While some external accounts of social movements are interesting, they tend to provide little toward teaching people how to best organize themselves or how to frame  issues to conduct an effective social movement or advocacy organizations.

The “social physics” view of history tends to limit its interpretations in favor of famous people, places, wars, objects, and demographic inventories. By  its external perspective it also fails to notice the periods of cultural intensification which have preceded and provide a foundation for the eras of high levels of artistic and technical developments, and of the periods of democratic expansion. A missing piece is the subjective experiences and engagement of those who have successfully pressed for societal change. 4 The implied suggestion is that ordinary people cannot contribute to the development of social movements and are obliged to passively wait for the next “celebrity” leader. In that celebrity status is a franchise controlled primarily by privatized public media, that wait could be either very long or a pretext to suffer an impostor who has no clue about how to work in collaboration with any one. 

Additional presumptions also discourage the importance of organizing and advancing the demands for cultural and societal change. One is of the inevitability of social progress. An alternative form is the belief that “good” will ultimately prevail. A third posits that due to human nature being by definition flawed, it is necessary to have some form of leadership elite. Each of these  encourage a slavish response. History is not inevitable, it is simply history. Though there is some coherence between one scene and the following, there is little necessary causality and is no less thereby worthy of understanding. For a counterinsurgency priority, opposing the formation of social movements and any potentially informed discourse  about social movements and organizations, sometimes described as “the social sciences,” will have a high priority.

Assuming widespread deliberate errors may be  both too generous and too harsh. It has to be allowed that the results are simply a product of ideological self preservation by the existing social order. It is by pursuing the conventional values and priorities of an ideology within an anti-democratic culture that the possibility for change is nullified. Social movements become by design ineffective and anti-social in part by only rising to the social capacity of herds and posturing. Social movements based upon cultural intensification and subjective engagement will not have the same level of personal recognition as those based upon external interpretations. It is also in the interest of ineffective “social movements” to perpetuate their reputation as successes and also ignore their decline.

The  ideologies of societal structures tend to be self sustaining except for the conscious few among those at risk or excluded from sharing in the benefits of the societal surplus wealth. A part of this is that those who self identify as “middle class” will predictably first react to retain or restore their privileges and assets when those are lost through the liquidation of their productive contributions. Further, even those who are a part of the lower income stratas will often be much more concerned with receiving a portion of the surplus value within an “affirmative” action context,  rather than modifying the  basic principles of distribution, division, and control. There should be a high priority instead for the basic elements and identifying characteristics of successful social movements. One goal should be to distinguish between assimilation to forms of corporate  state socialism as an ideology from the actual expansion of democratic practices and principles. The inability to accomplish peaceful societal change either by increments or by the confrontation of mass movements places a society in a position of unsustainable rigidity and embedded violence.  The alternative process includes establishing a sub-culture which demonstrates a positive interpretation of societal capacities and which  reverses subordination. 

There are further aspects of social movements that  also deserve examination and review. As a field of study it seems to have been largely surrendered to interests  hostile to genuine social movements, lacking in substantial first hand experience, and conforming to paradigms which fail to interpret in a dialectical and practical way. Key is the absence of the subjective experiences of those involved as participating subjects and as a population subject to systemic harm.

Tadit Anderson, could be reached at ideasinc@ee.net

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