You're More Powerful than You Think by Eric Liu

Author:Eric Liu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2017-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

GUERRILLA CITIZENSHIP: UNDERMINE

All around the world are people with few visible forms of power at their disposal who manage to shape their societies passively. In Weapons of the Weak, his incisive 1985 study of the Malay peasantry, James Scott describes the many subtle ways that poor peasant farmers engaged in “everyday forms of resistance.” Foot-dragging, willful misunderstanding of mandates from landlords and officials, ritualized performances of defiance, outright sabotage—all have been part of an unstated, unending re-litigation of the social contract in Malaysia.

Power from below also can arise from unplanned collective action. In his insightful book Life as Politics, Asef Bayat describes “social nonmovements—uncoordinated choices to practice a way of everyday life” that may not evolve into formal political action but that nonetheless change the frame of the politically possible. In Iran, for instance, young people have chosen to adopt styles of fun—in clothing, music, food, books, gender mixing, and slang—that subtly defy official Islamist culture. Those young people, like the daring youth who wore blue jeans in Soviet-era Moscow, are making choices of resistance. Their choices are not organized by anyone in particular but they are tacitly connected in a quiet form of dissent that generates power from below.

That kind of intuitive, uncoordinated resistance from below may be necessary in a society with a sharply unequal power structure. It is often one of the few ways that people who are oppressed can express their frustration or show any agency. But as a method of social change, it is always insufficient. Movements that truly change a society will cohere only when intuitive and uncoordinated activity becomes intentional and well-coordinated. Only when the disenfranchised become organized and directed toward actively unmaking the system do they become capable of true revolution.

Mao Zedong, in his long war to take control of China in the 1930s and 1940s, took a most cold-eyed inventory of his situation. He knew his Communist forces did not have the advantage in trained soldiers or materiel or diplomatic alliances; the rival Nationalists, backed by the United States, had that edge (and their common enemy, the Japanese, had the most powerful military in Asia). He knew as well that he could not rally a sympathetic urban proletariat, as the Leninist playbook prescribed: China’s cities were not industrialized enough and were in many cases controlled by the Nationalists. What Mao did have were millions of beleaguered peasants primed for change, his own knowledge of the rural and remote areas of the country—and the option to buy time.

So he shaped his approach accordingly, by relying extensively on such insurgent tactics and strategic retreats as the Long March, and by investing heavily in propaganda and mass political education as he moved through the countryside. He let the Nationalists bear the brunt of fighting against the Japanese Army, even as he undermined the Nationalists with guerrilla warfare.

By the time military circumstances had shifted in his favor—the end of World War II found the Nationalist forces depleted—he was able to pivot to a more direct strategy of frontal assault with regular military forces.

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