"Citizens" Politics" - How to Do It

...Revolutions happen, and all sorts of people find themselves, unexpectedly, participants in the happening...

...They try to develop a coherent program for social or political change...

...But there can be no doubt that they are most effective among the people they literally left behind, who are glad (mostly) to see them back...

...A single-issue educational campaign, even with victory inconceivable, may be a useful activity...

...It involves the movement in a coalition with many other groups and so defines its position on many other issues...

...they are a minority, probably a small minority, of the country...

...Generally, movements seeking to respond to injuries or injustices endured by particular groups of people plausibly direct themselves to those same groups...

...Some members insist that its focus should be resolutely fixed on the single issue that brought them together...

...Indeed, it is hard to think of any other kind of victory that citizen activists have ever won...

...Here, with the kind permission of his publishers, are a few sections...

...But this is rarely a serious business...

...Activists and their spokesmen can safely exaggerate both the importance and the simplicity...

...His followers are rational men, not the victims (not, at least, in any simple sense) of oppression or "false consciousness...

...There is nothing else to do but try again...

...The general answer is, not until the movement is strong enough to force MICHAEL WALZER fairly clear positions on the professionals and to exercise some control over them once they have won...

...Let victory bring its complications and disappointments...

...Usually this is a break with the middle-class world, and the men and women who make it are eager to differentiate themselves from the people they have left behind...

...its members may not be conscious of the identity they share...

...The efforts of middle-class activists to organize "in the community"— which usually means among working-class men and women—are sometimes worthwhile...

...He is betrayed every time he opens his mouth, even if his rhetoric is as radical as it can be...

...But this is a foolish effort if there are no such signs, if the sole reason for not organizing elsewhere is the ideologically rooted belief that members of the middle class are different from "the people...

...They are almost certainly wrong, as a more humble approach might well demonstrate...

...Defining the Issues NEW POLITICAL MOVEMENTS GENERALLY take shape around a single issue—a wrong being done to the people who join or to some other group with whom they have political connections or moral sympathies...

...Nor, however, were they or will they be without significant effects, for good or ill...

...In time, the cause will be described in new accents...

...On the other hand, they often feel that their break with the routines of the system precludes it...

...To choose pressure politics means to try to influence those people who already hold power, who sit in official seats, who may even be responsible for the outrages against which the movement is aimed...

...If local activists don't take charge, it's best to give up and begin again somewhere else...

...They have come to be distrustful of the promises of professional politicians...

...But this constituency is not given, like that of a congressman or senator...

...In either of these last two cases, constituencies may be particularly hard to search out and put together...

...A new party is something quite different...

...The end of child labor, women's suffrage, prohibition, the end of this or that war: none of these planted the new Jerusalem...

...It may well be the "right" response even to very particular wrongs, rooted in sociological sophistication, reaching toward intellectual complexity and completion...

...To choose electoral politics is to try to dislodge those people and plant others in their seats, not necessarily or even probably the leaders of the movement, more likely whatever alternative set of professional politicians the system provides...

...One form, however, is not harmless at all, that is, the adoption of an ideology that focuses the new activist's hostility on his own past, his social or ethnic origins, his former friends and neighbors...

...One day, hopefully, there will be a new mobilization of activists, a reorganized movement, and another citizens' campaign—that is, another "last chance" for the system...

...This suggests that revolution is the next step if citizen activism in general, or this particular citizens' campaign, fails .to carry the cause to victory...

...There are, in fact, two very different strategies entangled here, which will have to be separated out in the course of movement debate and action...

...I don't want to deny the need to reach or try to reach beyond immediately available constituencies...

...Yet the historical evidence is clear: the available people in such cases MICHAEL WALZER are largely middle-class...

...For this reason above all, it Is important for activists to know what they can and cannot do and never to indulge themselves (or frighten their enemies) with fantasies of social and political changes they cannot actually bring about...

...It is not very often that anyone actually makes a revolution...

...It is also a reason for seeking out conventional politicians and urging local activists to run for office...

...Power of the ultimate sort is at stake, and no one contends for such power in a part-time way, or carries on simultaneously a nonpolitical career, or retires "CITIZENS' POLITICS"-HOW TO DO IT casually from the struggle once some point of special interest has been won...

