How can activists change the world? Experts offer seven strategies
In their new book, Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the World, Deepak Bhargava and Stephanie Luce offer what they say are “winning strategies, history and theory for a new generation of activists”.
Bhargava and Luce – professors at the City University of New York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies – emphasize that strategies can be taught to build successful movements. In their book, they detail seven tactics that have been successfully used to change the world: base-building, disruptive movements, narrative shift, electoral changes, inside-outside campaigns, momentum, and collective care.
Steven Greenhouse, a longtime labor reporter and senior fellow at the Century Foundation, conducted this Q&A. It has been edited for length and clarity.
Steven Greenhouse: Why did you write this book?
Deepak Bhargava: I was motivated by a sense of frustration about the state of strategy and strategic thinking among progressive movements. To win big changes on the major issues of the day, we’re going to need to up our game substantially. I wanted to explain: where oppressed groups managed to achieve big gains despite incredible asymmetries in resources, how did they manage to do that?
Greenhouse: Your book seems to be saying that the progressive movement is underperforming, perhaps even failing. How so?
Bhargava: There are examples of breakthrough success in progressive movements that we need to understand better. The book features some of the successes we found the most inspiring, like the movement to abolish slavery and contemporary examples like the Fight for $15 or the campaign to divest from fossil fuels.
The default position in progressive movements is often to organize toward tactics, like noisy protests, that may or may not have any impact on decisionmakers. Sometimes we just keep doing the same thing over and over, and that’s frustrating. We have to hold ourselves to a higher standard.
Greenhouse: Why is base-building the first strategy you focus on in your book?
Stephanie Luce: Base-building is the fundamental power that underdogs have. It’s based on the power of numbers, the power to come together, whether in the form of a labor union, community organization or tenant’s rights organization. That’s a bit of the foundation for any of the other strategies. To pull off a successful strike, you need to have built a solid organization among your coworkers.
Greenhouse: Narrative shift another strategy you focus on. Why is that important and what are some examples of how narrative shift has succeeded?Luce: Sometimes narrative strategy is taken to mean just writing a good slogan or press release. We came to see it as something much deeper, as organizing in a way that listens to people, understands their history and identity and helps people shape the common sense of what’s going on – understanding that there are problems
in the world that you’re struggling with, eg the economy’s bad, but what is the root cause of that? What are the villains we’re fighting against? The narrative shift approach is about making meaning of larger trends in society.
As for examples, we talk about Occupy Wall Street and the marriage equality movement. A lot of people think of Occupy Wall Street as a protest, but its largest impact was changing the narrative, changing the understanding of what was the cause of the 2008 economic crisis and what are some ways out of that crisis, so that we’re not just blaming low-income homeowners. Occupy developed a narrative about the 1% and 99%, and that helped reshape the notion of who is the agent of change.
Greenhouse: A huge problem progressives face is that the other side has so much money, corporate money, Koch network money. How can the group that you call underdogs overcome that?
Bhargava: When underdogs win, they do so by using multiple sources of power. The most important of those is people power, what we call solidarity power. There are more underdogs than overdogs in almost any situation, but it’s also crucial for underdogs to disrupt. By that we mean not just to protest, although protests can be very important, but to sometimes stop the functioning of an unjust system. This is what workers do when they go out on strike. It’s what the Freedom Riders did when they disrupted segregated interstate travel. It involves everyday people taking big risks. Without that, it’s often very difficult to get major social change.
Greenhouse: Another strategy you discuss is the momentum model. How does that differ from base-building?
Bhargava: Momentum is both ancient and new. It’s new in the sense that online technologies have enabled activists to assemble large numbers of people very quickly around a flashpoint that stirs people’s emotions. Sometimes those flashpoints are unplanned, as with the murder of George Floyd. Sometimes people can stage big moments, as environmental activists did when they organized arrests at the Obama White House to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. Those moments are opportunities to gather thousands of activists together, not just for a oneoff protest, but to train them in a vision and techniques of how to launch campaigns when they go back home. The momentum model combines scale with depth and trying to move agendas at the local level.
Greenhouse: The United Auto Workers recently pulled off one of the most successful strikes in decades. Did they use any of your seven strategies?
Luce: They certainly used disruptive power. They used the power to shut down the auto companies and make them suffer and lose a lot of money. That disruptive power also rested on solidarity power because they had to make sure they had cohesion within the union. People ready to strike have each other’s backs.
Now that they’re moving from the strike to an ambitious organizing drive, they’ll be using both the base-building approach and the momentum approach in trying to organize auto plants over the coming months.
