Social Movements and Activism in the USA

Stephen Valocchi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135258528
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

What can we learn when we listen closely to and engage in dialogue with social movement activists?

Social Movements and Activism in the USA addresses this question for a group of progressive activists in Hartford, Connecticut, who do community, labor, feminist, gay and lesbian, peace, and anti-racist organizing. Situated within the twenty-first-century landscape of post-industrialism and neo-liberalism and drawing on oral histories, the book argues for a dialogic and integrative approach to social movement activism. The dialogue between scholar and activist captures the interpretive nature of activists' identity, the variable ways activists decide on strategies and goals, the external constraints on activism, and the creative ways activists manoeuvre around these constraints. This dialogic approach makes the book accessible and useful to students, scholars, and activists alike. The integrative nature of the text refers to its theoretical approach. Rather than advancing a new theory of social movements, it uses existing approaches as a tool kit to examine the what, how, who, and why of social movement activism.

Chapter 1
Scholars and Activists in Dialogue

There is a certain irony to scholarly work on social movements. On the one hand, this work relies on the lived experiences of individuals as they encounter injustice and devise ways to fight it. These activists struggle on many fronts to make sense of the world around them, convince others of the justness of their cause, and confront numerous obstacles to achieving their goals. Their actions and campaigns are the raw material for scholarly books and essays on social movements. On the other hand, the questions and debates that inform the scholarship on social movements, while grounded in this raw material, are rarely formulated and resolved in dialogue with the individuals who supply this “raw material.” Many times scholars and activists talk past one another: scholars want the “big picture” and develop a conceptual vocabulary to bring that picture into focus while activists address immediate concerns and rely on experiential knowledge to make decisions about issues and strategies. Subsequently, we miss opportunities to benefit from each other’s stock of knowledge. Each purpose is important but there may be ways to reorient the knowledge produced by each for mutual benefit.¹

I have been reminded of this irony and these missed opportunities many times. My limited participation in various forms of collective action frequently leaves me frustrated with both the slow pace of change and the rapidity with which decisions need to be made. In these episodes, I struggle to find insights from the scholarship that can be useful for these decisions and, not surprisingly, come up empty-handed. Do we storm the president’s office because the administration has not been sufficiently responsive and risk losing supporters or do we continue the less dramatic path of “more meetings” and risk “death by committee”? Do we accept management’s “last and final offer” even though it is not all we wanted and risk alienating the more radical workers or do we accept the offer, define it as success, and risk cooptation? These are snap decisions, and the relevant research on these decisions either does not exist or is locked away in theoretical language and specialized methodology. These episodes of contention, moreover, do not lend themselves to the careful deliberation of scholarship by activists in areas where the research is indeed relevant. For example, social movement scholars know a great deal about the costs and liabilities of certain organizational forms for longevity, democracy, creativity, and cooptation (Breines 1989; Freeman 1973; Piven and Cloward 1979; Polletta 2002; Staggenborg 1986; 1989). Activists rarely have the luxury of learning from and then applying this scholarship.

My most productive interactions with activists have not been “in the heat of battle” but in the relative comfort of the classroom, coffee shop or, as I hope to demonstrate in the chapters to follow, in the conversations I had with activists for this book. In these contexts, reflection, deliberation and dialogue prevail, and it is those qualities that promote mutual learning. I want to model and extend these conversations in a more systematic way, and in the pages that follow, you will read the outcome of these extended conversations about progressive activism in one U. S. city—Hartford, Connecticut—at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. These dialogues and the commentary that contextualizes them demonstrate the intellectual benefits for students and scholars of social movements of listening closely to activists’ narratives and the practical benefits for social movement activists when scholars make their research accessible to organizers and activists. We can be better students and scholars of social movements if we listen to activists; activists can be more effective agents of social change if they listen to scholars.