...Why are you here today...

...someone must act on their behalf...

...The choice of action requires a break with the conventional world...

...But a party that grows, losing something of its coherence, but retaining a common program: this is an extremely rare and difficult achievement...

...It makes more sense to approach first the "CITIZENS' POLITICS"-HOW TO DO IT leaders of whatever organizations are established among the people one is trying to reach: unions, churches, veterans' groups, community clubs...

...That is a commitment many of the activists would probably like to make, but it is not what first brought them together and it is not what holds them together with other activists in the movement...

...simply listing them helps explain why amateur politics is most often parasitic on the routines of a more or less stable democratic system...

...Going to the People IT's NECESSARY to think twice before turning the movement loose on "the people...

...Efforts to reach beyond the middle class are so often ruined by the arrogance or condescension of the citizen activists involved...

...Activists can try to turn it into a single body, a self-conscious whole, a collective force...

...it recognizably exists in the sense that men and women sharing those characteristics exist...

...This is not a boundary that one can just dash across...

...But it is not organized...

...The two kinds are pressure politics and electoral politics, and I am inclined to think that there are no other kinds...

...and they come from fairly distinct sectors of the middle class: urban professional families, suburban housewives, students, and so on...

...It requires a useful theory, or something less than a theory, a point of view, a set of opinions, an argument, that at least does not contradict whatever little we know to be true...

...It is never easy to know when to shift from pressure to electoral politics, whether at any given moment (and the moments are recurrent) to enter or to avoid the campaign of this or that candidate or party...

...Among the poor, the movement cannot live on the cause alone: that's not or not necessarily a reason for giving up its single issue, but it does mean that it must ally itself with political groups and ambitious individuals who address themselves to other issues as well...

...What is more important for our purposes is the special difficulties that middle-class activists have in dealing with their own people, their inevitable constituency...

...The worst kind of middle-class bias is the assumption that everyone else has or ought to have leisure, disinterest, and a passion for distant goods...

...For sometimes there are plausible signs that a working-class base can in fact be won or some substantial number of people recruited to the work of building their own base...

...But sometimes such groups are thought to be incapable of defending themselves...

...nor does it act as a single body...

...The real choice faced by the men and women who plan these successive attempts is between two kinds of politics, both of which have conventional names, though they can each be pursued in a variety of irregular ways...

...These different possibilities lead from the first to very different views of what the movement should be like...

...They are where they are, however, because people trust them, and unless some support can be found in their ranks, no other success can be expected...

...If they are moved, how can the rest of the world stand still...

...they seem to be saying...

...This doesn't mean that one should be able to imagine winning tomorrow...

...But these are the characteristics of citizen activists...

...If they are in fact different in more fundamental ways, they are unlikely to be able to act effectively...

...As they work together they may come to share more than this...

...The effect is not much better when students spend a summer inside the factory...

...Naturally enough, his notes grew into a book, published this spring by Quadrangle Books under the title Political Action: A Practi cal Guide to Movement Politics (copyright © 1971 by Michael Walzer...

...The question is not so much of time as of particularity and limit...

...They prefer often enough to go almost anywhere else (though they are unlikely to end up anywhere else...

...Giving the system a "last chance" is another fantasy...

...It is always possible to describe one social problem so that it involves every other, so that its solution requires the solution of every other and the transformation of society as a whole...

...It presumably has objective characteristics...

...Changing the political system within which policy is made is rarely a real option for citizen activists...

...They are in search precisely of a politics that does not require them to support candidates who are only barely better than their opponents and who have, most likely, weak and vacillating positions on what the activists believe is the crucial issue...

...Where will you be tomorrow...

...its members find that they are really radically different from one another...

...Citizen activists may aim at this or that fundamental change, but they cannot hope to make a revolution...

...ac tivity will take on a new style...

...Issues should be defined so that victories can be won...

...Ordinary citizens will be among them (often yearning not to be), but at such moments it is the professionals, newly recruited professionals perhaps, who take charge...

...So a conventional politician who provides routine and necessary services easily wins a larger following then citizen activists with a program for utopia, and probably deserves the following he wins...

...Once contacts have been made, it is possible to think either of organizing a local branch or forming an alliance of some sort with groups that already exist...

