“Direct action gets the goods”

The person who wrote this definitely could have meant “social power gets the goods”. But they just as easily could have thought that the use of direct action, the tactic itself, is the essense of what makes an action effective. Those who think that direct action is what brings about victories are often confused, annoyed, or frustrated when it fails to do so. It is important to move beyond simplistic slogans like this, and especially dogma around everything from direct action and voting, to issues of state power and reform struggles. Without breaking through these simplistic concepts, we will be ill-equipped to maximize our chances of success and effectively analyze our failures and setbacks.

Most good organizers who use direct action as a tactic would agree that greater numbers and higher consciousness among participants will increase the likelihood of success. But unless a correct understanding of the nature of power is central to their “conceptual toolbox”, they are less likely to convey the correct lessons to those they lead, or are more likely to convey them in a language which is misinterpreted by newer members. If the central slogan they use is “direct action gets the goods”, and they have an implicit understanding that direct action works best with large numbers and with a high level of political unity, then they can be effective leaders. Unfortunately, their use of the term often gives newer members with an incoherent and/or poorly synthesized perspective on organizing, power, and action. Effective organizers would do well to say precisely what they mean: organizing that builds evermore social power is what “gets the goods”, and direct action is often an extremely useful tactic in the context of an well-planned strategy. We should not elevate tactics to the level of strategy nor should we misattribute causal attributes (i.e. incorrectly attributing to the success of a campaign to direct action, compared to correctly attributing the success of a campaign to the organized social power of progressives who used direct action as part of an effective and well-planned strategy).

As more youth organizers correctly grasp the nature of power and strategy, our movement will flurish in ways previously unseen.

Suppose what one cared about most was reforms. Suppose even that one called one’s self a reformist, embracing the term much the way someone who seeks total human emancipation from this rotten system might call themselves a revolutionary. Suppose that the main goal of all of our struggles were to win reforms, to make life more tolerable, to save just a few lives, if saving all were not possible. If that were one’s vision, one’s program, and one’s aim. What would be one’s most effective strategy.

Ironically, the failure of social democracy rests in an inherent flaw in its ideological outlook. To win the type of reforms that would matter: real universal healthcare, an end to war (Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine; a withdrawal of military bases), universal higher education, etc… one must be a revolutionary. If one is only a social democrat, then one cannot possibly pose enough of a threat to win such strong reforms. This is true for at least two major reasons…

1. Reforms are won through raising the social costs for elites so much, that continuing unjust policies would do more harm for their wealth and power than continuing them would. During the Vietnam war, when professionals and rich people turned against the war they held a press conference, as they thought they were so important of people. What was their reason for turning against the war? Was it because millions were dying and they could no longer morally support the war? Nope. Was it because the U.S. was spending billions of dollars while people suffered at home for lack of social welfare programs? Of course not. The reason given was that we were “losing the next generation”. By that they meant that our streets were in turmoil. Our campuses were being turned upside down. Our military was in revolt. Youth in American were no longer just “antiwar”: they were anti-capitalist; they were feminists; they were anti-racists; they were queer liberationists; they saw their work as in solidarity with revolutions in Vietnam, Cuba, Africa, and elsewhere. By “losing the next generation” they meant that a revolutionary movement so powerful as to threaten the entire elite power structure in of the world capitalist system was rising and gaining in roads in all areas of society. They turned against the Vietnam war because youth were REVOLUTIONARIES, not merely because they demanded reforms or social democracy.

2. People aren’t idiots. They won’t join a movement that seeks to merely reform the status quo - or at least they won’t stay in one for long. People in this country, especially members of our generation, have zero faith in politicians, corporate America, or any of the values or institutions of our nation. They are cynical and reasonably disillusioned about everything they see around them. They want a comprehensive, positive, and hopeful vision of the future. They want to know what life beyond our authoritarian world could look like. Only revolutionaries, armed with a positive vision of a world beyond capitalism, patriarchy, heterosexism, white supremacy, political authoritarianism, and ecological devastation can possibly motivate the youth of this generation to act in large enough numbers and for such an extended period of time so as to get us the long-lasting reforms that are needed. You want to motivate people? Become a revolutionary. You can win your reforms and much more too!

