[Peace-discuss] Is AWARE mesomobilized?
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at uiuc.edu
Thu Sep 20 15:41:51 CDT 2007
Mort--
Your defense of UFPJ and ascription of "the lack of effectiveness of the
anti-war movement" to the fecklessness of the American populace reminds
me of a remark attributed to the British playwright Ashleigh Brilliant,
that his "play was a complete success: the audience was a failure."
We know from the survey data that (a) the political opinions of
Americans are generally social democratic; (b) that a substantial
majority opposes the war (at a level not reached until perhaps the tenth
year of the Vietnam War); and (c) both semi-official political parties
are substantially to the right of the populace. It is indeed the task
of those two parties to contain and restrict the political participation
of the majority in the interests of the small minority who control
wealth and power in the US, to mask the contradiction between the
interests of that majority and those of that small group, and to provide
the appearance but not the reality of debate. (For this last point,
witness the shadow-boxing "attacks" on the war policy by the current
members of Congress -- only made more obvious by honorable exceptions
like Kucinich and Paul.)
To these ends, perhaps a third of GDP is devoted to marketing and public
relations, the real inventions of the American 20th century, which
include the corporate media. Don't you think they get their money's
worth? As Alex Carey put it, "The twentieth century has been
characterized by three developments of great political importance: the
growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of
corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against
democracy."
Nevertheless, the largest world-wide antiwar demonstrations in human
history occurred even before the US launched the invasion of Iraq. (How
many other times can you think of anti-war demonstrations in a
belligerent country before it starts a war?) Yet in spite of that --
and remarkable grass-roots support, as shown by the referenda in
Champaign county -- we agree that no effective antiwar movement has
developed. Why not?
My principal answer is that the political system of the US -- the most
sophisticated in the world, because the US elite can't rely on simple
repression -- has done its job. In a landslide substantially larger
than the "Republican revolution" of 1994, Americans voted against the
war and for the opposition party in 2006 -- and then watched as that
putative opposition worked strenuously and successfully to undermine
that result by continuing to fund the war and putting real oppositional
measures (such as impeachment) "off the table." They cloaked what they
were doing with hypocritical criticisms of the war (our senators in the
lead), from which they thought they could draw some narrow partisan
advantage, while not of course wishing to alter the fundamental policy.
And the organized anti-war groups went along with them, from the
somewhat conflicted UFPJ to the outright false-front AAEI.
And incidentally, Cockburn (who no more "stands on the sidelines and
just bitches" than Chomsky does) has been one of the few (along with
Chomsky) who has consistently, for more than thirty years, exposed the
forms of journalistic and political manipulation in this country, as one
would know from reading what he wrote during the mendacious wars of
Clinton, Bush I, and Reagan. His NLR article on the present state of
the antiwar movement (which I posted to the list) continues that
important task.
It's up to us to decide, given the situation that Cockburn seems to me
accurately to describe, what we should do. The answer is not
supporting the Democrats, who have subverted the anti-war movement -- or
the soi-disant anti-war groups overtly or covertly aligned with them.
--CGE
Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> I say this with no offense intended, Matt, but I believe that you are on
> another planet. The lack of effectiveness of the anti-war movement,
> organizations like the UFPJ included, derives in my opinion from the
> "annoyed" but non-militant character of the American populace with
> regard to the war and our policies thereto. We know this to be true on
> the local level, where no matter what is proposed, few show up for any
> demonstration or talk opposing the wars. This despite the fact that a
> large fraction of the population is "against" the war. If we could only
> get, say, 30% of those really against the wars to get together in
> protests, we might have something, but that is never achieved, even at
> the onset of the Iraq invasion. How to mobilize people to unified action
> is the major problem here with which all anti-war movements have had to
> contend. One can attribute this state of affairs to various causes,
> including lack of effective organization, the fragmentation of the
> "left", or aiming at the wrong targets, but it is too easy to criticize
> without offering real alternatives to their policies.
>
> Popular revolutions are hard to organize without catastrophic events
> involving the populace, and to change our system/policies a kind of
> revolution is needed. Naomi Klein now writes about this in a different
> context.
>
> On the subject of UFPJ---that they are just money grubbing
> bureaucracies---I can only say that I disagree. They have asked for very
> little… and have encouraged local actions.
>
> Cockburn stands on the sidelines and just bitches from his California
> niche. I don't know what eats him. He has written useful stuff in the
> past, but too often goes off on wild tangents.
>
> --mkb
>
>
> On Sep 20, 2007, at 11:15 AM, Matt Reichel wrote:
>
>> As somebody who worked very closely with UFPJ during its formation as
>> part of the Peace Action delegation, which is one of the largest
>> member organizations within the coalition, I can tell you that
>> Cockburn is RIGHT ON with his analysis.
