Target choice

Power research and target choice

The intellectual and other streams feeding the phenomenon of civilian-based nonviolent power are rich and venerable. Etienne de la Boetie in the 16th century formulated the notion of consent as the ultimate source of political power, wrote about the origins of dictatorship, developed the analysis of political power in which the technique of non-violent struggle is rooted and described the means by which people could prevent political enslavement and liberate themselves.

--Berel Rodal[1]

In the days of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a volunteer professor ran a small shop within SNCC doing research on power structures, interlocking corporate and bank boards of directors, and property ownership in counties and towns. What we now call “power research” looks for actual beneficiaries when thinking about harmful policies, and seeks to discern not merely the official levers of power and the known elected officials who might make public decisions, but also to seek deeper knowledge about oppositional forces and tangible influences large and small.

Before you get loud, be sure you’re not wrong.

--Reverend William Barber II[2]

Oxford historian Paul Kennedy researched the fall of great empires and identified one of the primary factors as “imperial overstretch,” that is, trying to control too much for the mounting costs involved. Empires fell.[3]And as lifelong civil rights organizer Bernard Lafayette notes, it is important to impose new and challenging costs by your resistance. A member of the 1960 Nashville student sit-in campaigns, he recalls that the effort was intended to “be a burden on the system.”[4]

Advance research into ownership, the powers-behind-the-powers, and unseen controlling influences can help in choosing short, medium-term, and even longer term targets. While the emotional content of a liberation struggle has multiple levels, so too does the research into the deeper control layers of power over domineering and unequal societal institutions. Veteran organizer, professor, and author George Lakey notes that figuring out who you can ask to make the change you want must focus on the one who can actually do that or your campaign is impotent.[5]

And so, bear in mind that the agenda is not the target. The Moral Monday movement, for instance, had 14 agenda items but focused on one target at a time, just as Dr. King had eliminating racism, militarism, and materialism as his agenda but moved from target to target as others requested his presence. He was assassinated, after all, working for the betterment of Memphis garbage haulers. 

When the Women’s Strike for Peace spun off of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in 1961, it did so in response to the publicly known health risks from open-air nuclear testing. That agenda drove their varying target choices, which included Congress and the President, but also all American men, American business, and American society. They expressly took to the streets during business hours, withdrawing their paid and unpaid work in an urgent bid to push for a treaty banning the tests that were spreading airborne radiation around the world. Their effective choice of targets and powerful messaging help push President Kennedy to sign the historic Partial Test Ban Treaty, ending open-air testing.[6]The agenda may not even be the target if research reveals that works best.

This power research is prefigured by a social power analysis, locating primary power, however latent, in society, and secondary power as held by the political elite, which seems far more monolithic than it really is, once social power is exercised.[7]

But power research needs to also turn to involved communities and develop clear pictures of demographics, income levels, and asset maps, that is, understanding of potential resources and untapped strengths.[8]Developing asset conversations, surveys, and assessments can reveal possible capacities. For participants already involved, what do they do professionally? What areas of campaign organizing might match their skills? Who do they know who can help? 

In the case of the attempt to roll back the gains made in the Wake County school system since the Brown v Board of Educationdecision of 1954, the precursor organization to Moral Mondays did their dual research, first tracing the influential huge donations back to the Koch brothers and even noting that the Koch brothers’ father had led the effort to try to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after Brown. They also examined the data that showed the dramatic improvement in educational achievement metrics as a result of the mandated desegregation.[9]This gave them the push and pull needed to launch a people power vs money power struggle.

Identifying the powers-behind-the-powers, if done in ways that are demonstrably valid, can not only help campaigns focus limited resources more effectively and achieve results more swiftly, it can help a campaign’s image as credible. Every action that increases the legitimacy of a campaign or coalition lowers barriers to recruitment.[10]

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[1] Rodal, Berel (2007). Bottom-up, inside-out: The record and potential of civilian-based nonviolent power to win freedom and respect for human rights. http://www.voltairenet.org/article163267.html

[2] Barber (p. 18)

[3]Kennedy, Paul (1987). The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House.

[4] York, Steve (2000) (Director). “We were warriors,” Episode 1, A Force More Powerful (film). 

[5] Lakey, George (2018). How we win: A guide to nonviolent direct action campaigning. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House. 

[6] Foster, Catherine (1989). Women for all seasons: The story of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom.Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

[7] Sharp, Gene (2013). How nonviolent struggle works. Boston, MA: Albert Einstein Institution. Sharp focuses most of his prodigious body of work on analyzing and diminishing the power of the political elites, helping via strategic decisions and campaign targeting to find hidden cleavages in that “monolithic” power elite and using nonviolent action to drive wedges into those fissures, splitting rulers and overcoming them via that induced division. This is exactly what anti-apartheid activists did in South Africa with mass boycotts, causing the business community to split off from the racist ideologues and thus accelerating the end of apartheid. 

[8]Ohmer, Mary L. & DeMasi, Karen (2009). Consensus organizing: A community development workbook. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

[9] Barber (p. 76)

[10]Walker, Henry A., and David Willer. 2014. "Legitimizing Collective Action and Countervailing Power." Social Forces 92, no. 3: 1217-1239. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost (accessed March 4, 2018).