Social democracy has failed over and over again. Those are just a few of the many reasons to call yourself a revolutionary and win others to the movement for total human liberation. So, my question is, if you’d like the entire world, why demand just the table scraps?

I’ve been wanting to read “Winning Your Election the Wellstone Way” for a while.

From the people who wrote the book on running progressive electoral campaigns:

“We’ve put together all our campaign know-how into a practical, hands-on guide for progressive grassroots candidates and their campaigns on how to win.  This latest offering was written by Jeff Blodgett and Bill Lofy with Erik Peterson, Sujata Tejwani, Ben Goldfarb and others at Wellstone Action.”

I wrote this post a few months ago. I’m reposting it. Seriously though. If you want to win a new world, read The Art of War by Sun Tzu. And study strategy. Study your opponent. Study the art of winning.

“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The Art of War, written in the 6th century BC by Sun Tzu (Master Sun), is a 13 chapter Chinese treatise on military warfare and strategy. When read metaphorically, its a brilliant addition to those studying political strategy, and especially for those seeking fundamental social transformation.

Steve Bucknum posted an article called “George Lakoff vs. Sun Tzu” two years ago on BlueOregon where he recommended the ancient text to those interested in building progressive political power. Referring to text in the context of Oregon he said:

“Study of the ‘Nine Terrains’ (a chapter in the ‘Art of War’) is a good metaphor for having political strength in one part of the State, but not others — and how to maximize our strength and minimize the power of the other side. (If we attack their homelands, and cause them to defend their base, then they will not have enough strength left to attack our base. — Makes you want to spend more time/effort/money in Eastern Oregon!) There is a lot of good advice for strategy in these works — ‘When you are committed to employing your forces, feign inactivity. When your objective is nearby, make it appear as if distant; when far away, create the illusion of being nearby.’ These works have stood the test of thousands of years, in fact that some of it has risen to the level of ‘common sense’ in that we have heard parts before.”

Its a short book too, depending on the version & translation you get, the actual text is about 60-75 pages - and well worth every page. The translation I have can be bought here.

We are trying to win a new economy, a new realm of daily life and love, a new culture, a new polity, a new ecology, a new internationalism, all without hierarchies that condemn some people to subordination. We reject roles unsuited for humanity - the role of the owner, boss, manager; the role of the patriarch, misogynist, homophobe; the role of the racist, religious bigot, fundamentalist; the role of the denier, decrier, decider, dictator; the role of polluter of air, sea, and land; the role of bombardier, cultural commissar, empire expander. Gone with all of that.

We are pursuing this better world that will leave behind these horribly oppressive aspects by seeking improvements in people’s lives right now, from the washed out streets in New Orleans to the porn strewn back alleys in Chicago, from the black lunged mines in West Virginia to the dignity destroying commercialism of billboards and TV, from rural poverty to urban blight, from self-imposed diets seeking false beauty to society-imposed diets imposing criminal starvation, from the flesh houses of Los Angeles and its glam and glitter to the cardboard homes under bridges in Philadelphia, from the miles of AA meetings to the miles of local bars, from the capacity crushing horrors imposed on eighty percent of our school’s students to the elite Ivy farms spewing out scholars who lack sense and humanity, from the modern slave houses called prisons to the court houses that function like auction houses, from elections that are bought and sold by rich corporate executives investing in their preferred paths of domination to acres and acres of misguided commodity production remorselessly destroying our weather and water, from the endless skyways of half empty hotels to the endless alley ways of homeless children, mothers, and fathers.

We seek more income for the poor, more power for the weak, more status for the forlorn, more social ties for the lonely, more responsibility for all our crying souls. We seek equitable material well being, self managing influence, and mutual fulfillment of all kinds. We seek, as well, to ensure that our demands today not only partly redress the suffering caused by the world we now inhabit but also move us toward a better future in which worldly and spiritual benefits of society reach a high level and then persist due to the intrinsic logic of our new institutions rather than only when we win against harsh opposition.

And why we are doing all this? We are doing it tirelessly, steadfastly, and vigorously, for the memory of revolutionaries and visionaries and humanists from history past, for people all around us now, and for history’s and humanity’s future.

