In particular, the grassroots efforts aimed at (and successful in) SGK’s reversal of this decision happened through a Move-On petition, in-person boycott tactics, an elite show of support from U.S. Senators, and online tactics culminating in sizeable donations.

What is clear from this timeline and other recent reversals of corporate policies (see recent Mobilizing Ideas posts including mine about Verizon and about McDonald’s, as well as Jennifer Earl’s on Sallie Mae) is that online activism is speeding up some groups’ response to protest. What is less clear is which groups are more or less susceptible to online activism and  how these quick responses will affect protests that do not acheive quick results.

Firsthand activist experience is often thought of as fodder only for case studies, not for generating broad theory. But both of these authors could create useful new concepts precisely because of their long, long activist experience.

Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements grew out of Moyer’s five decades of activism, which began with working under Dr. Martin Luther King on the Southern Christian Leadership Council’s northern organizing project. During the no-nukes movement of the 1970s, he started to see patterns of movement stages and activists’ responses to them. He developed the “Movement Action Plan” model then, and continued to refine it until the anti-globalization movement of the 1990s, his last movement involvement before his death in 2003.

Identifying a stage he calls “Perception of Failure” after the exciting take-off stage is one example of a concept that only someone in close touch with core activists could have created. Similarly, his concept of the “negative rebel” role draws a thread from the violent ultra-leftists of the late 1960s to the small subset of anarchists who have advocated random disruption and street fights since the 1990s. Moyer could write about negative rebels with authority because he knew so many of them and had watched their harmful effects in so many movements.

The main weakness of the book, overgeneralization, as if the eight stages were universal and fixed for all movements, is far outweighed by its strengths in concrete advice for activists at each stage, and by the 5 illuminating case studies written by Moyer and co-authors. The MAP model is still taught in strategy workshops by Training for Change.

Bridging the Class Divide connects the classism Stout faced as a child, when she was called “white trash” and “trailer trash,” with the classism she later encountered in the middle-class peace movement. She coins the term “invisible walls” for the barriers to access that keep low-income people out of most social movement groups, barriers of language, logistics, and assumed background knowledge.

The second half of  the book chronicles the group Stout founded, the Piedmont Peace Project, which broke new ground in organizing low-wage mill workers and farmhands in a conservative part of North Carolina around the controversial issue of re-directing federal spending from the military to domestic needs. The strategic dilemmas PPP faced led Stout to lay out a set of principles for success for progressive groups. If they could change their Congress member’s votes and win tangible victories in such a challenging environment, under threat from the KKK, then odds are her strategic principles would be useful to all of us who want to build a bigger and more inclusive movement.

(Full disclosure: I publicized Stout’s newest book, Collective Visioning, as part of my spouse’s book publicity business, gail leondar public relations.)

I’d like to suggest that both these books are so terrific specifically because of their authors’ class backgrounds. Both Moyer and Stout grew up in deep poverty. Both of them kept, for decades, a laser-like focus on social change, drawing connections among many kinds of injustice, I suspect as a result of their early hardships.

A university education bestows many strengths, but too often it also trains us to convolute our writing with jargon and confusing abstractions. Instead, Moyer’s and Stout’s written voices sound like someone is talking at your kitchen table; you can agree or disagree with their generalizations, but you’ll never be confused about what they mean. Stout’s writing voice is so vivid, direct and personal that this book has been a favorite of undergraduates to whom I’ve assigned it. (In fact, in student evaluations of one course, Bridging the Class Divide  was ranked the single most memorable thing about the entire course.)

Most social movement scholars take either the long view – looking at root causes and/or ultimate impacts of movements – or they zoom in for an up-close view of a movement’s internal group dynamics and tactical choices. It’s hard to do both – unless you spend your entire adult life as a hands-on activist and then in middle-age begin to look back to draw conclusions about what worked and what didn’t and why. Some such big-picture thinkers learned to theorize in college – but others are self-taught conceptual innovators.

How many other brilliant theorists do you think we may be overlooking, if we turn only to academics for social movement theory?

Image taken by Charles Menzies

I just wanted to draw attention to the opposition First Nations in British Columbia are mounting against the Northern Gateway Pipeline.

This pipeline would transport oil from Alberta to the coast of British Columbia.

