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co-optation

How Movements Can Maintain Their Radical Vision While Winning Reforms

April 15, 2022 Mark Engler And Paul Engler , Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
For movements in the U.S. and beyond wondering how they can engage with the system without being co-opted, the MST offers a powerful example. Many social movement scholars believe that movements can institutionalize their wins over the long-term by having the state and mainstream political parties adopt their demands and programs. However, these scholars also contend that such institutionalization comes at a price: too often, as movement programs are incorporated into mainstream structures, grassroots forces become demobilized, dull their radical edge and lose their ability to exercise disruptive power.

‘Full Spectrum Resistance’: A Field Manual For Insurgencies

June 29, 2020 Kristian Williams, ROAR Magazine. , , ,
 Full Spectrum Resistance, Aric McBay’s massive, two-volume, handbook for political action, covers the fundamentals of social change, offering advice on organization, strategy, tactics, security, communication (internal and external), and so on — all illustrated with historical case studies. McBay does not tell us what we should do. Instead, he helps us learn to think about what we should do, and answer the question for ourselves in light of our actual objectives and circumstances. This is by far the stronger approach, especially because one thing that holds our movements back is the failure to think carefully and creatively about what we are doing, to reexamine our theories and alter course as needed. Instead, we tend to engage in the same sort of actions as we always have, as if they were rituals or reenactments. Peaceniks march against military interventions; workers picket job sites; antifascists “deplatform” right-wing speakers.

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