We are trying to win a new economy in which there are no classes. No one in the better world we seek will own workplaces, resources, or other people’s ability to do work. There will be no owners of Walmarts or Microsofts. There will be no private profits. There will be no wage slaves, working under the dictates of others. Further, no one will monopolize empowering conditions at work, as doctors, lawyers, engineers, and managers so typically do now, and on that account rule over those left only menial and obedient tasks. No one will earn inequitably whether from property, power, or output. No one will have more say over decisions than the fair share that we all are entitled to in accord with how much we are affected. There will be no top and no bottom of who decides what for whom. There will be no order giver and no order taker about production, allocation, or consumption. There will be no class responsible for decisions while another class is suppressed and responsible only to obey. We will all be elevated to use our fullest capacities and express our fullest desires, rather than most of us learning only to endure boredom and to obey orders showered down on us by the anointed masters of all that occurs. Our new economy will be classless, at last. Out with the old boss - and out with any new boss, too. We will enjoy a participatory economy, operating as one part of a participatory society.

But our project is not just about economics - we are not economistic. We realize that life is not working and consuming alone. For example, we are trying to win a new polity too, that will incorporate the will of all citizens in legislation, that will adjudicate disputes to produce justice, that will respond to violations to attain rehabilitation and liberation rather than vengeance and retribution. Our new polity will have citizens of diverse age, belief, experience, and knowledge, but will not have rulers and ruled. We are not merely seeking new Presidents and Senators because we understand that our political problem is government by a few - not simply the oddities of any particular few who happen to be prowling around the White House and Senate at any particular moment. We won’t have political choices mediated by dollar bills but by the will of informed citizens, each with equal rights and comparable means. We will have in our new society’s new polity, participatory democracy and self management. We won’t have information conveyed by agents of corporate power. We will have education, communication, and popular participation that together prepare all citizens to be full participants in social life and decision making. We will build and responsibly contribute to assemblies that express our informed desires for legislation allowing us to self manage our political and social life. We will build media that conveys expert information so we can function wisely. We will adopt decision methods that apportion influence over outcomes to those affected in proportion as they are affected so that we collectively self manage our conditions and projects. We might well call all this participatory politics, one more part of our new participatory society.

Beyond economy and polity, however, we are trying as well to win a new realm of sexuality, nurturance, socialization, and daily life. Do the roots of sexism reside in nuclear marriage as we know it? Do they stem from a gender division of labor that is women mothering and men fathering rather than both parenting? Is sexism born in a disparity in who does caretaking work and who doesn’t? Are there other roots of sexism, other structures that continually toss misogyny up into our lives, reproducing its contours year in and year out, and thereby subverting our potentials for sharing and caring? Whatever the roots of patriarchy are, whatever produces and reproduces sexism, it will all be transcended in a new world. Sexism will be only a memory in the new world we will win and celebrate. Will we need communal living arrangements, new modes of parenting, new ways of apportioning the labors of life, all even beyond the obvious need for fair and free access for women to all positions in society? If we do, then that’s the feminism we must and will achieve in our new participatory society. If something more or other is needed, then that too will be done. We will have participatory kinship, participatory living, in our new participatory society, nothing less is acceptable.

We are trying to win a new culture, as well, that celebrates cultural diversity while defending each community’s every participant. Our preferred new society will include social structures and relations that welcome spirituality and religious sentiment even as our new approaches escape the strictures of fundamentalism of all kinds and respect atheism as well. In our new society, we will all still celebrate, communicate, identify, and forge ways of seeing and understanding ourselves and our communities - but we will do it with mutual respect, taking pleasure not only in our own solutions but in admiring, learning from, and enjoying the rich variety of other people’s solutions too. We will choose our cultural communities freely, move among them as we choose, and refine and enrich our ties to them over the course of our lives. Racism, religious bigotry, ethnocentrism, and all kinds of self identification based on or presupposing the inferiority and subordination of others will have become a thing of the past, and our ways of constructing our communities and the institutions we adopt in our new cultural relations will have to respect, abide, and propel that outcome. New cultural institutions, that is, will guard the rights and norms of all communities, but particularly of the smaller in disputes with the larger. The name for all this might be multiculturalism or perhaps intercommunalism, another leg for our new participatory society to stand on.