...Two questions are crucial: should the citizens' movement be committed to single-issue or to multi-issue politics...

...Their first constituency is the campus...

...whether it is or isn't in any particular case is a tactical decision...

...or they can try to build such a body from among its members...

...Necessarily they attribute great importance to that issue: they believe or they say that the world will be different (and much better) once it is resolved...

...Now it is a great deal harder to launch a party than a movement, as American history amply demonstrates...

...That is especially important in the case of student activists...

...Quiet citizens are the resources of a democracy, saved up, so we are told, for those moments when professionalism fails...

...Perhaps that means that some activists will drop out, they say, but ultimately the movement will be stronger and because of its wider scope will appeal to more, not fewer, people...

...And victories can be won through single-issue campaigns...

...In fact, for many people, a cause, even their own cause, is a luxury they can only occasionally afford...

...Searching for a Constituency A CONSTITUENCY is a social base, a sector of society (ethnic group, age group, economic class, or whatever) within which the movement finds sympathy and support, from which it recruits members, for which it claims to speak...

...That doesn't mean that what they do isn't important, nor that it isn't sometimes dangerous...

...Small bands of sectarian militants may then experiment with disruption and violence, fantastically imitating Jacobins and Bolsheviks...

...But it requires too much from too many people —too much time, energy, money, above all, "CITIZENS POLITICS"—HOW TO DO IT too much commitment—to be politically viable...

...That focus should almost certainly be on a single issue, an important issue, but simply stated: the vote, the war, the bomb...

...And the most useful argument is one that imposes upon activists only one choice and only one fight at a time...

...They blind themselves, sometimes willfully, to the entanglements of social and political life, to all the obstacles that lie between the particular victory they may in fact win and the transformations they hope for...

...Nor is it at all clear that a new party and a struggle for social change on a wide front is the best (the easiest or the quickest) way to carry their own cause to victory...

...Some members of the movement will want to plan ahead and should certainly do so, though not at the expense of the movement's immediate focus...

...But it is worth emphasizing the two simply because they exhaust the range: changing the policies men make and changing the men who make policy...

...Of course, the two choices overlap in important ways...

...The notion, so common on the Left, that workers must be organized "from below" is one of the clearest examples of the arrogance of the organizers: they assume they have some massage to deliver that has never yet been thought of, let alone argued and championed, by leaders and would-be leaders within the working-class community itself...

...They may feel unconventional...

...The activists are likely to disagree about much else, but this sense of injury or indignation they must share...

...Political activity anywhere in a society obviously produces adjustments, not necessarily transformations, everywhere...

...organizers know exactly where to look for support (though they may look elsewhere as well...

...No serious political enterprise can be sustained for long by outsiders—though it is always possible to make a few converts and pretend to be leading a mass struggle...

...But activists have no business imagining that they will win right away...

...Finding a constituency is not always a problem...

...Often they do the second, while pretending to do the first...

...should the movement be organized as a single constituency or a coalition...

...But it is always best to plan one's moves on the supposition that most of the world will stand still, that established institutions and social practices will survive the shock...

...It's all to the good if the movement comes to look very different in different parts of the country or even of the city...

...If they do take charge, they must be given their head...

...but their intermittent forays into the political arena are by now one of the conventions of democratic politics...

...It isn't absolute, as they will learn, but it is a great deal more than revolutionaries have any right to expect...

...Issues related to the original one come into view and the values that underlay their first choice of action lead them to choose again, to extend the range of their movement...

...And sometimes a movement is aimed at a policy thought to be unjust or immoral, but which is not injurious or not obviously injurious to any group of possible political actors (a foreign war, for example...

...they may behave unconventionally...

...Activists do best if they begin by assuming that there are more people like them where they came from...

...Then they want the movement to adopt their program, to switch from singleissue to multi-issue politics...

...They choose the part over the whole, that is, they have or choose to have perceptions of the part, only visions of the whole...

...This is appropriate for a revolutionary, perhaps, but it makes citizen activism a great deal harder than it need be...

...Using democratic rights puts them at risk: now there are men and women —now there are enemies—threatened by that use...

