New Orleans I’m a fan of Zeynep Tufekci, a professor specializing in studying social movements and more recently a sometimes columnist for the New York Times. Regularly, she has been spot-on in her analysis of the real factors behind movements. She doesn’t worship at the throne of social media as a substitute for real organizing, for example, and calls BS whenever she sees it. Recently, though, she used her platform to argue that the time of mass protests is over in America and the powerful have “outmaneuvered” protestors. She may be right in her contemporary analysis, but I think she may be right for the wrong reasons and drawing the wrong conclusions, including whether mass protests are now powerless and passé.
Every organizer knows that the more repetitive a tactic is, the less effective it will be. That’s a universal law of organizing. Looking at the student responses on campus to the Gaza conflict and their use of encampments, she accurately reports that universities, often goaded by their trustees and donors, have pushed back in hundreds of cases with newer, more restrictive policies around speech and encampments and the penalties crossing their bright lines.
Where Tufekci stumbles is in arguing that encampments were ever a mass tactic or an effective pressure point for change. Admittedly, encampments are highly visible and an embarrassment to cities and institutions where they exist, but their closest relative is homeless gatherings, not mass marches. She dates this tactical adaptation fueled by social media to the Occupy movement, which was brilliant branding, but using encampments as its central tactic always involved limited, self-selected participation, not mass appeal. I would argue it was a tactic that only had real appeal to activists, and even in that cohort was elite, not mass-based. It was a tactic that also swallowed any strategy for change, because it was, by definition, not sustainable. Encampments have always been a shortcut tactic and easy to beat. Winter was always coming then, just as summer was always coming to the campuses now.
Additionally, as wildly effective as social media is as a communication tool, it is similarly worthless as an organizing tool. Social media might give an alert, but it isn’t a persuasive tool that educates and inoculates to create deep commitment to a long-term campaign. All of which makes it a two-edged sword. Others can also use it to confuse and communicate, and the target institutions know that they can hold out and resist the demands of such ephemerally organized movements without making change.
The mass protests that have been effective develop through deep organization, strong leadership, committed resources, clear demands, and focused strategy. Tufekci must know that the antidote to the current ineffectiveness of protest is not simply a new tactic, but organization. Organization can convert activist response and breaking issues into mass protests and sustainable campaigns. Winning requires deep roots, not sudden flowers bursting out in the season. There are too many examples even now in places like Kenya and Bangladesh, where mass protest continues to be wildly effective. In the American arrogance, lessons need to be learned from our own history and what is happening elsewhere in the world. We need to strike the tents, abandon the tweets, and put on our marching boots and struggle vests again, but we need to do it when we have our act together on the nuts and bolts. Mass protests only work when there is an infrastructure of mass organization and commitment to demands, tactics, and strategy.