How to Be Spontaneous in Two Easy Lessons
How can we on the left be spontaneous, and still be effective in helping societies change in progressive ways?
Benjamin Abrams has published a very well-conceived, and even better written, book that will help us to answer that question, The Rise of The Masses: Spontaneous Mobilization and Contentious Politics.
Abrams develops a new theory to explain all of the many major protest events that are NOT initiated and then led by pre-existing social movement organizations, or even by pre-existing networks of (past, present and ready-to-be-future) activists.
To be precise, Abrams develops a theory, Affinity-Convergence Theory (ACT), that seeks to explain the causes of what he calls "spontaneous mobilization". He does not try to analyze the mobilizations themselves beyond what is necessary to explain the causes. How is it that masses of individuals with no necessary pre-existing relations come together to wage massive protests over a sustained period?
Abrams presents detailed yet impressively concise analyses of four cases -- the 2011 Tahrir Square in Cairo Egypt Arab Spring uprising, the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protest that began in New York and quickly spread to many cities in the US and elsewhere, the George Floyd Black Lives Uprising of 2020, and the early years of the 1789 French Revolution.
I hope to write several articles based on Abrams's book. This first one will present the basics of Affinity-Convergence Theory. I will illustrate it by discussing one of the four cases covered in the book, the 2020 George Floyd murder protests.
Abrams is a British Sociology professor at University College London. His book is in conversation with the predominant sociological theory explaining what Charles Tilly called "contentious politics". Indeed, Abrams states that he sees ACT theory as extending and complementing what I will now call Contentious Politics Theory (CPT). I mention this because the book is written for specialists in social movement theory.
I will select out the basics of the theory in order to draw lessons for activists. I strongly recommend reading the book, even if you have zero background, because Abrams is that good at explaining things and in as few words as necessary.
Before I start presenting the basics of ACT theory, let me raise the stakes. Abrams intends to provide a theory to explain what he says current social movements theories have avoided trying to explain, contentious politics that were not significantly initiated by any organizations or even activist individuals. I believe that ACT theory can and should also be applied to explain most mass mobilizations initiated, and/or soon after their beginning led, by left activist organizations and individuals -- for the very simple reason that almost all such mobilizations today are deliberately organized in order to promote and maintain as much spontaneity as possible.
A spontaneist approach to organizing is hegemonic, and almost sacred, within the left around the world. I view ACT theory as a powerful tool for describing how we on the real existing left do contentious politics today. It is also powerful in demonstrating that major uprisings can be shown to be spontaneous in the strict sense used by Abrams, of people acting together without organization or activist leadership, or by ignoring attempts to impose it.
The Contentious Politics Theory (CPT) that Abrams extends and complements, while of course also critiquing, is a mostly meso level theory. CPT explains how activist "social movement organizations" (SMOs) and networks of formerly or currently active individual activists initiate, organize and lead all forms of contentious politics. Meso means explaining at the level of groups, whether formal or informal (e.g. networks).
ACT theory is an explicitly two-level theory, micro (individual to individual) and macro (large structures/relations and cultures/ideologies).
Meso theories tend to be intermediate in time, explaining "waves" of protest. Micro theories tend to be presentist. Macro theories tend to be historical, exploring causal factors that extend over long periods of time. Of course, all theories try to address all three levels of action and causes of action, but ACT arguably differs from CPT in its emphasis.
Abrams starts by asserting that there are three avenues, three chains of causal factors, that lead to leftward mass mobilization -- organized groups, supporting networks and mass affinities. An "affinity for participation" is defined to mean a predisposition that makes an individual more likely to participate spontaneously. Affinities are characteristics of individuals, but Abrams stresses that his theory is a probabilistic theory about "mobilized people's aggregate behaviour : the combined consequence of many individuals' interactions with large-scale social forces". (p6)
In other words, in a given situation there may be thousands and even millions of individuals with characteristics that predispose them to participate, but only a minority will actually ever choose to participate. ACT theory explains the participation of that subset of people with given predispositions who actually mobilize.
