Introduction
Explore inspiring and educational articles by George Lakey, US activist, strategist, Quaker, trainer and writer. He shares hard-won lessons on nonviolent action and social movements. Many of his articles are featured in Waging Nonviolence. Explore the selection below, organised by topic area.
Allies
Whatever an activist’s personal code of morality about violence and property destruction is, this question is a collective and strategic one. Evidence-based knowledge shows more allies are stirred to act when we heighten the contrast between our tactics and the tactics of our opponent. – George Lakey, Source
Know your Allies your Opponents and Everyone in Between: The Spectrum of Allies
There are plenty of times when an individual comes up with a great idea for a group’s next direct action. But when Martin Oppenheimer and I wrote A Manual for Direct Action during the civil rights movement, we also wanted to offer a tool that would help a group, collectively, to generate excellent ideas. So Marty and I created a tool that has spread far beyond that time and place: the Spectrum of Allies.
Finding allies in unlikely places
The willingness of campaigners to take risks for justice can inspire others to also take risks.
What makes effective white allies? Training, not shaming
A pro-training culture moves beyond the language of correction and control, toward the goal of liberatory empowerment.
Class
How does class matter?
The hardest job I ever had in a half century of social change work was coordinating a multi-class coalition… An advantage I had was that our campaign included a collective of the Movement for a New Society (MNS), a radical network that was already figuring out how social class influences the way activists do and don’t work together for change.
How class tunnel vision hurts social movements
In the larger context of class war the defensive posture is for losers. To win, movements must take the offensive and fight for a compelling vision.
Break out of your class bubble, get training and win!
Many activists have access to anti-oppression trainings, and that’s one place to learn the kind of “inclusive strategizing” needed to build movements that cross class lines. But beware! Some traditional training styles that activists use have been influenced unwittingly by classist assumptions.
Climate Crisis
What should we do with the perpetrators of the climate crisis?
Chuck Collins’ novel “Altar to an Erupting Sun” raises important questions of strategy in the fight for a livable future.
How can nations best prepare to face a pandemic or climate crisis?
Our willingness to prioritize the protection of the community as a whole depends largely on social trust — something the Nordics achieved by rising up against their establishments.
How to create a multi-level movement for climate justice
The more we hear calls for the urgency of climate justice like that of Bill McKibben’s July Rolling Stone article, the more we confront a strategic dilemma: Where shall we put our energy, on the local or national level?
Courage and Fear
‘Courage’ is a muscle developed through a series of successfully-taken risks. Each success expands the courage muscle, and loosens the self-limiting beliefs we walk around with. – George Lakey, Source
Ingredients for building courage
While many of us will never face a terror situation like that of pre-1970s Mississippi, we all experience fear and learning how to handle it is important.
Finding courage in anxious times
Courageous cultures are created by centering ourselves on our strengths and encouraging members to take chances with the support of the group.
Where’s the hope in the midst of a shutdown?
Declining legitimacy alone does not make a revolutionary situation — people need to fine another place besides electoral politics to put their hope.
Fascism
How to fight fascism from a position of strength
A Swiss progressive political movement and Denmark’s first female imam show the power of going on the offensive.
How to take on fascism without getting played
Focusing on fascists as the enemy is mistaking the symptom for the cause.
For authoritarians, violence is about getting what they want, which is to make us scared. – George Lakey Source
Hope, Vision and Opportunities
At our best, activists stay nimble. We scan the environment looking for lemons that can be turned into lemonade, noting that our society gives us lots of lemons. – George Lakey, Source
How can I keep from singing, even in grim times?
As a young activist during the civil rights movement, I learned the importance of singing to get through hard times.
How activists can fight through doom and gloom to be more effective
When the biggest changes seem impossible, activists can still take important steps to empower themselves and build for long-term success.
Envision or perish — why we must start imagining the world we want to live in (co-author Pamela Haines)
Without a bold, inclusive vision that makes intuitive sense to most Americans, not even the best strategies will be enough to carry the day.
Can now really be the best time to be alive? A dialogue across generations
A worried young organizer confronts a movement elder who believes that now — in the midst of deep crisis — is our best chance to make big progressive change.
Why the Resistance can’t win without vision
It’s time to move past reactivity to Trump and channel that passion into more focused movement-building for change.
‘A Vision for Black Lives’ is a vision for everyone
The vision will benefit all of us. So we must beware of the subtle tendency to reduce its impact by reducing it to the color of its origins.
When the next crisis comes, which movements will seize the opportunity?
By not having a clear vision, the Occupy movement remained small and was unready for the heavy lifting of forcing structural change.
Very few movements seem to realize that the pace of change can accelerate so rapidly that it outstrips the movement’s ability to use its opportunities fully. – George Lakey, Source
Lessons Learned
What we can learn from the LGBTQ movement’s 50 years of achievement
Despite pain, loss, disruption and grave threats, the LGBTQ movement — decade after decade — launched new campaigns for more advanced goals and won.
Lessons from the LGBT equality movement
Given deeply structured heterosexism and its link to oppression, policies toward LGBT people are changing fast. How did this movement become so effective?
A century later, the women’s suffrage movement offers a timely lesson on how to win through escalation
As the 19th Amendment turns 100 amid a summer of mass protest, it’s important to remember the decisive role nonviolent direct action played in hastening its ratification.
Today’s progressive movements must learn from Black Lives Matter — and join together
Black Lives Matter prepared for this current moment in key ways, and the united power of many movements should join to take on the system.
What the Parkland teens can teach Medicare for All campaigners
The Parkland teens are succeeding because their faces and passion can be seen and felt. The extraordinary opportunity for Medicare for All is that vulnerable people are everywhere.