We seek a greener world too, but not just sustainability. We are not content with the idea that the best we can do is to avoid suicide, which is what sustainability literally mandates. Rather, in our participatory society not only will our culture and daily life respect our natural environment, but our legislation will freely and effectively protect it and our economy will properly discern its interconnections and their value. Likewise, even beyond our own shores, we seek a community of countries that goes beyond being at peace to attain a condition of mutual benefit. We will have war no more - of course - but we will not dispense with global ties. On the contrary, we will enrich and extend global ties so that countries freely share their lessons and virtues, protect one another from harm, and exchange not according to competitive norms that ensure that trade benefits accrue mostly to whoever is richer and more powerful, but instead exchange in a way that always reduces disparities in wealth and power. In the time-honored tradition of our predecessors, we can call this internationalism, but it is ultimately just participatory societies participating in cooperative solidarity with one another.

But how do we win all this, that’s the question, isn’t it? We know we must. We know we will. But how? Of course, we only know some things about this massive question - the rest will be revealed only in the clash and jangle of struggles and constructions as we pursue the road forward. But, even now, there are some insights we can commit to, as we develop and share more.

In our future there will be participatory self management via worker and consumer councils in the economy, via people’s assemblies in the polity, and via new personal and collective arrangements in culture and in kinship as well. We can’t grow that kind of future participation using movements that are harshly hierarchical. No more of that. We can’t attain equitable remuneration, self management, classlessness, women and men in partnership, sexual liberation, political participation, wide dispersal of information, cultural intercommunalism, a wise relation to nature, and internationalism, if we use movement vehicles that incorporate the ills of the present. No more of that. We can’t have racism, sexism, or classism in our movements. No more, no more.

We will win a better world by winning sequences of improvements in people’s lives within existing society which also win our movements ever more consciousness, ever more commitment, and ever more infrastructure of struggle, until they are powerful and wise enough to win not solely modest elixirs for pain, but also the infrastructure of full freedom and liberation.

We can’t create a society of sharing souls by having fragmented, alienated movements. We can’t generate responsibility and initiative with movements that denigrate and debilitate. We can’t sustain participation with movements that are as oppressive as society at large - indeed we can’t win with these flaw in our movements since winning entails a movement of perhaps a hundred million involved participant leaders. Without movements that give their participants better lives than they would have outside, more friends, more love, more dignity, more empowerment, more knowledge, more confidence, we can’t win. So we must create such movements.

We can’t use anti democratic means to produce democratic results. We can’t use anti egalitarian norms to produce equitable distribution. We can’t use authoritarian culture and conceptions to produce participation. We can’t maintain soul wrecking values much less elitist and egocentric behaviors to produce intercommunalism.

We need to have our eyes on the real prize which is to enlarge membership, enlarge consciousness, enlarge commitment, and enlarge infrastructure, all consistent with our long term aims and not solely our short run priorities and tactics.

We do it for workers on the line, bored, tired, impoverished, and robbed of their creative days. No more Maggie’s Farm for us, instead classlessness.

We do it for women door-opened, pinched, decultured, feminized, impoverished, beaten, raped, advertised, psychologized, ball and chained. No more hustle and no more Hustler for us, instead Feminism.

We do it for Blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians…nameless, robbed of dignity and means, legally lynched, harassed, low paid, running, jailed. No more plantations in the midst of plenty for us, instead Intercommunalism.

We do it for the drunks and addicts, the worn out and the never lively, for the old and ill who should be long lived and wise, for the forgotten, the dispossessed, the lonely.

For the young, schooled and unschooled, enduring boredom, sniffing glue, stealing sex and losing love, trying to escape or trying to find a way in, whether they exist under a massive thumb or are trying to grow a massive thumb with which to hold down others.

We do it for those on welfare or off it, looking into the mall or looking out from it, employed or unemployed, alone or crowded beyond sanity, hiding their sex or flaunting it, angry, sad, or mad.

We do it for all those who feel less than they could feel, for all those who have been made less than they could be in this rich land, the United States - and -

We do it for the Colombian, Paraguayan, Guatemalan, Haitian, South African, Congolese, Liberian, Sudanese, Iraqi, Iranian, Palestinian, Pakistani, Indian, Thai, Malaysian, and Chinese exploited, robbed, starved, cheated, tortured, ambushed, kidnapped, and death-squadded.

