Strategy & Tactics
Thoughts on Tactics and Strategy for Anti-Authoritarian Liberationists
Tactics are easy to visualize and romanticize. Strategy is hard to picture.
When people imagine social movements, they picture tactics: Protests, revolts, blockades, civil disobedience. It may be an ancient human trait to glorify deeds over the larger plans they serve, but this tendency is amplified by the rampant power of spectacle: Capitalism and the despotic State both generate vast troves of captivating, entertaining, brain-jacking media to sell a social order that, beneath the surface, is dangerous, miserable, and rapidly shredding the ecological fabric of our one habitable world. We tend by default to think in terms of the spectacle on which we suckled from birth.
It’s not surprising, then, that the vast majority of social movement activity most people engage in is based around tactics without long-term plans. Some new horror appears in our city or somewhere far away - so what do we do? We protest. And then what? Protest again. Maybe a direct action, like the destruction of some symbol or tool of the despotic regime. Maybe something dramatic, or picturesque - after all, we usually imagine that to have our image captured and replicated - to go viral - is the height of tactical success. Often, we just get into a cycle of activism that we repeat forever, hoping that somehow, someway, it will lead to something greater. Too often, we give up.
What’s the alternative? Strategy.
Strategy is the long-term plan for success. The dominant powers in this world operate through strategies (granted, often stupid ones - but tenacity and might can compensate for some stupidity). Any force that is purely reactive can be predicted, and quickly and easily channeled and defeated by a force able to anticipate, learn from, and respond intelligently to their actions. Long-term planning is easier to do with more resources, though material might can also lead to laziness and strategic stagnation on the part of the powerful. Nevertheless the discipline to chip away toward a goal, day in and day out, is more easily coordinated when you make it peoples day jobs.
Learning from mistakes, cultivating and passing on knowledge, and gradually accumulating support, membership and resources - those are all easier when you can pay people to do them. That’s maybe the central contradiction we must all learn to overcome: We must manage to coordinate and incentivize ourselves in the service of good, long-term plans despite a general lack of financial resources and free time. But keep in mind the reality that in total there are more of us in the classes of the oppressed and exploited than there are capitalists, bought-off politicians and elites. We do in fact have greater material power, if it were coordinated and mobilized as effectively and consistently as theirs. It is strategy, the reality that we are captured in their plan rather than them in ours, that undergirds their domination rather than our liberation.
Ideally, strategies are layered all the way up to revolution: We may have a strategy for how we mobilize and coordinate tactics within a single protest, but that fits into a strategy for a campaign with a larger goal like a wilderness defense or the establishment of public housing, and that larger goal helps build public support and a material base for revolutionary social change. Strategies can also be layered from the local to the global. The more distant or larger the goal, the less immediately clear the steps will be, but we can nevertheless keep gathering the resources, knowledge, and support that we know we’ll need while winning smaller victories now.
None of us can tell what revolutionary strategy will work. The best we can do is build power, try things, and learn from history and each other. Here are a few starters:
Consider the material things we all need to be able to be free from capiitalists and despotic states. What makes us depend on them, obedient to them? We need food. We need healthcare. We need housing. We need clothing, security, entertainment, community. Who currently controls them and what can we do about it? How can we create free or extremely cheap universal access to those things? Consider how the imperative to return indigenous control of stolen land, to undo the material reality of white supremacy and patriarchy and other systems of domination, is bound up with these questions. Consider the ecological systems we are part of: How can we defend them? How can we get access to the things we need in ways that nurture, and don't damage, those systems and the beings that compose them? How can regenerating our ecologies also meet revolutionary material needs for universal support and provision?
Consider the realm of culture, belief, knowledge and cosmology: How can we cultivate the kinds of thinking and ways of seeing ourselves and each other that support liberation, equality, and ecological kinship? Who and what exerts the most control over our thinking, our conscious and subconscious minds, our spirituality and ritual and sense of community today? How can we democratize these forces and help cultivate liberatory worldviews? How can we disrupt dominant media and knowledge systems?