>> His thoughtful and rigorous critiques of the mainstream bodies of the
>> "American left" are what attracted me to his writings, because no one
>> else provides such forthright critique of these organizations.
>> The reason the anti-war movement has become so weak over the last 4
>> years, and it is undoubtedly weak, is that all of the original energy
>> that spawned up in late 2002 and early 2003 has been eaten up by
>> bureaucratic non-profits. Instead of continuing with demonstrations in
>> every small town in the U.S., and other creative forms of protest such
>> as strikes, walk-outs, die-ins, sit-ins, hunger strikes, etc, people
>> were content with throwing a little donation the way of a peace
>> non-profit or two.
>> These non-profits spend their entire existence just trying to continue
>> to exist. 90% of what they do relates in some way to fundraising, or
>> getting their logo out there to attract future donors. This leaves
>> very little time to engage in any real direct action, and, when they
>> do, they will never be bold enough to seriously challenge the two
>> party power structure, again, out of fear that this would spell
>> disastrous consequences for their annual income.
>> While these organizations (From Greenpeace to the PIRG's to Peace
>> Action) can be of use to the left for the work they do in keeping to
>> date with the congressional timetable, they are in no way a valid
>> replacement of real GRASSROOTS activism: local organizations
>> throughout the country who aren't afraid to challenge the two-party
>> power structure.
>>
>> -
>> mer
>>
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> From: brussel4 at insightbb.com <mailto:brussel4 at insightbb.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Peace-discuss] Is AWARE mesomobilized?
>> Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 23:25:46 -0500
>> To: galliher at uiuc.edu <mailto:galliher at uiuc.edu>
>> CC: peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
>> <mailto:peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net>
>>
>> I agree with Monbiot
>> [http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-06/13monbiot.cfm]
>> <http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-06/13monbiot.cfm%5D>
>> that Cockburn cannot be taken seriously. He's obsessive,
>> prejudiced, and often intellectually dishonest. His last
>> phrase---(in the paragraph quoted below: "…the mainstream
>> anti-war movement, as represented by UFPJ, is captive to the
>> Democratic Party") from my observations of UFPJ is arrant
>> nonsense, if not destructive (to antiwar initiatives).
>>
>> How many prominent others who have been up front against the war
>> were not invited? Must they all be invited? (And was Nader asked,
>> or did he ask, to be included?)
>>
>> Cockburn says "But it was, alas, rather dreary, rather
>> predictable". I think that better applies to Cockburn.
>>
>> --mkb
>>
>>
>> On Sep 19, 2007, at 5:48 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>>
>> [Without going into their institutional origins, this is the
>> best account I've seen of the differences between ANSWER and
>> UFPJ. We used a flyer from the latter at our last demo and so
>> should be aware of Alex Cockburn's comment
>> <http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2677>:
>>
>>
>> "Both UFPJ and ANSWER had their successes. But across the four
>> ensuing years, as the full ghastly futility and
>> destructiveness of the war has become more and more manifest,
>> the anti-war movement has got weaker. In late January 2007,
>> United for Peace and Justice held a rally in Washington. It
>> mustered a respectable number of people. It featured Hollywood
>> stars like Sean Penn and 60s icons like Fonda and her
>> erstwhile partner, Tom Hayden. But it was, alas, rather
>> dreary, rather predictable ... An absence on the speakers’
>> platform at that January UFPJ rally gives us a significant
>> clue to the weakness of the anti-war movement. Ralph Nader was
>> not invited, even though he is a major political figure on the
>> left, and a fierce critic of the war. Why was he not invited?
>> Nader is still anathema to many Democrats because he ran as a
>> third party candidate in 2000, and they blame him for drawing
>> crucial votes from Al Gore, thus enabling Bush to win. Even
>> though the war in Iraq is a bipartisan enterprise, even though
>> Democrats in Congress have voted year after year to give Bush
>> the money to fight that war, the mainstream anti-war movement,
>> as represented by UFPJ, is captive to the Democratic Party."]
>>
>> Inside Higher Ed
>> Sept. 19
>> Mess o’ Mobilizations
>> By Scott McLemee
>>
>> A few months back, Intellectual Affairs reported on the work
>> of a couple of social scientists who were studying the
>> contemporary antiwar movement. They have been showing up at
>> the national demonstrations over the past several years and –
>> with the help of assistants instructed in a method of random
>> sampling – conducting surveys of the participants. The data so
>> harvested was then coded and fed into a computer, and the
>> responses cross-correlated in order to find any patterns
>> hidden in the data.