We do it for all the world’s citizens suffering the brutality and indignity of electric shocks and murdered relatives, suffering secret or public bombs, suffering Guantanamos and Abu Ghriabs, suffering poverty and even starvation, suffering the military boot and the cultural stamp.

We do it for the empire’s citizens, proud but beleaguered, and also for the empire’s enemies, our forebears:

We do it for the strikers, the saboteurs, the feminists and anarchists, the Marxists and nationalists, for those with no ideology but liberty, and for those who had too much ideology as well.

We do it for the memory of Che and the Cuban freedom fighters - we will be “guided by great feelings of love.”

We do it for the memory of Amilcar Cabral and the liberation of Africa - we will “tell no lies and claim no easy victories.”

We do it for the memory of Rosa Luxembourg and the revolutionaries of Europe - we will move, and therein we will notice and break our chains.

We do it for the memory of Alexandra Kollantai and Russians in revolt - we will not only create direct means of popular rule, we will preserve, revere, and utilize them.

We do it for Emma Goldman and the anarchists in struggle - we will dance on our way to, on our arrival at, and in celebration of our new world.

We do it for Simone de Beauvoir and feminists everywhere - we will accept no biological, psychological, or economic fate deterring women in our future.

We do it for Ho and the Vietnamese, the Vietnamese who yesterday taught us all, and who will have their day too, around the corner, over the hill, when we win the world we all desire.

We do it for r Martin Luther King Jr. - his mountain is our mountain, his vision looking into uncharted mists will become our daily pleasure, surrounding us during each breath of our lives. We will win for Martin too.

We do it for Fannie Lou Hamer and the Civil Righters, for Dave Dellinger and the new leftists, for Fred Hampton and the Panthers, for Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers, for Lolita Lebron and the Puerto Rican nationalists, for Leonard Peltier and the fighters in AIM, and for all the fine souls who resisted and died in the past and who nonetheless live on.

We do it for the young who dodged the draft. For the young who went to war and disrupted. For the young who went and died - or lived. For the Vietnam Veterans against war, and especially for the Iraq Veterans against war.

We do it for the French in the streets of May and the Italians in Autumn, for the Mexicans in the summer, and the Czechs and Chinese, for the Nicaraugans, the El Salvadorans, the Haitians, the Bolivians, and the Venezuelans. For the ANC and landless peasants movement. For the anti globalization veterans of Seattle and Prague. For the camepasinos in Brazil and the piqueteros in Argentina, for the Zapatistas in Mexico and for movements all over Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas - for the millions who opposed the Iraq War before it began and the many millions more who oppose it now.

We do it for everyone who has fought, fights, or will fight for a better wage, a better home, more dignity, more respect, a better life, a better world than they were, are, or are going to be bequeathed.

And at the same time, necessarily:

We do it against the Rockefellers, the Waltons and Buffets, the Somozas and Pinochets, the CIAs and FBIs, and the Bushs, Clintons, and Kissengers all.

We do it against the doctors coerced by their positions to deal in dollars but not in dignity, against the landlords, the corporate lawyers, and the politicians with their eyes closed to injustice or wallowing in its waste.

We do it against the owners, administrators, bosses, rapists and racists, those on top and those who aspire only to be on top, against all the dealers of bad hands, against the stacked decks.

We do it against the social ties and unties that breed the pain and all who grow ugly by benefiting from its continuance, one step above those suffering below.

We do it against the intellectuals who keep information as it if were their little toy, who enshrine their ignorance under false halos and who hide it behind big words, who justify barbarism or technically dissect it as their interests require, never shedding a tear, never raising a fist.

We do it against the media liars, the news pimps, the career thinkers with brains the size of cornflakes, the academics - left and right - who propagate propaganda to preserve this system or some other, and yes, we do it against the academics who call themselves socialists and always do nothing, the ones who succeed but don’t stay angry, the ones who don’t really care.

And finally, we will make this new world for our parents, our friends, our children, our children’s children, and for ourselves too.

To succeed, we must all soon agree on at least the essential core aspects of what a better world can and will embody.

To succeed, we must flexibly agree on what it will require to make it so, what skills must be learned, what tasks accomplished, what obstacles overcome, and to succeed, we must act, and act, and act, and refine our awareness as we learn from our actions.

Let us not mince words. Let us not call ourselves less than we are. The name for all this is revolution.