Consider the physical force necessary to produce and reproduce any social order. Who will attack us and how if we take any action toward liberatory ends? How can the systemic violence of the dominant order be disrupted, challenged, and radically transformed or abolished? Could changing laws alter the way that violence is deployed? Can dominant institutions of governance - the socially-sanctioned channels of violent force - be influenced and democratized by our movements, or do we need to create new and powerful institutions for the defense of a new legal, material, and cultural order?
Consider how coalitions, international solidarity, and different scales and avenues of action influence these questions. Consider how a movement might most effectively work through multiple avenues and multiple strategies at once in a way that creates synergy and symbiosis rather than conflict and paralysis.
The Pitfalls of Strategy
One danger of an emphasis on strategy is that it can give rise to a class of ‘movement managers’ who put their own desires for power above the movement’s goals, and convince others to go along with them in the supposed name of good strategy.
Consider for example nonprofit leaders and politicians who emerge from movements, but whose loyalties become captured by elites who offer them resource streams that allow them to maintain their power even as they act against the interests of the movement’s base. Or self-appointed protest managers who limit the self-activity of the gathered crowds because to them, the protest is one instrument in a larger strategy that the participants never got to consider or vote on - and it must be managed to make it most useful toward those hidden ends.
How can we act strategically while doing our best to limit the potential dangers?
The first is simply to make strategy a regular part of your discussions. Check in every so often - maybe every quarter like the corporations do, or more often, or less - to review your long-term plans and consider how your campaigns and tactics have been serving them. Simply organizing anti-authoritarian, pro-democracy groups and making strategies yourselves is the best possible antidote to being managed and corralled by someone else - be they corporations, governments, or self-appointed bureaucrats.
Another important step is to make unpredictability, diversity, and democracy a part of your plans. Don’t let strategy become an excuse to dominate and control others unnecessarily. That’s how we get fake socialist dictatorships, or the local-level equivalent. First of all, those most directly affected by an issue (NOT just their supposed community leaders, but the people themselves in all their diverse voices) should get the greatest say in how that issue is addressed. Know when to follow the lead of other people and groups rather than co-opting their causes, but don’t just take their self-appointed non-profit movement managers at their word either. How will you know the difference? Engaging, meeting people where they’re at, making real connections and building trust, and doing your best to follow the right path.
When your group is making strategy yourselves, build the unpredictability of others into your plans. How can you make room for diversity of tactics - while simultaneously protecting yourselves and your movement from the unwise actions of others when necessary? How can you make space for people who just arrived to add their own ideas and voice, or take their own risks, without letting anybody who walked in - who may or may not be an undercover or an opponent - jeopardize or co-opt the cause of the majority of participants? Make plans, set boundaries, and get creative.
Remember that NONE OF US HAS ALL THE ANSWERS. Strategic diversity and scrappy inventiveness can be a tremendous strength if we make our different strategies complementary rather than conflictual. The strategy of the liberationist must be one open to the symbiosis of multiple strategies, multiple experiments - to create synergy rather than conflict and paralysis whenever possible.
If and when your movement decides to elect representatives - to city council, to a regional meeting, or wherever - consider the rules you can put in place to limit their ability to act autonomously from the democratic base of the movement. Bribery and lobbying may be legal in the capitalist State, but we can ban them in our movements, requiring our representatives to support themselves only through the resources the movement provides, or setting strict limits on what votes or positions they can take without movement referendum - and maybe through our own infrastructure, we can get reliable people into government too, if we even need to elect anyone to their government by the time we get to that point!
Finally, remember that you have skin in the game and you have the right and responsibility to make strategy. You need to get free too. You have the right to start planning and acting, to create a strategy for freedom and figure out how to link up with others whose freedom is bound up with yours. Democracy is critical, dialogue is essential, and we’ll be more powerful together, but we also need everyone to take their own liberation seriously and to be proactive in reaching for it. Don’t wait for someone else to lead you - they may never come along.
So next time you feel the call to act, do it - but remind yourself to think about strategy too, and to bring up the question with your collective. How can we make sure that the next time our movement mobilizes, the people have even more power than before?