the very existence of leadership, along with organization, resources, engagement with the mainstream media, forging broad alliances, and many other necessary operations that reek of the scent of political power. Having spent years submerged within anarchist currents of the contemporary US left, I am speaking to—and from—the best intentions of the anti-authoritarian impulse. I believe, however, that such a humanistic ambivalence toward power must mature; that its adherents must learn nuance and appreciation for the details of context and terrain—if we are to develop something that can accurately be called a political force.
If we fail to build such a force, then history—if there is anyone to tell it—may well conclude that our generation did, indeed, come to the game too late. I take no solace in the prospect of history listing me among the righteous few who denounced the captain of a ship that sank. We can and we must aspire to more than this. We must conspire to take the helm. This book is an invitation to join such a conspiracy.
Overview
I want to make transparent to readers the challenge that I have had in the writing of this book, which I conceive of as two interlocking challenges: that of pedagogy and of style. In terms of style, this is a highly conceptual work that relies heavily on story, anecdote, parable, and metaphor. Throughout the book I oscillate between a plainspoken story-telling voice and a more detached theorization, which seeks to generalize, abstract, and distill lessons from experience, observation, and history. Add to this that Hegemony How-To is also something of a moral apologia for collective power, and this presented me with another stylistic element to have to weave into the work, all while attempting to minimize visible seams. Most authors, in my experience, make a choice between these stylistic options, and it is perhaps wise of them to do so. A book may be narrative-driven, and the concepts, “lessons,” or “point” remain under-developed and ambiguous, open to different readers’ interpretations. On the other end, a book may be highly theoretical, where the elaboration and specification of concepts is its purpose. The former option tends to be more readable and accessible, while the latter tends to be more dense, typically requiring of readers a prerequisite specialized vocabulary. For better or for worse, I have ambitiously attempted to merge these styles, and my reasons have to do with pedagogy. For the past several years, I have had a recurrent interaction with editors (usually of magazines), where they tell me that they themselves love my submission, but they hesitate because they think it’s too much “inside baseball” for their readership. They push me to “dumb down” the theory, and I push back to keep it in. The times when I have prevailed in the back-and-forth (to keep the heart of the theoretical argument intact, while gratefully accepting other edits), editors have been consistently pleasantly surprised by how much play these kinds of pieces get (usually measured in terms of traffic to the web page). It is my experience that there are many readers who want to know more than the specifics of the given issue; they want to gain a better understanding of the political “inside baseball” that can help to determine the outcome. This is the pedagogic project that I have been attempting with my writing and my training work in relation to the workings of collective action and social movements for the past decade. The reality is that all fields develop specialized or technical language in large part because they are dealing with more things than outsiders need to bother themselves about. It is enough for me to understand that my car has an engine; my mechanic had better have a more precise understanding of the component parts and how they interact. Unlike the field of automobile maintenance and repair, however, we as a society cannot afford to leave the workings of the political field to the specialists. Responsible citizenship requires some understanding of this field. More precise understandings often require more precise words. This is hardly a tragedy. Words are lovely and powerful things, and we should not be upset about having to learn new ones and new uses of them in order to gain a better understanding of something that concerns us. Nor should we assume that because a work engages with Gramsci or Habermas that a less formally educated reader (who is interested in the subject matter) will inevitably “get lost.” I myself nearly flunked out of high school and did not attend college until my mid-30s, and I hope this experience helps me to stay oriented both to making my language accessible and to not underestimating the intelligence of readers (e.g., readers who are, like myself, from working class backgrounds and interested in the subject matter). So, this is my pedagogic and stylistic challenge: I believe that a somewhat specialized theoretical vocabulary can help us to understand the “field” of social movements and political struggle, but I am committed to introducing and explaining terms; to building the theoretical apparatus from “the ground floor up.”
As for the progression of the book, this opening chapter partly serves to introduce myself to you the reader, and to situate myself and my work in relation to the concepts and frameworks that follow. While my own stories appear throughout the work, this chapter contains much more memoir than the rest of the book—which also includes anecdotes from other organizers, collected through interviews.
In chapter two I discuss the importance and the symbolic structure of Occupy Wall Street’s dramatic intervention, as well as its shortcomings and internal problems. This discussion sets up chapter three, where I focus on the interior and the social and psychological micro-dynamics of political groups and social movements. I examine what I call the life of the group, a term that includes a group’s internal workings, but especially speaks to its culture and motivational structure. I explore how the logic of the life of the group operates in tension with the logic of political instrumentality (i.e., the group’s potential accomplishments beyond its own existence), and the creeping tendency of self-referential formulas and fetishes to stand in for strategic action. I discuss the story of the righteous few, wherein some individuals and groups become invested in their own marginality vis-à-vis society, and how this story has gotten mixed up with the story of what it means to be “radical.” I then discuss a political identity paradox that challenger groups have to navigate: on the one hand, they have to cultivate a strong identity in order to mobilize in the first place; on the other hand, they have to be on guard against how strong identity can also create walls between them and potential allies—too much cohesion can lead them down a dead-end path of insularity.
In chapters four and five I dig into the deep ambivalence toward power that thrives in many pockets of the social justice left in the United States (and elsewhere) today. I look at contemporary movements through a lens of an ethic of responsibility versus an ethic of ultimate ends, as elaborated by sociologist Max Weber. While acknowledging the abundant good reasons for critiquing power, I discuss how the wholesale rejection of engagement in the terrain of political power is especially concentrated in advanced capitalist nations and correlates with relative economic privilege—and how it is, ironically, a product of neoliberalism. I discuss at length how these dynamics played out over the course of Occupy Wall Street’s brief run, where the dominant tendency within Occupy’s core rejected all forms of power and leadership, at least rhetorically, but another tendency struggled, with limited success, to build leadership skills and to develop clearer political goals and strategies. I make both a moral and a strategic case for why challenger movements must engage conscientiously in the terrain of power, by building and wielding a collective force. I argue that to eschew political power is to commit political suicide and to abdicate responsibility.
While chapters 1–5 deals as much with “how not to” (i.e., internal patterns that are presently holding us back) as with “how to,” in chapters 6–8 I explore the operations of a political challenger force that embraces the morality and the necessity of engaging in the terrain of power. In chapter six I explore the necessary growth trajectories of nascent political operations and social movements, discussing movements’ kinetic versus their potential force. In chapter seven, I look at how organizations, movements, and campaigns have to learn how to speak the language of the people they’re seeking to organize or mobilize. In chapter eight I examine how underdog challengers have to articulate a compelling “we” to serve as the basis of political alignment.
Throughout this book I discuss constraints and openings that are sometimes particular to the contemporary context in the United States, but that may nonetheless be of interest to readers in other parts of the world; given the current reality of American economic, political,