Greenhouse: One of the biggest challenges facing labor right now is that more than a year after workers at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader Joe’s, REI, Chipotle and Apple first unionized, none of them have first contracts. What do you recommend doing about this? Luce: This is an example where we need a major disruption of corporate power. The deck is stacked against these workers. They don’t have the same kind of economic power and disruptive power the autoworkers have. They don’t have the ability to strike in strategic ways that shut the companies down so drastically. So they’re going to have to rely on other forms of alliances, other partners that can aggregate power and disrupt economic power. That could be broader circles of unions and workers and non-union workers coming together. It might be community partners.
Greenhouse: Our nation will hold unusually important elections in November 2024. You talk about electoral change as a strategy. What strategies do you recommend for the 2024 elections?
Bhargava: Electoral strategies that are only about candidates are not likely to succeed. There is cynicism about politics because it hasn’t consistently delivered material improvement in people’s lives. Engaging in elections requires a long-term organizing approach. Our book features examples where electoral strategies are driven by community groups and unions that aren’t just inviting people to vote, but are inviting people to be part of organizations to work on the issues they care most about. That community-centered approach is going to be even more important in 2024 when many communities are afflicted by despair or a deep distrust of establishment political parties. That model will become central if we’re to get the kind of turnout, particularly from young people and communities of color, that we all hope for.Greenhouse: What do you hope to achieve with this book, beyond selling thousands of copies?
Bhargava: We argue that great strategists are made, not born. We think the times are right for a broad scale investment in thousands of everyday people to be the Ella Bakers and Bayard Rustins of our own age. That kind of strategic rigor needs to be taught on a mass scale. The challenges we face are so large and daunting that without many thousands of people capable of understanding the power relationships in our society and what the leverage points are, we aren’t going to win. A big hope of this book is that it contributes to democratizing great strategy, that it makes strategy accessible to many more people in the years to come.
Base-building is the fundamental power that underdogs have. It’s based on the power of numbers
soapy massages and sexual services – in
Tokyo and other parts of the country, sometimes spending weeks away from home.
And she is still with the host to whom she owes money. “It’s not even a relationship,” said Yuko. “It’s a form of abuse. My daughter will never be able to repay her debts. I wonder if she will ever come home. But it’s not just her. So many women have been deceived.”
national law? Just the ideals, the principles? In that case, why call it “law” at all, why not call it “international wouldn’t it be nice”? I know I must sound cynical. But right now I find it hard not to be.
IH: It’s true, international law is meaningless if there is no political will to enforce it. And the discourse of human rights has always failed peoples of the global south: it was produced almost entirely by Europeans, did not address coloniality, and it took the nation state as the framework without accounting for indigenous peoples and their rights, for example.
Also, the Declaration of Human Rights was written and ratified in 1948, the same year as the Nakba [“the catastrophe”] and the founding of Israel. This is sort of a weird fact. That same year 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their homes, and meanwhile the UN was signing this abstract document about universal principles. Then Israel was admitted into the UN on condition that it implement resolutions 181, on internationalising Jerusalem, and 194, which “resolve[s] that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return”. Obviously, Israel did not do any of this. So from the very beginning, the “universality” of this declaration was questionable and the people who immediately fell out of its purview were the Palestinians.
Even if the origin of the discourse itself is flawed, though, should not protecting human rights still be some kind of baseline? I know the discourse comes out of the UN, which came out of the League of Nations, which came out of European imperial power, and the whole system needs an overhaul, but is it not at least one implement, one framework that is broadly legible across different countries, that might, if actually applied, be used to restrain an otherwise pretty horrible “might is right” attitude of post-imperial or neo-imperial nation states hungry for power? Do you think this is outweighed by the way that human rights discourse ends up functioning like a fig leaf for the crimes of the powerful?
Speech in support of Palestinian rights in the west has been repressed for a long time, but it’s true that the repression is happening more in the open now, and it is happening at scale. I do think the backlash is a sign of fear: repressing speech is an indication that speech is powerful. And perhaps it happens more at moments when speech is seen as particularly powerful (which would explain the change you experienced).
Whether we should be optimistic, though, I don’t know. It’s good to feel encouraged, so long as that doesn’t lead to complacency. Solidarity with Palestinians may be waking up in what you call the “imperial core” (which is also what I think people are often referring to when they talk about “the international community” –especially the US, the UK, France and Germany), but at what cost? The numbers killed, maimed, people without any family, small children without parents… the mass graves. At the moment international solidarity has not even produced the bare minimum: a ceasefire. The bombs are still falling. My heart breaks every day. It’s unbearable.
