The Activist's Handbook. Randy Shaw
enabled activists to increase assistance to progressive campaigns nationwide.
The times have changed, as have many of the issues, campaigns, and activist tools. But the fundamental rules for winning struggles for social change still apply. In fact, the strategies and tactics that brought activists success in the past provide valuable guidance to us today. For example, in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1955, a seamstress named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing a driver’s order to move to the back of the bus. Her arrest spurred a citywide bus boycott that brought national attention to Parks and a young minister named Martin Luther King, Jr. Although it took another decade of struggle before stateimposed segregation laws were eliminated, Rosa Parks’s courageous act stands as the symbolic start of the modern civil rights movement.
The civil rights movement comprised thousands of heroic acts, but even after her death Rosa Parks’s story resonates long after other events of the period have been forgotten. When, forty years after her legendary act, Parks held a book signing in a small bookstore in Oakland, California, thousands of people waited in line for hours merely for the opportunity to see her up close.
Rosa Parks’s stature, along with that of Cesar Chavez, Rachel Carson, and other activist icons, has grown rather than diminished over the years. I believe it is because people today have nostalgia for a seemingly bygone era when individuals at the grassroots level could initiate campaigns that made a difference in the world. Underlying the reverence for Parks is the common perception that today’s political climate is so dominated by big money and so burdened by institutional barriers (e.g., the Supreme Court, filibusters) that campaigns for significant social change cannot prevail.
We saw a break in this cynicism in 2008 when millions of Americans, and particularly young people, put their hopes, dreams, and time into Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Although Obama achieved some major goals in his first term, many of his supporters were left disappointed. They saw his failure to accomplish more as signaling the inability of the nation’s political system to accept transformative change. This feeling was bolstered when the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling struck down hard-won restrictions on campaign financing. This left many convinced that the system was rigged and that activists could never win real change against corporate and wealthy interests.
In this book I flatly reject the widely held notion that current political conditions have confined social change activism to the history books. The civil rights, farmworker, environmental, and other social movements all faced seemingly insurmountable barriers, yet all used the right combination of strategy and tactics to prevail. Their success shows that today’s activists can use strategy and tactics to triumph in their own campaigns for change. As difficult as the path to progressive change in the United States appears in the second decade of the twenty-first century, activists in prior generations have overcome far greater institutional and cultural obstacles.
The critical impact of strategy and tactics on the outcome of social change campaigns is often overlooked. One reason is that most analyses of U.S. politics are not written by activists. People who participate in social change activism recognize that the chosen tactics or strategies often spell the difference between victory and defeat; outside commentators, however, evaluate actions by what did happen, not by what alternative strategy or tactic might have brought a better result. Moreover, the value of tactics and strategies is best demonstrated at the local level, but most accounts of institutional barriers to political change focus exclusively on Washington, D.C.
In the following pages I detail the strategies and tactics that activists in diverse fields have found necessary for success. I focus on winning campaigns and show how efforts that lost might have been victorious had the proper tactics and strategies been used. I also analyze why a particular tactic was successful and why it was preferable to other approaches. By discussing the strategic and tactical choices faced by activists, I take the reader inside the thought processes of experienced activists in the midst of their struggles.
Central to all social change activism is the need to engage in proactive strategic and tactical planning. Activists must develop an agenda and then focus their resources on realizing it. Unfortunately, many activists have failed to establish and implement their own agendas and instead have focused on issues framed by their opponents. Although the contemporary political environment frequently requires activists to respond to threats or defend past gains, these defensive battles cannot be waged at the expense of proactive campaigns for change. Social change activists can avoid fighting battles on their opponents’ terms by establishing a broad, realizable program for fulfilling their goals. The means of carrying out the program are often the subject of lengthy meetings and internal debate. Once they have agreed upon an agenda and endorsed tactics and strategies, activists should expend their energy primarily on implementation, responding to the opposition’s campaign solely within the framework of furthering their own programs. This proactive approach ensures that the social change organization sets the public debate, forcing the opposition to respond to the unceasing drive for progressive reform.
Against the backdrop of proactive agenda setting, particular tactics and strategies have consistently maximized the potential for achieving social change. These tactics include creating what prominent Texas community organizer Ernesto Cortes, Jr., has described as a “fear and loathing” relationship with elected Officials to ensure political accountability; forging coalitions with diverse and even traditional opposition groups; harnessing the mainstream and alternative media to the social change agenda; and using sit-ins, “die-ins,” and other forms of direct action.
Through a discussion of current political issues and events, I analyze the impact of particular strategies and tactics on the outcome of campaigns centered on neighborhood preservation, immigrants’ rights, homelessness, economic inequality, crime, tenants’ rights, sweatshops, the environment, AIDS policies and programs, student battles against tuition hikes, disability rights, gay and lesbian rights, and school reform. These issues serve to illustrate the diverse avenues activists may take to achieve social change: state and local ballot initiatives, electoral politics, grassroots lobbying and advocacy, direct action, media events, and litigation. Participants in these struggles range from the ACT UP activists of New York City to young DREAM Activists and undocumented Latino families across the nation. They include the urban poor of San Francisco, blue-collar and radical environmentalists, and teachers challenging the corporate takeover of public schools. These diverse constituencies have not always fit the popular chant that activists are involved in the “same struggle, same fight,” but they have used similar tactics and strategies to achieve their goals.
My analysis covers local, state, and national battles. I have placed greater emphasis on national campaigns in this new version of the book, for two reasons. First, the rise of the Internet and social media has made it easier for activists to participate in national struggles. Second, activists are working in many areas—immigration, education, economic fairness, health care, public transit—where key decisions are made in the national arena. Most progressive activists remain primarily involved in struggles in the geographic area in which they live, and I discuss many local campaigns that have made a real difference in people’s lives. New media tools have expanded national activism without detracting from local campaigns, and activists can now think and act both nationally and locally.
Bookstores and libraries contain dozens upon dozens of business-oriented how-to books. There exists a virtual industry of works designed to assist people in developing skills in management, negotiation, sales, communications, networking, and media relations. These volumes emphasize the tactics necessary to defeat in-house competitors, overseas competitors, and any other competitor who stands in the way of business success. People in the business of seeking social change, however, have few such resources to turn to for guidance. This book is meant to provide such guidance, particularly to a younger generation that has exhibited strong interest in fights for social and economic justice.
Although the media will never promote young people’s activism as it did in the 1960s, when it was “new,” the eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old generation has demonstrated a tremendous desire to work for progressive change. We see this in many of the social justice struggles discussed in this book, and it was prominently demonstrated in the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Today’s young people want to address poverty, the environmental crisis, and