How To Make Change

On The Path To Victory

Guillaume Courtois, “David and Goliath,” 1650-1660. Oil on canvas

Change occurs when the status quo becomes too costly to maintain. This can be achieved through a combination of collective, forceful action that exploits strategic locations in society; by exercising governing power; and by having the technocratic know-how to implement an alternative. If a movement makes the status quo too costly while offering an attractive, feasible alternative, it can change society in its preferred direction.

Let's break down what this means.

"Change." Political and economic power begins serving new interests.

"Too costly." The inputs required to preserve the existing distribution of power exceed the outputs.

"Collective." People acting in coordination to serve their shared interests.

"Forceful." The creation and application of power.

"Strategic locations." Weak points in the infrastructure of power.

"Exercising governing power." Seizing and wielding state power in the service of change.

"Technocratic know-how." Administrative competence and capacity.

"Movement." A deliberate, organized effort to make change.

"Attractive." Understood by the necessary constituencies to serve their interests.

"Feasible." The practical ability to be implemented under current conditions.

This theory of change is rooted in the notion that people generally act in what they believe to be their own interests. "Believe" is key: people interpret their conditions through the lens of ideology, which forms their understanding of their own interests. Ideology is strongly influenced by material conditions but not determined mechanistically by them; this is why people are open to persuasion.

Persuasion is key to building a movement, but it does not do the work of a movement. It is a means of recruiting and softening resistance to change, but it is unreliable and generally ineffective as a means of making change. Exercising power—the social production of force—makes change reliably and effectively.

Without a movement to generate that power, the odds of success are exceptionally low. Movements give coherence to dissatisfaction and channel that energy into a change-making process. While movements have their pitfalls—like any set of relations—the pitfalls of attempting to make change without them are far greater. At a minimum, any efforts to make change outside of movements must occur in strategic coordination with them.

When is a movement needed? When those who hold power are not open to persuasion. This occurs when the desired change is at odds with their perception of their own interests. Persuasion is often sufficient when interests are broadly aligned, but when they conflict, only exercising power will do. A movement is the most reliable, effective, and ethical means of doing so.

The organizational structure of a movement must be dictated by political conditions. A movement form that makes sense under one set of conditions will not make sense under another. Often, this is determined by the relative responsiveness and repression of the state in which the movement is taking place.

Successful movements take different organizational forms but follow the same strategic path: they steadily increase the cost of maintaining the status quo. In doing so, they are disciplined in targeting strategic locations and ratcheting up the pressure in stepwise fashion until their demands are met. They do not fetishize certain tactics but remain open to anything that can be effectively deployed in the service of their goal. The ethics of those tactics are determined by the values of the movement.

A movement is not a loose structure. It is a single organization or a small handful of organizations working in tight coordination towards a shared goal. Anything looser is not a movement; it might be a trend, but it has not cohered into a movement. Non-movements are usually incapable of making sustained structural change.

The core component of any movement is the organizer. The role of an organizer is to recruit, educate, coordinate, and mobilize people in a campaign for change. In the ideal scenario, everyone involved in a movement would be an organizer. In reality, being an organizer requires a high degree of socialization, competence, patience, and maturity, which are not qualities shared by everyone. Nonetheless, a movement cannot succeed without a high proportion of organizers.

People that do not have the qualities that make good organizers (and I count myself among them) often cope with this reality by dismissing the need for organizing and substituting something they prefer doing, such as "living by example." This is a mistake. People who cannot be organizers should find ways to support organizers; one of the biggest threats to organizers is burn-out. Making the work of organizing more rewarding and less thankless is a meaningful contribution to any movement. Additionally, non-organizers can lend support to a movement by participating to the best of their ability in the campaigns initiated by organizers.

While it may seem like there are lots of movements and organizing going on, in fact, there is not. The reason is that activism is not organizing. Activism is the politicization of routine activities. These politicized routine activities, such as short-lived social media-fueled boycotts of consumer brands, exist outside of any movement. They are largely useless skirmishes, and worse yet, activism creates the impression of change and the exercise of power where there is none. The subcultures, dramas, and personal litmus tests of activism are incompatible with effective organizing.

Most disagreements about how to make change are not a function of differing theories of change but about tactics, and they usually miss two key points:

1) Outside of a movement, nothing really works, so debating tactics in the absence of a movement is pointless.

2) There are no tactics that work under every set of conditions, so discussing the merits of tactical issues like voting or nonviolence in absolute terms is foolish.

Tactics are simply tools, and tools can be wielded by any one for any reason. A frying pan can be a cooking utensil or a weapon, and even then, the ethics of those uses are context dependent: cooking for the bad guys is wrong, but fighting them with violence is not. A movement must be constantly willing to entertain and reevaluate tactics as conditions change.

Without increasing the cost of the status quo, offering an attractive, feasible alternative is useless. Structures of power are self-reproducing: they cannot be persuaded to change in the same way that individuals sometimes can. Without a stick, power ignores or subsumes the carrot.

Simultaneously, if a movement increases the cost of the status quo without offering an attractive, feasible alternative, it will still lead to change, just not in the movement's preferred direction.

The goal must be to make it easier to accept a movement's alternative than it is to continue with the status quo. Once that goal is achieved, a movement can win.