The second type of causal factor that Abrams deploys to describe spontaneous mass mobilizations are macro (historical circumstances) factors that he calls convergences. What he really means is historical circumstances type causes of convergences (he uses the word "catalysts" for those causes).
Convergence means a spontaneous coming together at the same point of people who start off weakly or not at all related and in separate places. The fudging of the lines between the process of individuals coming together without being led or organized by anyone to do so (the process of converging) and the historical circumstances that combine with individual affinities to cause that convergence is intentional.
Abrams wants to stress that the process of coming together, or converging, is a process that happens to individuals choosing to act on their own, and then acting together with others on an individual basis. Every participant is responding to historical circumstances that favour participation in protest individually and differently. It is spontaneous.
Abrams also wants to argue that a presentist logic predominates. The historical circumstances are conjunctural, are immediate, existing and operating as causes in the present.
Abrams provides a helpful diagram of ACT theory where two sets of causal factors combine to produce participation in a spontaneous mobilization: "Affinity predisposes, [then] Convergence catalyzes". In my own words: Individual Characteristics and Individual Responses to Circumstances cause some individuals to mobilize at the same time and in the same place. And the experience of coming together, of converging, is in itself energizing. Characteristics plus Circumstances equals Spontaneous Mobilization that becomes self-causing once it has begun.
Now let us put some meat onto those very abstract bones. ACT theory is too detailed to present in all its detail, so I will be selective.
THE 2020 BLACK LIVES PROTESTS AGAINST THE POLICE MURDER OF GEORGE FLOYD
George Floyd was murdered by police on May 25, 2020. Mass protests against yet another instance of extreme police brutality against, and murder of, Black people continued for months, leading up to the November 2020 presidential election. Donald Trump was still president up until the November 2020 election, which he lost.
The Republican Party made the anti-racist protests a central election issue with demagogic and alarmist ads about law and order being under threat by the "radical left" organized protests. This provided a stimulus to ordinary Democratic Party voters who may have never before even seriously considered participating in an anti-racist street protest to consider participating, directly or indirectly. The protests could be perceived as anti-Trump, hence pro Democrat, and Trump and the Republicans went out of their way to persuade everyone to see things that way.
The protests took place in the early high period of the COVID pandemic. In 2020, Trump was widely seen by people who were already anti-Trump as having allowed the virus to spread. He belittled the efforts, and discredited the advice, of Doctor Fauci and the Center for Disease Control medical experts for quarantines, wearing masks and taking the vaccine when it became available. He promoted quack cures, and went as far as aligning himself with the far right promoted conspiracy theories, all of which boiled down to the fear-inducing message that "The Vaccine is Worse than the Virus".
During 2020 COVID large numbers of people were stuck at home for long periods. They were either kept away from their workplaces or from in person schooling. The virus proved much less likely to kill young people. So young people were especially available to go out and mix with others, and risk catching COVID, at the street protests and in socializing in small informal groups in and around the protests.
To vastly understate, protests against anti-Black racism, and specifically against police extreme brutality and murdering actions against Black people, have a very long history. To take only the relatively recent period since the mid 1950s, here is a very selective list to trigger your memory: the Emmett Till murder and anti-lynching protests (1955); the 1961 firebombings and beatings of the Freedom Rider activists during their riding of buses to the US South, where Blacks and Whites were not supposed to ride in unsegregated buses; the 1964 killing of three civil rights workers at the outset of the Mississippi Freedom Summer voter registration campaign; the February 1965 assassination of Malcolm X; the August 1965 Watts uprising; the 1967 Detroit riots (part of a summer of anti-racism riots); the 1968 murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy that were seen as assassinations by State and police connected shooters, and those murders gained more sympathy for anti-racist protesters when the Chicago police used extreme brutality at the Democratic Party convention against mostly White and middle class youth, who were protesting what was seen as a racist genocidal war in Vietnam; the 1969 murder of Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton that was openly planned and carried out by FBI police as part of a Cointelpro campaign to eliminate Black leaders, either by the courts or by murders; the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles; the 2012 vigilante justice killing of Trayvon Martin in open gun carry Florida; the 2014 protests against police killings and years of aggressive police brutality in Ferguson Missouri.
