On Action
Taking action is one of the hardest things to train organisers to do well. Failure to cultivate our collective imaginations hamstrings our impact and suffocates our movements. Learning everything we can, digging deep into tradition and remembering not all action needs to be public can help
Marshall Ganz describes learning to organise as like learning to ride a bike. You can't do it by reading books about cycling - you learn it by getting on, falling off, and going again. That means most often folks learn action from participating in the actions of others: media stunts, letter writing, demonstrations, assemblies.
The challenge here is that organisers end up learning to re-enact, rather than to take action. We start petitions because that's the done thing. We escalate with a stunt or a demonstration. We might take it further into disruption and direct action. But this re-enaction is killing our movements.
Saul Alinsky wrote that the purpose of action is in the re-action, he argued that we should design our actions based on what we want to happen as a result. Re-enaction of old tactics gives our targets a chance to get used to them, and so they lose potency. As the tactics lose potency so too our supporters lose confidence in their likelihood of success, and so their willingness to participate collapses. These are bad reactions. And where organisers avoid re-enaction, they often do so by falling into two other traps:
Dumbing down: struggling to persuade people to act alongside them they reduce the request into something ever smaller - "just turn up this once", "just sign the petition", "just one click"...Often this doesn't work, people just don't buy it. But when it's successful things are not much better - it mis-educates people on the true cost of social change and traps organisers in a cycle of ever larger aggregation where we have to get even more petition signatures than last time
Overreaching: organisers ask too much of those they want to work with, inviting them to take actions too far beyond their capabilities, interests and understandings of themselves. You know this has happened when no one shows up. As important as the level of risk and complexity, but often overlooked here, is what I call the hinge. Hinges help people see a proposed action as something someone like them might do or has done in the past, it situates a political act within their emergent understanding of themselves
So how can we cultivate our collective imaginations and avoid re-enactment, how can we strike the right balance between dumbing down and overreaching? How can we think up the actions that will deliver the types of reaction we want? Here are a few principles I find useful:
Food for thought
In the summer of 2016 we were deep in the fight to help refugee children stranded in the Calais Jungle. We’d helped about 60 kids to reunite with their families so far, winning case by case in the courts and forcing the government to bring them to the UK, and this had provided a spine to wider campaigning work such as our challenge to the demolition of the Jungle and the fight for the Dubs amendment.
And then it ground to a halt. We kept winning in the courts but the government, convinced that every child safely reunited would create a pull factor for others, realised they could drag out the transfer process itself for months. Kids would win their case and then wait in the Jungle for a month, two, all the while at acute risk. We petitioned, we challenged in parliament, we litigated. Nothing.
Months earlier, driving back through the joint British & French controls off the Eurostar, I’d been struck by how easy it was for us to make the exact same journey people were trying to do while risking their lives. Having seen HBO’s documentary on the Freedom Rides one couldn’t not think about just putting these kids in a car and driving them to their families in the UK, so that’s what we threatened to do.
A group of a dozen Bishops & Rabbis signed a letter to the Home Secretary saying that if the children with court orders hadn’t been transferred within two weeks that they’d go and get them themselves. Within hours the Permanent Secretary called me up and invited me to lunch. We sat there discussing everything under the sun except those children until he paused and said, “so, these kids. You do realise if you go ahead you’ll all be arrested and the children will be placed at even greater risk?”
We sat there in silence for one minute, two, and then his assistant interjects “and of course here are the dates we plan to transfer them ourselves” handing me a paper sheet. I looked over the sheet and said we’d only call off the action if I got a written guarantee that no child with a court order would ever have to wait more than two weeks for transfer again. An hour later I got the email, the deal was done. As Alinsky also wrote, sometimes the threat of action proves as powerful as the action itself. Over 1,000 children were subsequently brought to safety through the Dublin 3 this agreement helped operationalise.
Organisers must be continually learning about the actions taken by other groups at other times on other causes. Reading like Rules for Radicals, like Why We Can’t Wait, like Heart of Race, like I Must Resist, like Satyagraha in South Africa - these are all essential food for the imagination. Self study is critical, and so are relationships between different causes and generations of organisers - my friend Jo Beardsmore shared that it was the actions of Reclaim the Streets that inspired UK Uncut’s high street occupations.
Traditions as foundations
In 2014 food bank usage across the UK had started to explode. Churches across the country were starting food banks, hundreds of thousands of people were turning to them as welfare reform and austerity bit, and yet it felt like there was no accompanying sense of crisis.
We knew that the thousands of volunteers starting foodbanks felt a deep discomfort at the role they were being called to play. They wanted a way to challenge the cause of hunger as well as treating it in their communities.
