Castells Book Summary # 4 (Blog Post #5)

Much of what I know about activist networks comes from Starhawks' 2002 book Webs of Power: Notes from the Global Uprising.  Unfortunately I loaned it to someone and they never gave it back, otherwise I would be flipping through it right now for similarities to Castells' book, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age.

Much of the way I live my life as a woman and a scholar sits on a foundation that Starhawk built with her 1982 book, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics. This work introduced me not only to a philosophy of activism and non-violent resistance, but to a philosophy of life.  In the years since reading Dreaming the Dark, I have read almost everything Starhawk has written, but I no longer feel the need to don a black cape to "draw down" full moons at midnight.

Despite  following in Starhawk's footsteps as a feminist with a penchant for earth-based spiritual practice, I have never followed in Starhawk's footsteps as an out-spoken activist.  She chains herself to the gates of nuclear power plants and to old growth cedar; she creates and participates in non-governmental organizations that go forth and enact huge demonstrations of resistance (like Code Pink: Women for Peace) and she has spent way more time in jail than I have.  I have my places where I like to subvert dominant paradigms--most notably at work in the Writing Center and as a doula and critic of unnecessary interventions into the healthy childbirth process--but beyond that I am more slacktivist than activist.

I do, however, fully appreciate the degree to which non-hierarchical structures can work to bring about social change, and Manuel Castells' book illustrates how the internet can act as a web of power, a site that can bring people together in horizontally, rather than hierarchically, structured social movements.

Horizontal organizational strategy can and has worked--specifically in the "Occupy" movement--because "Most occupations follow the same general rules, although some may have slightly different norms" (180).  In other words, leaderless organizations do not necessarily result in anarchy; they can have very loosely structured--based on soft survelliance practices (24)--,but communicatively effective, designs.  Those designs are web-like.  That makes them quite compatible with the www.

The sharing of information (as compared to the hoarding of it), is crucial to non-hierarchical systems.  The key is organizing units to only need certain types of information in order to function.  In other words, some information isn't necessary, it's just noise.

In the Occupy movement, decision-making groups all grow out of a connection with a General Assembly.  In the GA, "Anyone is free to propose an idea or express an opinion" (180).  Affinity groups and Working groups constitute smaller units of the organization.  Each realm of decision making handles a domain.  "Ideally, only decisions that affect the entire group are brought to the GA" (180).   The sub-structures are often designated by a division of labor.  For example, group facilitation, media issues, public outreach, food supplies, peace keeping/security, sanitation/sustainability, and budget supervision (181) are just some of the committees that might be sanctioned by a GA.  There also might be Spokes Councils or caucuses that contribute representation to the GA, but from the microcosm to the macrocosm, the network or the web is the metaphor that guides the ways information is shared.  These organizations embody power with rather than power over.  I would call these "tend and befriend" movements as compared to "fight or flight" movements (for more on "Tend and Befriend" responses to stress see the UCLA research of Dr. Shelley Taylor).  Castells call this kind of power (the kind that challenges traditional institutional power) "counterpower" (5). 

Because "social movements are emotional movements" (13),  they are triggered when the emotional conditions of people's lives become untenable.  According to Castells, those reasons usually include: "economic exploitation, hopeless poverty, unfair inequality, undemocratic polity, repressive states, unjust judiciary, racism, xenophobia, cultural negation, censorship, police brutality, warmongering, religious fanaticism (often against others' religious beliefs) carelessness toward the planet (our only home), disregard of personal liberty, violation of privacy, gerontocracy, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and other atrocities in the long gallery of portraits featuring the monsters we are" (12).

Castells distinguishes the difference between social movements and civil wars, showing how very tenuous the line between them is. A social movement can devolve into civil war when people lose  focus on non-violence as the one form of resistance whose means is consistent with the movement's ends.  Castells writes, "Since my main interest here is not about war games, but about the fate of social movements, what appears clearly is that once the movement engages in military violence to counter military violence, it loses its character as  democratic movement to become a contender, sometimes as ruthless as its oppressors, in a bloody civil war (100).  He continues, "In a certain sense, civil wars not only kill people, they also kill social movements and their ideals of peace, democracy and justice" (100).

One of the vital strategies of the Indignada movement, resulting in its ultimate success in Spain, was/is the fact that "The indignadas was and is a peaceful movement whose courage allowed for the de-legitimization of violent repression, thus achieving a first and major victory in the citizen's hearts" (136).  The key here is courage.  As Castells explains, the decision to participate in a collective uprising to challenge oppressive political institutions is not an easy one (218).  It is risky because the institutions that want to preserve their control (or the power-hungry folks operating those institutions) have access to state-of-the-art destructive machinery that hurts, maims and kills.  To face such potential consequences, people have to get so angry they no longer care, "...the trigger is anger, the repressor is fear" (219), but the "Fear is overcome by sharing and identifying with others in a process of communicative action"(219).

From Reykjavik to Tunis to Alexandria, Libya, Bahrain, Spain, to Occupy U.S.A (read hundreds of cities here), to Ferguson Missouri, it is clear that, as a tool used by dedicated and empowered protesters, the Internet has the potential to serve as a major force of hegemonic subversion.  It has the potential, through easy uploads and insta-links to fast footage and technicolor images, to show the  ugliness of power hungry thugs who don't just want to be in charge of organizing things, they want to control things by whatever means possible. And that macho leadership bull-shit is just so tiresome.  The real courageous action, whether coordinated off-line or on, is the willingness of people to be harmed or even to die in the pursuit of a more peaceful, joyful, agency-filled life, and that can only happen if  the social movement is disciplined enough to set and maintain a peaceful example.

One of my favorite stories of using peaceful protest to challenge a police barricade is in Webs of Power, (but I can't check the citation facts until I get another copy of the book).  The protesters in this situation were trying to interrupt a set of hearings in D.C. that were to result in sending troops into Iraq (the post 9/11 Bush administration stuff).  Rather than yell, rant, scream at or push into the police (who were forming a human wall around the White House), a black woman protestor singled out an African  American police officer, went up to him and starting singing, "We Shall Overcome."  Her voice moved him, and he stepped out of her way.

Beauty as rhetoric matters.  It's like kryptonite to ugly.

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