Changing the world is hard. Creating equitable and egalitarian social relations have proven difficult to create. The path forward isn’t necessarily clear, but I have some general inclinations about how we should frame our approach. We should avoid a traditional approach, where we just try to turn things back to “how they used to be”. We instead should wrestle with present and past ideas to create the best possible course for the future.
This is super important for tactics. Depending on where you lie on ideological lines, you might be super into some tactics over others. I’d say, once we have a basic idea of our visions and values (and some ethics), we can try to pick some tactics from what’s available, and decide how to execute from there. from there. This post will mostly be gesturing towards a way to categorize tactics to decide what you will think will be useful based on the context.
So, I think some useful variables for any given tactic are:
Level of visibility or publicity. How aware will people be of this? How “viral” will it be?
Legality. How much trouble will you get in with the law?
Directness. How far are you from the issue? Is this a direct action, or do you have to go through intermediaries?
“Violence” or confrontation. How confrontational is this with oppressive systems?
Organizational structure. What kinds of organizational structures can facilitate this action?
Intended impact/likely result.
Current feasibility. Given your current power level, are you able to pull this action off?
Risks. What are the dangers with this idea?
Benefits. What can be gained if this tactic yields successful?
You can look at any given tactic, rank them based on these categories, and based on your strategy and analysis, decide if it’s something that you want to do. Depending on the situation, you can use as many or as few variables as you want.
I’ll end with an example of using this to categorize certain tactics, with a specific selection of variables.
Above Ground Tactics a. Legalist Tactics
Peaceful protests
Petitions and letter-writing campaigns
Lobbying and advocacy
Public speeches and rallies
b. Illegalist Tactics
Civil disobedience
Sit-ins and occupations
Blockades and disruptions
Nonviolent direct action
Underground Tactics a. Legalist Tactics
Covert research and information gathering
Whistleblowing
Strategic media campaigns
b. Illegalist Tactics
Sabotage and property destruction
Hacking and cyber-attacks
Underground publications and propaganda
This is just a start. I think that something like this can be useful so that we can have a way to gauge our tactics in the context that we plan to apply them. Hopefully, this can be part of an interesting tactical/strategic discussion.
TLDR: We want to figure out how to analyze the world around us (past, present, and future) so that we can create the futures that we want. We do this so that we can understand why the world isn’t what we want it to be, and to get ideas for how to change that. It also allows those ideas to be experimental in nature, where we can review the results and assess them. More spontaneous actions that exist in a vacuum (as in substantive strategic thinking isn’t present in the movement) are great but can have wildly varying effects that are hard to discern and make useful long-term. Creating strategies that are flexible allows us to have our cake and eat it too, where multiple tactics are employed to service liberation in ways that are symbiotic and reinforcing, rather than parasitic and counterproductive.
Continuing my conversations around creating social change (including how to get started, how to organize, and the importance of worldbuilding), I want to talk about the importance of strategy. I’ve made a couple of posts about this, with some broad notes on changing the world, and some more specific notes on the importance of anti-authoritarian, distributed resistance. I want to come at it from a different angle. Let’s discuss why strategy is important, and how to create strategy.
Let’s start with defining strategy. If you imagine social change work as fractal, where the vision (as in the idea of what you want the world to be) is the fractal, zoomed out to the largest scale, and specific actions as zoomed into the smallest scale, strategy sits at the middle scale. Said otherwise, strategies are the culmination of bundles of actions (also known as tactics), and/or pieces of visions. So, a vision would be akin to a snowflake, an action would be a specific triangle on that snowflake, and the strategy is one of the “arms” of the snowflake. Strategy is how we get from disparate actions to our world-building vision. Strategy builds on and creates the spaces for spontaneity to be effective, towards the end of improving the conditions of dispossessed folks. It’s an additive element to those ruptures that happen in society. We can protest, occupy squares, and do direct action… but if those are not in the context of some wider orientation, those folks just get singled out, and at best become martyrs. Again, I am not against spontaneity. It’s going to happen. The more strategic elements should cultivate a space to maximize the effectiveness of spontaneity, and strategically figure out ways to create change, understanding the different elements that exist. There should be efforts made to work around and network disparate parts of a movement, even if it’s for the sake of being aware of the landscape.
