Figure 1: Four Roles of Social Activism

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CITIZEN

Effective

Promotes positive American values, principles, and symbols, e.g., democ­ racy, freedom, justice, nonviolence

Normal citizen Grounded in the center of society Promotes active citizen-based society where citizens act with disinterest to assure the common good The active citizen is the source of legitimate political power

Acts on "confirmatory bias" concept Examples: King and Mandela

Ineffective

• Naive citizen: Believes the "official policies" and does not realize that the powerholders and institutions serve special elite interests at the expense of the majority and the common good OR

• Super-patriot: Gives automatic obedience to powerholders and the country

REBEL

Effective

• Protest: Says "NO" to violations of positive, widely held human values

• Nonviolent direct action and attitude; demonstrations, rallies, and marches including civil disobedience

• Target: Powerholders and their institutions, e.g., government, corporations

• Puts issue and policies in public spot­ light and on society’s agenda

• Actions have strategy and tactics

• Empowered, exciting, courageous, risky, center of public attention

• Holds relative, not absolute, truth

Ineffective Authoritarian anti-authoritarian Anti-American, anti-authority, anti- organization structures anfl rules

Self-identifies as militant)radical, a ^ lonely voice on society's fringe V \) Any means necessary: Disruptive tactics and violence to property and people Tactics without realistic strategy Isolated from grassroots mass-base Victim behavior: Angry, dogmatic,^ aggressive, and powerless . Ideological totalism: Holds absolute truth and moral, political su p e rio rity '

Strident, arrogant, egocentric; self \ needs before movement needs v * Irony of negative rebel: Negative rebel similar to agent provocateur ^

r?.j L J asfuv ^

THE FOUR ROLES OF SOCIAL ACTIVISM 29

REFORMER

Effective Parliamentary: Uses official main­ stream system and institutions — e.g.; courts, legislature, city hall, corporations — to get the move­ ment's goals, values, alternatives adopted into official laws, policies, and conventional wisdom Uses a variety of means: lobbying, lawsuits, referenda, rallies, candidates, etc. Professional Opposition Organizations (POOs) are the key movement agencies Watchdogs successes to assure enforcement, expand successes, and protect against backlash POOs nurture and support grassroots

Ineffective

• POOs: Dominator/patriarchal model of organizational structure and leadership

• Organizational maintenance over movement needs

• Dominator style undermines move­ ment democracy and disempowers grassroots

• POO "Realistic Politics": Promotes minor reforms rather than social changes

• POO co-optation: Staff identify more with official powerholders than with movement grassroots

CHANGE AGENT

Effective

• Organizes People Power and the Engaged Citizenry, creating participa­ tory democracy for the common good

• Educates and involves the majority of citizens and whole society on the issue

• Involves pre-existing mass-based grassroots organizations, networks, coalitions, and activists on the issue

• Promotes strategies and tactics for waging long-term social movement and Stage Six

• Creates and supports grassroots activism and organizations for the long term

• Puts issue on society's political agenda

• Counters new powerholder strategies

• Promotes alternatives

• Promotes a paradigm shift

Ineffective

• Too utopian: Promotes visions of per­ fectionist alternatives in isolation from practical political and social action

• Promotes only minor reforms

• Movement leadership and organiza­ tions based on patriarchy and control rather than participatory democracy

• Tunnel vision: Advocates single issue

• Ignores personal issues and needs of activists

• Unconnected to social and political social change and paradigm shift

30 DOING DEMOCRACY: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements

Finally, the roles are related to specific Movement Action Plan stages (described in Chapter 3). While all the roles are needed in every stage delineated by MAP, one role is usually predominant in any particular stage. For example, the rebel role predominates in the take-offstage, while the change agent predominates in the majority public opinion stage. Change agents and reformers often get upset when their movement is in the take-off stage because of the dominance of rebels. They do not realize that at that particular stage the rebels are best suited for the job and that this is the normal developmental process of social movements.

PLAYING THE FOUR ROLES INEFFECTIVELY

Movement activists and organizations sometimes play the four roles in ways that violate the normal process of social movement success. Playing the roles ineffec­ tively can greatly undermine a movements effectiveness or even destroy it completely (see Figure 1).

Ineffective Citizen

Activists play the citizen role ineffectively by being naive, by believing the official party line and policies of the powerholders as if they were true. An ineffective citizen believes that powerholder leaders and institutions are acting in the best interests of the common good, rather than serving special elite interests at the expense of the rest of society. Many Americans, including most movement activists, have been socialized to uncritically believe in America and the “American Way of Life.” They may accept the official story that the United States is always working for peace and democracy around the world against dictators, terrorists, communists, or “rogue states.” They may fail to recognize that the United States supports ruthless dictators around the world, often opposing the efforts of oppressed people to establish their democratic rights. Many social movement activists, therefore, are only aware of the powerholders’ harmful role in the par­ ticular issue that concerns them.

