision, optimism, organization, and deep culture.
Historical knowledge
Knowledge of history makes the world a four-dimensional place. Without history, the world only has three dimensions.
That crucial fourth dimension of reality is a battleground, with many different contestants. We can learn history as told by the rich people in charge, we can learn about history from the vantage point of the outcomes of various wars, we can learn mainly about the most horrible things that people have done to each other, or we can focus on the heroic stuff. We can learn a version of events that says that every social movement prior to our times has somehow failed and therefore isn't worth knowing anything about, or we can learn about how social movements succeed in other parts of the world, and about the victories that have been won by social movements in the past in the US, and we can build on that knowledge -- but only once we have it.
A crucial aspect of history to understand in the first place is that it is a battleground, and one with far more than two contestants or versions of reality to contend with. There are many different realities to focus on, or to ignore, and many different lies to spread, for different reasons. One lie is past movements have been ineffective and aren't worth paying attention to. Another lie is that recent movements have been bigger than ever before, which is comparing apples with oranges, given the media-driven nature of social movements in recent decades, which is a new phenomenon in my lifetime. Another lie is US history is full of massacres but lacking in powerful, inclusive social movements and great solidarity.
The biggest lies are lies of omission. If nobody told you that there was a thing called Cointelpro, you don't know about it. There's no need to tell us about things we don't know about, if it's much more convenient for the ruling class that we remain ignorant. But some of us are armed with the historical knowledge of the incontrovertible fact that the main purpose of the FBI, from its inception in 1908 right up until 1971, was to undermine, misdirect, and destroy the US left, by any means necessary. Those of us armed with this knowledge are also armed with the knowledge that there is no doubt Cointelpro didn't stop in 1971, and that the sorts of activities involved have also long involved many other agencies in addition to the FBI, such as the CIA, and local police department Red Squads across the country. Those lacking this context for reality are basically the human equivalent of a deer in the headlights.
Reality-based history will tell us that society and the left have been actively targeted in so many ways, in order to spread division and confusion, and knowing about this reality, we can clearly see that in so many ways, these sorts of efforts have been working exceptionally well in the age of social media. Reality-based history will also instruct us that past social movements, and social movements existing now in various parts of the world, developed strategies for minimizing the impact of efforts at division coming from mass media or secret police. But if we don't know about these strategies and how they were used in the past or how they are used elsewhere in the world, how likely are we to come up with all these good ideas by ourselves? Much less, I would postulate.
Knowledge of history teaches us that social movements that grow and become seriously threatening to the status quo share in common certain characteristics. The ones that collapse can do so for many reasons, but some of those persistent reasons are when they lack these characteristics, and thus have no solid foundation to stand on.
Vision
My understanding of history and my observation over the past several decades of traveling tell me that the social movements that really capture the imagination of large numbers of people who keep coming out into the streets and otherwise being deeply engaged are movements that involve a radically different vision for how society should be organized.
Those with the historical knowledge to know which social movements have in the past caught the imagination of tremendous numbers of people in US society know that what was so enthralling for so many people about the syndicalist labor movement in the early 20th century, the socialist labor movement in the 1930's, the Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and 1960's, or the Vietnam War-era antiwar movement of the 1960's and 1970's, included the fact that these movements involved so many leaders and participants who viscerally and broadly understood that they were in this movement to transform society, whether this transformation would involve the IWW's vision of One Big Union for the entire working class, or the 1930's vision of prosperity for the entire working class, or the Civil Rights' movement's vision of not just equality between people of with different hues of skin, but prosperity for the entire working class, or the 60's antiwar movement's vision of the total demilitarization of American society, starting with the hearts and minds of the youth.
Movements that have lacked this kind of vision, as I have observed them, have tended to be flashes in the pan -- they have some dramatic moments early on, with lots of appearance of potential, sometimes helped immensely by massive amounts of media attention and algorithmic attention on social media, but then they fizzle out and die within a few months. There are lots of different reasons for this, of course, but one consistent one is these movements are mostly oppositional in nature, seeking better treatment or conditions for a certain category of people, but without tying this goal to the broader goal of the transformation of society as a whole.
Oftentimes the messaging of these short-lived movements that involve any kind of vision call for other categories of people in US society to make sacrifices in order to provide for the betterment of another category of people. Those people who are supposed to make sacrifices for the betterment of others never seem to be the top 1% of society -- the abundantly obvious category that needs to make sacrifices, given that they literally own half of the wealth of the nation -- but other people defined by things like race and gender, which statistically makes no sense in terms of the 1% owning half the country, and is akin to fighting over crumbs. It's a very convenient form of logic if you're a rich liberal. It manages to hold all white people responsible for fixing racism in US society, while leaving the ruling class off the hook.