For these reasons, the book privileges the “voices” of activists, letting them express themselves in their own words. Their words are just as important as, if not more important than mine and the success of this effort depends on reading both in relation to one another. In practical terms, this means that the (almost) verbatim excerpts from my conversations with activists comprise significant space in the book. As Richard Flacks (2005) argues in an edited volume devoted to a similar joint enterprise, productive collaboration comes from listening closely to activists’ theories of change. As Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer (2006) demonstrate in another similar project with Australian progressive activists, activists produce “practical knowledge” which can reorient scholars’ theoretical approaches to social movements.

The other source of frustration from my involvements in collective action is in the slow pace of change. My critical and cynical temperament focuses my gaze on the limits of reform, the need for radical restructuring, and the vast resources of those in power to thwart substantive social change. I know full well how my biography and background led me to that temperament. I am not quite a child of the 1960s as my students sometimes think I am. More accurately, I am a child of the 1970s: someone who came of age during the unraveling of the civil rights, student, and peace movements. I did not imbibe the heady optimism and earnestness of that earlier period. Instead, I participated in the 1960s only vicariously through its music, drugs, and sexual liberalism. The politics I imbibed were tinged with caution and cynicism as I witnessed the demise of dreams (perhaps fantasies) of revolution and the rise of political conservatism and economic insecurity. No surprise then that I ended up a scholar trained to stand at a critical distance from the world even as I continue to see the value of acting in that world. Thus, I am naturally drawn to and stand in awe of activists who seem to have this imperative to act and the temperament to do so. For that reason, the chapters that follow not only illuminate and contextualize the “what” of progressive activism in Hartford—what it is exactly they do, how they do it, and the challenges associated with it—but also the “who” of the activists themselves—how they came to do this work, why they commit themselves to it, if and why they become frustrated and why, despite the frustration, they persist. As these chapters argue, these two sets of questions are inseparable.

Thus, the dialogic stance of the book is partly in service to scholars and students of social movements. What can we learn about the utility of our existing concepts and perspectives when we listen closely to the stories activists tell about their lives and work? What new questions do activists pose that demand the attention of social movement scholars? The book’s dialogic stance is also in service to activists to help inform their work on progressive social change. How can our concepts and perspectives assist activists in understanding better the full range of options available for doing their work, the possible consequences of particular strategies and goals and the tradeoffs involved in particular courses of action? How can these concepts help activists gain a better understanding of the sources and possible resolution of some of the conflict and tension experienced while doing this work?

To begin to answer these questions, Chapter 2 presents an overview of the major social movement theories and argues that, rather than seeing these as competing paradigms, I recover the concepts that are most useful for understanding the interplay of constraint and agency, and structures and meanings that organize the dialogue between activists and scholars. I want to forge a path between activists who oftentimes insist on their agency in terms of their actions and beliefs and scholars who oftentimes insist on the constraints and structures that limit action and shape beliefs. In order to accomplish this balancing act, I describe the theoretical frameworks as they developed in interaction with the historical social movement landscape over the course of the past sixty years and examine the relevance of these frameworks for the dialogue between scholars and activists. As we will see, this interaction reveals an ongoing tension between the themes that animate the book: constraint and agency; structures and meaning.

Many of the concepts developed by these theoretical frameworks inform my historical overview of progressive activism in Hartford in Chapter 3. This chapter does several things. First, it places the activists whose stories you hear throughout the book in a long line of activism in the city and stresses the diversity of this progressive activism. Second, the historical analysis also helps us see both the uniqueness and typicality of Hartford as a setting for progressive activism. Hartford shares several economic, demographic, and political features of medium-sized cities in the United States but possesses a somewhat unique civic culture that both encourages and contains various forms of social action. Third, the historical analysis demonstrates the utility of sociological concepts to organize and analyze that history, particularly stressing the constraints and structures that shape contemporary activism and the ways in which individuals have constructed oppositional cultures and belief systems to challenge some of these constraints and structures. Finally, it introduces many of the institutional actors and activist campaigns referred to by progressive activists in subsequent chapters as they recount and reflect on their experiences.