Ineffective rebel

Ineffective rebels often use strident rhetoric or aggressive actions and display defiant and anti-authoritarian attitudes against powerholder institutions and individuals. Their militant protest actions are usually driven by strong feelings of anger, hostility, and frustration. They advocate change by any means necessary, including disruption and destruction, regardless of how it affects others. Even when other activists have organized nonviolent social movement activities, many of these rebels characteristically engage in property vandalism and skirmishes with police. Their authoritarian anti-authoritarianism often mimics the oppressive

THE FOUR ROLES OF SOCIAL ACTIVISM 31

attitude and behavior of the powerholders they hate. They alienate not only the people who aren’t involved in a social movement, but most movement activists as well — even though they need both groups to achieve their stated goals. An extreme form of the ineffective rebel is the negative rebel, who is described in the next section.

Ineffective change agent

Ineffective change agents adopt ideologies and undertake activities to achieve a better world, but they either oppose or are unconnected to the long-term process of building the social and political conditions needed to achieve their vision at the societal level. Ineffective change agents try to alleviate symptoms without pro­ moting systemic change and a paradigm shift. They call for reform, not social change. For example, the “not in my back yard” (NIMBY) anti-toxic waste pro­ testers oppose toxic waste dumped in their own neighborhood, but often do not oppose either the growth and prosperity system that causes toxic waste or the dumping o f it elsewhere.

On the other hand, some ineffective change agents promote utopian ideas, but they don’t engage in the hard work of grassroots organizing to achieve them. They believe that envisioning and proclaiming the new society is enough. Some anti-hunger projects of the 1970s, for example, envisioned a world without hunger without any concrete program for ending hunger. For over a decade, such organizations collected tremendous amounts of money, while world hunger esca­ lated. Other Utopians advocate personal growth or alternative rural lifestyles in ways that could only be achieved by society’s privileged, highly educated, and over-consuming upper-middle and upper classes.

Ineffective reformer

Some reformer behaviors conflict with movement success. Many reformers are based in national and regional offices of POOs. These generally have traditional oppressive hierarchical organizational structures, large staffs and budgets, boards of directors, and large memberships. Their own organizational maintenance needs often take precedence over the political actions that the movement requires from them. Catering to big funders, foundations, and powerholder-laden boards of trustees inevitably leads to moderate or conservative politics that don’t stray too far from the status quo. For some professional movement bureaucrats, the desire to preserve their career, high salary, and high-status job inhibits their advocacy of controversial social change.

When social movements get to the point where they have gained a majority of public opinion and are on the verge of achieving alternatives, powerholders and mainstream institutions try to split or undercut the movement by offering minor

32 DOING DEMOCRACY: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements

reforms. The ineffective reformers start making agreements in the name of “real­ istic politics,” usually over the objections of the grassroots groups. Then they become cut off from the grassroots and the general public, whom they believe do not understand how “The System” works. For example, during the early 1980s, while the anti-nuclear weapons grassroots efforts staunchly opposed cruise and Pershing 2 nuclear weapons, the Washington-based movement lobbyists unilater­ ally and quietly refused to oppose these weapons. They thought such opposition was unacceptable even to liberal congressional Democrats and Republicans.

The staff of professional opposition organizations often act as self-appointed leaders of social movements. In coalition with staff of other POOs, they behave as if they represent the movement, deciding on strategies and programs for the entire movement and then sending directives down to the local levels. This oppressive hierarchical behavior, combined with conservative politics, splits the POOs off from grassroots activists, especially when the POO is a national or regional organization dictating to activists in local groups. By playing the role of movement bosses, the POO staff disempower the grassroots. They undercut the movements power and success because all the power of social movements is based in the grassroots.

All of those who play ineffective roles believe that their approach is the only one that counts and regard activists in other roles, promoting other programs, as naive, unimportant, or even harmful. They fail to see that social change requires a complex, multi-dimensional web of approaches and coalitions that support each other, creating a united front.

The Negative Rebel

The negative rebel deserves special attention because it is the most confusing and potentially harmful of the roles of activism. Negative rebels are often self-defined radicals who advocate militant actions and revolutionary ideologies for funda­ mental change. Yet, their ideology, slogans, attitude, and activities are usually disconnected from any means of achieving their high goals. The activities of the negative rebel are mostly tactics oriented and are counterproductive to achieving their goal of radical social change. For example, they focus on militant activities at demonstrations, such as blockading a doorway for 30 minutes longer than the rest of the demonstrators, calling police derogatory names, or making surprise “attacks” on property so that the police will not discover them until after they are already on the site. The strategic question of whether these activities help or hinder the movement in achieving its long-term goals is not discussed.

