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En breve

Crises such as coups, wars, natural disasters, recessions, and pandemics are not just opportunities for the powers that be to impose their will, but for people power to win great victories.

Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.

— Pablo Picasso

Orígenes

Naomi Klein coined the term “Shock Doctrine” in her 2007 book of the same name to describe how neoliberalism seizes on crisis to push through reactionary reforms. Since then, many commentators, including Klein herself, have invoked the idea of a reversal of the process, in which people-power leverages crises to move progressive reforms. In a 2014 interview with BillMoyer.com commentator Joshua Holland, Klein referred to such an inversion as a “people shock,” and noted that progressive “policies tend to be popular, so you don’t need to engage in the sort of devious trickery that I documented in The Shock Doctrine.”

Milton Friedman, the avatar of neoliberalism, understood that in a crisis, “the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable…Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.”

In the late 1970s, when the big post-war-boom stalled out and global capitalism entered a protracted crisis of stagflation, among the ideas “lying around” were Friedman’s own neoliberal tenets of unfettered markets and privatization (see: THEORY: Neoliberalism). Thatcher & Reagan picked them up and, unfortunately for regular folks the world over, remade the world.

In a crisis (whether that’s an economic collapse, war, natural disaster, coup, or global pandemic), the population is in shock, disoriented, reeling; emergency measures are the order of the day. If the fascists play their cards right, people can even welcome an authoritarian mode of leadership. To describe the way autocrats and corporations take advantage of such a moment, Naomi Klein coined the term “Shock Doctrine” in her 2007 book of the same name (see: THEORY: The people’s shock).

But progressive people’s struggles can also leverage a crisis to seize power. In fact, that’s how most progress has historically happened.

Take for example one of the great people-powered institutions in history: Britain’s National Health Service. During WWII many of Britain's hospitals were nationalized by Churchill’s conservative government as an emergency war measure. With the end of the war, a landslide victory by Labor set up the opportunity for the full socialization of healthcare in the UK.

This example reveals a basic recipe: four key ingredients that comprise one revolutionary cocktail:

1 part crisis
Progressive people’s struggles can leverage a crisis to seize power. That’s how most progress has historically happened.
+ 1 part emergency measures
+ 1 big idea
+ 1 mass mobilization
________________________________
= 1 nation-state-sized revolution

And during the global pandemic of 2020, we’ve seen that same basic recipe in action:

1 part crisis (failure of mild “sensitivity training”-style reforms of MN police to stop violent racist policing)
+ 1 part emergency measures (budget cuts already happening because of virus-driven economic crunch)
+ 1 big idea (“Defund the Police”)
+ 1 mass disruptive mobilization (nationwide Black Lives Matter uprisings after death of George Floyd)
________________________________
= successful defunding of police in a growing number of communities across the U.S., and a general trend away from militarized policing towards safer communities rooted in justice and care

As every sharp mixologist knows, it’s all about specific ingredients (local sourcing encouraged) and how they’re shaken or stirred. Context matters. Sudan’s bread crisis offered an opportunity for Sudanese organizers to escalate a movement that would oust three-decade-long military dictator Omar al-Bashir. In that same year, in the immediate wake of the mass shooting at the Christchurch mosque, PM Jacinda Arden turned “tragedy into action” by banning all military-style semi-automatic weapons. Organizers must determine for themselves what constitutes a crisis fit to catalyze their big ideas for change.

Organizers must also decide what strategy best propels them to victory. Electoral mobilization secured Britain’s National Health Service in 1948, but mass street actions drove the 2019 Sudanese revolution and the victories of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising.

Crisis is not destiny. It is merely opportunity, and things can always go either way. In fact, the very same crisis can be turned to radically different ends. The mass unemployment and economic dislocation of the Great Depression set the stage for both a fascist seizure of power (Hitler in Germany) as well as a social democratic revolution (the New Deal in the USA).

As Milton Friedman knew all too well, only out of a crisis do we get real change. That change can be for good or ill. But as so many of these inspiring examples show, today’s people-powered movements have the courage, and increasingly the savvy, to seize upon a moment of crisis, define a new reality, and beckon her forth.

Principio clave

Use your radical fringe to shift the Overton Window

In a crisis, the window of acceptable politics can shift dizzyingly fast. What was once “unthinkable” can quickly become “acceptable,” then “common sense,” then the law of the land, sometimes in a matter of weeks. Effective storytelling and the courage to lean into the radical edge of our movements is key to success here, as well as remembering that most progressive ideas are more popular than we’re told they are.