Chapters 4 through 8 examine their experiences using the stories of activists themselves. These chapters mimic and model the nature of the conversations we had around strategies and goals (Chapter 4), resources and organizations (Chapter 5), participation and commitment (Chapter 6), activist burnout (Chapter 7) and activist identity (Chapter 8). Every chapter introduces some relevant scholarship on the topic and allows the activists to weigh in on the topic. This encounter serves any number of purposes. In some cases, it critiques the concepts; in other cases, it suggests solutions to or “ways around” dilemmas or unresolved tensions within activism. In general, this encounter is between the scholar’s emphasis on “the ties that bind” and the activist’s emphasis on the actions and meanings of individuals that loosen those ties. Its goal is to chasten the hubris of activists who see all things possible and counter the cynicism of scholars who see cooptation and compromise at every turn.

Chapter 4 uses this encounter to provide suggestions about strategies to move from reform-oriented goals to those that attempt institutional restructuring. Chapter 5 uses activists’ stories to remind scholars of the plethora of viable social movement structures and settings. Chapters 4 and 5 present activists speaking about the goals they pursue in doing social change work, the strategies they use to obtain those goals, the resources they try to cultivate to assist them in that work, and the networks or organizations they develop to give continuity to that work. The many excerpts from the oral histories are structured by and juxtaposed with the relevant theoretical frameworks and concepts that scholars use to examine strategies, goals, resources, political opportunities, and organizations. This encounter yields several outcomes. For social movement scholars, it provides some suggestions about improving those concepts and frameworks. For activists, it provides some clues to resolving or thinking differently about some of the dilemmas and issues involved in their work.

Chapter 6 gives both scholars and activists a different way of approaching recruitment and commitment, moving scholars away from additive or monocausal understandings and showing activists the untapped resources and techniques they possess to mobilize members. The chapter features activists’ personal stories about how they were recruited into and became committed to activism and the strategies they use to encourage participation in progressive activism. Unlike the way that scholars have presented that process, activists describe it not as a function of a single factor or even a combination of factors accumulated in an additive manner. Instead, we see a variety of pathways to activism, all interactively constructed across a number of biographical, social-network, and event-driven dimensions. The stories do participate in the concepts that social movement scholars use to describe these processes but they complicate and deepen these concepts in many ways. This encounter between concepts and stories provides some insights into techniques activists might use in doing their recruitment and solidarity-building work in various organizations and campaigns.

Chapter 7 uses concepts of abeyance and plausibility structures (Nepstad 2004; Taylor 1989) to point to the importance of social supports when doing activist work. In the absence of formal supports, activists talk about the informal ways they use to manage burnout and conflict within their activist work or, more generally, to balance their activism with other areas of their lives. This encounter challenges scholars to attend to these informal methods of support and activists to attend to formalizing some of these informal techniques.

Chapter 8 employs the now-popular concept of collective identity to explore progressive activism not only in terms of the strategies, goals, coalitions, organizations, and opportunities but also in terms of the ideologies or belief systems of the activists themselves.² For activists, it encourages a reassessment of those typical concerns (e.g. strategies, goals, etc.) in terms of the individuals who believe in them and pursue them in different ways because of their identities. By showing activists that the ideas, strategies, and goals of a campaign or organization are not necessarily precisely shared by all participants of that campaign or organization, this chapter opens up a new set of challenges for activists.

The Activists and Their Activism

As a teacher of courses on social movements, I am frequently frustrated by the scholarship available in this area. Most of it is so dense with theory, concepts, hypotheses, and statistical procedures designed for causal analysis that the excitement, the uncertainty, the full array of human emotion is squeezed out of it.³ In order to reinsert this energy into the study of social movements, I put “front and center” the words, stories, rhetoric, and emotions of over thirty activists—men, women, young, old, religious, secular, Black, white, Latino, straight, gay, bisexual, queer—who have devoted a significant part of their lives to the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes frustrating, and oftentimes difficult work of social justice, democracy, and equality.

The result of six years of oral history interviewing, Social Movements and Activism in the United States gives voice to the lived experiences of men and women who work for progressive social change in the city of Hartford, Connecticut, one of many medium-sized cities in the U. S. characterized by deindustrialization, urban poverty, and increasing inequalities between city and suburb. But to locate these activists solely in a local economic context does not do justice to the diversity of the work they do. They are simultaneously local, state, national, and global activists.

