> Chip Berlet wrote:
>
>> John Lacny:
>>
>>> "social movements do not just respond to divisions within the
>>> ruling class; they CREATE them by causing the kind of disruption
>>> that needs to be dealt with. Politicians and other elite figures
>>> then feel bound to follow the on the movement's coattails, and
>>> not the other way around."
>>
>> This needs to be posted on the wall of every activist, along with
>> the corollary:
>>
>> Political parties do not create social movements, and generally
>> try to deflect their radical demands. Social movements, when they
>> become powerful, pull political parties toward their demands.
>
> I would add one corollary -- no one EVER knows in advance _which_
> initiatives will "take off" and which will be merely mocking
> footnotes to history. Without numerous foolish efforts, no
> abolitionist movement, no CIO, no civil rights movement, etc. That
> is one of the reasons that leftists fearful of looking foolish are
> such a drag.
>
> Carrol
In an essay that points out various shortcomings of William A. Gamson's methods in The Strategy of Social Protest (e.g., Gamson's definition of success [Gamson arrived at his relatively low overall success rate -- 49% -- of protest groups by bundling groups that gained partial advantages with groups that gained no advantage], coding [Gamson, for instance, oddly codes The First International as a "non-displacement group," i.e., a group that does not seek to destroy or replace its antagonists]. etc.) and reanalyzes the same data, Jack A. Goldstone finds that "the timing of success seems to depend heavily on the incidence of broad political and/or economic crises in the society at large," more so than any attribute of a protest group ("The Weakness of Organization: A New Look at Gamson's The Strategy of Social Protest," The American Journal of Sociology, 85.5, March 1980, p. 1029).
If anything, Goldstone says that bureaucratization and the use of selective incentives, which Gamson found to be factors that promoted success, were actually correlated with delay in success: "the bureaucratic groups took significantly _longer_ to attain success than the nonbureaucratic ones"; and "groups that used selective incentives" took "significantly longer to attain their goals" (p. 1034). The only factors identified by Gamson that do seem to make a difference predicted by him are factionalism and being on the receiving side of violence, both of which, as Gamson found, put protest groups at disadvantage (p. 1036).
What can we learn from Gamson and Goldstone?
Avoid factionalism and too much bureaucratization (especially since these two factors are more under your control than any others); avoid getting destroyed by violence of antagonists (of the state or other groups); be feisty, be willing to use disruption, don't be passive when attacked; and accumulate skills and resources during long lulls between crises and stay in the game till the time comes.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>