existed—that it is the category they must step into in order to take collective action. Not understanding the history and structures that constructed activism, most “activists” do not question how this construction might constrain their actions and options.
When activists enter a special cultural space where activism takes place among likeminded activists, what happens is that some of the most idealistic and collectively minded young people in society remove themselves voluntarily from the institutions and social networks that they were organically positioned to influence and contest. While most activists may not fully extricate themselves from “non-activist” spheres of their lives (e.g., family, workplace, etc.), still the framework that activism occupies a special space unto itself—that it is an activity disembedded from the day-to-day lives, cultural spaces, and workplaces of most people in society—encourages activists to check their activism at the door when entering “non-activist” spheres. Alternatively, they may proudly and defiantly wear their activism on their sleeve, but more as self-expressive fashion that distinguishes them from the group—and likely inoculates others against taking them seriously—than as part of a genuine attempt at strategic political engagement.
The spheres of everyday life are certainly not easy to engage politically, let alone to organize into a political force. There are plenty of legitimate and understandable reasons why many social justice-oriented people gravitate towards spaces where we feel more understood, and why we choose the path of least resistance in other spheres of our lives. However, the slow work of contesting and transforming such messy everyday spaces is the essence of grassroots political organizing. When we do not contest the cultures, beliefs, symbols, narratives, and common sense of—and from within—the existing institutions and social networks that we are part of, we also walk away from the resources and latent power embedded within them. This is not a winning trajectory. In exchange for our own shabby little activist clubhouse, we give away the farm. We let our opponents have everything.
Should we then abandon the “activist” label? A better question would be: Is there any compelling reason to persist in using a label that inoculates so many people against us and our messages? If this word effectively functions as a cognitive roadblock that prevents most people from considering anything we do or say, while also excusing sympathizers (who don’t consider themselves “activists”) from joining us, then inertia is not a good enough reason to hold onto such a disadvantageous label.
Just abandoning the label will only get us so far, though. It is much more important that we break out of the contained cultural niche that the label has prescribed; that we also abandon a make-believe world of activism in favor of strategically engaging in the terrain of politics. Our work is not to build from scratch a special sphere that houses our socially enlightened identities (and delusions). Our work is, rather, to contribute to the politicization of presently de-politicized everyday spaces; to weave politics and collective action into the fabric of society.22
A caveat is important here. The category of activism is a product of social, political, structural, cultural, and linguistic processes. It’s not the activists’ own original invention. The critique of the category is not about hippie-punching. It is all too easy to parrot negative stereotypes about “activists” and “protesters” and to attribute blame only to the aspiring change agents for what they fail to accomplish. This principle extends beyond just the category of activism. It extends to social movements generally, in relation to their milieus. It is hardly fair to place all the blame for internal movement problems upon the movements themselves. Movements must be conceptualized in relation to the societies they spring from. If a society lacks social movements that are strong enough and strategic enough to function as drivers of meaningful political change, then culpability and responsibility for that lack is shared to some extent across the society. How absurd would it be to only scrutinize those who are visibly attempting remedial collective action when so much of the problem often has to do with those groups and members of society who make no such attempt, or who get in the way? Challenger movements are not conjured out of thin air. They emerge organically within larger social realms, in relation to and in tension with status quo structures, cultures, norms, and policies. Changes and developments in the larger social realm shape the character and content of emerging challenger movements. The same is true for the constraints that movements face, including constraints internal to movements’ cultures. Social movements are not fully autonomous subjective actors, neatly separable from the status quo they challenge. If a certain strategic error or pitfall is found to be recurring within challenger movements of a particular era, then we may be able to reasonably theorize a relationship between the common error and larger sociological patterns. To understand social movements’ internal challenges, we also have to study the broader social, economic, and political context in which they are situated.
On the other hand, because progressive social movements occupy such a unique symbolic place in the larger public imagination, and because they have played such an indispensable role in effecting historic progressive changes, it behooves us to focus a significant portion of our attention on their internal dynamics, in order to make the movements of our time as effective as possible, both as catalyzing symbols and as instruments of change. This is why I dedicate so much effort in this book to examining the interior of political challenger movements. It is not about blame. It is not about posturing. It is certainly not about making them more pure. The purpose of such an examination is to gain clearer understandings of our constraints, external and internal, structural, cultural, and even psychological, so that we might better navigate them.
Ultimately, it’s about taking responsibility for our future. Frederick Douglass famously said that “power concedes nothing without a demand.”23 We can righteously shout slogans at the halls of power until we’re blue in the face, but in the long run we have to take responsibility for constructing the collective power needed to make our demands potent. Social movements in the United States today do not have anywhere close to the capacity needed to mount sustained challenges to the entrenched power structures that we are up against, at least when it comes to issues for which change would threaten capital and the increasingly plutocratic order (e.g., progressive taxation, public education, universal public health care, cutting military spending, public elections, corporate personhood, financial regulation, or combating climate change). Given our weak state of popular organization over the past few decades, the emergence of Occupy Wall Street was a beacon of hope for many in the United States, as it provided a powerful, popular counter-hegemonic narrative that aligned overnight a hitherto fragmented left and created a political opening to connect to far more popular audiences and broader social bases than we had had access to in decades. However, as we have seen, momentarily seizing the national narrative did not send bankers and Wall Street executives packing. A much more massive movement is needed if we are to actually challenge the formidable power of capital. Fortunately for us, we know from history that such challenges are possible. Tremendously difficult, but not unprecedented. Possible, when enough segments of society can be mobilized as bases of power.
So how do we build such a movement? Digging into this question is the central purpose of this book. Hegemony How-To is an invitation to imagine a reality in which values of social justice do not need to be defensively guarded by a righteous few—because these values have been woven into the fabric of society itself. This book is an invitation to strategize together about how to make it so. I should qualify the word “roadmap” in the subtitle though: Even if someone managed to draw up the perfect “roadmap” or to write the perfect field manual for social movements, it would be outdated as soon as any politically active person read it—because changes in the strategic knowledge within a terrain will alter the terrain itself. There is no universal manual for such complex social problems. There is no silver bullet solution, no perfect formula, no tactic that works the same exact way twice, and no universal tool suitable for every particular problem. Does this mean that there is no useful knowledge that might help to prepare us for more effective engagement in political struggle? Of course not. We just need to be careful to always recognize our strategic knowledge as limited and as valid only insofar as its utility is empirically demonstrated on the ground, in real-life contexts. Useful knowledge of strategy, technique, and terrain does exist—and, to be clear, this book is
