The Stories We Tell Ourselves Determine the Actions We Take

Two books I read recently reflect two different stories about power and change.  How to Blow Up a Pipeline by Andreas Malm, and Rules for Radicals by Saul Alinsky, are both primers on how to upend entrenched economic, social and political power structures. But the underlying  stories about power are far different and so inevitably are the choices they give us of how to achieve change.

The stories we tell ourselves about how power works shape how we understand the world and our place in it. They give us the possible strategies we can use to get what we want. If the story is flawed, the actions that flow from that story will be ineffective.

We seldom pause to evaluate our stories. Caught up in the debate about what action should be taken today we focus on tactics. The underlying story that makes sense of those tactics is assumed. It is the  way the world works.

For Malm, the “ruling class” has power and then there is the rest of us. The ruling class is named, but not described. It is to their ministers that we “hand over a list of demands”. We can protest or resist. Persuasion and force are the choices we have.

“Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like … when I make sure everyone else stops going along too.”

Malm’s argues that in the decades we have known that the devastating effects of climate change are caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and since despite protests of every kind, nothing has changed, it is time to consider the violent destruction of the industry’s infrastructure.

Malm reviews the three stages of climate activism and the failure of each to achieve their goal. He rejects the philosophy of non-violent protest arguing that much of the success of those movements can be attributed to the violence and threat of violence by associated groups. There was Martin Luther King, but also Malcolm X and the Black Panthers.

Since peaceful protests, even disruptive protests, have not worked, it is time to consider directly destroying property that makes burning fossil fuels possible if we want to save the planet. The looming catastrophe of climate change justifies the violence.

There is a “Need for militancy … The ruling classes of the world will not be talked into action. They are not amendable to persuasion. Change will have to be forced on them.” Much of  How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a discussion of the “tactical choices” for forcing the ruling class to change.

Organizing people, creating a mass movement, political action, are not on the list. Elections are never mentioned. The only strategy is to force those who have the power and make the decisions to change their minds. To change their calculus of what the costs to them might be and so change their actions.

For Malm, the masses are spectators, playing no active role. Resistance is planned and carried out by a “working vanguard” of activists. The vanguard just needs to be careful not to isolate themselves by getting too far ahead of the masses. Sabotage should be “intelligent” walking the tightrope between raising the consciousness of the masses to the severity of climate change  and alienating too many. “It would be a very bad idea to assassinate a coal executive or fly an airplane into an ExxonMobil skyscraper.”

For Malm, power is limited to the few – the “ruling class” on one hand, and the “working vanguard” on the other. They are antagonists competing for supremacy, but resemble each other in structure. Both are top down. Both are self-selected. Neither is answerable to a constituency.  His conclusion follows naturally. Change can be achieved only through violence.

In contrast, for Alinsky in Rules for Radicals the goal is not to change the minds of the ruling class but to take their power. “In this book we are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people; to realize the democratic dream of equality, justice, peace, cooperation.”

He called Rules a “step toward a science of revolution”. A revolution in which the masses take the power that is theirs. A revolution that starts with a change in thinking and a willingness “to let go of the past and chance the future.”

Rules is focused on changing people’s perception of themselves, the power they can take if they want it, and how to do it. He would agree with Malm that protest doesn’t get the job done. His solution, however, is much different. Organize. Take the power that you have.

Rules is a call to participate. And a primer on how. Alinsky’s concern was for “our people who, thwarted through the lack of interest or opportunity, or both, do not participate in the endless responsibilities of citizenship and are resigned to lives determined by others. … There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.”

Alinsky’s “organizer” is not Malm’s “vanguard”. Much of Rules is advice to potential organizers on how to communicate in a way that changes attitudes and motivates and empowers people to act. Start where the person is. Stay within their experience. Step back and let them make their own decisions on what actions to take.

“To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that is the way the game is played.”  

For all his reputation as an agitator, Alinsky believed in the democratic process. Change comes from empowering more people, people who are otherwise left out, to comfortably and actively participate. “That means working in the system.”

Elections are a tool. Alinsky tells the young who demonstrated in the streets of Chicago against the Viet Nam war but failed to change the minds of convention delegates, “Go home, organize, build power, and at the next convention you be the delegates.” They had a choice. Feel sorry for themselves, “go psycho and start bombing”, or take their place.

Alinsky was a pragmatist. For him dogma was the death of democracy. “The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.”

Conflict is inevitable. Compromise is essential. “A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises – which then become the start for the continuation of conflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum.” Politics in a democracy is an ongoing effort.

Progress is what matters. “If you start with nothing, demand 100 percent, then compromise for 30 percent, you are 30 percent ahead.” On the other hand, confrontation for the sake of confrontation produces only “a flare up” and then it is “back to darkness.” Alinsky looked for potential partners even among the less likely.

How would a conversation between Malm and Alinsky go? Malm, who regardless of our formal democratic structures, believes the ruling class has the power, makes the decisions, and will be moved only by violence.  And Alinsky, who regardless of evident control by an elite, believes that power lies with the masses if they but organize themselves and take it.

Would Alinsky be accused of being naïve? When have the masses ever organized themselves?

Or Malm, of being delusional? When has violence resulted in anything but backlash and a reinforcing of authoritarian impulses?

The stories in our heads by which we make sense of events, that shape our response, and determine our actions don’t connect. We talk past each other. We see the same facts, have the same experiences, use the same words perhaps, but our understanding, our belief in what is real and how we interpret it, are vastly different. There is a wall that separates.

Is persuasion possible? Can we change our stories? Particularly when much of the rhetoric from our political leaders is designed to reinforce those stories and build higher and thicker walls?

Gradually. Indirectly. Perhaps. People have to find their own reason to change. In conversation. Not argument. In questions. Not assertions. We need space to decide. The new story has to make more sense than the one carried for years.