I have brilliant friends. A couple of them are activists, and have turned their brilliant attention to the problem(s) of activism. I learn a lot from listening to these friends. In response to a chapter that I have in an upcoming Routledge book (“On Pathological and Ineffective Activism: What is to be Done?), one friend has written thus. My responses, fwtw,in italics.
On another topic, still thinking about the dysfunctional groups thing, and why your analysis bothers me:
1 – You posit the existence of a large group of great people who would be involved but have been put off by activist crapness. I think there is an element of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence – ie they look like great people because you haven’t seen them in action. Or they have made a rational decision that it’s not worth it for reasons other than the dysfunctionality of the group – ie they ultimately are not sufficiently motivated/don’t think the cause is worth the commitment/having looked harder they don’t think it’s winnable. Otherwise one would expect to find some activist groups formed by these great people which do all things you think functional groups do.
Yep. I have come to that conclusion. And there are always ‘easier’ ways to virtue-signal; by going to a demo, clicking on a petition. That’s not to say that if the crap groups didn’t exist, the Revolution would happen (just as the disappearance of the lackeys-of-capitalism-in-Labour is not going to lead directly to the dictatorship of the proletariat.)
2 – What voluntary groups do you know, preferably activist but also others, which meet your criteria for functionality? How do they avoid the pitfalls you have identified?
Good question. I suppose groups where there are clear success/failure/performance metrics, and ways of ‘getting rid’ of those who repeatedly and irredeemably under-perform. I presume, for example, the RNLI doesn’t tolerate people who don’t answer the phone. The Samaritans probably gets rid of people who say “oh, go jump.” But activists? In the smugosphere? Nope…
3 – If you can’t come up with convincing answers to point 2, ie if all or almost all of the groups you know are to some extent dysfunctional and not flourishing, or are too new to know whether they will flourish, then the flaws go beyond bad interpersonal relations and inept group process. Your point about rewards and punishments comes in here – as with CCS, activism doesn’t have an internal economy/feedback system to say whether it’s working – this goes beyond how groups operate but is a fundamental problem.
Yep. Thus I carpe many of the diems.
4 – Might this suggest that in our current social/cultural/political context, activism as we understand it doesn’t work? If so, you’re flogging a dead horse. Anger at the people involved for having failed is fair, but just ends in bitterness, I fear.
Bitte(r) schon!
5 – alternatives – I’m probably not the person to ask 🙂 Go small, maybe, concentrate on one local, winnable campaign and making its organisation as functional as possible while nourishing the people involved. This would require skills I haven’t got, like niceness and diplomacy.
Me too. I have come to believe in capacity building, but with groups. I tried a couple of times to stage skills-development stuff for random individuals, and while the time itself was excellent, I doubt there was real impact. And just now people are asking me to do one-to-one FoIA training, and I am going to say “nope, it has to be a group of people who are from the same organisation, and are likely to support each other.” That is, I can’t be bothered to either try to reform existing groups or to start one of my own. If I have any role (questionable) it is to be a mentor/sounding board. I might do a day-thing around movement building, invite only, in August. Depends….
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