“Collective “weapons of the weak” are elements of what Charles Tilly and others have called “contentious politics.” Contentious politics disrupt liberal capitalist society via a range of direct actions including but not limited to demonstrations, strikes, occupations and mass civil disobedience.101 Even to conceive of the organization of the unemployed, leftists had to look beyond the apathy and perceived reactionary dispositions of precarious labour and assert that the relative deprivation, misery, weapons of the weak and the indignation of the unemployed could be important ingredients in the making of a socialist consciousness.102 The unemployed themselves had to develop a counterhegemonic understanding that capitalism and the liberal state, not the individual, were responsible for unemployment and involuntary hardship. But even if these two conditions were met, unemployment organizations “do not simply spring from the dissatisfaction with unemployment; they have to be built.”103 The tools to build such a movement are by no means self-evident and have evolved over more than century and a half of contestation.
Scholars have suggested that effective counter-hegemonic groups face “three analytically distinct tasks.”
The first involves the construction of an identity, community, or culture of resistance.
The second internal requirement is an ideology, campaign or “cognitive frame(s),” historically socialist, that articulate the needs and exploitation of the unemployed while “prefigur[ing] alternative ways of life” and creating opportunities for the unemployed to think and act otherwise.
The last ingredient to give rise to anti-poverty movements is instrumentality, or repertoires of action, which serve to mobilize the unemployed around particular actions with concrete demands which participants are convinced that they might win.104
These evolving repertoires, Piven explains, “are forged in a political process of action and reaction.”105
Much scholarly ink has been spilled since the 1960s on how the unemployed lack the tangible resources to mount effective protests and have had to rely on “third parties.” I follow Piven, Cloward, Paul Bagguley and others who, while not discounting the importance of certain resources, critique such Resource Mobilization scholarship for its “materialist instrumentalism.”106 Whatever the actual or potential contributions of leaders drawn from outside movements of the unemployed, they pale in significance beside the motive-force of indignation and the possibilities of disruption. As Piven and Cloward insisted, in order for poor people’s movements to be successful, “strategies must be pursued that escalate the momentum and impact of disruptive protest at each stage in its emergence and evolution.”107 They argue that the marginalized’s power is derived less from organization or resources, than upon leveraging “the patterns of interdependence that characterize all of social life.”108
Lower strata populations through the “withdrawal of contributions to social cooperation” exercise such interdependent power.” The unemployed disrupt the interdependence upon which liberal capitalism relies when they fail “to comply with the norms of civil life.”109
- David Thompson, “Working-Class Anguish and Revolutionary Indignation: The Making of Radical and Socialist Unemployment Movements in Canada, 1875-1928.” PhD Thesis, Queen’s University, 2014. pp. 30-32.
104 These elements are “additive” and “can compensate for one another” and work in concert with exogenous structural factors of liberal capitalism. The actual designations of identity, ideology and instrumentality are drawn from Bert Klandermans, “Mobilizing the Unemployed; the Social Psychology of Movement Participation,” in Unemployment and Protest, 44, 53-55. Similar designations are found in William Carroll and R.S. Ratner, “Sustaining Oppositional Cultures in ‘Post-Socialist’ Times: A Comparative Study of Three Social Movement Organisations,” Sociology 35:3 (August 2001), 605; Charles Tilly, Social Movements, 1768-2004 (Colorado: Paradigm Publishers, 2004), 53; Bagguley, From Protest to Acquiescence?, 37-70; Perry and Reiss, “Beyond Marienthal,” 3-38.
105 Frances Fox Piven, Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2006), 32.
106 Bagguley, From Protest to Acquiescence?, 46; Sanford F. Schram, “The Praxis of Poor People’s Movements,” Perspectives on Politics 1:4 (December 2003), 716. Piven and Cloward are sympathetic to resource mobilization theory (RMT) and its desire to prove social movements are neither mindless nor incoherent. But, they claim, RMT is too quick to dismiss the theory of relative deprivation and the persistence of collective protests that rely upon minimal organization. A politics of dissensus, not organization or resources, best explains the potential power of the poor. See Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, “Collective Protest: A Critique of Resource Mobilization Theory,” International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society 4:4 (1991), 435-458.
107 Piven and Cloward, Poor People’s Movements, 37.
108 Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, “Disruption and Organization: A Rejoinder,” Theory and Society 13:3 (July 1984), 588
109 Piven, Challenging Authority, 20. Frances Fox Piven, “Can Power from below Change the World?,” American Sociological Review 73:1 (2008), 5.
