We need to be cellular to win...
A modern framework for community action requires acting in cohesive units of mobilization to achieve goals specific to each groups objective
Everyone probably remembers that stage in like middle school where you learn about the different functions of a cell and all the different roles that things like the endoplasmic reticulum play in life processes. To be honest, I either slept or messed around all through eighth grade and Tennessee does not have the best IEP system so that’s a fun bit of origin story. I mean what is an anarchist without a cool origin story?
Anyways, I barely even learned much from that class, but what I did learn a lot from was hit anime series “Cells at Work” by Akane Shimizu. No matter where you learn about crucial life processes though, one thing that will always be true is that in a cell, everyone has their role to play. Recently, I made a pretty strong claim that protests are a totally dead strategy, and like the stubborn Taurus I am dug my feet in on that because how dare someone express their desire for change differently /s. After a few really great conversation I realized that not only was the statement wrong, but we in fact need peaceful protesting in modern frameworks of mobilization.
During this conversation, a really interesting research article was shared with me from Trends in Cognitive Sciences that applied a unique framework to organize the various literature to find a pattern which reveals how effective social action has been over time.
Across fields, there are many findings indicating that normative and nonviolent protests gen- erally tend to be most effective [5,9,11,12]. However, there is also empirical evidence that social protests are more effective when they are nonnormative but still nonviolent [7], involve violent radical flanks [8,13,14], or are even entirely violent [4,15–17]. While some may see such find- ings as conflicting, we contend that these disparate findings highlight the need for an integrative framework that defines what it means for collective action to be effective. Researchers may be operating based on different working definitions of effectiveness in terms of the outcome variable and target audience assessed to measure effectiveness. Thus, including these in a unified frame- work can help address gaps in the literature and advance our understanding of this important social process.
The article highlights the need to identify three critical indicators when evaluating the effectiveness of social action:
The type of social action
The type of audience
The type of social change
The framework review ends up finding that normative nonviolent forms of protest tend to be more effective on the outcome of mobilization for sympathetic target audiences, while more non-normative social action and even straight up violent social action tend to be more effective on the outcome of policy change among more resistant target audiences.
While I love this framework as a start, I have a small nitpick. In it’s current form, there is nothing that delineates violent protests (e.g. riots) from decentralized illegalist1 actions directed specifically at the means of production. In 2019, French union CGT cut power to an Amazon facility in direct support of striking workers, and the next year in 2020, the French unions reached a deal with Amazon to reopen, in what we called a good deal for workers.
I would be very curious to see data on the effectiveness of decentralized illegalist actions that strike at the heart of the growing tumor as opposed to the shock and awe approach of violent protests as a whole. That said, everyone has a role to play. As in any cell, whether a peaceful protest, a decentralized illegalist strike, or a violent riot, everyone has tolerance for different levels of action.
The most important thing is that we as Americans, and humans, organize and play off of each others strengths and weaknesses while not judging the ones who get their hands dirty, or choose not to. We need people in positions of power who understand the game and the stakes, so not everyone can go to a mass riot and crash out, but they can help coordinate legal and professional networks to help support the ones who do.
We’re all in this together, and we can win this. We don’t have a choice. That’s all I have for you today, if you liked this article, please share it with others so I can grow this publication and sustain it long term!
For those who aren’t privvy to the definition of illegalism, it’s a tendency of anarchism that developed primarily in France, Italy, Belgium and Switzerland during the late 1890s and early 1900s as an outgrowth of individualist anarchism. llegalists embrace criminality either openly or secretly as a lifestyle. Illegalism does not specify the type of crime, though it is associated with theft and shoplifting.
Some anarchists, like Clément Duval and Marius Jacob, justified theft with theories of individual reclamation (la reprise individuelle) and propaganda of the deed and saw their crime as an educational and organizational tool to facilitate a broader resistance movement. Others, such as Jules Bonnot and the Bonnot Gang, saw their actions in terms of egoist anarchism and referred to the philosophy of Max Stirner.