...Drawn from his own experiences in the Cambridge area, Walter's little book is a useful guide, and sometimes a very wry and funny one, to the kind of "amateur" politics without which democracy withers...

...When working among the poor, there is one thing that must never be forgotten: they have more immediate and pressing concerns than those of the movement...

...In either case, the actual work must be done by people established in the community...

...Revolution is such a fantasy, less common than is often thought, but worth dealing with early on...

...They are wrong to think of themselves as unusual people, though they may well take pride in their resolution and energy...

...This general rule sometimes suggests to activists that they must run their own candidates or that they must join in a new political party...

...But it is also possible to describe one social problem as if it stands alone or sufficiently apart from other problems so that it can be solved without doing anything else or waiting for anything else to happen...

...It is, after all, what makes the movement possible in the first place...

...Differentiation takes a great variety of forms, and many of these are harmless enough: small badges, selfawarded, for distinctive conduct...

...All that has changed is that some group of people have decided to use the pronoun "we" and to act together...

...Sentiment of this sort is entirely justified...

...And they ought, whatever their preferences, to be as effective as they can...

...In fact, of course, like everyone else, they are salt of the earth...

...it requires a commitment to an elaborate program and to broad social change...

...Nor is it the case in a democratic society that this decision challenges the political system...

...Most men and women join the movement counting on that protection...

...Strategic Choices DIET MEN AND WOMEN often exaggerate the importance of their own outrage, their long delayed decision to do something...

...On the other side of the class line, a man is a stranger for a lot longer than two months...

...But the character and extent of these are almost impossible to predict...

...Indeed, the more sudden and seemingly uncalled for is the attempt, the more certain it is to fail...

...They can always make further choices, join further fights, later on...

...Neither description is true, though it is possible that the first is more sophisticated...

...We make guesses and are usually wrong...

...In any case, action cannot and does not depend upon a true theory of social change...

...But assuming that pressure politics (petitions, mass meetings, marches, and so on) doesn't lead to a change in government policy, electoral politics is a necessary next step...

...The movement can't avoid it, even if supporting conventional candidates and parties involves some compromise of its principles...

...Winning turns out, of course, to be something less than they expected...

...The constituency of the labor movement is the working class...

...Last summer Michael Walzer began writing some notes on the problems of "citizens politics"—that is, the kinds of local groups, some tenacious and others short-lived, that have grown up throughout the country during the last few years...

...Or, to make the same point in another way, it is all-too-easy to establish a very small political party, an association of activists who have the same position on almost everything...

...Sometimes, however, and probably more often, new is sues have opposite effects: the movement splinters...

...they are often pursued simultaneously, with stress being put on the first only until some group of professionals adopts the cause...

...That is a reason, of course, for the movement staff to provide whatever services it can: day-care, legal help, advice on available welfare programs...

...On the one hand, electioneering is the sort of politics citizen activists are most familar with, know best, probably do best...

...The crises and outrages that set off the political activity of ordinary citizens are serious enough, but they occur within a system that is not yet in a state of total crisis and that protects even the irregular recourses of its members...

...Many citizen activists explicity assume that these leaders are not to be trusted...

...The truth is that the class barrier is painfully difficult to break through, and the difficulty is not reduced simply because activists agree on the importance of making the breach...

...Other members seem to be more realistic...

...They try to fit the single issue into a complex of problems...

...This is one of the major achievements of Marxist ideology...

...They must risk failure, and they ought to be aware that the most likely consequence of failure is not revolution at all, but the fragmentation of their movement and the retreat of many citizens from politics...

...The tendency of this second group is to turn the movement into a political party...

...their second is the world of their parents...

...Failure can be seen clearly, I think, in the way workers look at students leaf(etting at a factory gate: "Who are you...

...The movement, with all its necessary pretension, is more nearly possible...

...Begin where you are —this is one of the central maxims of moral life, but in the life of a political movement it is often necessary to begin where you were...

...Their good intentions are transparent, but so, unhappily, is the assurance of superior wisdom that is the badge of their class...

...I am not concerned here with efforts to explain the peculiar capacities of the middle class for moral indignation, nor with the level of education, leisure time, child-rearing practices, ethnic history of its members...

...It is only a question of when, and to that there is no specific answer...