Negative rebels tend to view themselves as being on the margins of both society and their social movement, challenging authorities, structural arrange­ ments, decisions, and policies. They usually view the world as polarized between

THE FOUR ROLES OF SOCIAL ACTIVISM 33

good and evil, revolutionary and reactionary — “we” who have the truth and are the vanguard of righteousness, against “them,” the powerful enemy. Their atti­ tudes, thoughts, and actions are dominated by deep feelings of outrage, anger, and hostility.

On the one hand, the negative rebel is widely accepted as a part of move­ ment culture and many negative rebels claim to be the most radical and politically correct of activists. On the other hand, they can be so damaging that powerhold- ers even hire infiltrators to play the negative rebel in an effort to subvert movements (these infiltrators are known as agents provocateurs). In addition, the mainstream media use the image of the negative rebel to characterize social movements so they can belittle and de-legitimize activists in the eyes of the public. Negative rebel activity makes such good headlines and copy that it usually over­ shadows the more positive movement efforts.

In the United States, many rebels define themselves as anti-American and passionately oppose the country, its symbols like the flag, and its traditions like the Fourth of July. They are the mirror image of the super-patriot. Anti- Americanism is devastatingly counterproductive to movements in the U.S. It alienates the 90 percent of Americans who are patriotic, often frightening them into supporting the powerholders and the status quo when they might have been persuaded to support the movement. Anti-Americanism turns off ordinary citi­ zens and makes it almost impossible for them to listen to the movement’s message. That is why FBI director J. Edgar Hoover continuously tried to portray Martin Luther King as anti-American. Richard Gilber identifies the fear of being seen as anti-American as the chief factor restricting participation in the anti-nuclear weapons movement.2

While negative rebels appear anytime, they are especially prevalent within a year of the movement s take-off stage. The extensive media coverage and popular­ ity of a social movement during this time induces many opportunists to flock to the movement to promote their own ideology, organization, or personal rebel­ liousness. These people frequently end up filling the negative rebel role. Simultaneously, there is often a leadership vacuum and reduced discipline in the movement because many of the original leaders have either dropped out from exhaustion and depression or have moved on to new activities, such as public edu­ cation, local organizing, promoting alternatives, or parliamentary politics.

Ironically, negative rebels interpret the movement’s successful progression to the stage of acceptance by the majority of the public as an indication o f the failure and demise of the movement. They become demoralized because the powerhold­ ers fail to change their policies, even though a majority of the public has adopted the movements goals for change. This mistaken sense of failure causes negative rebels to call for desperate militant actions as a means of last resort. They may

34 DOING DEMOCRACY": The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements

claim, “We tried nonviolence and the soft approach. The powerholders wouldn’t listen. To achieve our goals we need to devise actions that are even more militant and forceful. We must use any means necessary.” Other activists who have lost hope of success join the negative rebel, acting out their frustration, rage, and despair through aimless, violent militancy. An indicator of the futility of this approach is that most of the infamous negative rebels from the 1960s, including the Red Brigades of Germany, the Weather Underground, and the many violent radicals described in the film Berkeley in the 1960s, have recanted their actions as mistakes.

Types of negative rebels

There are many different kinds of negative rebels. Some fit into several categories.

• True Believers. Many activists believe that the negative rebel role is the most powerful and militant way to act out their strong feelings of anger and com­ passion regarding a grave social problem. Some might doubt its effectiveness, but emotionally they need to take this type of strong and dramatic action.

• Hard Left. Some negative rebels are members of far left-wing groups whose politics combine revolutionary and anarchistic anti-authority ideologies along with militant action. Although small in number, their flamboyant and arro­ gant style attracts naive negative rebels and often gets the most media coverage. Hard-left negative rebels are typically organized into small tightly knit groups that sometimes quietly join movements and other groups to disrupt, destroy, take over, or manipulate them for their own self-serving purposes.

• Personal Rebels. The negative rebel role is ideal for people who are in a rebel­ lious stage of their personal life and want to establish their own identity. The movement may be the only place where these individuals can act out their anger and rebelliousness, flout authority, and trash property while they simultane­ ously claim to be acting in the name of a good cause, receive television cover­ age, and get positive feedback from others.

• Naive Followers. People who are new to social activism might join negative rebel activities at a movement event, not knowing that this kind of activity probably violates the guidelines for participants that were set out by the events organizers.

