constantly shifting under our feet, and with it the utility of any given technique or tactic, the most important thing becomes our ability to “think on our feet.” More than specific techniques, my focus is on conceptual structures that can help to clarify our thinking and action.
Right does not equal might
Today we face mounting social and economic problems, and a formidable ecological crisis to boot. These crises have common roots, and they also compound one another. The ecological crisis is already disproportionately damning the poor. And as class stratification increases, the potency of racism is renewed in important ways: e.g., the policing of poor and working class communities of color becomes a deadly line of scrimmage in a deepening but misrecognized class conflict. Add to the mix the alarmingly fast rise of right-wing authoritarian movements and political parties over the past five years, and it should be clear that we are seeing serious signs of trouble all around us. How do we begin to approach these daunting predicaments?
Analysts, pundits, and academics who approach facets of these problems often work with an unstated assumption that solutions will come from more accurate understanding. Global warming, for example, is often treated as more of a problem of information, facts, and beliefs, than of power and economics. In a way, this is a problem of “Enlightenment thinking”—the assumption that we live in a rational society whose “marketplace of ideas” will enable the best ideas to prevail by way of persuasion through rational and, one assumes, symmetrical debate. This belief is rarely acknowledged explicitly, as it stands so feebly against conscious scrutiny, but it functions nonetheless as a detrimental unexamined idea. With the problem framed as a lack of good ideas, the solution that arises intuitively is to focus our efforts on coming up with and educating people about better ideas—as if it were only ignorance, and not a profound power imbalance, that constrains us. Adding to and incentivizing this implicit naiveté is the academic orientation of so many intellectuals, which, in the words of Pierre Bourdieu, causes them to “uncritically attribute political efficacy to textual critique.”24 When asked for prescriptions that pertain to political terrain—e.g., the audience member’s question, “What can I do about the problem?”—they cannot help themselves from offering, authoritatively, an answer that, more often than not, is well beyond the scope of their competence. They thereby extend the authority they have derived from their advanced knowledge of a particular issue into an entirely different realm—one that has little to nothing to do with their area of expertise: namely, political terrain. In other words, there is no reason to assume that an individual who possesses pertinent insights that could inform sound policy also has a clue about how to navigate the realm of policymaking itself (or the realm of building and wielding a collective force with enough power to intervene in policymaking and politics).
It is of course critical that scientists and scholars study and understand the details of complex problems like global warming. However, this expertise gets us nowhere if we fail to see that our central problem is one of power and will. Truth, unfortunately, is not its own arbiter. Here we have to invert the maxim that Might does not equal right. For our purposes it matters just as much that Right does not equal might. Of course it is important to continue refining our scientific understanding of global warming, but the pressing task at hand is to build a new alignment of power that can counter the entrenched power of the fossil fuel industries. In the case of economic inequality, we could certainly use a few more left-leaning economists, but, much more so, we need to construct a broad-based political alignment that has capacity to throw down in a protracted struggle.
Here we are making explicit a conceptual distinction that is as basic as it is elusive: that knowledge of what is wrong with a social system and knowledge of how to change the system are two completely different categories of knowledge. For shorthand, we might refer to these two types as knowledge of grievances (i.e., what’s wrong) and knowledge of political strategy (i.e., how to make change by political means). Too many critics fail to grasp that having the former does not automatically confer them with the latter.
The book that you hold in your hands is my attempt to give attention to knowledge of political strategy and the terrain of power, because I believe that such knowledge is immensely powerful. It creates the possibility that people who today hold very little power might tomorrow, with a lot of labor and a little luck, cohere into a force strong enough to threaten and reshape the established order. For elites to maintain possession of a vastly disproportionate share of wealth, power, and privilege, they must also hoard this knowledge of political strategy and the terrain of power. Functionally, such hoarding has much more to do with asymmetries between different social classes’ dispositions and educational access than calculated conspiracy.25 Power tends to appear magical to those who have less of it, and mechanical to those who are accustomed to wielding it instrumentally. This is why elites are sometimes incredulous—even morally indignant!—when challengers break “the taboo of making things explicit”26 by pulling back the curtain and sharing this knowledge with people who just might use it to effectively upset the order. From Machiavelli to Gramsci to Alinsky, this “pulling back the curtain” has never been merely a matter of exposing the crooked plots of the powerful—as if exposure ever accomplished anything on its own. Revelations of misdeeds of the powerful induce only popular resignation if there is no viable counter-power to seize the opening. The threat comes when, at a politically ripe moment, the terrain of power itself is revealed—when knowledge concerning how to contend effectively is made accessible to “the wrong people” at “the wrong time.”27
My hope for this book is that it might make even a very small contribution to this long-haul project of revelation. My focus throughout this work is on facets of the knowledge of political strategy and terrain, within the particular historical context in which I find myself. While I have no shortage of political opinions, this is not a book about issues and opinions per se. This is a book about how to join with others to act effectively upon your political opinions. Of course, I am not shy about sharing my own political positions. The stories and anecdotes woven into the pages that follow are of organizers, groups, and movements that are working to advance particular goals and political agendas with which I am politically aligned—whether to halt foreclosures, change immigration policy, end wars, oppose racist policing, fund education, or win a living wage. Yet, this is not a book that does much to elaborate those particular issues. The particulars of different issues and social systems become relevant for the purposes of this book insofar as these particulars show up on the terrain of power as constraints or opportunities. Capitalism, for example, is relevant here inasmuch as concentrations of wealth can stack the deck against political challengers by rigging the political system and by out-resourcing them in the fight. Racism, ethnocentrism, xenophobia, patriarchy, homophobia, and other social systems of privileges and exclusion are relevant here inasmuch as they hinder the solidarity that social justice movements need to cultivate in order to mobilize. I have strong opinions on all of these issues, and I make no effort to mask them, but the purpose of this book is not to comprehensively explicate any issue or social system of oppression. I am glad that there are many fine authors who engage in the hard work of researching for and writing such books. However, this work in your hands is not such a book. It is not intended for explaining why to care about any particular issue or why to hold any particular political opinion. This book is for people who already have a pretty good idea about why, to explore how and what holds us back.
As such, Hegemony How-To is also intended as an apologia for leadership, organization, and collective power, a moral argument for its cultivation, and a strategic discussion of dilemmas that challenger movements must navigate in order to succeed. I believe that such an apologia is profoundly necessary today. This work is situated a few years into a “moment” of global uprising, in which an anarchistic self-expressive “prefigurative politics” has emerged, initially at least, as predominant (dare I say hegemonic within many of the movements). The historical actor of Occupy Wall Street—within which this author was a core participant—performed an impressive intervention that shifted the common sense in the United States in a class-conscious direction. But Occupy was also a high-momentum mess that ultimately proved incapable of mobilizing beyond a low plateau of usual suspects. We were not merely lacking in our ability to lead the promising social justice alignment that