SR: On a few occasions recently, when I’ve been feeling almost inured to the imagery of violence, some particular report or photograph or video has suddenly left me speechless, lost, unable even to think. I had one of these moments yesterday, seeing footage online of a mass grave. The footage showed a rough trench in which dozens or maybe hundreds of bodies had been laid, bound in blue cloth, and a mechanical digger was shovelling earth into the trench. I’ve since read that these bodies had been brought from al-Shifa hospital, which is now under Israeli occupation, to Khan Yunis, to be buried.
How is it possible to describe such a scene? As if it’s happening in a film or a novel; as if I’m trying to tell you about something I’ve seen in an episode of a television show. But this is our world, the world in which soil is shovelled over the unmarked bodies of the dead.
I’m at a loss to understand this. Nothing can make sense of it. Everything in me rebels against what I’m witnessing. And I think of everything I’ve written to you until now, about geopolitics, about public opinion in the west, and I think: how pointless! Some celebrity said something on Instagram, and I’m asking you whether this is cause for optimism, really? When every time I pick up my phone I’m seeing footage of destroyed neighbourhoods, grieving mothers, mass graves. It makes everything I have to say feel absurd and disgusting. In these moments I lose faith in language, in conversation, dialogue, everything. The only word that means anything to me at such a moment is the word: No. And all I want to do is repeat it to myself again and again, seeing these images of devastation and suffering. No, no, no.
What term can describe the mass killing and starvation and psychological torture that is being inflicted on the Palestinian people, if not, as you say, genocide? And to talk about that, we need to start with a shared language, shared definitions. Of course you’re right to point out that this is something international law offers us, despite its flaws. I recently read a piece by the Palestinian legal scholar Rabea Eghbariah, in which he wrote: “We do not have the privilege to relinquish any legal tools available to name the crimes against the Palestinian people in the present and attempt to stop them.” However frustrated and cynical I might feel about international law, I can’t forget that the work being done in this area by historians and legal scholars like Eghbariah, like the Israeli historian Raz Segal, is more important than ever right now.
I’m also thinking of the American civil rights activist Mario Savio, who was speaking about racial segregation when he said in 1964: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus – and you’ve got to make it stop!” It puts me in mind of the anti-war activists right now who are shutting down the factories of weapons suppliers, who are blocking military vessels, who are putting their bodies on the gears and the wheels of this machine. How vital and courageous that kind of work is too.
IH: Thank you for the honesty of your last message. I don’t know how we are going to survive this. I think we will never be the same.
After the first three weeks I decided I really needed to get a grip. I’d missed my flight from the US, I somehow got the day wrong, I wasn’t eating meals and my tongue swelled so much it had the indents of my teeth on either side, I couldn’t hold a conversation and I forgot names and places, and then last week I was, for some weird reason, finally operating fairly normally – yes, in a daze and with a brick on my chest but I was even doing work, I was going on marches and undertaking a normal level of political activity until, I think it was the day I wrote my first response to you, maybe it was because writing that demanded that I think a tad more deeply again, maybe it was because someone had just texted me that a colleague had lost his parents and his older sister and all her children in the bombing but I just lost my shit, as they say. It was like the lid of the box flew off. I don’t know if I’ve ever had a meltdown like that before.
I am also, I want to say, filled daily with an enormous amount of shame. I know that I do try, and that I’m limited like anyone, and at the same time, Sally, I feel so ashamed of myself that I am to all ostensible purposes fine and people in Gaza are being massacred.
I said in my first message that at first I’d thought talking and writing seemed pointless, as you say, and they may continue to feel incredibly difficult, but talking and thinking as clearly as we can, even as we understandably do not feel cool-headed, is so important, it is our responsibility, when the politicians are telling the public that this is too complicated to understand. They are lying. Just as they are lying when they say that what they are carrying out is moral or proportionate.
Unfortunately, what people write or post on Instagram does actually matter. The war on Palestinians has always been a war of language, a war of propaganda and PR. It is a project that has relied on western military support since its inception. Without the consent of western publics and without that military support (to date, $172bn in US largely military aid and missile defence funding; Israel is the largest international recipient of US aid bar none), Israeli apartheid would not survive. So these do matter. Language is not small, even though, in our hearts, of course, what actually matters most is this terrible brutal waste of human life.
I’m happy you brought up Rabea’s piece. The most important thing he writes about there, for me, is the framework of the Nakba. All massacres are unique, and it’s high time the ongoing catastrophe suffered by the Palestinians was described internationally using the terms used by Palestinians. Colonised people still have agency, even if the structural decks are stacked against them. There’s a wealth of analytical, strategic and philosophical thought and practice among Palestinians that should be engaged with. And the Nakba is a place to start.
There is a real solidarity with Palestinians among the people of Ireland