Hearing what passes for discourse from the stages at rallies I have attended, what passes for vision among the anti-Trump protesters is maybe now the Democratic Party will develop a backbone and start leading the resistance against authoritarianism. What passes for vision at some of the protests against Israel is all the descendants of settlers in all the countries that are largely or mostly populated by European settlers, immigrants and refugees should go back to Europe. Both of these visions are completely detached from historical reality, and are born out of a deep lack of understanding of the nature of class society. Without knowing the details, most people in the US sense that this kind of talk is nothing but wingnuttery, and they want nothing to do with it. The kind of vision that mobilizes people recognizes the nature of class society rather than pretending class and race are the same thing. And the kind of vision that mobilizes society is inclusive of the vast majority of people, not exclusive towards some large segment of the population -- as evidenced by the social movements today and historically that have had any staying power or impact.
Optimism
"The arc of history is long, but it leads towards justice," to paraphrase MLK, whether true or not, is the kind of sentiment that has a history of mobilizing millions of people, and keeping them mobilized for years and years.
By contrast, "do this because it's the right thing to do and if you don't do it you're a bad person" is a sentiment that has never mobilized a sustained mass movement.
Around the world today, and historically in the US, it's abundantly clear that for large numbers of people to mobilize and stay mobilized, there needs to be a widespread understanding that victory is possible. A widespread understanding that if we keep this up, we stand a good chance of actually winning. Whether it's a movement to bring back the subsidy for bread somewhere, or a movement to demilitarize the hearts and minds of a society, or a movement for universal suffrage, or universal prosperity, or whatever else, one of those key points at which a movement really catches on in a society is when a whole lot of people start to believe this might actually work, if we try hard enough, and if there are enough of us.
This kind of optimism contrasts completely with the attitude of so many recent and current groups in the US protesting inequality or empire or support for fascist regimes such as Israel. What you can hear coming from those sectors is much more along the lines of nihilism than optimism. The dominant sentiment is there are not enough of us, most people don't seem to care, but at least we're out on the streets doing something, unlike everybody else. At least we're on the right side of history. At least when we're old we can tell our grandchildren we tried.
This is the orientation of the White Rose collective in Germany, who held a little protest and then were executed for doing so. There were, by some estimate I came across, around 20,000 Germans who sacrificed their lives in such a noble fashion during the rule of the Nazis. They were all incredibly admirable people, no doubt, just as Aaron Bushnell was, and the actions of the White Rose collective, as with Aaron Bushnell's self-immolation at the gates of the Israeli Embassy, will probably be remembered for a long time still.
But even 20,000 Germans carrying out such self-sacrificial actions didn't spark a mass movement against fascism back in the day. This is because a tiny minority of society being extremely dedicated to a cause can make a stir, but if there's no conceivable road map to victory, no hope in doing anything other than making a point before you get yourself killed or imprisoned, then people don't mobilize. That's how we humans are, whether or not we like it. Most of us don't stick our necks out in order to make a point before getting our heads chopped off. Many of us are willing to take tremendous risks, but only if there's a chance that the risk will lead to some kind of tangible result.
Organization
To state the obvious, young people in the US today have grown up online, in an online world hegemonically dominated by massive tech corporations. At the same time, young people in the US today have also grown up in a polarized media environment, with Republican corporate media and Democratic corporate media, vying to spread different forms of lying propaganda. The same is true not just for people under the age of 30, but for anyone of any age who has only gotten involved with organizing the resistance in the past two decades.
The impact of social media has been devastating to the hearts and minds of America, leading to an unprecedented crisis of depression and loneliness. This reality is fairly widely reported these days. Less widely reported is the way social media has facilitated the atomization of society as well, and has been the major force in helping society un-learn how to organize, along with the new, polarized media landscape.
With the media paying attention to certain protest movements -- which for decades they never used to do, except very occasionally for one token story here or there -- people today have come to expect that if the protest is around certain issues during a certain kind of political environment, the media will cover your protests and will be the main way so many people hear about them.
Social media has done the same thing. People organizing anything these days now will very commonly announce from stages throughout the English-speaking world, "if you want to know what we're planning to do next, follow us on Instagram." In other words, follow us on this massive corporate platform that can ban us, shadowban us, or change their algorithms at a whim, and make us invisible. We give the Meta Corporation full control when we say "follow us on Instagram." "Follow us on Instagram," translated, says "we abdicate all control over our messaging, and whether or not you hear it in the future. We are powerless in the face of Big Tech, and we supplicate ourselves to Mark Zuckerberg."
I am not here blaming anyone for using modern technology or for never learning how real organizing works. We are all products of our environment. If you grow up in an environment where the algorithms seem to be working for you and what you're trying to organize, and in an environment where the corporate press sometimes does what appears to be a great job of promoting your next protest, then it's very easy to forget about the "old-fashioned" organizing methods, or to never learn about them in the first place.
But as many more people viscerally understood in the pre-social media era, which was also the era prior to the polarization of the corporate media -- when it moved from having the broad, and broadly false, pretense of objectivity, to abandoning that altogether in preference for blatant tribalism -- real organizing is not something you can outsource to social media algorithms or MSNBC.