These activists do peace and global justice work at the local and national level, community organizing in the neighborhoods of the city, anti-violence, anti-racist, and immigrant rights work in those neighborhoods and around the state. They work in the progressive wing of the labor movement, in feminist organizations; they engage in campaigns for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights, and in organizing queer youth.

Although these activists work on different issues with different targets and different short-term goals and although they sometimes disagree on priorities, strategies, and goals, they reference one another when I ask them to name others in town doing similar work. In general, they talk about themselves as members of a progressive community dedicated to changing individual consciousness, the institutional practices of organizations in the city and region, the structures of power at all levels of government, and the culture of the larger society. They come from similar cultural and political traditions awakened or nourished in a diverse array of the area’s institutions: colleges and universities, churches, unions, social service agencies, and neighborhood organizations. As we will see, “similarity amidst difference” is a very good way to describe the identities of these activists, their activist biographies, their activist engagements, and activist philosophies. It may also be a good way to reconsider definitions of progressive activism that tend to restrict membership on any number of criteria.

To define progressive activism in such a capacious way may appear troubling to some who object to the inclusion of one sector or another in that community. While not wanting to engage in debates about the nature of the political left or the kinds of political work that contribute to or impede a progressive movement in the United States, I do want to distance my definition from those who would define it solely on the basis of class and economic justice issues.⁴ Of course, any definition of progressivism must include these issues and a political framework that acknowledges the structural inequalities generated by a capitalist system and the class divisions it produces. In an age of financial excesses, mortgage defaults, and corporate bailouts, a progressive movement must organize around a critique of capitalism.

Other inequalities and divisions are also enduring features of American society (and all western societies), most notably: race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Again, in an age when some pundits are encouraging a discourse of “going beyond” or transcending race and gender, it is imperative for a progressive movement to analyze and critique this “post-racial” and “post-feminist” discourse and recognize the continued but changed significance of race and gender cleavages in twenty-first-century America.

Some on the left have contended that political attention to these cleavages prevents a broad-based social justice agenda around economic transformation and leads to a fragmented identity politics, cultural isolation or inconsequential personal empowerment. I reject this narrow view and embrace one that begins from an analysis of structural inequalities in all their dimensions and complexities. Racism is a structural source of power. Sexism is a structural source of power. Nationalism is a structural source of power. Homophobia is a structural source of power. Moreover, they are not isolated and individual in their operation but interconnected with complicated material and social psychological effects.⁵ Activists who draw their motivation from or see their issues in terms of these dimensions qualify as progressive activists.

I would also want to entertain a definition of progressivism that embraces a service ethic in that definition. Again, some progressives would contest that definition since service work involves individual or even group-level benefits that may alleviate some of the distress of inequality but does not question the nature of nor directly challenges that inequality. This blanket refusal, however, does not account for the diversity of approaches to service delivery.⁶ Admittedly, some approaches do abide by a strictly social work approach that sees only the individual as the cause of the problem for which the service is delivered or that locates the problem in family or community breakdown and refuses a broader structural explanation. Other approaches, like the ones included here, involve an explicitly political component to that service ethic (Gilkes1988; Sacks 1988). Included in my sample, for example, are a few individuals who deliver services to specific populations in the city and region but do it utilizing progressive principles. For example, in some cases, this role of service provision is in addition to their m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Scholars and Activists in Dialogue
• 2 Theory and Activism
• 3 The Historical and Contemporary Context of Hartford Progressive Activism
• 4 What Activists Do: Developing Strategies, Conceptualizing Goals, Exploiting Opportunities
• 5 What Activists Do: Gathering Resources, Forming Organizations
• 6 What Makes Them Do It: Recruitment and Commitment to Social Movements
• 7 What Makes Them Tired: Activist Burnout and Managing an Activist Life
• 8 Who They Are: Collective Identity and Oppositional Consciousness
• 9 Rethinking Activists’ Questions and Scholars’ Answers
• Appendix
• Notes
• References