[The new book Practical Radicals takes inspiration from successful
social movements to identify tactics that pay off ]
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HOW CAN ACTIVISTS CHANGE THE WORLD? EXPERTS OFFER SEVEN STRATEGIES  
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Steven Greenhouse
December 17, 2023
The Guardian
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_ The new book Practical Radicals takes inspiration from successful
social movements to identify tactics that pay off _

'A lot of people think of Occupy Wall Street as a protest, but its
largest impact was changing the narrative.’, Justin Lane/EPA

 

In their new book, Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to Change the
World [[link removed]], Deepak
Bhargava and Stephanie Luce offer what they say are “winning
strategies, history and theory for a new generation of activists”.

Bhargava and Luce – professors at the City University of New
York’s School of Labor and Urban Studies – emphasize that
strategies can be taught to build successful movements. In their book,
they detail seven tactics that have been successfully used to change
the world: base-building, disruptive movements, narrative shift,
electoral changes, inside-outside campaigns, momentum, and collective
care.

Steven Greenhouse
[[link removed]], a longtime
labor reporter and senior fellow at the Century Foundation, conducted
this Q&A. It has been edited for length and clarity.

STEVEN GREENHOUSE: Why did you write this book?

DEEPAK BHARGAVA: I was motivated by a sense of frustration about the
state of strategy and strategic thinking among progressive movements.
To win big changes on the major issues of the day, we’re going to
need to up our game substantially. I wanted to explain: where
oppressed groups managed to achieve big gains despite incredible
asymmetries in resources, how did they manage to do that?

GREENHOUSE: Your book seems to be saying that the progressive
movement is underperforming, perhaps even failing. How so?

BHARGAVA: There are examples of breakthrough success in progressive
movements that we need to understand better. The book features some of
the successes we found the most inspiring, like the movement to
abolish slavery and contemporary examples like the Fight for $15 or
the campaign to divest from fossil fuels.

Jim Obergefell, named plaintiff in the Obergefell v Hodges case,
bottom center, speaks to the media after the supreme court’s
same-sex marriage ruling on 26 June 2015.  Bloomberg/Getty Images

The default position in progressive movements is often to organize
toward tactics, like noisy protests, that may or may not have any
impact on decision-makers. Sometimes we just keep doing the same thing
over and over, and that’s frustrating. We have to hold ourselves to
a higher standard.

GREENHOUSE: Why is base-building the first strategy you focus on in
your book?

STEPHANIE LUCE: Base-building is the fundamental power that underdogs
have. It’s based on the power of numbers, the power to come
together, whether in the form of a labor union, community organization
or tenant’s rights organization. That’s a bit of the foundation
for any of the other strategies. To pull off a successful strike, you
need to have built a solid organization among your coworkers.

GREENHOUSE: Narrative shift is another strategy you focus on. Why is
that important and what are some examples of how narrative shift has
succeeded?

LUCE: Sometimes narrative strategy is taken to mean just writing a
good slogan or press release. We came to see it as something much
deeper, as organizing in a way that listens to people, understands
their history and identity and helps people shape the common sense of
what’s going on – understanding that there are problems in the
world that you’re struggling with, eg the economy’s bad, but what
is the root cause of that? What are the villains we’re fighting
against? The narrative shift approach is about making meaning of
larger trends in society.

Base-building is the fundamental power that underdogs have. It’s
based on the power of numbers

As for examples, we talk about Occupy Wall Street 
[[link removed]]and
the marriage equality movement.
[[link removed]] A
lot of people think of Occupy Wall Street as a protest, but its
largest impact was changing the narrative, changing the understanding
of what was the cause of the 2008 economic crisis and what are some
ways out of that crisis, so that we’re not just blaming low-income
homeowners. Occupy developed a narrative about the 1% and 99%, and
that helped reshape the notion of who is the agent of change.

GREENHOUSE: A huge problem progressives face is that the other side
has so much money, corporate money, Koch network money. How can the
group that you call underdogs overcome that?

BHARGAVA: When underdogs win, they do so by using multiple sources of
power. The most important of those is people power, what we call
solidarity power. There are more underdogs than overdogs in almost any
situation, but it’s also crucial for underdogs to disrupt. By that
we mean not just to protest, although protests can be very important,
but to sometimes stop the functioning of an unjust system. This is
what workers do when they go out on strike. It’s what the Freedom
Riders did when they disrupted segregated interstate travel. It
involves everyday people taking big risks. Without that, it’s often
very difficult to get major social change.

GREENHOUSE: Another strategy you discuss is the momentum model. How
does that differ from base-building?