The Canadian government and associated corporate interests are pushing the pipeline because it will have “economic benefits”.

There is a huge problem with this.

It will run right through First Nation’s land.

Most of British Columbia is First Nation land.  No treaties have been signed.

The only way for the government to aquire rights to FN land is through treaties.  And under international law only sovereign nations can make treaties.

As a non-Native here are the two analogies I come up with for what is happening:

1. The U.S. puts a pipeline through Canadian territory without consent.  Canadians should accept this because there are “economic benefits.”

2.  A company puts a pipeline on a homeowner’s front lawn without consent. The homeowner should be grateful because there will be “economic benefits”.

The images for this post were taken by my colleague Charles Menzies who was at the recent Prince Rupert demonstration.

Image taken by Charles Menzies

Several distinguished scholars and religious leaders participate in the debate about the current state of black church activism, writing about the issues they see as most pressing for black churches to address. Some argue for a focus on education and better reintegration of former prisoners; others recommend an emphasis on environmental justice.

Frederick C. Harris, director of Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies and author of Something Within: Religion in African-American Political Activism, argues that in order to revive Civil Rights activist traditions in black churches, a major obstacle must be overcome: the contemporary popularity of the “prosperity gospel” in some black churches. He writes:

“As scholars of social movements have demonstrated time and again, institutions like churches help to sustain activism over time…However, the activist wing of the black church – which was the backbone of the civil rights movement during the 1950s and 1960s and the organizational basis of black electoral politics from the 1970s to the 1990s – is slowly fading away. That activist tradition has given way to megachurches and the self-centered theology of prosperity. “Prosperity gospel” teaches adherents that God wants Christians to be wealthy in this life as well as the next one. Perhaps the “Occupy the Dream” effort can reinvigorate the activist wing of the black churches. But to bring that tradition back requires that the “Occupy the Dream” effort fight the battle against corporate interests on two fronts. The “Occupy the Dream” effort will not only require challenging the economic institutions and policies that have devastated black communities, but also will have to do battle with the popularity of a theology that celebrates material success as a mark of God’s favor to obedient followers.”

Indeed, as “free spaces,” black churches have long been important centers for activism in African American communities. But has a move toward prosperity theologies in some circles acted as an opiate for potential black church activists, moving congregants toward a focus on individual self-improvement rather than on collective responses to structural injustice?

Join the debate– What do you think? What are the major challenges facing black church activism today? Are there particular issues black churches should focus on if they are to revive King’s legacy in a post-Civil Rights era?

Back in December, I wrote about the relationship between elites and Occupy Seattle (OS), namely the Seattle Central Community College faculty and staff, and the Occupy camp on their campus (Elites, Media and Framing in the Occupy Seattle Movement). Indeed, sympathetic faculty at the college integrated what was going on outside into their classes. Early on, when some occupiers visited classrooms to speak about the movement, faculty did not know how to respond. Eventually, the general policy became one where faculty allowed, if not encouraged, activists to speak but on the condition that they integrate their discussion into the course curriculum. I am not sure how that may have played out in a chemistry class, but there was surely an opportunity in social science courses.

I would argue that teaching and learning about the Occupy movement, at least in the Seattle example, is also a movement tactic – one that has had especially long-lasting effects. For instance, as occupiers increasingly saw the local media as portraying activists in a negative light, and then linked these negative media frames to increasingly negative statements by college officials, occupiers used teach-ins as a way to persuade people otherwise. As I noted in my post, the Occupy Seattle Club at the college was established as a way to educate the community about the movement.  Teaching about OS did not prevent their expulsion, but it did leave an important impact on the college community. Even though the chancellor of the college refers to a “peaceful closure of the Occupy Seattle camp,” a sort of institutionalization of OS has occurred.  For example, a regular series of lectures and discussions are coordinated by faculty and staff which focus on student activism and education (a dialogue that originally began when OS came to the campus).  The college has also coordinated social justice teach-ins which focus on a variety of topics, including OS.

I am also reminded of the documentary series “Making Sense of the Sixties” where a host of activists, former college students, and academics describe the growing university social science curriculum in the 1960s that engaged students with the social change of the time. I wonder what Rick Santorum thinks in light of his recent comments (see the video). Any thoughts?

