Thoughts on Movements and Consensus

I had an interesting conversation over lunch this week that left me in a decidedly philosophical mood. The conversation was about whether it’s more productive to work to build a consensus among the powerful and influential members of a community or whether mass, populist movements of ordinary people are more effective. During the conversation I admitted that it’s a smoother ride from idea to implementation for those who work the elites for their pet causes, though the idea seemed fundamentally elitist and undemocratic to me. Still, say whatever you want about democratic principles, when the elites want something done, especially in Spartanburg, it gets done.

There’s a famous Fredrick Douglass quote that says, ““Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Less often quoted though, is the context of that particular quote.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

Try as I might want to for the sake of my friends who seem to—on occasion at least—marvel at the efficiency of oligarchy, I can find no reason to disagree with Fredrick Douglass. The truly powerful people in a community (or a society) will never agree en masse to a move that threatens their own position. It’s not an evil on their part, at least not a conscience one; it’s simply the nature of power. No thinking person who sits as lord and master of the manor is going to argue that we should burn the manor down. The servants, however, may have a different opinion.

Movements are messy. Movements are invariably imperfect. Movements are sometimes destructive. But movements are the only tools for meaningful social change that have ever worked.

Without a labor movement, there would be no minimum wage, no eight-hour day, no child-labor laws, no social security, and no right to organize. Without the Civil Rights movement, there would be no Brown Vs. Board, no Voting Rights Act, and no Civil Rights Act. These were things that the powerful did not want. They were things that the powerful actively fought against, and were it not for the thousands who lost their lives fighting in those causes, these are things that never would have happened. Societies move forward because those without a seat at the table demand a chair.

It’s no different at the community level. Rent control in New York happened because tenants during the Great Depression demanded it. Berkley, California’s “People’s Park” didn’t exist until a group of people who wanted a place where free speech would be respected without condition seized it from the university, instigating a bloody standoff with then-Governor Ronald Reagan. City ordinances all over the country covering everything from public green space protection to affordable housing, and from benefits for same-sex partners of city employees, to the preservation of culturally significant historic landmarks all have their origins with community movements.

If a community’s progress is left exclusively in the hands of a community’s powerful members then we should never be surprised if that progress only seems to benefit those already affluent members, aside from the paternalistic sense of noblesse oblige driving the best-intentioned among those elites of course. Well intentioned though they may be, theirs is a paternalism that thinks of the underclass as a problem to be solved, not as a people who should be empowered. Those benevolent members of the beau monde never seem to come up with the right answers for how best to lift up the underclass because they spend all their time asking the wrong questions.

Like most other ideas I have, there’s a quote out there that sums this one up far better than I ever could. This one’s from Paulo Freire: “True generosity consists precisely in fighting to destroy the causes which nourish false charity. False charity constrains the fearful and subdued, the ‘rejects of life’ to extend their trembling hands. True generosity lies in striving so that these hands — whether of individuals or entire peoples — need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.”

If it seems like I’m throwing the idea of influencing the aristocracy as a means to bring change under a bus it’s because I am, but that’s not to say that I don’t think that sort of thing has it’s place. In areas less about the powerful versus the powerless, it can work effectively and quickly. That’s nothing to shake a stick at, but the issues where that sort of thing is possible are almost always benign matters that may have a perceived benefit to all of a community’s citizens, but never seem to address the disparities between those citizens.

I guess when you get right down to it; this whole thing is a lot simpler for me than it is for a lot of other people. Many people go through their lives never wanting to rock the boat, and I understand that. I’ve just always been the sort of person who doesn’t just want to rock the boat; I want to capsize the motherfucker, and drown the people who’ve been steering it. That’s one area of my radicalism I’ve never been able to completely abandon, and really, I hope I never do.

At the end of the day, it comes down to one point that I think is absolutely inescapable. Elites are fine with progress, so long as that progress doesn’t threaten their status. To me, any progress that doesn’t threaten the status of a community’s elites isn’t progress at all, at least not the sort of progress that truly matters. So when it comes to deciding how people seeking real change go about achieving it, I think the roadmap is already pretty clear.