BHARGAVA: Momentum is both ancient and new. It’s new in the sense
that online technologies have enabled activists to assemble large
numbers of people very quickly around a flashpoint that stirs
people’s emotions. Sometimes those flashpoints are unplanned, as
with the murder of George Floyd
[[link removed]].
Sometimes people can stage big moments, as environmental activists did
when they organized arrests at the Obama White House to protest
the Keystone XL
[[link removed]] pipeline.
Those moments are opportunities to gather thousands of activists
together, not just for a one-off protest, but to train them in a
vision and techniques of how to launch campaigns when they go back
home. The momentum model combines scale with depth and trying to move
agendas at the local level.

A busload of Freedom Riders, including professors and students,
arrives in Montgomery, Alabama, on 24 May 1961. Perry Aycock/AP

GREENHOUSE: The United Auto Workers recently pulled off one of
the most successful strikes
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decades. Did they use any of your seven strategies?

LUCE: They certainly used disruptive power. They used the power to
shut down the auto companies and make them suffer and lose a lot of
money. That disruptive power also rested on solidarity power because
they had to make sure they had cohesion within the union. People ready
to strike have each other’s backs.

Now that they’re moving from the strike to an ambitious organizing
drive, they’ll be using both the base-building approach and the
momentum approach in trying to organize auto plants over the coming
months.

GREENHOUSE: One of the biggest challenges facing labor right now is
that more than a year after workers at Starbucks, Amazon, Trader
Joe’s, REI, Chipotle and Apple first unionized, none of them have
first contracts
[[link removed]].
What do you recommend doing about this?

LUCE: This is an example where we need a major disruption of
corporate power. The deck is stacked against these workers. They
don’t have the same kind of economic power and disruptive power the
autoworkers have. They don’t have the ability to strike in strategic
ways that shut the companies down so drastically. So they’re going
to have to rely on other forms of alliances, other partners that can
aggregate power and disrupt economic power. That could be broader
circles of unions and workers and non-union workers coming together.
It might be community partners.

GREENHOUSE: Our nation will hold unusually important elections in
November 2024. You talk about electoral change as a strategy. What
strategies do you recommend for the 2024 elections?

UAW wants to unionize Tesla. It faces a tough and high-profile battle
with Musk
[[link removed]]  Read
more
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BHARGAVA: Electoral strategies that are only about candidates are not
likely to succeed. There is cynicism about politics because it
hasn’t consistently delivered material improvement in people’s
lives. Engaging in elections requires a long-term organizing approach.
Our book features examples where electoral strategies are driven by
community groups and unions that aren’t just inviting people to
vote, but are inviting people to be part of organizations to work on
the issues they care most about. That community-centered approach is
going to be even more important in 2024 when many communities are
afflicted by despair or a deep distrust of establishment political
parties. That model will become central if we’re to get the kind of
turnout, particularly from young people and communities of color, that
we all hope for.

GREENHOUSE: What do you hope to achieve with this book, beyond selling
thousands of copies?

BHARGAVA: We argue that great strategists are made, not born. We think
the times are right for a broad scale investment in thousands of
everyday people to be the Ella Bakers and Bayard Rustins of our own
age. That kind of strategic rigor needs to be taught on a mass scale.
The challenges we face are so large and daunting that without many
thousands of people capable of understanding the power relationships
in our society and what the leverage points are, we aren’t going to
win. A big hope of this book is that it contributes to democratizing
great strategy, that it makes strategy accessible to many more people
in the years to come.

_STEVEN GREENHOUSE is a senior fellow at The Century Foundation,
where he writes about wages and working conditions, labor organizing,
and other workplace issues. Before coming to The Century Foundation,
he was a reporter for the New York Times for thirty-one years,
spending his last nineteen years there as its labor and workplace
reporter, before retiring from the paper in December 2014. He is the
author of Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of
American Labor, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2019._

_DEEPAK BHARGAVA is a policy expert on issues of poverty, economic
justice, racial equity, and immigration at CUNY School of Labor and
Urban Studies.  He has extensive practical experience in community
organizing, leadership development, social movements, progressive
strategy, issue campaigns, coalition building and voter mobilization.
Prior to joining SLU, he was President and Executive Director of
Community Change and Community Change Action for 16 years, two of the
premier national organizations supporting grassroots community
organizing in low-income communities of color in the United States. He
has trained and mentored hundreds of leaders who play key roles in
progressive organizations and social justice movements, and worked to
establish important labor-community partnerships at the national level
on issues such as immigration reform, health care, and fiscal policy._

_STEPHANIE LUCE is a Professor of Labor Studies at the School of
Labor and Urban Studies [[link removed]], and a Professor of
Sociology at the Graduate Center
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City University of New York (CUNY). She received her BA at the
University of California, Davis and both her PhD in sociology and her
MA in industrial relations from the University of Wisconsin at
Madison. Best known for her research on living wage campaigns and
movements, she is the author of Fighting for a Living Wage, and
co-author of The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy, and The
Measure of Fairness. She is also author of Labor Movements: Global
Perspectives. _

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