>>
>> The methodology was all very orthodox and unremarkable, unlike
>> some things we’ve discussed around here lately. But one of the
>> researchers, Michael T. Heaney, an assistant professor of
>> political science at the University of Florida, explained that
>> the project involved a departure from some of norms of his
>> field. Political scientists have tended to be interested in
>> studying established institutions, rather than the more
>> informal or fluid networks that sustain protest movements.
>>
>> His collaborator, Fabio Rojas, is an assistant professor of
>> sociology at Indiana University – so their effort to
>> understand the polling results had the benefit of
>> cross-disciplinary collaboration, and could draw on models
>> from recent work on social movements and network analysis.
>> Nowadays you can often spot a paper by a sociologist at five
>> paces, just because of the spiderweb-like graphics. Those are
>> the maps of social networks, with the strength of connection
>> between the nodes indicated by more or less heavy lines.
>>
>> Heaney and Rojas have kept on gathering their surveys and
>> crunching their numbers, and they recently presented a new
>> paper on their work at the annual meeting of the American
>> Political Science Association in Chicago. The title,
>> “Coalition Dissolution and Network Dynamics in the American
>> Antiwar Movement,” seems straightforward enough – and the
>> abstract explains that their focus was on the rather difficult
>> relationship between United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) and
>> Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER), the two main
>> coalitions organizing national protests.
>>
>> So far, so good. The topic is rather familiar to me –
>> deriving, as it ultimately does, from certain important
>> disagreements between the Judean People’s Front and the
>> People’s Front of Judea. (See Monty Python, 1979.) But my
>> effort to follow the paper soon ran up against a single
>> curious and unfamiliar term: “mesomobilization.”
>>
>> You could decrypt this etymologically, if course, as
>> “intermediate mobilization” or something of the sort. But
>> doing so did not cause a concept to spring instantly to mind.
>> And since they were addressing colleagues (all of whom
>> probably had strong and definite ideas about mesomobilization)
>> it wasn’t as if the authors had to define their terms. So I
>> broke down and asked Heaney for a gloss.
>>
>> “Mesomobilization,” he wrote back, “is the process through
>> which social movement leaders mobilize other organizations to
>> do the direct work of bringing individual participants to a
>> protest. In that sense mesomobilization is one level ‘above’
>> micromobilization (i.e., bringing out the actual bodies).”
>>
>> In other words, an organization (a labor union or whatever)
>> does the micromobilizing when it gets its members and
>> supporters to become involved in some activity (a
>> demonstration, political campaign, etc.) A coalition enables
>> different organizations to collaborate when they share a
>> common agenda. This is “mesomobilizing” – that is, mediating
>> and connecting the different activist cohorts.
>>
>> That distinction corresponds to very different sorts of
>> functions. “Micromobilizing groups play a critical role in
>> contacting people and shaping they way they understand issues
>> and the efficacy of political action,” as Heaney explained.
>> But mesomobilizers – that is, coalitions – provide “an overall
>> conceptual framework for events that links the demands and
>> grievances of myriad groups together.” (The mesomobilizers
>> also buy advertising and get the parade permits and so forth.)
>> “Effective mesomobilization is necessary to make large-scale
>> events possible,” says Heaney, “especially in highly
>> decentralized fields, like peace and antiwar movements.”
>>
>> The paper delivered at APSA looks at how relations between the
>> two biggest antiwar mesomobilizers have affected participation
>> in the national demonstrations. The differences between ANSWER
>> and UFPJ are in part ideological. The rhetorical style of
>> ANSWER normally runs to denunciations of American imperialism
>> and its running dogs. (I exaggerate, but just barely.) UFPJ is
>> by contrast the “moderate flank” of the antiwar movement, and
>> not prone to tackling all injustice on the planet in the
>> course of one protest. As Heaney and Rojas put it, UFPJ argues
>> that “in order to build the broadest coalition possible, it
>> should focus on the one issue about which the largest number
>> of organizations can agree: ending the war in Iraq.”
>>
>> The groups have a long, complicated history of mutual
>> antagonism that in some ways actually predates even the
>> present organizations. Comparable fault-lines emerged between
>> similar coalitions organizing in 1990 and ‘91 against the
>> first Gulf War. But UFPJ and ANSWER did manage to mesomobilize
>> together at various points between 2003 and 2005. This
>> honeymoon has been over for a couple of years now, for reasons
>> nobody can quite agree upon – even as public disapproval of
>> president’s handling of the war rose from 53 percent in
>> September 2005 (when the UFPJ-ANWER alliance ended) to 58
>> percnet in March 2007.
