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Seven Strategic Assumptions Of Successful Social Movements

By Bill Moyer

1. Social Movements Are Proven To Be Powerful

Social movements have been a powerful means for ordinary people to participate directly in creating positive social change, particularly when formal channels for democratic political participation do not work. Social movements helped end slavery, create labor unions and child labor laws, attain women’s suffrage, end atmospheric nuclear testing, achieve many civil rights for blacks, women, gays and lesbians, end the Vietnam War, oust dictators, challenge South African Apartheid, curb the cold war, and move Eastern Bloc nations toward democracy. Almost every positive aspect of American society has been influenced by successful people’s movements. Social movements are more numerous and powerful than ever. Much acclaim is given to the social movements of the 1960s, but those of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were bigger and more numerous.

2. Movements Are At The Center of Society

Most social movements are not exceptional [or] rare protest events on society’s fringe, and activists are not anti-social rebels. Quite the contrary, progressive nonviolent social movements are at the center of society’s “historicity,” the ongoing process of society evolving and redefining itself. In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, a chief purpose of social movements is “to fulfill the American Dream, not to destroy it.” Social movements are deeply grounded in our founding values of justice, democracy, civil right, security, and freedom. In contrast, they oppose vested interests that use public offices and corporate institutions in ways that violate these principles. Implication: Social movements, therefore, must consciously articulate society’s central value and sensibilities. Almost all ordinary citizens consider themselves patriots; that is, they strongly believe in the positive values of their country. Movement activists will be successful only to the extent that they can convince the great majority of people that the movement, and not the powerholders, truly represent society’s values and sensibilities. In contrast, movements are self-destructive to the extent that they define themselves as being rebels on the fringes of society who oppose the majority and are trying to overthrow core social values and structures.

3. The Real Issue Is Social Justice Vs. Vested Interest

The experience of social movements is consistent with Arnold Toynbee’s dictum that the real struggle in the world is between vested interests and social justice. An elite minority holds enormous political, economic, and social power and influence, which they use to benefit a minority of elites at the expense of society’s majority. In their attempt to promote democracy, justice, peace, ecological sustainability, and the general social welfare, social movements must oppose the excessive power and influence of the elite powerholders. The consequence of such opposition is, inevitably, conflict with the political, economic, and corporate powerholders—whether they be military contractors wanting to increase the military budget and prolong the nuclear arms race, doctors wanting to undermine guaranteed health care, or logging companies wanting to destroy the remaining old-growth forests. The struggle between vested interests and social welfare will be intensified with the growing crises during in the 1990s. Implication: In the face of this inevitable struggle, movement activists must neither become discouraged nor believe their movement is losing when powerholders do not change their minds or policies. Even though a social movement may be supported by a majority who opposes current policies and condition, powerholders will fight until it becomes in their interest to change.

4. The Grand Strategy Is To Promote Participatory Democracy

The grand strategy of social movements is to promote participatory democracy through people power, in which an ever-increasing majority of ordinary citizen is alerted, won over, and becomes involved in addressing critical social problems and achieving progressive change.

The lack of democracy is a major source of social problems. The American system increasingly exemplifies that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When a society functions to support the self-serving interests of its privileged few, lack of concern for the welfare of all people helps to engender environmental destruction, massive poverty, reduced social programs, vast military expenditures, support of Third World dictators, and global military intervention.

Political power ultimately rests with the general population. The official power-holders in any society can only rule as long as they have the consent of the people. Ultimately, the general population will give this consent only as long as those who govern are perceived to be upholding the public trust and the basic morals, values, and interests of the whole society. (That is why all governments — including those of the democratic West as well as the harshest dictatorships — spend enormous money and effort trying to justify their power and policies to the ordinary public, wrapping them in terms of widely-accepted values and traditions.) There have been remarkable examples of the power of ordinary citizens to overthrow even brutal Stalinist dictatorships in the Eastern Bloc nations. Participatory democracy, led by social movement people-power, therefore, is a key to facing the awesome problems that confront us today and to establishing a more humane world. The resolution of today’s problems require an informed, empowered and politicized population that assertively demands democracy, justice, security, equality, human welfare, peace, and ecological preservation.

5. Social Movements Focus on Winning Over Ordinary Citizens, not Powerholders

Social change happens only when the majority of citizens are alerted, educated, and motivated to be concerned about a problem. Social movements are only as powerful as the power of their grassroots support. The chief task of the activist, therefore, is to focus on and to win over the public, not to change the minds and policies of official powerholders. Implication: The formal powerholders will not change their policies until there is overwhelming pressure from the general population. Ignoring this reality is a chief source of activists’ feelings of powerlessness and movement failure. When powerholders fail to respond to initial movement demands, many activists become depressed and angry. This can lead to burnout, dropout, unnecessary compromises, or aimless rebelliousness. This creates a cycle of increased failure, because rebellious acts alienate the general public, the true source of movement power.

