Most of this post was written about three to four weeks after the George Floyd Uprising began. I got busy and returned after the November 3rd election to add and finalize the last couple sections. There is another blog post tangentially related to this one—and written around the same time—about a couple common pitfalls that new contemporary activist organizations face early on in. That post can be found here.
The most recent anti-police protests arose spontaneously out of the stacked social failures of the status quo. Not even Covid-19 could slow down police murders, and people were so fed up with the failures of our government that they took to the streets, burned down police stations, and put pressure on our supposed representatives unlike anything we’ve seen in decades.
These rightful protests were not extensively planned, although many people had been preparing for them for years, whether they knew it or not. This post will look at what I believe are some of the most important factors that help determine how effectively people are able to transform the spontaneous mobilization of people into successful medium-to-long-term organizing.
After a brief overview of anarchist thought and how it relates to the current push for police abolition, I move to a discussion of motivation, numbers, and preparation—three important variables in the success of spontaneous movements.
Anarchist Thought and Black Lives Matter in 2020
A discussion of spontaneous movements should probably first give a nod to the anarchists, who have been talking about this sort of revolutionary social change for so long.
Many anarchists seem to expect revolutions—social, political, economic—to arise spontaneously. They think a break in society will occur in which people en masse realize that the logic of the status quo is unacceptable, and then respond in the form of a general strike or some other mass disobedience. With this rejection of the old order, almost everything becomes possible. Anarchists hope that people will learn—from experience, from their basic desire to care for one another, and from leftist and anarchist thought—to develop norms and lifestyles that respect each other’s humanity. A society emerges in which people help and care for each other because people broadly recognize that, “I like being kind and generous to you, and I like it when people are kind and generous to me!”
Anarchists are accused of being too idealistic, even by other leftists. I think that anarchists are expecting a lot, but I also think many anarchists realize this. Because they’ve put in a tall order, most serious anarchists conclude that they’ll have to work extra hard for their politics to be successful.
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Well, in the past months, we’ve seen a lot of what anarchists have been hoping for, at least as it specifically relates to police reform and abolition.
The break in society in the past months came with the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. This happened at a time when people couldn’t ignore the injustice—Covid-19 has made it so that we are stuck at home or unemployed, glued to news and social media. These two murders were a sharp and unavoidable reminder of our government’s ceaseless murder of Black people, and the government’s dismal failure to address the problem, even though it’s been well-documented on smartphones for around a decade.
People responded with spontaneous, mass civil disobedience in all fifty states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and around the world. Destruction of property, police stations burned to the ground—our representatives have been put into a position where they cannot continue to ignore what they’ve left unaddressed for so long.
So we’ve seen a break from the logic of the status quo, and we’ve seen the resulting mass protests. We’re now at the point where almost everything seems possible in the realm of police reform and abolition. How effectively people will be able to make the most of this opportunity remains to be seen. It depends on all of us.
Transforming Spontaneous Actions into Effective Organizing
I do not see these 2020 BLM protests as the thing that triggers an anarchist reframing of society, even as people are also facing crises of evictions, joblessness, and health. I am a socialist, and I think anti-racist, feminist, working-class success will come in a drawn-out fight by the working class for political, economic, and social power.
One of the largest problems facing the movement now is the energy and effort required to set up organizational structures and norms. These structures and norms will direct the spontaneous outburst of energy into organizing for the medium-to-long term, pushing for specific demands, sustaining the movement over time, and preparing for future events that open up new opportunities. Concretely, these structures include methods for communicating, for deciding on demands, for deciding on actions to take, and the bureaucratization of the logistics involved in getting people and resources to the right places at the right times. All the while, the structures created will need to remain flexible enough to adapt to a changing situation.
Once these norms and structures are in place, a lot of the planning and logistical work becomes streamlined. With this efficiency, people are less likely to get burnt out from unnecessarily repeating the tasks of coordinating similar actions from scratch.
This is important for growing the movement. Newcomers usually do not have the capacity or organizing experience to continuously figure things out from scratch. They may stop coming to meetings and drop out of organizing. The feeling of putting in a lot of unnecessary effort in for few results is demoralizing for interested-but-inexperienced people, and is of no fault of their own.
Having structures in place also makes things possible that weren’t before. The organization is more competent in situations that demand urgent decisions and action, or when taking on a very complex project that demands coordination and division of labor among different groups. To take on complex projects, we need the energy to focus on the complex things, and we can’t waste the group’s energy on inefficiently doing basic organizing tasks like figuring out who can take what role, when a meeting will be held, or how a vote will be conducted. In these moments, it tends to be useful to already have a pragmatic scaffolding of norms and shared understandings about what ought to be done, and whose responsibilities it generally is to do specific things. In these moments, it also tends to be useful to have the structural capacity for representative decision-making.
This is a make-or-break moment in the movement. The energy of a spontaneous social outburst can burn bright and fade fast—to sustain itself over time, and to scale up in power, it needs an organizational structure.
Figuring out norms and structures takes a considerable amount of initial effort, but it saves a lot of effort in the future. It happens naturally in the process of organizing, but there are factors that determine how easily it happens. Sometimes, the initial amount of effort required is too much, and the spontaneous movement fails to transform itself into an effective organizing structure.
Three Factors: Motivation, Numbers, and Preparation
Reflecting on what helps spontaneous movements successfully get over the initial hurdle of effort required to set up structures and norms, my thoughts settled on three things:
1. the motivation of the people in the movement,
2. the number of people in the movement, and
3. the preparation done by interested people before the event that prompts mass organizing.
The more we have of each of these three things, the it easier it is for us to get over the initial hurdle of effort required to translate the spontaneous social outburst into effective organizing structures.
I will give a brief description of each, and then discuss what we can do to maximize them.
Motivation can be measured in the amount of money, time, and effort that people are willing to expend toward organizing for the movement. The more motivation people have, the more they’re able to do research, figure out strategies, litigate, and go out to protest. Even with a small group of people, if they have enough motivation, they can put a lot of pressure on institutions and people with institutional power.
What is important is not simply the personal cost involved (how much money, time, effort; if they are willing to be arrested; etc.), but also the people’s focus to help the movement. Our actions need to be based in our analysis of power and oppression, and our analysis should tell us where we need to focus our energy to be the most effective. If our effort is unfocused and merely a thoughtless reaction to the events around us, then it runs the risk of being wasted energy. We also need to update our analysis of the world after reflecting on how effective our focused actions have been. (This concept of theory-informed-and-theory-informing action, by the way, is the concept of praxis that you might have heard leftists throw around.)
People can lose motivation when it feels like the movement is losing, or when people keep going out to protests without seeing results. In other words, if people don’t see how all the effort they expend will get our demands met, they lose the belief that they can change things. Unfocused effort makes organizing feel like a waste of time, and it means that people will stop taking part in meetings, protests, and actions.
Numbers literally refers to the number of people who both identify with the movement and take an active part in shaping it. With a large enough number of people—even if everyone is inexperienced—there will be some people who come up with good ideas to grow the movement’s power. With a good communication system that lets the good ideas rise to the top and the bad ideas fall to the wayside, the movement naturally builds an effective system of norms, strategies, tactics, and institutions. For example, people learned on social media and in the streets how to neutralize tear gas, and how to dress to protect themselves from rubber bullets.
Our numbers depend on motivation and the knowledge that our effort is following a plan to win. It depends on a moral message, which is simple to understand. This doesn’t mean we have to simplify our message, however. ‘Defund the Police’ is an idea that depends on knowledge of the ways that police are harmful to society, and how they are incapable of addressing the root social problems. Before the 2020 BLM movement, this could take a lot of time to explain. Now, with the intense focus on policing’s structural problems, this once-complex idea is relatively simple to explain.
We can achieve a decent amount with a small group of highly motivated organizers. But that is not enough.
Ultimately, a massive number of people is what we depend on to win. To sign a petition, to win an election or ballot measure, to create alternative systems of production, to have mass civil disobedience, to shut down the normal procedures of corporations or government, to have a general strike, to go up against institutions with centuries of oppression written into their rules—we need an overwhelming number of people. People power is both the means and the end.
Preparation is the norms, organizations, and ideas which exist beforehand which are suited for organizing the spontaneous movement.
For example, does an organization with a democratic structure already exist? Local BLM groups, Abolitionist groups, DSA and PSL groups already existed. Or, are there basic norms that people already share about how to work together effectively and exercise power? At the beginning of BLM 2020, people quickly moved to make petitions, march on the streets, and donate money to grassroots groups and bail funds—this was the basic understanding of influencing power that people generally held. Other forms of preparation include: Using existing or past groups as a blueprint for new organizations; or onboarding mechanisms for interested but unexperienced people to gain experience in organizations.
Intellectual work done by activists is highly important preparatory work. Prison Industrial Complex Abolitionists have been chugging away for a long time at developing ideas, demands and strategies. To take a quote from one of our opponents, Milton Friedman, an avid neoliberal and effective popularizer of neoliberal capitalism:
“Only a crisis—actual or perceived—produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”
— Milton Friedman, ‘Capitalism and Freedom’
We need to prepare by developing “the ideas that are lying around,” which people reach for in a time of crisis. ‘Defunding the police’ was one such idea, and the intellectual work done around it made it a viable solution to the crisis. Because of all the work they had done already, they were able to create the website 8toabolition.com in a mere 24 hours. Without the work they had done, a lot of organizing would be put down the dead-end road of useless police reforms, and increases in police funding.
It’s also important that people and organizations are anticipating what sort of spontaneous breaks in society would occur. This anticipation lets us have an existing structure ready to deploy at a moment’s notice, as a place for newcomers to find an organizing home. It’s not hard to imagine anticipating a mass public outburst against police violence. We will continue to see this. Other things we might anticipate are mass outbursts against debt, against poor working conditions and living standards, for climate justice, and/or against the politicians who make laws for the rich to the detriment of the public health.
