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Poor Peoples Movements

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Perhaps the singular contribution of the intellectual tradition of the left, as it has developed since the nineteenth century, has been to bring working-class people fully into history, not simply as victims but as actors. — location: 51 ^ref-55253

The proletariat is a creature, not of communist intellectuals, but of capital and the conditions of capitalist production, — location: 56 ^ref-27333

The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. — location: 61 ^ref-1983

historical developments frustrated Marx’s prediction: expanding capitalist production did not create a revolutionary proletariat. — location: 62 ^ref-498

Or did it.. just not where expected. Rather, in the exploited colonies

It has clung instead to the specific nineteenth-century content of the dialectic, and by doing so, has forfeited dialectical analysis. — location: 74 ^ref-37503

popular insurgency does not proceed by someone else’s rules or hopes; it has its own logic and direction. It flows from historically specific circumstances: it is a reaction against those circumstances, and it is also limited by those circumstances. — location: 93 ^ref-61316

To suggest that blacks might have done it differently—that they might have induced large elements of the southern and northern white working class to coalesce with them—without showing how specific institutional conditions afforded that option, is to assume that people are free to act without regard to the constraints imposed by their social context. — location: 103 ^ref-53746

the relevant question to ask is whether, on balance, the movement made gains or lost ground; whether it advanced the interests of working people or set back those interests. — location: 119 ^ref-9731

to criticize a movement for not advocating or reaching this goal or that one without even the most casual appraisal of its political resources is an exercise in self-righteousness. — location: 137 ^ref-38768

alternative to the totalitarianism of left or right was possible, — location: 144 ^ref-55719

BS equivalence of left and right "totalitarianism"

He argues, for example, that the vulnerability of the SPD stemmed in part from its failure to take control of the policing function, an action that was clearly within its grasp, — location: 145 ^ref-51977

Then what? What about imperialist subversion? Wreckers? Opportunists? Sabotage? Espionage?

to show what the suppressed alternatives were, and to show that these were grounded in empirically demonstrable institutional conditions. It is just such careful analysis of actual political possibilities and limitations that the critics of the gains won in the 1930s and 1960s fail to make. — location: 147 ^ref-30819

tenets about the strategies that movements “should” have followed or “ought” to have avoided, statements regarding the goals that movements “should” have embraced or “ought” to have eschewed, and statements regarding the reactions from dominant groups or others that “ought” to have been averted—none of these criticisms takes on meaning unless it can also be shown that it could have been done differently. — location: 151 ^ref-3334

to show how it might have been done goes beyond the invocation of doctrine; it requires examination of the institutional conditions which both create and limit the opportunities for mass struggle. — location: 154 ^ref-54714

it was not formal organizations but mass defiance that won what was won in the 1930s and 1960s: — location: 166 ^ref-2897

forced concessions from industry and government — location: 167 ^ref-23930

If you're talking context.. what about the global context? The fact that the Soviet Union showed another way? And other states were pursuing socialism as well?

because they were acutely vulnerable to internal oligarchy and stasis and to external integration with elites, the bureaucratic organizations that were developed within these movements tended to blunt the militancy that was the fundamental source of such influence as the movements exerted. — location: 169 ^ref-26608

the imperatives of mass-membership organizational maintenance characteristically create the kind of leadership Bernstein deplores. — location: 184 ^ref-9253

The poor need a great deal, but they are not likely to be helped to get it when we ignore the weaknesses in received doctrines revealed by historical experience. — location: 188 ^ref-55521

less susceptible to penetration by dominant elites. — location: 191 ^ref-3234

Indeed a problem (weakening of the Party was a key part of the fall of the Soviet Union), but other pressures will also arise

mass-membership bureaucracy was, after all, not invented by the left, but is rather a form through which the left emulated the modes of organization that exist in the capitalist society the left seeks to transform. That it should be defended so uncritically seems odd. — location: 191 ^ref-14316

Because it is effective and provides the best way to resist capitalist/imperialist onslaught
After all, other than movements, which can compel those already in power, it seems like soc dem approaches are preferred. are those not susceptible to all the pitfalls of beaurocracy mentioned? Compromise on key issues in order to maintain political power? (AOC/the "squad")

Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century — location: 201 ^ref-54355

Once protest is acknowledged as a form of political struggle the chief question to be examined must inevitably be the relationship between what the protestors do, the context in which they do it, and the varying responses of the state. — location: 221 ^ref-54056

it is not possible to compel concessions from elites that can be used as resources to sustain oppositional organizations over time. — location: 241 ^ref-18070