6. Success is a Long-Term Process, Not An Event

The process of putting a social problem on society’s agenda, winning a large majority, and subsequently achieving long-range movement goals (such as cutting the military budget in half and curbing the cold war) occurs over many years. This lengthy process includes reaching many sub-goals along the way.

Implications: Activists should evaluate their movement by how well it is moving along the road of success, not by whether it has achieved its long-term goals. And activists should develop strategies and tactics that advance their movement along the next segment of the road, instead of trying to achieve the long-range goals directly—and feeling they have failed because those long-range goals have not yet been reached.

7. Social Movements Must Be Nonviolent

Following Gandhi and King, the ideology and method of nonviolence provides social movements with the optimum opportunity to win over and involve the general citizenry in people power because:

  • Nonviolence is based on timeless national, cultural, human, and religious values and principles such as equality, security, preservation, justice, democracy, love, forgiveness, caring, compassion, and understanding.
  • Nonviolence appeals to these values and principles held by people and nations
  • Nonviolence is less threatening to ordinary citizens.
  • Nonviolence (unlike militaristic or violent methods) allows everyone to participate: women men, elderly, youth and even children; people from all traditional levels of strength and weakness.
  • In nonviolence, the means are consistent with the ends—they are the ends in the making.
  • Nonviolence has the capacity to reduce the effectiveness of police and state violence—the powerholder’s ultimate weapon — and to turn it to the movement’s advantage.
  • A clear policy of nonviolence makes it difficult for agent provocateurs to disrupt or discredit movements by promoting internal violence, hostility, dissension, dishonesty and confusion.
  • Successful social movements need participants and organizations that effectively play four different roles: citizen, rebel, social change agent, and reformer.

Steps Of A Nonviolent Strategy

We need a carefully developed strategy in order to transform social injustice and its underlying cultural assumptions. The following six steps are key phases of a nonviolent strategy, adapted from the work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Alvaro Diaz.

1) Information Gathering and Analysis

  • In approaching any injustice that we want to transform, we need to know the facts and factors of the situation. We need to understand the policy or condition “in the round” — from every angle.
  • First, this means carefully describing this policy and its consequences.
  • Second, this means identifying the power relations: who holds the power? We have to understand the position of the opponent and her or his interests that underlie this position. Who are the allies of the opponent? What are the cultural attitudes or assumption that keep this policy in place? In other words, how is this policy sustained?
  • But this also means analyzing the power of those opposing the policy. As Gene Sharp writes in The Politics of Nonviolent Action (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973), political power ultimately rests with the general population. Power is not a magical substance invested in policy-makers; in fact, policy-makers rely on the consent of the people. We need to analyze the ways the population has given its tacit or overt support to this policy.
  • These steps, then, are part of the Gandhian process of identifying the truth of the situation: the truth and untruth of our position, and the truth and untruth of the opponent’s position.

2) Choosing a Concrete Objective

  • This is based on our analysis and must address an injustice that violates central human and cultural values.

3) Dialogue

  • Using intelligence and persistence, communicate to the other party the list of injustices and your concrete plan for addressing and resolving these injustices. Look for what is positive in the actions and statements the opposition makes. Do not seek to humiliate the opponent but find creative ways to call forth the good in the opponent. Look for ways in which the opponent can also win.

4) Securing Public Support

  • If change does not occur, we must next secure public support for change. This involves a broad effort to educate the public, and at the same time, to build alliances with key organizations. This phase includes the development of “public participation events” (interfaith services, marches, petitions, phone-in campaigns, etc.).

5) Action

  • Nonviolent direct action is taken to move the opponent to work with you to resolve the injustices when the other means of persuasion have not reached the objective. These actions need to reveal with the greatest clarity the injustice being denounced. Such actions should be designed to give the largest number of people possible the opportunity to participate.
  • Direct action introduces a “creative tension” into the conflict. It is most effective when it illustrates the injustice it seeks to correct.

6) Resolution and Reconciliation

  • Education, dialogue and action can create the conditions for a humane alternative to the identified injustice.
  • This alternative addresses the specific issue at hand, and changes the dynamics between the opponents. Nonviolence seeks friendship and understanding with the opponent. Nonviolence is directed against evil systems, forces, oppressive policies, and unjust acts, not against persons.
  • Reconciliation includes the opponent being able to “save face.” Each act of genuine reconciliation is one step closer to the goal of human life, which Martin Luther King, Jr. called the “Beloved Community.”
  • Both the individuals and the entire community are empowered. With this comes new struggles for justice and a new beginning.

