Author’s note: This is the second article in a series about the challenges of activism and political organizing
The COVID-19 pandemic and movement for Black lives led to a significant upsurge in grassroots political organizing and changes in the methods used to galvanize people for a cause. As I argued in last week’s column, one of the most striking elements of these new initiatives, whether they were community-led or existed largely on social media, were bold, radical visions for combating the societal factors that led to these cataclysmic moments in the first place.
But as of 2024, there are few, if any metrics by which we can consider the explosion of activism over the past four years a success. Culturally, most of the energy that ignited your coworkers, classmates, neighbors and family members in response to systemic racism seems to have dissipated, vanishing as the 2020 protest wave died down or being folded into a heavily pacified non-profit-industrial complex.
A state that imposes violence on poor people of color and unleashes military violence across the world and a global economic system that will extract profits at any planetary cost are, all things considered, nigh-insurmountable obstacles for small community organizations and national movements alike. What’s more, as scholars like John Smith argue, the global capitalist system benefits even low-wage workers in wealthy nations like the United States through the “super exploitation” of even lower-wage workers in poor countries.
It only makes sense, then, that when the going got tough and it became apparent that political organizing is more of a full-time job than a pastime, Americans abandoned on-the-ground initiatives to counter white supremacy and create a more just and egalitarian society. But where material conditions and the relative comfort of many Americans are one explanation for why no sustained, popular movement came out of 2020, strategy and tactics are another. Throughout the late 2010s and 2020s, activists have fallen into numerous formulaic traps for maintaining, growing and mobilizing their organizations, leading to irrelevance and organizational meltdown at worst.
Here’s how to kill an activist organization in three easy steps.
1. Overly rely on social media.
Social media is useful for spreading an organization’s name and messaging, but only if it already has a successful ground game. Ultimately, an organization aims to affect material change in a place, whether that be Washington D.C. or a housing project. No matter how many social media followers an organization has for having all the right takes, that nebulous collection of internet clout is depreciated completely without a real-world presence to give your statements and infographics a tangible effect.
Much has been written about Slacktivism — which refers to a form of advocacy that takes place solely through sharing and engaging with posts on social media — to the point where the Slacktivists know that they’re doing Slacktivism. Organizations must challenge themselves to encourage potential Slacktivists in their own communities to show up and engage in initiatives. Flyering in public spaces, door-knocking and talking to strangers in parks and at the bus station, holding demonstrations to build a presence and hosting mass meetings to garner feedback from a constituency are all ways for organizations to unchain themselves from the attention sink of social media and build connections with people who are, so to speak, on your block.
Of course, social media is still instrumental for expanding to a wider audience and inspiring people to learn from successful campaigns or even growing your organization across city, state or national lines. However, it should be the last resort for primary outreach, being far less accountable than in-house, direct communications networks. If you want to condemn your organization to internet purgatory, followers matter much more than your neighbors.
2. Come up with unachievable, out-of-touch demands.
As someone with experience in activism and organizing, the second most common cause of burnout is exerting all your energy to move an immovable institution. Furthermore, without friends or fellow organizers to rage against the machine with, the goal of institutional change in any facet of society becomes evermore out of reach. Organizations and activists shouldn’t forget the big victories on the horizon — changing laws, uprooting forms of oppression, transforming systems. But they also shouldn’t forget that it takes small wins and popular messaging to build that foundation. Political goals and demands need to be crafted, tried and erred in collaboration with members of the community you’re actually trying to organize. At the very least, they should be doable. “Abolish private property,” for example, isn’t going to get very far if you’re trying to mobilize tenants against a landlord.
This isn’t to say organizers shouldn’t try to advance the political consciousness of the people around them. The point of organizing a community is to be among the people, but also to pull them forward when necessary. There’s no reason that unionizing factory workers couldn’t also avert their attention to local issues like police department funding or international issues like Palestinian liberation. Before this can happen, though, there needs to be a baseline of unity within that organization, allowing members to work out differences and advance as a collective body
3. Avoid structure, discipline and accountability.
Structure is good. That feels like an overly facile thing to write, but you’d be surprised by how many people are afraid of regimentation and leadership in an organization. Although concerns about power imbalances are reasonable, the accumulation and abuse of power among a small number of people — leaders in all but name — is just as, if not more likely to happen in a group with no governing structure, accountability measures or discipline.
Structure also allows for delegation, which is particularly important because the number one cause of burnout in my experience is concentration of responsibility and work in the hands of one person. Delegation helps prevent a culture of non-delivery and can allow people to be held accountable for shirking duties or not communicating. When these factors combine and tasks are not completed, an organization can risk folding completely.
The point of this article is not to bash activists who tried in earnest to organize but did not succeed — hence any vagueness. Rather, the point is to open up new possibilities for politically active people and give us all the chance to reflect critically on the social media-centric, loosely structured forms of organizing that have dominated our culture for the past decade. Only when we dissect the mistakes of the past can we win successes in the future.