Fight the power...with counterpower?

Submitted by Matthew on 25 January, 2012 - 1:51

Tim Gee claims to have “a single idea which explains why social movements succeed or fail”. Two hundred pages later I am not convinced.

Gee’s theory of “counterpower” is that “the resistance of the oppressed is a major driver in history”. Agreed. That is the principle which guides my politics and activism. But here the idea is developed in a confusing direction. “Power is when the few control the many; ‘counterpower’ is when the many resist the control of the few.” But from the historical examples Gee uses it is evident that he is interested in winning genuine social change — to talk about just resisting is problematic.

Gee’s “counterpower” is the power used by a social movement to force concessions or change from a government or in society, that is, the power (leverage) exercised by our side. Using the term “counterpower” and focusing on this alone obscures the struggle for power between the oppressed and oppressors; it suggests that an alternative form of power exists alongside this conflict and that, potentially, all we need to do is grasp this alternative form of power, thereby giving up on the fight for... power. Yet the way Gee deals with his historical examples suggests that this is not his perspective!

He advocates confrontation and negotiating for reforms, showing a tacit understanding of the struggle to exert working-class power over capitalism, to take power away from the capitalists.

Gee describes three distinct types of “counterpower”:

“Idea counterpower... can be exercised by challenging accepted truths, refusing to obey and finding new channels of communication”. I would call this “propaganda”. It could even be critical theory. However, I think it obscures things to pretend that “idea counterpower” is fundamentally different from what Gee calls the “idea power” of governments and business.

“Physical counterpower... can occasionally mean literally fighting back, or, alternatively, non-violently placing our bodies in the way of injustice.”

Gee argues against “absolute pacifism”, that is, against allowing an opponent to rain blows down on a movement in the belief that demonstrative passivity changes minds. He is, however, very firmly in favour of non-violent direct action, arguing that “the greater the role of violence in social change, the lesser the democracy of the post-transition settlement”. He cites the “Bolshevik coup in 1917” and the Libyan rebels as examples of failure.

Leaving aside the ahistorical lumping together of the 1917 October revolution and the Russian civil war that soon followed and the branding of this combination as a “coup”, Gee ignores the fact that context and conditions can make certain events inevitable. The military might of Qaddafi, coupled with his determination to crush all opposition and the absence of any organised labour movement made civil war unavoidable in Libya.

Gee’s notion of an “economic counterpower” is underdeveloped, but its presence is important. It is defined as “strikes, boycotts, democratic regulation and ethical consumption”. Gee does not say whether some of these tactics are more useful than others. I would argue that a strike is more useful than a boycott, and that ethical consumption is only an expensive way of making yourself feel a little better about the naked exploitation of capitalism. It is positive, however, that Gee accepts the importance of economic power as a method of fighting back.

Gee sees struggles as corresponding to stages. I would have liked to see this idea a little more developed.

Do these different stages require different tactics or is it just an attempt to compartmentalise and tidy up the process of class struggle? I got the sense that Gee was trying to lay a theory over historical events, rather than searching for the logic that emerges from them.

Gee tends to see movements as homogeneous masses struggling toward the same goal — that drastically limits his analysis. Take this assessement of the women’s suffrage movement, for example.

For Millicent Fawcett’s Suffragists, the 1918 victory was testament to decades of constitutional campaigns for change. For Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst it reflected the delayed gains from their militant strategy. For Sylvia Pankhurst and other radicals, the eventual extension of the ballot was a concession by those in power in order to prevent more fundamental change. To an extent they were all right. The Suffragists embodied the “Co-ordination Stage”, the Suffragettes moved things to the “Confrontation Stage”, while the socialists aided the “Consolidation Stage”. In the process, the perfect dynamics were constructed to achieve a major step toward the change for which they had so long striven.

But these different groups were fighting for different aims: there was a conflict between “votes for all women” and “votes for ladies”, and the grassroots agency of working-class women was opposed by some sections of the movement.

The strength of Gee’s book is its idea that a great many tactics and methods need to be combined in order to build effective campaigns. But Gee tries to raise this “insight” to the level of theory, and claims to have found a complete solution to the big question “how can we win”. He looks in history to find examples to fit his theory. In so doing he makes omissions and slight misrepresentations, several of which I noticed in his account of the campaigns I had read about or been involved in.

If this were the first radical book I had read it would have had a positive effect on me, encouraging me to think that change from below is not only possible, but desirable. But I would also have picked up a number of confused and counter-productive ideas and been misled about at least some of the history of these movements.

Tim Gee is asking the right questions, but doesn’t deliver many good answers.

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