Organizers do not create such moments, as we will be at some pains to explain later, but they are excited by them, — location: 245 ^ref-2634

How much can the existencesuch moments be influenced?

by endeavoring to do what they cannot do, organizers fail to do what they can do. — location: 256 ^ref-34119

in the largest part organizers tended to work against disruption because, in their search for resources to maintain their organizations, they were driven inexorably to elites, and to the tangible and symbolic supports that elites could provide. — location: 267 ^ref-59587

People whose only possible recourse in struggle is to defy the beliefs and rituals laid down by their rulers ordinarily do not. — location: 321 ^ref-17783

only under exceptional conditions are the lower classes afforded the socially determined opportunity to press for their own class interests. — location: 420 ^ref-50081

“A revolution takes place” says Lefebvre “when and only when, in such a society, people can no longer lead their everyday lives; so long as they can live their ordinary lives relations are constantly re-established” — location: 472 ^ref-4909

it is usually when unrest among the lower classes breaks out of the confines of electoral procedures that the poor may have some influence, for the instability and polarization they then threaten to create by their actions in the factories or in the streets may force some response from electoral leaders. — location: 539 ^ref-21962

Opportunities for defiance are not created by analyses of power structures. If there is a genius in organizing, it is the capacity to sense what it is possible for people to do under given conditions, and to then help them do it. In point of fact, however, most organizing ventures ask that people do what they cannot do, and the result is failure. — location: 637 ^ref-6436

through new programs that appear to meet the moral demands of the movement, and thus rob it of support without actually yielding much by way of tangible gains. — location: 756 ^ref-18418

The widely heralded federal programs for the ghettos in the 1960s were neither designed nor funded in a way that made it possible for them to have substantial impact on poverty or on the traumas of ghetto life. But the publicity attached to the programs—the din and blare about a “war on poverty” and the development of “model cities”—did much to appease the liberal sympathizers with urban blacks. — location: 764 ^ref-13828

In the context of much-publicized efforts by government to ease the grievances of disaffected groups, coercive measures of this kind are not likely to arouse indignation among sympathetic publics. — location: 770 ^ref-17331

efforts to conciliate and disarm usually lead to the demise of the protest movement, partly by transforming the movement itself, and partly by transforming the political climate which nourishes protest. — location: 778 ^ref-48475

the right of industrial workers to unionize, won in response to massive and disruptive strikes in the 1930s, meant that workers were encouraged to use newly established grievance procedures in place of the sit-down or the wildcat strike; — location: 786 ^ref-63471

movements had arisen through interaction with elites, and had been led to make the demands they made in response to early encouragement by political leaders. — location: 795 ^ref-849

At the same time that government makes efforts to reintegrate disaffected groups, and to guide them into less politically disturbing forms of behavior, it also moves to isolate them from potential supporters and, by doing so, diminishes the morale of the movement. — location: 803 ^ref-14429

government’s responses not only destroy the movement, they also transform the political climate which makes protest possible. The concessions to the protestors, the efforts to “bring them into the system,” and in particular the measures aimed at potential supporters, all work to create a powerful image of a benevolent and responsive government that answers grievances and solves problems. As a result, whatever support might have existed among the larger population dwindles. — location: 810 ^ref-20156

protesters win, if they win at all, what historical circumstances has already made ready to be conceded. — location: 843 ^ref-40765

both the limitations and opportunities for mass protest are shaped by social conditions. — location: 849 ^ref-48779

Whatever influence lower-class groups occasionally exert in American politics does not result from organization, but from mass protest and the disruptive consequences of protest. — location: 856 ^ref-28461

Organizers and leaders cannot prevent the ebbing of protest, nor the erosion of whatever influence protest yielded the lower class. They can only try to win whatever can be won while it can be won. — location: 858 ^ref-25764

strategies must be pursued that escalate the momentum and impact of disruptive protest at each stage in its emergence and evolution. — location: 866 ^ref-38818

courts continued to view unions as criminal conspiracies until 1842 — location: 2324 ^ref-32764

It was not remarkable that welfare officials, confronted by turbulent interference with the operation of their programs, moved to grant the disrupters a symbolic role in the system, — location: 6664 ^ref-31989

To be listened to by the powerful conveyed a sense that they were at last wielding a measure of influence, that progress was being made, that reforms would follow. — location: 6669 ^ref-57319

Association with government officials who were “sympathetic” and “reasonable” and “oriented toward the problems of recipients” produced a large number of recipient leaders and organizers who came to affirm the efficacy of persuasion and negotiation. — location: 6689 ^ref-32710