Changemakers. Radical Strategies for Social Movement Organiser

When faced with the scale and complexity of the problems that face us, it is tempting to pull up the duvet and weep silently. The polycrisis reaches everywhere, and the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. Radical academics might like to think that the power of evidence and a reasoned argument might win the day, but their muttering is rarely heard outside the seminar room, or from behind the publishers paywall. So how to keep hope alive? In this book, such handwringing is put aside in favour of practical advice on how radicals might win. Jane Holgate and John Page have form in this area, having been long involved in many social protests, both workplace based and concerned with other social and environmental issues. They are serial dissenters, and in this intriguing and well-written book, they use their experience to put forward strategies that they think social movement organizers need to think about if they want to win. Some of these ideas come from trade unions and workplace struggles, but they range much more widely than that, referring to the civil rights movement in the United States, hunt saboteurs, gay rights, anti-fascist groups and so on. Holgate and Page are interested in what radicals can learn about ‘organizing for transformational social change’ (8) from successful and unsuccessful campaigns. This means being clear about strategy and theories of change because the point of the exercise is to gain power, not just smash windows and then go home. This means producing durable bottom up social movements. According to a pop management fable which they quote approvingly, if you chop a spider's head off, it will die, but a starfish can grow a new body from a severed limb (Brafman and Beckstrom 2008). The implication is that starfish organizations are more robust, and that organizers should be sceptical about charismatic leadership because it is vulnerable and myopic. It would be nice if someone had explained that to the US tech bros. For their illustrations, the authors turn to a more honourable tradition of organizing in the United States. Saul Alinsky was the founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a community organizing network established in 1940 in Chicago. Myles Horton established the Highlander Folk School (now the Highlander Research and Education Center) in Tennessee in 1932. Alinsky, in his 1971 Rules for Radicals, described a form of charismatic leadership which was always trying to stay ahead by setting the stage for any confrontation with the opposition. Horton, by contrast, was convinced that robust organization must be based on democratic community decision-making. The difference between their top down and bottom up approaches really structures this book, with the authors acknowledging the importance of Alinsky's inspiring ability to throw the opposition off balance, but continually preferring Horton's careful insistence that radicalism cannot be handed down from on high, but must be built by the people themselves. What Holgate and Page really want to encourage is not merely mobilizing, getting your supporters onto the streets for a demonstration, but long-term self-propelled organizing. Much of this work will not be heroic, not a ‘moment of the whirlwind’ (88) in which slogans are coined while speakers declaim, but a patient building of networks and resources which produce an inexorable movement towards change. Such organizing is also necessarily democratic and inclusive because it must connect to as many people as possible in order to be successful. Vanguardism will not work in the long term. Being ‘stuck in protest’ (240) will not help build robust and sticky alternatives. Another recent book from the same publisher comes to similar conclusions in terms of the long run prospects for enduring social change (Roth and Saunders 2024). It seems that change happens because of hard and hidden work in multiple sites, not dramatic confrontations. I really liked this book, but kept on hoping that it would not fall into the hands of the enemy. The strategies that Holgate and Page describe are, of course, reversible and could just as easily be applied by ‘take back control’ Brexiteers, MAGA populists, neoliberal managers and a host of pantomime villains. That is the problem with politics because there are always at least two sides, and they do not agree on who the white hats and the black hats are. It is also interesting that so many of the terms that the authors use are the staple of the business school too—leadership and management (and the difference between the two), as well as strategy, organization, empowerment, change, narrative and so on. It is sad, and I do not blame the authors for this, that there has been so little connection between industrial relations and critical management studies on these questions because many of these terms have been the objects of common critique and their reinvention is so important if we are to produce a low-carbon, high inclusion, high democracy economy (Parker 2018). This requires knowledge that goes beyond academic books, and Holgate and Page are also teaching these lessons through the Ella Baker School of Organizing, a training ground for activists of all kinds. Ella Baker played an important part in the civil rights struggles in the United States for most of the 20th century. In 1960, she helped to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and throughout her life was a powerful advocate for grassroots organization, for the ability of oppressed peoples of whatever kind to express their own criticisms of the system that bears down on them, and to formulate strategies for change. This book is a powerful argument for the possibility that we all might learn from Ella Baker and connect the university to wider struggles for social justice.