• Personal Opportunists. The dramatic and individualistic nature of negative rebel activities is ideal for egocentric and narcissistic individuals ro assume lead­ ership roles and to get media attention at the expense of the goals of the move­ ment. The loudest, pushiest, and most obnoxious can take center stage in the free-for-all of an ideology in which no one can tell anyone else what to do and everyone is free to do his or her own thing. This simply opens every demon­ stration and social movement up to being destroyed by agents provocateurs or other negative rebels.

THE FOUR ROLES OF SOCIAL ACTIVISM 35

• Agents Provocateurs. At least since the time of Machiavelli, powerholders have used agents provocateurs to subvert citizen-based opposition, and this practice has thrived in the modern era of social movements. In addition to gathering intelligence, a chief goal of agents provocateurs is to discredit movements in the eyes of the public and to destroy movement organizations from within by cre­ ating internal conflict, mistrust, confusion, dissension, disruption, mayhem, and general unhappiness.

In the United States, agents provocateurs have generally been undercover police officers who infiltrated movements and tried to make them appear vio­ lent and anti-American. The COINTELPRO Papers documents how the FBI hired thousands of people to infiltrate, disrupt, and discredit 215 dissident groups since the 1960s.3 A noteworthy example was the use of police as agents provocateurs to perform militant actions that resulted in massive clashes with police at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Officials claim that one of every six demonstrators was an undercover agent,4 including the shirtless radical with a red headband who climbed the flagpole in Chicago’s Grant Park during the convention, tearing the American flag down in front of the world’s television cameras. He was, in fret, a Chicago police officer.

Those disruptive, angry, radical activists who vehemently and militantly call for revolutionary change through any means necessary — disruption of meetings, property damage, battle with police, or the violent overthrow of authorities and the establishment — perform the same function as agents provocateurs. The irony of the negative rebel role is that it carries out the strategy and tactics of the pow­ erholders and authorities it claims to oppose so strongly.

"Doing your own thing" - and its limits

Unfortunately, aspects of negative rebel activity are sometimes accepted as legiti­ mate movement behavior and culture by people who believe the following stereotypes about social movements:

• Activists should use militant direct action that goes beyond traditional nonviolence, with no distinction between what is strategically effective or ineffective.

• Activists should freely express their anger and frustration because it is cathartic for people to act out their feelings and, after ail, the personal is political.

• People should be free to “do their own thing” by whatever means they prefer, unfettered by movement authorities, rules, and structures.

• No one in the movement should tell others what to do; after all, isn’t that the kind of authoritarianism that we oppose?

Negative rebels often justify their independent actions by claiming that the freedom to “do your own thing” is a sacrosanct cardinal principal of democracy

36 DOING DEMOCRACY: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements

and, by extension, of social movements. But this is not true in general and is par­ ticularly dangerous when applied to social activism. In a democracy, participants are not free to do whatever they want. Democracy requires a balance between individual freedom and responsibility to the whole group or society. Individuals are only free to act within agreed-upon boundaries, rules, and requirements. They must act in ways that do not violate the rights and privileges of other citizens or participants and that are necessary for the good of the whole group.

Negative rebels, however, commonly violate these principles of democracy. One typical way is by attending events organized by others and disrupting them with rowdy behavior, vandalism, and provocation of the police or other groups — acts that clearly flout the principles and agreements of the sponsoring organiza­ tions. These are subversive acts that constitute parasitic exploitation rather than democratic participation.

Interpreted this way, “do your own thing” (DYOT) not only violates the principles of democracy, but also makes social movements more vulnerable to the powerholder strategy of undermining movements through agents provocateurs. DYOT, moreover, is closer to the capitalist tenet of rugged individualism in the unfettered marketplace than it is to participatory democracy.

One of the recent examples of “do your own thingism” is the pro-violence groups, sometimes called the “black bloc,” that have uniformly adopted the anar­ chist black dress code and have shown up at a series of anti-corporate globalism demonstrations around the world, beginning in Seattle in November 1999. While the organizers and at least 99 percent of the participants in those demon­ strations clearly followed nonviolent principles, the tiny minority countered that DYOT was politically correct. They had a right, they claimed, to show up in the name of pluralistic relativism, and they argued that the imposition of nonvio­ lence was authoritarian and hierarchical.

There is a critical difference between authority and authoritarian and between hierarchy and oppressive hierarchy. The organizers and the participants who wanted nonviolent demonstrations had the authority to call for total nonvi­ olence because the decision came from the majority through a democratic process. They were acting in a hierarchical manner because they depended on the differ­ ent levels of structure required for groups of people to work together. The DYOTers, however, were both authoritarian and oppressively hierarchical because they forced their decision to act violently on everyone else. The nonviolent demonstration organizers, on the other hand, were not allowed to do their own thing, that is, have a nonviolent demonstration.

