Tag: strategy
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Occupy: A Name Fixed to a Flashpoint
From my article in The Sociological Quarterly’s new special issue on Occupy Wall Street: Public Performance and Backstage We know that Rosa Parks was not merely tired when she refused to give up her bus seat. She was acting with agency, and the appearance of spontaneity was part of an intentional performance designed for strategic…
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Expressive & Instrumental Actions (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 5)
by: Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Joshua Kahn Russell, and Zack Malitz Sometimes activists will take an action without much thought to how others receive it, or what precisely the action will achieve. Many people participate in actions because it’s meaningful to them, or simply because it feels good to do the right thing. We call this…
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Seek Common Ground (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 4)
When disagreeing with someone else’s ideas, it can be tempting to engage in narrative attack; to make a direct attack on one narrative from the vantage point, and in the language, of your opposing narrative. For example, when someone wraps climate change-denial views in the rhetoric of creationist beliefs, it is tempting to directly attack…
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Escalate Strategically (Beautiful Trouble – Essay 1)
There is a tendency within highly cohesive political groups to want to turn up the heat. It seems to be written into the social DNA of oppositional political groups: when group members’ level of commitment increases, they want to go further. They want to be a little more hardcore. This tendency toward escalation and increased…
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Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution – Party Tonight
It’s out! And there’s a party tonight (April 5th)! After months of sweat and tears, Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution has hit the shelves! Huge props to Andrew Boyd for herding about 70 cats into writing a whole lot of short, outstanding essays about activism, organizing, creative action, and social change. Beautiful Trouble is…
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Radicals & the 99%: Righteous Few or Moral Majority?
The Occupy Wall Street movement claims to be a movement of “the 99%”, challenging the extreme consolidation of wealth and political power by the top one percent. Our opponents, however, claim that the 99% movement is just a bunch of fringe radicals who are out of touch with mainstream America. They’re not 100% wrong about…
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#occupyWINNING: what I’m up to at Occupy Wall Street
The past ten days have been amazing. I took the train down to NYC last Wednesday, to see if I might lend a hand to the Wall Street occupation for a few days. There is so much going on. I don’t even know how many working groups there are, but today I heard that there…
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#OWS: Welcome Visitors & Plug In New Participants
Download this post as a printable PDF Three Tips for Plugging People In Bringing in new participants and volunteers is essential to an occupation-or any group or organization-that wants to grow in size and capacity. The momentum of the Occupy Wall Street movement has quickly attracted a lot of people to occupations across the United…
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Occupy Tactic Star
Download this post as a printable PDF Occupation of a space is itself a tactic. It is an action intended to help us build momentum and to move us a step closer toward our goals. And it’s been wildly successful so far! But an ongoing occupation of space is also more than a tactic. An…
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Occupy Wall Street Is You.
A week into the Occupy Wall Street actions in New York, I wrote a short article with perhaps an overly harsh title, Occupy Wall Street: Convergence of a Radical Fringe. I have to admit that I was not very hopeful about the prospects of this mobilization. The rhetoric of the initial call to action seemed…
Jonathan Matthew Smucker 