To create an effective strategy, it’s important to have three things: a vision, a method of analysis, and a matrix of tactics. We’re focusing on the method of analysis, including how that informs strategy and creates a bridge to our tactics.
What is analysis? For our purposes, it is three things. One, is an understanding of the world in the past (history). Two, an understanding of what the current situation is (current events + intelligence). Three, a theory of change, as in, a theory of how the world can be different in the future, along with the broad things that need to happen to get there.
We should understand the past, to create a mosaic of how we got to the present, contextualizing it, from current events to intelligence gathered. As we study popular and revised history, we should gather accounts from many perspectives, to shore up our knowledge for effective action.
We should understand the present, reading the current events using a similar methodology to our exploration of the past. Gather a variety of perspectives, discern discrepancies and understand why they occur, and acknowledge the different perspectives of your sources. We should also gather intelligence, through OSINT, rumor and gossip networks, and whatever else we need do for information on what’s really happening. Again, this is not the space for conspiracy. We gotta be able to back up our information.
We should understand the future, through a theory of change. This could be a broad theory made up of more specific theories, or a very specific way of how to make change. I tend to be against a purely universalist (there is a universal answer to complex issues) approach. I am also not very excited by the ephemerality of some poststructuralist critiques, which can sometimes devolve into non-answers. I’m interested in a dialectically structuralist, meta-structuralist, or meta-modernist approach, where we oscillate between more ephemeral and more rigid forms of understanding as necessary. Theories of change are necessarily and beneficially broad. It allows us to prepare for an uncertain future while giving us something to look back at. We can see how far we got by knowing where we started.
To create a theory of change, we can use this framework: If⇒ Then⇒ Because.
If we do this thing/action/tactic/strategy/campaign (this can be at any scale of our fractal)
Then we’ll get this result (what we’re expecting to happen)
Because of these reasons (our hypothesis going into the pending work).
Some interesting elements for a theory of change, from the Resource manual for a living revolution, are:
The nature of human beings (be careful exploring this—people tend to be very universalist with this)
The nature and sources of power (how does power-over [power as most people think of it] work and operate)
The nature and sources of truth and authority
The analysis of the causes of social problems (returning to our analysis phase, along with the perspectives we bring)
The role of individuals and institutions in social change
The vision of the way it can or should be (I’ve also referred to this as worldbuilding)
The mechanisms of change, existing or potential (how people make the changes)
These elements will color and shape your If⇒ Then⇒ Because statements. We can think of these as implicit elements to that statement. It could be useful to make those explicit, so that you and the folks we’re working with have more clarity on our built in assumptions, and challenge them if needed.
Focusing in on that last point, the different mechanisms of change here are some of the ones that the manual mentioned cover:
Becoming the decision makers/powers that be (I am hyper skeptical of this…undemocratic decision-making is the issue)
Influencing the powers that be to make better decisions (a lot of opportunity here, in the interim between undemocracy and democracy)
Confronting the powers that be and forcing them to do what you want (very effective from a speed perspective, can quickly lead to repression of not done deftly)
Care Taking (meeting the immediate needs of the crisis)
Social change through personal change (not in the liberal [individual choices sense], this is an acknowledgement that you should make sure that you’re working on yourself while working to change the world)
Building alternatives (this is where alternative institutions come in.
I have a special affinity for confronting power, education, caretaking, and building alternatives. These feel like the things that are, when possible, some of the best ways to ensure change occurs. This is not to say we shouldn’t do the other things. But again, we should move away from the interest in finding one massive fix to change the world, and look for how an ecosystems of changes creates that world that we want.
Once we have our If⇒ Then⇒ Because statement, we can start zooming in on our fractal. We can get into tactics. Ideally, we are constantly changing the shape of our fractal as necessary. If tactics aren’t working, we should understand why and adjust, referring to our analysis and revising. It is always worthwhile to make sure that our models are as aligned with reality as we can manage at that moment.
My appearance tonight on MSNBC ("All in With Chris Hayes") alongside Melissa Harris-Perry. In this segment we discuss the current cross-racial social justice organizing transpiring in NC as part of the "Moral Mondays" movement, and its implications for progressive politics.
