Mass street action

Everyone has felt the irresistible people-power of a large march or rally. When a crowd is fired up by great musicians or fiery speakers it can rock. There is real strength in numbers. Most of us have also been inspired by a great nonviolent direct action. When individuals or small teams decide to creatively throw themselves upon the gears of the machine, it can detonate powerful mind bombs in our psyches.

But when you bring the two together, and thousands of folks from all walks of life collaborate in a mass street action, that’s when magic and movements happen. Movements do mass actions. And you need a highly functioning and energized movement in order to repeatedly pull off smart mass actions in an escalating struggle for change.

When thousands of folks collaborate in a mass street action, that’s when magic and movements happen.

In the spring of 2011, a million Egyptians took to the streets, occupied Tahrir Square, fought off wave after wave of security forces, and after eighteen eventful and often bloody days, forced President Hosni Mubarak from office. In 1999, 70,000 people took to the streets of Seattle and nonviolently shut down the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting, the world’s largest business meeting (see: STORY: Battle in Seattle). In 2010, 3,000 trade unionists and their allies formed a “Citizens’ Posse” and encircled a downtown Washington D.C. hotel full of insurance industry lobbyists for a day in a show of force during the closing weeks of America’s epic health care reform fight.

In spite of the differences here in scale, duration, political importance, targets, and tactics, all three of these mass street actions succeeded in their goals because they all shared a few key ingredients:

• they disrupted business as usual;

• they had a clear motive and story;

• they used disciplined nonviolence and focused militancy; and

• they offered an easy way for individuals to participate.

A mass street action can’t really be choreographed, because it’s too big to direct by shouting through a megaphone — instead, it needs to be largely self-organizing. To work, though, it needs a shared framework, mode of action, or rough script to both facilitate self-organizing and maintain the coherence of the overall action (see: PRINCIPLE: Simple rules can have grand results).

Tahrir didn’t need a script. All it needed was a call to congregate in public spaces.

The movement that shut down the WTO was built around a loose coalition, held together by a horizontally democratic spokescouncil. It agreed on a broad messaging frame and laid down some tactical ground rules (e.g. an agreement on nonviolence, specific responsibilities for each cluster of affinity groups, etc.). It was not choreographed, it was chaotic; decentralized but connected.

The Citizens’ Posse action was tightly scripted. Coalition partners designed and agreed on the action frame up front. It needed a tighter script because the action relied more on theatre and story than on an actual shutdown of the target. Even though it was primarily a communicative action, it felt like a concrete one because the theatre itself was militant, and participants were given a powerful role to play in it (see: PRINCIPLE: Don’t expect a concrete outcome from a symbolic action).

Originally published in Beautiful Trouble.