The DYOTers were free to organize their own demonstration at another time or place and proclaim ahead of time that they would attack police and destroy property. This would never happen, however, because negative radicals

- THE FOUR ROLES OF SOCIAL ACTIVISM 37

doing their own thing need a mass of nonviolent people to hide behind and use as human shields — that is the real reason they come to nonviolent demon­ strations.

But the responsibility for organizing a nonviolent demonstration ultimately falls on its organizers. They need to take a positive and direct stand ahead of time by proclaiming that the demonstration will be totally nonviolent and that only those willing to abide by the guidelines are invited to attend. Moreover, they need to have a clear position that they will denounce and oppose those who attempt to be violent. This position requires the organizers to include extensive plans and training in the organizing process to ensure the demonstration is totally nonviolent.

Negative rebels make bad revolutionaries

Despite their radical ideology and bravado, negative rebels usually act out of deep feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, and desperation. Because they see the powerholders and system as all-powerful and themselves as relatively powerless, negative rebels have little hope of achieving success. Consequently, they promote rebellious tactics Out of deep personal and political frustration and anger, and the resulting actions are disconnected from a practical strategy. There does not need to be strategy, accountability, or responsibility if one believes there is no chance of success. Many negative rebels act on the sense that “We have to do something; it doesn’t matter what.” As a result, many of their activities violate guidelines for achieving movement success, as the following examples show.

• Negative rebels alienate the public. Angry mob actions that include public vio­ lence, random trashing of property, skirmishes with the police, flouting the law, and interfering with the rights of others are widely viewed as intolerable. Negative rebel activities, therefore, not only turn the general public against the movement, but also scare many potentially sympathetic citizens into support­ ing the status quo and the powerholders.

• Negative rebels reduce movement legitimacy and power. A chief ingredient of movement success and power is convincing the majority of ordinary citizens that the movement, not the powerholders, is the true representative of widely held values, principles, and traditions of society. The actions of the negative rebel have just the opposite effect and turn the majority against social activism.

• Negative rebels cause movement burnout, dropout, and dissipation. While positive energy re-creates itself and stimulates movement growth, the negative rebels energy does the opposite. Negative rebels dissipate movements by mak­ ing activism unpleasant, inefficient, and ineffective.

• Negative rebels legitimize fascistic tactics. Mob street violence, clashes with the police, and property destruction are standard behaviors o f fascism. An unin­ tended impact of negative rebel behavior, therefore, might be the legitimization

38 DOING DEMOCRACY: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements

of behavior that can be carried much further by future fascists, especially where there is economic depression, political oppression, or economic or ecological collapse. What moral or ethical defense could negative rebels have if fascistic groups brutally attacked them? Indeed, the presence of negative rebels takes the power of nonviolence away from all demonstrations they attend — that’s why powerholders hire agents provocateurs.

• Negative rebels provide an excuse for police to be violent and for legislators to pass laws contravening basic civil rights of protest. This result is the oppo­ site of engaging more citizens in civic life and building democracy, which is the goal of nonviolent social movements.

These are some of the reasons why Lillian Heilman, referring to herself and others, said, “Rebels make bad revolutionaries.”

Curbing the negative rebel

Steps can be taken to reduce the harmful impact of negative rebels. Movement organizations need to establish clear, specific guidelines and standards of behavior for participants in both their internal affairs and their public events, based on the vision of a peaceful civil society. Similarly, individual activists need to take respon­ sibility for their own movement participation by becoming more mature political activists. They need to ask themselves, “How am I playing the four roles? Am I a negative rebel? How can I become a more effective activist? Are my personal issues of rebelliousness, guilt, anger, or powerlessness or my self-image as a militant radical getting in the way of my effectiveness?” Such questions could be pursued with others in discussion groups. Finally, activists need to continue experiment­ ing with participatory democracy, including learning how to balance individual freedom with responsibility and accountability within organizations and the movement in general.

MOVING FROM INEFFECTIVE TO EFFECTIVE ROLES

The effective ways of playing all four roles of activism have a common set of char­ acteristics, as do all four ineffective roles (see Figure 2). Effective activists also respect those playing the other roles effectively and are allies with them, while appropriately challenging and negotiating with those playing the roles ineffec­ tively. They also seek to play all four roles, as needed and appropriate.

THE FOUR ROLES OF SOCIAL ACTIVISM 39

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