The name for those who believe in it, who aspire to it, who devote themselves to it, is revolutionary.

Till when there will be fewer acquaintances and many more friends and lovers, we must be revolutionary, we must be revolutionary, we must be revolutionary - to win our new world.

“HOPE is a VERB with its SLEEVES ROLLED UP!” - David Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies, Oberlin College

If you’ve been following my site for any period of time, you might have started to understand what I’m trying to get at - perhaps I’ve even become too repetitive on certain subjects. If I could sum up my site into a simple “thesis”, it might be something along the lines of: if we want to change the world, we have to move lots of people in lots of little ways. The ways that we move different people are, well, different.

Ronald Reagan was a mastermind of this. Barack Obama has a similar strategy. To move “conservatives” (politically), progressives need to figure out how to move them on issues that they are progressive on. Many evangelicals, for example, care deeply about poverty and employment. We need to take to them in terms of our values and reframe the debate. Conservatives don’t own the moral high ground on religious and spiritual issues, and indeed, the evangelical voting bloc is splintering. We can regain this ground - we have righteousness on our side.

If we work hard enough, if we are strategic, if we are visionary, and if we are effective communicators, all of these efforts - both qualitative and quantitative - will eventually add up and snowball into dramatic and wide-spread institutional changes.

Lots of people and events inform my thinking on this. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called “The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.” In the book he draws upon many fields, from sociology, to psychology, to marketing, linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology, and evolutionary biology. He focused on: the message, the messengers (including people with various types of personalities), and the context of the message.

Folks ranging from George Lakoff to the smartMeme Collective have taught lots of people in the movement that we need to be effective language warriors. Language, effective communicating, framing, messaging, memes (contagious bits of information that spread virally through society via social networks), and the creation of new progressive narratives are all a vitally important part of changing the world.

And then theres history and dozens of revolutionary and radical movements who’ve waged liberatory movements and conducted liberatory experiments in human social organization - all showing the change is indeed possible and that other forms of social organization are possible.

Basically, theres a grand, yet simple and straight-forward, theory of change, and it has supporting evidence in many fields of science, ranging from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to sociology, anthropology, linguistics, and psychology. Its how human interact, grow, and transform the space around them. There are no statics in society. The category of “conservative” was as much a constructed and arbitrary one as any other political label. We just have to redefine the debate and we’ll start owning the right! And if we are effective in these tasks, and intentional about how we organize ourselves, then before we know it, we will be marching to freedom…

by Michael Albert

Toward the end of last Summer I spoke at a National Green gathering about “movement building.” My initial idea was to discuss the progressive and left community’s outreach problem. We try to reach potential allies in society and to “reel them in” to full participation. Not enough people hear us. Our outreach problem involves our organizing methods, campaigns, and demands and how they appeal to people, but also our need for “a megaphone” loud enough to reach beyond audiences already seeking us out—our own progressive mass media.

But as I thought about movement building, I realized there was another problem that was even worse than outreach because it was more debilitating and we had less excuse for it. Think of the progressive/left community as a team, if you will, fighting against both apathy and outright support for the status quo. Call it Team Change. Size isn’t the only variable affecting Team Change’s strength, for sure, but without numbers we aren’t going far so we must reach out more widely. But as we do reach out and get people’s attention or involvement, do we then keep them committed? Call this the “Stickiness Problem.”

To win fundamental change, and that is our purpose, not solely to play well, Team Change needs a force field that draws potential team members steadily leftward ever more strongly the closer it attracts them. First a person hears about some facet of Team Change. There is an attraction, however slight. As the person is drawn closer the attraction must increase to offset counter pressures from society to avoid Team Change lest the person get away. Once a person joins Team Change, the attraction should sustain permanent membership.

Do we have this kind of community seeking change? To decide, we can look at (1) the historical experience that Team Change has had with potential recruits in the past, and (2) the characteristics of Team Change to see whether its attractive force escalates as people get closer to steady involvement.

