Responding to the Current Moment: Power and Theories of Change
How do we take political action in this moment? We need sharp goals and strategies for how to get there.
A common refrain I’m hearing from many of my friends and colleagues in this moment is: what are we supposed to do? I share the same sentiments. The political landscape has shifted so drastically in the past weeks that it seems the same political campaigns we were waging are no longer relevant. The result of this shift, for many of us, is paralysis and frustration.
An example that is close to me is the science funding cuts, specifically the cancellation of National Science Foundation (NSF) grants that were flagged as radical Marxist DEI agendas. This is a Federal department that has tremendous reach, affecting thousands of scientists. The department can seemingly be controlled by the Executive branch, with some recourse from courts, but probably nothing substantial. In the end, thousands of scientists will lose their funding, and this is simply the tip of the iceberg as plans to defund academia in other ways progress.
Much is uncertain, but what seems clear at this point is that we need some new strategies for political change-making. Given the power and unity of the Republican party, as well as their massive base of support, the usual street marches, lobbying at Congressional offices, and general mass mobilization tactics may not work as well as they might have under previous administrations. We need to be smart and creative. What follows is my attempt at laying out some ways of thinking about our situation and generating the critical questions that we need to answer to move forward. Hopefully this resonates with many of you who have been sharing similar thoughts to mine.
An Ecosystem View of Society
A method that I’ve utilized for making concrete the dynamics we’re trying to change is what I call an ecosystem view of the social world. It’s an ecosystem because it itself is a collection of different actors responding to information and incentives, where collections of people grow, shrink, and power and resources flow throughout the network as it also changes dynamically.
Take a workplace as an example. If you want to change the dynamics of the workplace, you have to identify all the relevant actors, their position, power, and incentives, their connections, and any groups that you have to contend with as well. Let’s say you’re a worker at a small company of 40 people, where there are three divisions each with eight workers, a manager for each division, a vice president, a president, and three major funders. You have connections to the workers in your division, some from the others, to your manager, and a tenuous connection to the president.
Say the company is doing something unethical and it’s bothering you. If you want to stop this, you have to influence the president, who’s pushing for this. The president follows certain incentives: their own vision and goals, their beliefs and values, pressure from the funders, and trying to keep order in the workplace. But beyond the workplace, the president may also be a member of some social clubs, have a family, want to look impressive on social media. There are many ways to try to pressure the president, including organizing your workplace to demand a stop to the project, influencing the funders, or maybe even influencing the president through connections outside of the company.
The same type of picture is largely true of political figures and society in general. They are part of institutions and social networks where they follow certain pressures and incentives. Our connection to them may be extremely tenuous if at all existent. When they are elected officials, they have a more direct connection to us as we are their constituents, but they also have to (ostensibly) follow the will of entire municipalities or states.
Different from elected officials, the people making decisions to cut scientific funding, like Trump, Elon Musk, or Ted Cruz, are largely inaccessible to the vast majority of the country and most likely follow influence from other political figures, billionaires, companies, lobbyists, and powerful connections. Importantly, they do have some interest in maintaining legitimacy, at least from a large part of the country, or they may be out a job unless they actually install an authoritarian regime which does not cede power (which is not out of the question).
Mapping out flows of power and influence among actors in the ecosystem and their connections is crucial to being able to properly assess your options and try to achieve victory. You better believe the powers that be are doing this type of thinking constantly.
Theories of Power and Change
We can then layer on top of this ecosystem view some understandings of how power and political change function. There are two ways of viewing power that I find helpful: the monolithic theory of power and the social theory of power. I’m taking this description from Mark and Paul Engler’s This is An Uprising, who in turn take it from Gene Sharp’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action. The monolithic view of power is a top-down view which focuses on elected officials and powerful people being the main actors in society. They are given power, which they then wield to change things. In this view, the major method of change is elections and lobbying.
Counter to this is the social view of power, which is a bottom-up view which influences powerful people by changing institutions and mindsets en masse. It holds that even if powerful people have positions of power, they are only as powerful as their ability to make the rest of society enact their orders (think of all the workers who support a company’s actions even though the CEO ostensibly has the power). If you can influence major institutions in society and make them noncompliant, powerful people must change their behaviors or lose their power.
A view adjacent to the social view is what Mark and Paul Engler cite as pillars of power, which they take from Lakey & Helvey’s On Strategic Nonviolent Conflict. The pillars are imagined as major social institutions: labor, churches, media, the military, civil service, education, courts, and more. These all support the government, so without their compliance, government has no power. If you can influence enough of those pillars, the whole structure topples — and the authors argue that not all pillars must fall: once enough topple, the rest may follow.
I tend to focus on the social view of power since I am not someone who occupies a very powerful position, nor are the people I work with. So, inside the social view of power, how would one try to knock down these pillars and influence major institutions?
The Ayni Institute, which is a movement training organization in Boston, articulates three major types of change-work that they say forms the movement ecosystem: personal transformation, alternatives, and changing dominant institutions. They emphasize that these three work in concert, and each have legitimate uses given certain contexts. One of the major pitfalls we often fall into is subscribing to one type of change-making and then putting down the others. Ayni argues that we need to embrace a vibrant ecosystem where many groups and individuals are making change in various ways, and therein lies true power and capacity for change.
Personal transformation is somewhat self-explanatory. You can spend time ensuring your resources and secured, or learning new skills to make yourself more influential for change-making. This could include a huge number of options, but some that come to mind for me are therapy practices, getting yourself a stable income, or forming a strong social network. This type of work is extremely important and often overlooked in social movement spaces because we’re very focused on our goals. But if we are draining ourselves and not taking time to make sure we have resources, the work suffers and we are not combating the culture of efficiency and overwork.
Alternatives is a change strategy that is often difficult to imagine at first. In essence, it describes the process of making institutions that better serve the needs of people — think community banks, therapy groups, mutual aid organizations, and more. Alternatives are crucial because if dominant institutions are not meeting the needs of people, but we cannot stop using them, they win anyway. If a good alternative exists, people can flock to that and the original can be left to crumble or change its behavior. Alternatives can be difficult to create as they often require a lot of resources and have to start as relatively unknown as compared to dominant institutions.
Finally, changing dominant institutions is perhaps the change strategy we are most familiar with. This can be trying to sway a political body or company through various means. One method is mass protest. Another is called structure organizing, which can be thought of as change from the inside by organizing within an institution (think of a labor union).
Somewhere in here also lies acts of resistance, which could be things like political acts of violence, destruction, graffiti, dance, film, music, you name it. It can often be more individualistic, so it’s not quite the same as mass protest.
These types of change-making efforts must happen simultaneously and from various groups depending on their situation. But you can begin to see how they may be aimed at chipping away at the pillars of society that support governance structures. This is also not to say that this list is comprehensive, but I have found it as a great starting point for anyone interested in ways to change their circumstances.
Ecosystem Change
To see the power of the ecosystem view of society, let’s take the theories of power and change and map them onto our model. We can first use our small company as a motivating example. Inside the company, if influencing the president is still the goal, we can see that we are not going to exert top-down power because we’re a lowly worker. The social view of change must apply. This case is so simplified that the company may not have distinct pillars, but it will almost certainly have different social cliques and maybe even interest groups within the company. But we can use our theories of change nonetheless.
Just as one example, we could imagine that we want to organize a labor union among our coworkers. We need to convince 31 others to unionize with us. If we already view them as in a social network, we can figure out who we’re already closely connected with, identify natural leaders, and figure out smart ways to form connections between people and convince them to stand up with us. A union works very well in this context because the president does not have any power without their workers, and the institution is a discrete entity. To bring people to accept your view that a project is unethical, you could also stage mass protest in the form of rallies or demonstrations. This could convince your coworkers of your cause, or if it was public enough, put pressure on the president from the outside. Along the way, if it is a long campaign, perhaps you and your comrades will need to take care of yourselves and improve your skills through personal transformation.
Applying this to the current power brokers destroying the country is a bit more difficult. But if we figure out some of their incentives, we can try to plan methods of change that work for our context. If these people really care about having some social legitimacy, we could stage mass protest to try to sway the minds of people, express dissent, and move public opinion. The same could be done by making coordinated media efforts to make the powerful extremely unpopular. Workers of a company that benefits one of these people could unionize and shut down operations until this person changes their behavior. Alternative structures could be started by resource-rich people who can then provide ways to challenge the dominant institutions.
The key to applying these theories of change to the ecosystem model is that we need to constantly be evaluating connections and how influence and power flow through them. Perhaps there’s a way to directly influence Elon Musk through his social network, if we could get close enough to him or his trusted confidants. He most likely cares about his financial standing, so undermining his companies would be a powerful tactic. On the flip side, staging protests to try to change opinion about Musk may be ill-advised, as he has a solid base of support who he likely cares about more than everyone else, and he is not beholden to any constituents who could vote him out of power.
Critical Questions for Our Situation
This all brings us to the matters at hand. How can we use these tools to figure out how to act in our extremely different political environment?
One set of considerations seems very salient from the outset: that there are very different power structures in play than there were in the previous administration, or even in Trump’s last administration. The Republican party is very unified and has the support of large swaths of society (for evidence, look at these few polls from Pew Research). There are well-oiled media machines supporting the agenda of that party and constantly justifying it to people who have been brought into this worldview over many years. Democrat party lawmakers are also deeply unpopular, even among those who vote for them, as they have lacked vision and success in achieving goals that better the lives of most of society. Finally, our movement tactics of years past — protest, marches, direct action — have worn thin and do not have the shocking value they once had. The powerful people shaping the system are following different incentives than the last administration (possibly having goals we don’t even understand yet) and they are largely unaccountable through traditional means (voting, courts, etc.).
Given the severity of the situation, we need to be extra sharp in our prescriptions. Being extra critical of ourselves, given the half-wins of our movements of the recent past (youth climate movement, Black Lives Matter, Palestine Liberation), we need to seriously reevaluate our strategies. What seemed like triumphs were only part of the equation; the reality is that many minds and structures changed, but then the system adjusted and are now using our wins against us. I don’t mean to dismiss the incredible work, passion, and sacrifice that went into these campaigns — I was heavily involved with them so I mean this as much as a critique of my own work. But I think we need to learn from our experiences and do even better so we achieve victories that can’t be taken away by a fascist regime.
This is the state of affairs. What specific things do we want to fight for? Who has power to make that happen? How are we going to influence those people? What campaigns will get us there in ways that our old campaigns didn’t? What do we need to learn and build?
I think that the answers will not be obvious to many of us. We may decide on a goal, do a great deal of research, power mapping, and strategizing, only to realize we have to change our plans. But the level of specificity of our goals and plans must rise to the occasion.
Edit: I initially forgot to include links to the Pew polls, so those have been added inline.