And yet, we cannot anticipate everything, which is why we need norms, orgs, and ideas already lying around. We will want norms for directing our motivation effectively and norms for discovering/communicating the best ideas in large numbers. We will want existing organizations which model successful and scalable democratic decision-making and logistical planning. We will want ideas lying around that people and new activists will grab onto as the solution to our crises.
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These three factors help us create an organized structure for winning. Organized structures are measured in how effectively work is being done. This is revealed when there are clear rules for carrying out a commonly repeated task (e.g. decision-making, producing flyers, coordinating the movement of people and resources). People will often be assigned roles in the organization (e.g. we know which groups of people are in charge of taking notes on a meeting, or making graphics, doing legal research, figuring out when the group can meet next, translating something into another language, etc.) The goal is that best-practices are built into the way the organization does things, instead of figured out each time something has to get done.
Admittedly, bureaucratization and patterns of action are not always good; you need flexibility in organizing. Having too concrete of a bureaucratic structure runs the risk of directing effort through a path of least resistance within the organizing structure, even when the moment demands a different set of actions.
Usually, Preparation Should Be Our Focus
We can’t really control the depth of people’s motivation or the numbers of people in a spontaneous movement—and certainly not at the beginning of it. However, we can prepare for these movements beforehand. For the future, we will need to do preparation work that gets specific—for example, having specific policies already written, having specific norms for organizing and communicating, and having talking points that are specific to our local governments. Our preparation should be designed to be flexible enough to meet the moment, and it should be based in general principles that allow our demands to grow beyond local politics. If anything, prep work familiarizes organizers with the nuances of different areas of struggle. As more contradictions in the logic of the status quo compound—mass precariousness of the working class, environmental collapse, and rise in right-wing populism—our preparatory work will become ever more necessary to multiply the effectiveness of the spontaneous movements to come.
We are a few weeks into the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, and yet I have just put a lot of emphasis on preparatory work, which needs to take before these movements. While we can’t go back in time to do more prep work, we can appreciate the people and organizations that have been doing the work of prison-industrial complex abolition for years and decades: Mariame Kaba, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Critical Resistance, the Movement for Black Lives. The movement in 2020 would not have been anywhere as strong or focused on #DefundThePolice if not for all their educational work and organizing. The work they have done serve as examples and preparatory guidelines in the present amplification of the struggle toward PIC abolition.
What Now?
Even though the time for preparatory work in socialist organizations like the DSA was before the murder of George Floyd, prep work is still useful throughout the organizing process. More things will occur that people and organizations will need to respond to, and it’s best to anticipate and be prepared for them.
Motivation, Numbers, and Preparation: These three things are always important, and they all depend on and grow out of each other. Here are a few practical ways of increasing each of them, and hopefully creating a virtuous cycle.
What does it take to keep motivation up? Encourage the group you organize with to come up with a clear set of demands. Then, come up with an analysis of how power works to usually prevent those demands from being met. Only now can you come up with a plan to put pressure on the weak points of power to get your demands met. This clear plan of action will justify people’s effort, and keep motivation up—even when victories are few and far between. A clear plan of action that justifies our effort also increases how many people join and stick around. These ways of organizing also become broadly held norms for organizing down the road—for example, Occupy Wall Street is credited with training a whole generation of organizers.
What does it take to keep numbers up? More things that help increase the number of people in our movement include having constant outreach to other organizing groups and social groups. Effort has to be directed into convincing new people to join, and providing them easy inroads to organizing so they stick around and gain experience. In doing so, we gain more people with their own life experiences—their input is useful in shaping the movement and coming up with new, good ideas, norms, and institutional rules. Numbers of people allow us to exhibit our power and win small battles and demands—this increases the motivation of people involved.
How are we organizing to anticipate and prepare for the changing situation? I’ve described how we prepare our norms, organizations, and ideas above. In short, work with the people your organization has in the calm times, keeping in mind the possibility that something might happen that your work will have deep relevance to. Prepare ways of onboarding new interested activists, even if it doesn’t seem like any are joining. Create your plan of action; analyze how the people in power make their decisions and how they can be influenced or replaced. Lead by example in terms of good norms for communicating and boosting good ideas—in person and across social media platforms. Build up your group’s analysis of the world, and fine tune your demands and arguments so that they are easily communicated. Start communicating your ideas—even before a crisis. When a crisis does occur, people will remember that your group has already been working on this issue. Many of them will turn to you for help figuring out the solutions.
All of these factors are extremely important for channeling spontaneous societal outbursts into effective long-term movements. As it seems like we are likely to face more crises—of racism, patriarchy, fascism, climate change, and capitalism to name a few—I’m glad I’ve spent the time clarifying my thoughts. We have a world to win!