Every Easter many Christians will give up certain types of foods or spend a period of time fasting. Having read An Organiser’s Tale by Cesar Chavez, and seen the role of fasting in other movements, in End Hunger Fast we invited people to explicitly fast in solidarity with those going hungry.
By picking an action within an existing tradition of those we sought to mobilize we were able in three months with a team of just four volunteers and a budget of £5,000, to mobilise 75,000 people, win a meeting with the Prime Minister and hit 7 front pages - really putting the rise of hunger in Britain on the political agenda for the first time.
The traditions of those we’re working to organise and mobilise provide vital inspiration for action, and where actions authentically sit within these traditions they provide a ready hinge for people from that community to participation at scale and speed. Hinges often combine the personal and the prophetic - they find ways to make individual action part of a broader collective effort at social transformation. Activists often see these two in tension, rather than recognising the dynamism of their complementarity.
Hinges can be found even for traditions defined in the loosest sense. When the Jungle was due to be demolished and we were concerned that kids we were working to help would be displaced we wanted to find a credible and impactful way for our celebrity supporters to raise hell. Almost everyone remembers being assigned a buddy on school trips, so that was what we did here. Celebs who signed up was assigned a specific child as a buddy, they paid £2,000 to cover their legal fees, and they were put on notice to scream bloody murder if their child went missing. Dozens of A-List celebs signed up putting the risk to kids on front page after front page and raising tens of thousands of pounds. Because of the financial contribution, and because budding sits within our collective traditions, not a word of criticism was leveled at the "talent" - unlike other efforts with weak hinges.
And it’s not just the traditions on our side that we can leverage. Following the financial crash in 2008 I spent years with friends fulminating on how to hold the banks more meaningfully to account. Moving our money and our debt seemed like the obvious answer, but again the challenge was to cut through at a scale that would actually deliver meaningful impact.
There is one image every banker fears - a line of people at a branch all withdrawing their money, a run on a bank. In Move Your Money UK we used this fear as the launch pad for our campaign, organising a crowd to all head to Barclays the day of their bonus announcement to form a queue, withdraw our money and close our accounts.
Private and powerful
Many organisations and campaign groups lean to always taking public actions. They often rightly argue that it’s only if an action is public can it be seen by their support base, and only if seen by their support base that the action also helps build the organisation alongside moving forward the cause.
This may be partly true for organisations that run off “big email” - those large lists of supporters rather than active members mentioned above. It is also the case that too much that's private can stifle participation, but in organisations where there are deeper ties people can participate in and tell the stories of actions that didn't go public, like the Calais Freedom Ride that never happened.
And sometimes, simply, public actions won’t deliver the change we seek. In Nottingham in 2012 Councillor Jon Collins had what felt like an unbreakable grip on the City Council. He had an enormous majority, strong support from key clients in the Labour Group, and a reputation for taking any kind of challenge appallingly badly.
The embryonic Nottingham Citizens alliance had set out to help the dozens of refugee and migrant families we’d found living rough in the city and bouncing from couch to couch, having been cut off by the No Recourse to Public Funds Policy while being barred from working. We wanted the city to step in, the challenge was how to get Jon Collins to agree.
Knowing any public challenge would be rebuffed we got local Labour party members to ask him to meet with us and hear about the problem first hand in St Andrew’s Church. When Cllr Collins arrived, just before we began the meeting, one older Labour member Konnie Lloyd, invited him to go for a brief walk around the churchyard. That walk led through the cemetery where, in a small cave, we had found a young Afghan asylum seeker called Zakir living. Cllr Collins met Zakir, saw where he lived and heard why, and then came into the meeting ready to find a solution. Until now we never spoke about what had happened outside the organisation, even though Zakir’s story made the evening news, but justice was done and the families housed.
Remembering that our targets are people, that they can be reached privately as well as publicly, massively widens the field of available action to potential organisers.
Last Thoughts
Taking great actions is necessary but also hard. For every great action above I have had dozens of failures. There was the time I ran the Robin Hood Half Marathon on my own raising funds for the marathon’s sponsor - Ikano - to pay a living wage, because none of our members had fancied joining me. There was the time I persuaded friends to jump in my car and come to Wells, only to be dressed up as Sheriffs and forced to run around pretending to be there searching for the local MP after he fiddled his expenses. There was the time friends and family bailed me out of a crowdfunding campaign aiming to repay the funds used by the British Parliament to purchase the Parthenon Marbles.
But by taking more action, by talking and reading far far more about it, organisers can cultivate the dynamic collective imaginations needed to find the ations that will both win change and energise our organisations.