Tagged: activism, activists, classroom, Framing, movement outcomes, Occupy Movement, Occupy Seattle, Occupy Wall Street, Political Science, protest policing, tactics, teach-ins, teaching ]]> http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2012/02/10/lessons-from-ows-inside-and-outside-the-classroom/feed/ 2 pettind http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/police-and-the-ows-protection-racket/ http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/police-and-the-ows-protection-racket/#comments Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:13:59 +0000 christophermsullivan http://mobilizingideas.wordpress.com/?p=1590 Continue reading →]]> While the protests in Zuccoti Park are presently on hiatus, members of the 99% movement continue to engage in protests and other forms of activism around the country. Police, for their part, continue to maintain a visible presence at movement events, while episodically engaging in more repressive actions, such as clearing protest sites and arresting demonstrators.

The sustained character of the movement has led to charges that the protests are stretching municipal budgets thin. Cash strapped cities, already hit hard by the recession, are being forced to spend increasingly large shares of their budgets on the police force in order to support the overtime associated with occupy events. New York alone had spent more than $6 million dollars on police salaries relating to the movement prior to clearing Zuccotti Park. There are also calls that policing the Occupy protests has stretched police forces too thin to deal with serious crimes. During the raid on the Occupy Oakland site last week (in which 400 occupy protestors were arrested) police had trouble responding to the volume of 911 calls made. Oakland’s police chief has been quoted as saying that “personnel and resources dedicated to Occupy reduce our ability to focus on public safety priorities.”

While concerns over budgets and crime fighting capacities are valid, anger directed at the activists is misplaced. Strategies and budgets are generated by the police forces themselves, not the protestors. As a result, decisions to direct police energy away from fighting crime and towards policing the protest movement rest with the police. Similarly, justifications for overtime are generated by police departments, which possess parochial interests in maximizing organizational budgets.

Charles Tilly has famously likened the state to a protection racket. Like mobsters collecting tribute for protection from other mobsters, states extract taxes from the public in order to protect citizens from threats created by themselves and other states.  A similar analogy can be made with regards to the policing of OWS. The greatest threats to public order have not emerged from the movement when it was left by itself, but from interactions with police that destroyed property and caused human harm. These outbursts of contention, for which the police are at least partially to blame, have been used to justify greater overtime and more resources. It is the policing of the movement that has led to growing costs and a diversion of resources, not the protests.

Further Reading

Tilly, Charles – ‘War Making and State Making as Organized Crime, In Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, et al., 169–87. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985

Stanley, William – The Protection Racket State: Elite Politics, Military Extortion and Civil War in El Salvador Temple Press, 1996(limited)

Map of locations of sit-ins in southern US cities, from Kenneth Andrews and Michael Biggs' 2006 American Sociological Review article "The Dynamics of Protest Diffusion."

Recent efforts to add a geo-spatial dimension to studies of protest have given social movement scholars the chance to draw some really interesting conclusions. Dan Myers and Beth Caniglia found how close your protest needed to be to New York City to have a hope of appearing in the New York Times. Kenneth Andrews and Michael Biggs determined how sit-ins rapidly diffused from city to city in the south in 1960. And Robert Sampson, Doug McAdam, Heather MacIndoe, and Simon Weffer-Elizondo established what neighborhood characteristics really mattered in where collective action occurred over 30 years in Chicago. While these studies asked different questions and focused on different places, they had one major component in common: they hinged on the painstaking collection of data from a variety of sources to identify the location and characteristics of large numbers of protest events.

A segment of The Guardian's interactive Occupy Wall Street protest site map.

What if you want to study a contemporary movement? Good news–you may be able to crowdsource (some of) the painful part! The Guardian has posted the beginnings of a geographic array of Occupy Wall Street protest sites worldwide, including estimates of the number of protesters, indications of the duration of the protest, and (if available) photos and images related to the events. It seems they did some of the initial locating and coding the old-fashioned way; they dug through media accounts. But now they’ve opened it up to “the crowd.” People who know of OWS sites and events can enter that information directly into the database. As word spreads and more people upload information, the data coverage for this particular protest wave could become quite the analytic treasure trove–and the crowdsourced data collection approach could become a model for other protest data collection in the future.