March 2001

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

From "Mass Action Since Seattle: Seven Ways to Make our Protests More Powerful"

First arrested in a civil rights campaign, George Lakey co-authored a basic handbook for the civil rights movement, A Manual for Direct Action, and then five other books on social change including Strategy for a Living Revolution. In some forty years of activism, he has led workshops for London anarchists, New York Act Up, West Virginia coal miners, Mohawks in Canada, African National Congress in Johannesburg, lesbians and gays in Russia, revolutionary student soldiers in a guerrilla encampment inside Burma, and many other movements and groups. The full article from which this excerpt is taken is available at www.TrainingforChange.org or Training for Change, 4719 Springfield Ave, Philadelphia, 215/729-7458.

Seattle, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Los Angeles: each of them experiments in mass direct action for justice and environmental sanity. Each has drawn thousands of committed people who care deeply about a better world, for their own back yard and for the planet. Each has involved risk, pain, and suffering, as well as moments of profound connection, creativity, and community. Historians will mark 1999-2000 as a time when the river of change ran more quickly.

Each city's action has also invited controversy and debate about tactics and strategy. In the "morning after" period in which people lick their wounds and organize legal defense against continued state repression, it's easy for resentments to flare and defensiveness to flourish. The challenge is: how to be honest about differences of views, how to allow the authentic debates to happen, and still not lose ourselves in divisiveness.

However much we may need to disagree as we dialogue about our future, two points of unity stand out for most activists:

• the System needs major change, and compared with those who consciously fight us to preserve the unjust status quo, we activists objectively are allies of each other;
• we will all benefit from a rapid learning curve in which we learn the most possible from each round of struggle and stay flexible and ready to give up what doesn't seem to be working.

In that spirit, I have written about some ways to sharpen future mass direct action scenarios. We can fully appreciate the hard work and sacrifice that has gone into each of these recent experiments and still act on our freedom to make different choices for next time as we learn more about how to make social change in the twenty-first century. And even though I write about the future and use some of this year's examples, I've also woven in direct action examples from the past in order to honor our ancestors and to reduce the near-sightedness that comes from only knowing about the activist culture immediately around us.

[In his essay, Lakey offers seven principles of strategy and tactics for effective public action: 1) creating dilemma demonstrations instead of relying on "disruption" (although they may sometimes be just as disruptive), 2) making conscious decisions about who in "the public" we're most eager to influence, 3) designing and implementing campaigns rather than simply showing up where the power holders decide, 4) working more realistically with mass media, 5) increasing the contrast between protesters and police behavior, 6) taking the powerful attitude of openness toward state repression, and 7) committing with more depth and explicitness to strategic nonviolent action. We offer you only two of them here, urging you to seek out the full article on the web.--Eds.]

Create More "Dilemma Demonstrations"

This form of direct action puts the power holders in a dilemma: if they allow us to go ahead and do what we intend to do, we accomplish something worthwhile related to our issue. If they repress us, they put themselves in a bad light, and the public is educated about our message.

Many examples can inspire our creativity. Some campaigns to save old-growth trees have set up these dilemmas. If, for example, the protesters are allowed to sit in the trees, the trees are saved. If the protesters are stopped violently, the public is educated and new allies can be won.

African American students in the South were very creative with such tactics, for example sitting at the lunch counter asking for coffee. If they were served, racism took a hit. If they were either attacked by civilians or arrested, racism also took a hit. The sit-inners didn't even need the signs they brought in order to make their point. The power holders were repeatedly put in a dilemma: whatever they did resulted in lost ground for the status quo.

It's not always easy to create such tactics, and there are times when stopping traffic may be the best we can think of. The difference, however, is very clear if we take the point of view of the bystander or the television camera. When the police drag away protesters who are blocking a city intersection, what is the message of the protesters? The World Bank has policies that hurt people? Maybe, if the bystander or television viewer is willing to make several logical steps or leaps of imagination. But there's no reason to expect that bystanders and TV viewers will work hard to make those connections, especially when the excitement is in the physical conflict itself between arresting officers and activists.

One way to spur our creativity, so more of our tactics actually put the power holders in a dilemma, is to picture to ourselves what the actual point of confrontation will look like to curious bystanders who are not already on our side. The scenarios we then develop will have more power and clarity of message.

One place to look for dilemma demonstration ideas is the community work that activists are already doing. Community gardens, for example, might be planted in places which need reclaiming. In the midst of the Seattle action some activists did guerrilla gardening in the median strips of downtown streets and avenues along the wharf.

Heighten the Contrast Between Protesters and Police Behavior

One of the great things about our movement is that it understands the importance of drama in the social change process. The confrontations of Seattle and since assume what every playwright knows: the heart of drama is conflict.

Young protester at World Petroleum Congress, Calgary, Canada, June 2000 © Aaron Booth aaron_booth@hotmail.com

Drama in the streets is, however, different from an off-Broadway play. A sophisticated theater audience might prefer characters to be multifaceted, without a clearly-defined "good guy" and "bad guy." The social change drama of the streets cannot be so subtle: it really does come down to "the goodies" vs. "the baddies"--in our case, those who stand with oppressed people vs. those who stand with greed, privilege, and domination.

The drama in street confrontations needs the simplicity of contrast between the protesters' behavior and that of the police.

The Republican National Convention in Philadelphia shows how much we need to learn about this dimension of direct action. The reaction of the membership of a largely-African American activist group of poor and working class people to the direct action was significant. These Philadelphians use civil disobedience themselves, and are experienced in tactics of blockade and occupation. They also have plenty of experience with media distortion and police brutality. Nevertheless, by and large they felt no empathy or solidarity with the Convention disruption. The Convention direct actionists didn't set up the contrast between demonstrators and the police to be clear and dramatic. Chanting "police state" is utterly unconvincing to bystanders who see with their own eyes an unusual degree of apparant police restraint, especially if the bystanders know personally how bad brutality can get.

The symbols used to heighten contrast depend on the situation. Black student sit-inners wore dresses and coats and ties, and remained calmly seated at the counters while hysterical white racists hit them. Vietnamese monks sat in meditative positions in the streets of Hue, in front of tanks, to help bring down the dictatorship in 1963. Philippine participants in "people power" mass action overthrew a government partly with flower necklaces for the dictator's soldiers.

Our power lies in our choices. We can choose to design our confrontations using appropriate symbology so that the part of the public we most want to influence will see us as the people standing up for justice. It's our choice.

Fighting globalization is a huge struggle. We need a steep learning curve. These are only two of the ways that we can learn from experience to design better actions in the future.

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