Systemic racism, including State supported and/or enacted extreme brutality and murder of Black people and other people of colour (notably Native Indians), has been an endlessly recurring Nietzsche-ian event in the US since its inception, and as far back as the first settlers. This, plus the very long history of protests against it, predispose a very large majority of the US population to have well-formed understandings and views about both. Very few individuals in the US in 2020 needed any organization or person in authority or social critic to tell them what to think or do.
Hence it only comes as a partial shock to discover, as Abrams documents, that the Black Lives Uprising of 2020 was neither initiated, nor subsequently led, by the national Black Lives Matter organization. They actually opposed it at first, and never did lead it after it had begun. Some local BLM chapters got involved, but essentially as what anarchists call "affinity groups", groups of people who share some characteristic that makes it easier for them to work together without much coordination, as a local face to face group.
This is only part of the Abrams explanation of how the Black Lives protests began and were sustained as largely spontaneous mobilizations. Let us put just these facts into the ACT theory categories of affinities (characteristics of individuals that predisposed them to participate) and catalyzing convergences (immediate historical circumstances that pushed or attracted some individuals to participate).
AFFINITIES
Young people of school age were thrust into a shared social status of being outside school and outside the workplace, and also being less threatened by the COVID virus during the first stages of the pandemic. They were primed and ready to get involved when an opportunity like the protests came along.
Most people who ended up protesting George Floyd's murder did not need anyone to tell them that this was yet another murder of a Black person by racist police, who were working for a government headed by a racist president and leader of a Republican Party that was trying to get elected by promoting pro-police and anti-Black racist hysteria. They were already disposed to be anti-racist and often anti-police.
CONVERGENCE CATALYSTS (Immediate Historical Circumstances that pushed or pulled some individuals into mobilization)
Independent of the issues at stake, or the predispositions of individuals towards them, the protests themselves were stimulating (an opportunity to mix with other youth during the COVID confinements) and they provided a cathartic release from some of the fear and depression induced by COVID. This is an example of what it means to say that many protests become self-causing once they have begun.
Donald Trump was president and he and the Republican Party campaign made supporting or opposing the Black Lives protests a partisan issue, telling ordinary, not necessarily left-leaning or ever in the past actively anti-racist, Democrats that they were unpatriotic police-haters and N-word lovers, who had to make a choice for or against the "radical left, anti law and order" protesters.
Trump kept the Black Lives protests in the news headlines for many months, and more specifically elevated the protests from just another in the long history of anti police brutality and murders protests, by sending armed forces and other federal agency policing agency personnel to violently suppress the protests in many cities. This made it not only the right thing to do to participate in the protests, or at least show open support for them, but a much more important than usual conflict to take an active stand on. Many people were persuaded that if Trump and the racists were not stopped here and now, then he would get re-elected and impose an extreme law and order authoritarian regime on everyone, more minorities and liberals and poor people than others, but on everyone outside of the wealthy and powerful and the Trump base.
CODA
I hope that this is enough to understand the basics of Abrams's Affinity-Convergence Theory explanation of the causes of spontaneous mobilization. As I stated above, the stakes are higher for this theory because most protests that are organized and led by activists and activist organizations deliberately try to foster as much spontaneity as possible. Spontaneity in this context means leaderless activity, except maybe in small affinity groups, and activity that results from consensus-seeking participatory democracy by the people physically present at the protest at the time of the debate and decision-making.
In today's left, spontaneist theories of organizing and mobilization are hegemonic, to the point of being sacred. I think that the Abrams ACT theory is a very well thought out accounting of spontaneous mobilization, a theory that shows how it is possible to make it work, at least as far as attracting mass participation, and often sustaining it by spontaneist methods once it has begun.
There is a lot to learn from Abrams's work that will be useful for both those who agree with the spontaneist approach and for those who, like myself, recognize its merits and have personally been involved in plenty of protests that maximize spontaneity as a matter of principle, but who think that spontaneism only takes us so far, and that we need to go much further.