If what you're organizing is a completely illegal action, that's one thing. But if what you're organizing is a social movement, then real organizing requires that we actually know each other. Real organizing is the opposite of what so many of us in broadly-defined left circles have come to know as "security culture." "Security culture" has been an unmitigated disaster for the left, and a massive gift to the FBI. The FBI already knows who we are, but as we attempt to organize on anonymous chat groups, going out into the public wearing masks so people supposedly can't identify us, we increasingly don't know each other, and this way we create the perfect environment for our continued reliance on the press and the algorithm, and our continued susceptibility to the rumor mill and the troll farm.
Deep culture
Lastly, what is probably the most important, and most overlooked, fifth pillar.
Around most of the world today, and throughout the US up until around the advent of social media, there was a broad understanding that any social movement needed a sense of community in order to sustain itself, and for a social movement to have a sense of community, it was necessary to have a deep association with culture -- with things like music, art, and food. A singing movement is a movement that says "come join us -- join the choir -- here we are, acting in unison, singing the same song together."
Authentic, grassroots social movements -- rather than their media-driven, simulated equivalents -- are easily recognizable around the world and throughout US history by the way they naturally mobilize the artists and musicians and writers in a given society, who collectively and individually and organically engage with the movement by communicating with us all through the incredibly powerful means of songs, giant puppets, murals, films, plays and poems that can break through the programming of a society's people and go straight to the hearts of so many of them, inspiring, educating, and sustaining them.
In societies where real mass movements are happening, the movements invariably have a "yes and" orientation. They naturally incorporate the best communicators into the movement, and use them -- the artists -- for all they're worth.
By contrast with this kind of movement, the algorithm- and media-driven movements that have characterized so much of the past two decades in the US seem intent on alienating all the people involved as soon as they arrive at a protest, with endless angry speeches, berating us all for our lack of engagement, interrupted by angry and often rhythmless chants that someone seems to have adapted from chants they heard in a Hollywood movie they saw about the 1960's. I have attended protest after protest for years in the US and other English-speaking countries where at just about no point in the proceedings on the stage was there any form of culture represented, where those in attendance are mostly being berated rather than inspired, where most of the crowd has left before the demo is over, feeling dejected.
Getting even angrier about the situation and shouting at us even more for our lack of engagement will not improve anything at all -- it will only dig the hole deeper. Whatever the way out may be, it will definitely involve abandoning all of that puritanical nonsense, and mobilizing people through communicating about the historical knowledge that leads us to the movement we're trying to organize, communicating the vision that this movement has for the future of our entire society, and communicating the optimism we have that by mobilizing people in pursuit of that vision, we can change the world, and make it a better place not just for some of us, but for all of us.
Those of us who are ready to undertake the journey of becoming effective movement-builders must all grapple with the question of how we got to where we are now, on many different fronts, and how we can overcome the obstacles that we now find around us.
We must ask how did we get to the point as a society where it is broadly accepted by many that all those hippies and commies didn't accomplish anything worth knowing much about, and the past basically is irrelevant, along with the elders?
We must ask how we got to the point where the best thing most of us ever think a protest might accomplish is that we had a chance to "speak truth to power"? How did so much of what we might call the activist element become convinced that our greatest achievement as a movement is what most radicals in previous generations would have dismissed as blatant tokenism?
We must ask how we arrived at this stage where the activist element in society is overwhelmingly alienated from our fellow human beings in the US and beyond. How did we develop the notion that there is any possible way to effectively organize anything without constantly recruiting among broader society, and constantly reaching out to people who aren't part of our social circles? How can we function if we're actively avoiding at least half of society for fear of feeling unsafe?
We must ask how we developed the notion that it's even remotely possible to organize a movement if we're not collecting names, email addresses, and phone numbers of lots and lots of people? What has led us to believe that there is any way to organize effectively when everyone's identity is secret and people are living in fear of being doxxed?
We must ask how the activist scene broadly has become completely disconnected from any sense of our culture. We lambast cultural appropriation and seem to have become paralyzed, perhaps unable to live with the subtleties inherent in the reality that art and music are inherently always cross-pollinating and will continue to do so, regardless of how racist or not racist society or the music industry is. How did we possibly get to the point where for one reason or another, we almost never have live music at protests? How did a whole series of majority-white social movements in a majority-white society develop the idea, in so many cases, that the best way to use culture is to avoid it completely if it means having a white musician on a stage? How is it possible for a social movement to shoot itself in the foot repeatedly so many times?
I don't think we'll find good answers to all of these questions in any one place. But what can be easily observed over my lifetime is that each of the five pillars I describe have been actively undermined by provocateurs, social media algorithms, corporate media coverage, and liberal politicians -- all elements actively and constantly fulfilling one of their most important roles, which clearly is to undermine and atomize the coherence of society and specifically the coherence of what we might still call the left.
By my observation, the gift that Big Tech's rise to almost completely dominate our communications landscape has given to those seeking to do the divisive work of endeavors like Cointelpro is beyond estimation. The impact on the culture of the left has been absolutely extraordinary, and overwhelmingly destructive.
I hate to end on such a downer of an observation, so I'll just add in closing that sometimes the darkest hour is just before the dawn.