>>
>> What this meant for Heaney and Rojas was that they had data
>> from the different phases of the coalitions’ relationship.
>> They had gathered surveys from people attending demonstrations
>> that UFPJ and ANSWER organized together, and from people
>> attending demonstrations the groups had scheduled in
>> competition with each other. (They also interviewed leading
>> members of each coalition and gathered material from their
>> listservs.)
>>
>> The researchers framed a few hypotheses about contrasts that
>> would probably be reflected in their data set. “We expected
>> that participants in the UFPJ demonstrations would have a
>> stronger connection with mainstream political institutions and
>> a weaker connection to the antiwar movement,” they write. “We
>> expected, given ANSWER’s preference for outsider political
>> tactics, that its participants would be more likely to have
>> engaged in civil disobedience in the past, while UFPJ would be
>> more likely to have engaged in civil disobedience in the past.”
>>
>> They also anticipated finding significant demographic
>> differences between each coalition’s constituency. “Given the
>> relative prominence of women as leaders in UFPJ,” they say,
>> “we expected that it would be more likely to attract women
>> than would ANSWER. Given that ANSWER explicitly frames its
>> identity as attempting to ‘end racism,’ we expected that
>> individuals with non-white racial and ethnic backgrounds would
>> be disproportionately drawn to ANSWER. Further, given the
>> relatively radical orientation of ANSWER, we hypothesized that
>> it would more greatly appeal to young people and the working
>> class. In contrast, we expected UFPJ to appeal to individuals
>> with higher incomes and college educations.”
>>
>> These predictions were not, for the most part, all that
>> counterintuitive. And so it is interesting to learn that very
>> few of them squared with the data.
>>
>> People who showed up at demonstrations under the influence of
>> UFPJ’s mesomobilizing framework were “significantly more
>> likely to say they considered themselves to be members of the
>> Democratic Party (54.1 percent) than ANSWER attendees (46.9
>> percent).” There might be a few Republicans mobilized by
>> either coalition, but most non-Democrats in either case would
>> probably identify as independents or supporters of third
>> parties.And they tended to come for different reasons:
>> “Participants at the ANSWER rally were significantly more
>> likely to cite a policy-specific reason for their attendance
>> (such as stopping the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), while
>> participants at the UFPJ rally were more likely to cite a
>> personal reason for their attendance (such as the death of a
>> friend or a family member).”
>>
>> But in terms of important distinctions, that was really about
>> it. There was no difference in degree of political
>> involvement, or experience with civil disobedience, or
>> previous attendance at antiwar protests. Nor was there a
>> demographic split: “Despite the stereotypes that many people
>> have of the two coalitions,” write Rojas and Heaney, “they are
>> equally likely to attract the participation of women and men,
>> whites and non-whites, the young the old, those with and
>> without college degrees, and people from various economic strata.”
>>
>> The paper also considers how the parting of the ways between
>> ANSWER and UFPJ influenced their mesomobilizing capacities —
>> that is, what effect it had on the networks of organizations
>> making up each coalition.
>>
>> The various spider-webs of organizational interaction did
>> change a bit. ANSWER began to work more closely with another
>> coalition pledged to denouncing American imperialism and its
>> running dogs. United for Peace and Justice came under stronger
>> influence by MoveOn – a group “much more closely allied with
>> the Democratic Party than either UFPJ or ANSWER” and taking “a
>> more conservative approach to ending the war.” (Or not ending
>> it, I suppose, though that is a topic for another day.)
>>
>> The researchers conclude that the conflict between the groups
>> has not really been the zero-sum game one might have expected
>> – if only because public disapproval of the president has won
>> a hearing for each of them.
>>
>> “To some extent,” write Heaney and Rojas, “ANSWER and UFPJ are
>> vying for the attention, energies, and resources of the same
>> supporters. But to a larger extent, both groups are more
>> urgently attempting to reach out to a mass public that has
>> remained largely quiescent throughout the entire U.S.-Iraq
>> conflict....If public opinion were trending in favor of the
>> president, or even remaining stable, the conflict might have
>> been more detrimental to the movement as its base of support
>> shrank.”
>>
>> Such are the points in the paper catching one layman’s eye, at
>> least. You can read it for yourself here. Heaney and Rojas are
>> discussing their work this week at Orgtheory – a group blog
>> devoted to what Alexis de Tocqueville calls, in its epigraph,
>> “the science of association.”
>>
>> Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week.
>> Suggestions and ideas for future columns are welcome.
>> The original story and user comments can be viewed online at
>> http://insidehighered.com/views/2007/09/19/mclemee.
>>
>> © Copyright 2007 Inside Higher Ed
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