Decompiling Oppression #155
Sam McVeety
With today's general strike marking the fifth day of a week of action in Minnesota, I want to talk more about Erica Chenoweth’s 3.5% rule that I mentioned last time. To get us off on the right foot, let's be clear that this is a correlative finding (rather than causative): that when more than 3.5% of the population is mobilized for large-scale change, they are highly likely to succeed. Like much of her work, this is a probabilistic statement, where there are exceptions and nuances buried within these averages. When I first heard this number, I was skeptical, not of the research backing it, but of the conclusions and behavior that it would likely inspire. To that end, it's worth getting into the specifics of Chenoweth's research into civil resistance, helpfully summarized in her 2021 book.
Emphatically, 3.5% is not a checkbox. It does not mean that, if you have 12 million-odd people show up to a collection of protest rallies across the United States, authoritarianism will be stopped dead in its tracks. (I realize that, when I put it that way, it may seem obvious, and yet, I think many folks are operating under this implicit assumption, for lack of a better one.) Mobilizing 12 million people can be a tactic as part of a larger strategy, but it shouldn't be construed as constituting the entire strategy.
Chenoweth warns as much in her research since publishing this result, which shows civil resistance skewing more towards large-scale demonstrations in recent years. This isn't to say that demonstrations are a bad thing; only to say that they are a single tactic among many, and almost certainly inadequate on their own. To understand one dimension of what a larger strategy requires, we can use her framework of concentration and dispersion. Concentrated actions correspond to people coming together to occupy public spaces (demonstrations, sit-ins), while dispersed actions correspond to actions where people withhold their presence or support (strikes, boycotts).
As a case in point, we are seeing organizers in Minnesota vary their tactics day by day, in response to ongoing state violence. Faith leaders staged a sit-in at Target corporate headquarters, demanding concessions from leadership. Labor unions across the region endorsed today's general strike, in one of the largest joint actions in decades. Different tactics also expand the participation base for resistance: people who are unable to participate in one type of action have alternative ways to participate.
More broadly, the case that Chenoweth and Maria Stephan repeatedly make in Why Civil Resistance Works is that successful civil resistance movements are able to toggle between (and interleave) tactics of concentration and dispersion as part of their overall strategy, and that this flexibility is highly correlated with successful movements. Sometimes the reasons are obvious: if state security forces are shooting at you in the streets, being able to shift tactics to stay-at-home actions like a general strike can save lives while simultaneously putting concrete economic pressure on the regime.
Importantly, many of these tactics require advance planning to use effectively. You can't just wake up one day and declare a general strike; you need plans for things like the distribution of food and care for the entire community. Here again, we aren't starting from scratch: mutual aid networks birthed by the COVID pandemic (and earlier) provide a degree of scaffolding for these care webs, along with the ongoing logistics work to support immigrant families who don't feel safe leaving their homes.
Indeed, the events of the past few years are well on their way to training us in the skills necessary to deploy a variety of tactics, right up to the present day. Over the winter vacation, we went for a walk with a friend in Minneapolis who was simultaneously engaging in counter-surveillance of ICE activities, part of a coordinated-but-distributed network of hundreds of people who were showing up for their neighbors, day after day.
In resisting authoritarianism, it's crucial that we be prepared to engage many different tactics, deploying concentration and dispersion in strategic ways. The attractiveness of a simplistic reading of the 3.5% and a heavy reliance on large-scale public demonstrations is that it gives people one specific thing to do, one that is relatively easy to wrap our heads around. In truth, the moment demands more of us, that we put in the work to engage and think more deeply about a variety of tactics and what part we can play in their deployment.
Here are this week's invitations:
Personal: What are concentrated and dispersed tactics that you can engage in?
Communal: How can we support each other to take communal actions that may feel risky or scary?
Solidarity: Support organizing and mutual aid efforts for people on the ground in Minneapolis.
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