“In nonviolence, the masses have a weapon that enables a child, a woman, or even a decrepit old man to resist the mightiest government successfully. If your spirit is strong, mere lack of physical strength ceases to be a handicap.”

-- Gandhi

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice…Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance - how violently I hate all this; how despicable and ignoble war is…I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”

-- Albert Einstein

“We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we do about peace, more about killing than we do about living.”

-- WWII General Omar Bradley

“Do not return evil for evil. Avenge not yourselves, but rather give way to wrath; for it is written, vengeance is mine; I will repay, says the Lord. Therefore if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him drink: for in so doing you shall heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

-- Romans 12:17-21

“Put up the your sword into its place: for all those who take up the sword will perish by the sword.”

-- Jesus

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate.”

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The first duty of love is to listen.”

-- Paul Tillich

“Nonviolence is the inherent quality of women. For ages men have trained in violence. In order for them to become nonviolent they have to cultivate the qualities of women. Ever since I have taken to nonviolence, I have become more and more of a woman.”

-- Gandhi

“Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder…. the working class who fight all the battles, the working class who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace… They are continually talking about their patriotic duty. It is not their duty but your patriotic duty that they are concerned about. There is a decided difference. Their patriotic duty never takes them to the firing line or chucks them into the trenches.”

-- Eugene V. Debs

A journey of A thousand miles must begin with A single step.

-- Lao Tzu

“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice…Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance - how violently I hate all this; how despicable and ignoble war is…I would rather be torn to shreds than be part of so base an action. It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder.”

-- Albert Einstein

“Love is the most durable power in the world. Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

“One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better”

-- Daniel Berrigan

“No one has a right to sit down and feel helpless, there”s too much to do.”

-- Dorothy Day

“A country which has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality.”

-- John K. Stoner, 2001

“One is called to live nonviolently, even if the change one works for seems impossible. It may or may not be possible to turn the US around through nonviolent revolution. But one thing favors such an attempt: the total inability of violence to change anything for the better.”

-- Daniel Berrigan

“Military power is as corrupting to the man who possesses it as it is pitiless to its victims. Violence is just as devastating to the soul of the perpetrator as it is to the body and souls of those who are victims of it.”

-- American Friends Service Committee

“If any preacher tells you that personal salvation can be achieved without first paying attention to social justice, you may know by this sign alone that you are listening to a false prophet.”

-- Sydney Harris

“Spending hundreds of billions of dollars on Star Wars will take money away from education, programs for women and children, and health care. There is a direct link between promoting weapons for space and the destabilization of our communities. People must connect these struggles.”

-- Bruce Gagnon

“The world will change because of your smile… to sit, to smile, to look at things and really see them”

-- Thich Nhat Hanh

“Christians no longer take up the sword against nation, not do we learn war any more, having become children of peace, for the sake of Jesus, who is our leader.”

-- Origen

“Conceit, arrogance and egotism are the essentials of patriotism… Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all others.”

-- Emma Goldman

“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems, maintaining my convictions that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But, they asked, and rightly so, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn”t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their question hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against violence on the oppressed in the ghettos without first having spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - our own government.”

-- Martin Luther King, Jr. NYC April 4, 1967

“The soulless corporate exploiters and militarists, each poised to become our future oppressors, somehow always succeed in staying on the gravy train no matter which cards fate deals them. It seems like it would make sense to stop voting for, stop paying for and stop supporting any system or group that could turn out to be our future executioners.”

-- Gary Kohls

“Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”

-- Theodore Roosevelt, on April 19, 1906

“Every gun that is made, every warship that is launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world, in armaments, is not spending its money alone. It is spending the sweat of laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the clouds of threatening war it is humanity, hanging from a cross of iron.”

-- Dwight C. Eisenhower

“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.”

-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

“One cannot level one”s moral lance at every evil in the universe. There are just too many of them. But you can do something, and the difference between doing something and doing nothing is everything.”

-- Daniel Berrigan

“If you see injustice and say nothing, you have taken the side of the oppressor.”

-- Desmund Tutu

“Nonviolence, when it becomes active, travels with extraordinary velocity, and then it becomes a miracle.”

-- Gandhi

“These form the basis of peace work. You can get something from a book. That something may be so important as to lead you to the recognition of the real thing.”

-- Idries Shah

“Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security”

-- Benjamin Franklin

“War will exist until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and prestige that the warrior does today.”

-- John F. Kennedy

Love turns upon a commitment to a certain kind of seeing, a certain kind of sharing.

-- R.C. Solomon.

“There must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.”

-- Frederick Douglas 1857

“It may well be that the greatest tragedy of this period of social change is not the glaring noisiness of the so-called bad people, but the silence of the so-called good people.”

-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr