“Activist Wisdom” not such a short book…

Attention Conservation Notice: This is a good book, that activists should read if they want to know a bit more about movement tensions and potentials(see footnote 1)

Its two authors, academics Sarah Maddison and Sean Scalmer set out to take activism seriously.
Their book

“tries to answer some of the most important questions posed by political activists. We spoke with campaigners in a range of social movements, and listened to their preoccupations. Our chapter titles do not reflect customary debates in the academic literature. They are reflections of the problems that our interviewees raised, and the tensions that they struggled with. Finally, this book is different because it takes the knowledge produce by activists very seriously…. Rather than seeking to show what academics can teach activists, we have approached this book in the opposite spirit. Activist Wisdom aims to learn from political campaigners in a range of contemporary movements.”

What do they hope to achieve?

“Three things, we hope: redirection, communication and theorisation. First, we will redirect students of social movements away from existing theoretical problems, and towards the problems that participants regard as most important and pressing. Second, we will foster communication between activists. Our accounts will inform active readers about the ways in which other campaigners deal with tensions and negotiate problems. Third, we will use these insights to reflect on existing concepts, and to work our way towards a new kind of social movement theory: more discursive and less geometrical; more practical and less abstract.”

To this end, a website might have helped, with some on-line discussion forums. I don’t know what the copyright implications are, but surely they wouldn’t have been insurmountable?

Anyhow, Maddison and Scalmer interviewed 19 participants at some length, from a gratifyingly broad range (not just the twenty to thirty something white middle-class ones, who are often over-represented in these sorts of studies), and this forms the basis for most of the book.

The first chapter, on the history of “social movement theory” from Gustave Le Bon onwards is very well done, free of jargon and minutiae. There is a brief glossary at the back of the book with useful capsule definitions of things like “abeyance structures” and “left melancholy“ and so on (see footnotes 2 and 3 below). Maddison and Scalmer certainly know their stuff, but there is no evidence that they’ve come to the activists with a summary of what might be useful in the academic literature. This could have been useful for the activists, and the activists’ comments on it could have perhaps improved it further. Why didn’t they do this? It may not have occurred to them, or perhaps they suffered from undue humility about the usefulness of academia, and were unwilling to run the risk of being accused of colonialism/hierarchy. If I get the chance I’ll asks them.
See the reviewer’s “Contentious Cats and Repertoire Dogs” (minus some hand-drawn diagrams of repertoires getting sussed and becoming ineffective etc).

The second chapter is on the nature of “Practical Knowledge” – what it is that activists do, and how they do (or don’t) transmit that knowledge to the next generation.

They quote one shell-shocked activist

“Some of the things that I would have taken as really obvious, in terms of activist stuff you do, are shock tactics in here! You know, maybe we should do a ring-around… maybe we should have contact lists that we use to contact people… Maybe we should have social things, where we bring people to the pub and have a chat and have a drink after work… Things that I would of thought of as relatively obvious strategies for anyone who’s organising a bunch of people are not regularly done… Because there hasn’t been a culture of campaigning, that knowledge has disappeared. Page 54″

This is one of the major problems for activists – the lack of institutions that can codify and “store” knowledge in useable formats. There is a lot or wheel reinvention going on, and it would have been good if Scalmer and Maddison could have pointed to some of the efforts made to capacity build and capacity-maintain.

The second part – and majority of the book – is given over to eight chapters based on themes that the authors have winnowed out from their interviews. The authors explore what they call “movement tensions.” These are “Expressive and Instrumental,” “Organisation and Democracy,” “Unity and Difference,” “Revolution and reform,” “Local and global” and “Hope and despair.”

This is useful insofar as it goes, but there are inevitably gaps… (see below).
They can display a very dry sense of wit at times. Writing on organisation and democracy they observe.

“Some are open about the need for leadership; others are more flexible, believing that the political context should determine the style of decision-making that is most appropriate. Some continue to value organizations. Others call their organisations ‘networks’, and tend to create and dissolve them with dizzying speed. Page 105

If I were being friendly critical, I’d say they’ve not (for reasons of time? Convenience?) got a random sample of activists. They’ve talked to people who are, for the most part, still active (or in NGO land, which almost amounts to the same thing).

If you’ll pardon me quoting from a review I did of a Climate Camp reader

What would have been interesting, useful and as far as I am aware unprecedented, would have been to do “exit interviews” with people who USED to be involved in Climate Camp but left the process. You could ask
# why did you get involved
# what was the ‘straw that broke the camel’s back’ for you leaving
# what were the build up factors for you, that made you uneasy
# as a sympathetic (?) outsider what do you think of Climate Camp now? What have you heard from people still involved?
# What are you doing now? Are you now in a period of recovery? Are you working on other projects- if so, what do you think they have that Climate Camp never had/lost?
# What do you think should be done?

If I were being slightly unfairly critical, I’d say occasionally they overdo the humility and don’t challenge activist formulations vigorously enough. Activism (done right) is a contact sport, and if activists feel “allowed” to try to change other people’s (political, economic) cultures, they shouldn’t expect a pass from academics. It’s tricky of course, because the academics don’t want to lose the trust and respect of their interviewees. One bad experience and the phone tree could spring to life and down would come the portcullis…
(for example, Doug McAdam admits his access to Freedom Summer participants was massively helped by a reference letter written by Howard Zinn).

If I were being really unfairly critical, I would say they didn’t focus on the issues I wanted them to focus on. There’s nothing on the frustrations for activists who don’t want to become part of the soft State/Green Confucians but are heartily sick of the “expressive” activists who simply want to have periodic spasms of self-congratulatory martyrdom that don’t actually weaken the opponent or strengthen the allies.
There’s nothing on accountability structures, or on how the pathologies of activism can reinforce the “Smugosphere”. There’s nothing on what strategy-design and implementation in the absence of a “centre” means. But no one book can deliver everything!!

Is the book perfect? No, of course not (see above). Is there heaps in it worth knowing, and useful articles and books cited in the bibliography? Yep. Am I reading Sean Scalmer’s earlier book “Dissent Event: protest, the media and the political gimmick in Australia” and learning lots from it? You bet. Do I think that the work of Sarah Maddison, now doing work on Mapping the Australian Women’s Movement, is worth busy activists’ time and mental bandwidth? Oh yes, oh yes indeed.

A final note. The library I got this from is huge. There are miles of shelves and shelves on all sorts of topics. That’s good, flourishing intellectual culture and all that. And how much shelf space is taken up by books about how groups of citizens can improve the world and challenge State and Corporate power? Well, not so much. A metre or so, and that’s a generous estimate. Perhaps it’s a sign of what our Lords and Masters (and “the system”) think is worthy of funding Maddison and Scalmer, at least, have provided some work on what democracy could look like, and doubtless will do more. That is to their credit.

Footnote 1: That it does not quite meet expectations may simply be a reflection on the cantankerous nature of the present reviewer. He’s been accused of being too tough in the past. And he has robust views on what most social movement academics do and who they serve.

Footnote 2: Abeyance structure The political organisations and networks of people who keep a political movement alive in times of relative inactivity. Abeyance structures are often hidden from the wider public, but they play a special role in ensuring the continuance of radical ideas, tactics, identities and traditions.

Footnote 3: Left melancholy A longing for an imagined time when social movement goals were clear and agreed upon without a complicating attention to difference.