Consider the past 30 years. How many people have heard about, come into contact with, worked with, or become part of Team Change who no longer have anything much to do with it? The number, I think, is in the millions, perhaps ten million. Remember this includes folks from the Civil Rights movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the women’s movement. It includes those who have been No Nukers, in green movements, and in student movements. It includes everyone who has worked in truly progressive local projects and struggles of all kinds and in various left electoral campaigns. Anyone who has taken a course from a radical faculty person, read a left book, or been part of the anti Gulf War movement, the anti-apartheid movement, or the various Latin American solidarity movements counts. So do those who have been in gay and lesbian movements, in pro choice campaigns, in community and consumer movements, and in union organizing campaigns, labor struggles, anti-racist campaigns, strikes and boycotts, and also people who have gone to talks or demonstrations, listened to progressive radio or read progressive periodicals. Ten million is conservative. And of all these millions of people how many are still an active part of Team Change?

When I faced up to this gap between those reached and those actively involved, while preparing my talk for a very small Green National Convention, I was shocked. If you think in terms of a year or two, the left’s outreach problem seems paramount. How do we get beyond the choir? But if you think about a decade or two, the left’s stickiness problem demands attention. I’m being a little cute with the analogy and labels, yes, but this gap between possibility and actuality is at the heart of our prospects for social change.

Let’s come at it from another angle. Why should someone, once attracted to the logic, dynamics, behaviors, and programs of the progressive/left community, stick to it? Conversely, why do people feel steadily less attachment as time passes, only to finally return to the mainstream?

Well, think of a person getting more and more involved with progressive ideas and activity. Does this person merge into a growing community of people who make him feel more secure and appreciated? Does she get a growing sense of personal worth and of contribution to something valuable? Does he enjoy a sense of accomplishment? Does she have her needs better met than before? Does his life get better? Does it seem that she is making a contribution to improving others lives, as well?

Or, conversely, does this person meet a lot of other people who continually question his motives and behaviors, making him feel insecure and constantly criticized? Does she feel diminishing personal worth and doubt that what she is doing is making a difference for anyone? Does he suspect there is little accomplished, and no daily, weekly, or monthly evidence of progress? Does she have needs that were previously met, now unmet, and few new ones addressed? Is his life getting more frustrating, less enjoyable? Does it seem she is only bothering other people, rarely doing anything meaningful on their behalf? Does he find himself ever less aware of what “the left” is or stands for, repulsed by its vague, or bitter attributes rather than attracted to its clarity, insights, and success?

You might ask different questions than I have, but I think the point is clear enough. The stickiness problem is graphically defined.

Let’s stretch the Team Change analogy. Imagine a football, baseball, basketball, or soccer team. Whether it is high school, college, or professional doesn’t matter. Suppose it doesn’t improve its results as time passes. At some point the coach looks at the choices made, the strategies used, the norms employed and says, hold on, we have to make some corrections.

Okay, our Team Change has no coach and it needs to be participatory and democratic, so being self-critical is everyone’s responsibility. But Team Change must also play to win if it is concerned with more than mere posturing. And that means we need to reassess how we organize ourselves, the culture of our movements, what we learn as we become more committed, how we interrelate, and what benefits and responsibilities we have due to our political involvement. The alternative to doing much better regarding “movement stickiness” is another long losing season…two or three decades worth, I think, which, unlike for inflexible high school, college, and professional ball clubs, means hundreds of millions of lives unnecessarily ended for want of our greater success and final victory.

Let me put it this way. Being right about what’s wrong with society and why it is wrong, and even being able to convey all this to wide audiences, just isn’t enough. Movements must be clear about goals and strategy to retain a sense of purpose, confidence, identity, and integrity in the face of critique. They have to be structured and function in ways that not only enlarge but retain membership, and that not only contribute to change but do so clearly in all members’ eyes. They have to not only attack problems, but to meet needs for members and populations more broadly, and they have to win victories that meet needs but also create the conditions for still more victories to follow. The absence of all this is our stickiness problem.

I have my own notions about the causes of the problem having to do with our lack of compelling guiding vision and strategy, our unclear class allegiances, and our continuing inability to combine respect for desirable autonomies and for essential solidarities both in a single encompassing movement. Others will have different notions. Can we at least agree that a priority is to enumerate the possibilities, assess them, and then develop clear plans for how to do better in the coming years? If we don’t manage this much, I fear we will be running in ever narrowing circles with a movement of diehards rather than astute social critics.

Michael Albert, co-editor of Z, is the author of numerous books on economics, vision, and strategy.