Unions have been down before, history shows how they can come back
The best way to honor unions at this time of trial is to learn from their innovations and successes, so that we can make strategic choices for today.
What Trump protesters can learn from the civil rights movement
When faced with a far worse foe than Trump, civil rights workers didn’t protest the Klan’s Grand Wizard, they pro-actively built power behind their own demands.
What white allies can learn from allies in the gay rights struggle
The main job of allies is not to unlearn bigotry and call each other out for betraying lingering traces of prejudice — it’s to become bold and take action.
4 lessons from Iceland and Greece for movements fighting austerity
Movements for justice around the world have much to learn from both nations’ overwhelming determination to take charge of their own economies.
Targets matter — why a small action group took on a mighty bank (and won)
The power of a campaign is related to its design.
How a neighborhood in Philadelphia learned that real safety lies in solidarity
Faced with rising crime, residents were forced to choose between leaving for the suburbs or demanding more cops — until activists presented a third option.
Industrial disasters and student activism — an overlooked story
The calamities in Bangladesh have reminded bargain-hunting consumers in Western countries of what goes on behind our backs.
Where the gun control campaign went wrong
There is, famously, a character in Chinese that includes both crisis and opportunity. I wish activists more often thought that way and planned accordingly.
Icelanders force accountability for banks — why can’t we?
Ever since Iceland’s economy collapsed in 2008, the country has been busy reinventing itself. The first step was to restore democracy through a turbulent nonviolent struggle, then to force resignations in the financial sector and secure a criminal conviction of their prime minister for dereliction of duty….
Puerto Rico’s lessons in revolutionary campaigning
Radical activists often face a dilemma about how to relate to campaigns. Campaigns focus on relatively short-term and winnable goals rather than the fundamental change that we radicals long for…
The Black Panthers’ ‘militarist error’
The Black Panther Party was an African-American radical organization founded in Oakland, California, in 1966. Originally it was called the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense…
How Swedes and Norwegians broke the power of the ‘1 percent’
Scandinavia’s high level of freedom and broadly-shared prosperity was won through nonviolent struggle that took the reins of government.
Nonviolent Direct Action
Occasional actions that simply protest a particular policy or egregious action aren’t enough. They may relieve an individual’s conscience for a moment, but, ultimately, episodic actions, even large ones, don’t assert enough power. Over and over, the Global Nonviolent Action Database shows that positive results come from a series of escalating, connected actions called a campaign. – George Lakey, Source
Can nonviolent struggle defeat a dictator? This database emphatically says Yes
The Global Nonviolent Action Database details some 40 cases of mass movements overcoming tyrants through strategic nonviolent campaigns.
The dangerous assumption that violence keeps us safe
A romanticized belief in violence renders people irrational to the point of hurting ourselves, over and over again.
How to Start a Direct Action Group to Make Martin Luther King Proud
The steps for beginning a group are not really as simple as a food recipe, but I’ll take the risk of writing this in a recipe-kind-of-way. Remember that every situation is always unique. You’ll need to think with friends through each step, adapting to your circumstances.
Why direct action campaigns are the best way to empower yourself and others
You don’t have to give up practices that support personal well-being in order to become an activist. Direct action campaigns allow for both.
8 ways to defend against terror nonviolently
Nonmilitary techniques have, in actual historical cases, reduced the threat of terror. What’s more, they can be applied by civil society, without waiting for governments.
Laboratories for nonviolent defense
The 1 percent would have us believe that violence must be the answer for meeting our defense and protection needs. Do we trust them?
Defense on the streets — stepping into conflict
I blush to tell this story, but friends tell me it’s a useful example for exploring how people can have each others’ backs in situations of threat.
While some campaigns are invitations to burn-out, others create a container that deliberately supports the campaigners to grow in their personal capacity and power. – George Lakey, Source
Polarization
How to build a progressive movement in a polarized country
Many assume that polarization is a barrier to making change, but history shows otherwise. By learning what worked in previous periods of polarization, we can observe a clear roadmap to transformation.
Tactics
How to Create a Dilemma
A particular form of action whose objective is to put the opponent into a dilemma where, whichever choice is made by the opponent, the campaigners gain an advantage.
The secret in designing a dilemma is that the campaigners need to create an advantage for themselves no matter what happens…Like a good playwright, the tactical artist uses imagination to create choices that are fine for the campaign but bad for the opponent. – George Lakey, Source
Training
How well people strategize, organize, invent creative tactics, reach effectively to allies, use the full resources of the group and persevere at times of discouragement — all that can be enhanced by training. – George Lakey, Source
8 skills of a well-trained activist
The history of training is a history of playing catch-up — but now’s the time for us to get a head start.
In times of rapid change, victory comes to those who train for it
If soldiers train for armed combat, why wouldn’t activists train for toppling the political-economic structure that’s killing our chance for a just future? The stakes are just as high.
How movements build strength through training
Training for movements is not unlike training for athletic competition: Pain is inevitable. It’s the conditioning of mind, body and heart that makes winning possible.
What role were you born to play in social change?
Bill Moyer’s Four Roles of Social Activism is a powerful tool that clarifies how we work for change on two levels: individually and organizationally.
8 skills of a well-trained activist
The history of training is a history of playing catch-up — but now’s the time for us to get a head start.
Break out of your class bubble, get training and win!
Many activists have access to anti-oppression trainings, and that’s one place to learn the kind of “inclusive strategizing” needed to build movements that cross class lines. But beware! Some traditional training styles that activists use have been influenced unwittingly by classist assumptions.
Training as action
Usually, direct action training is what it sounds like: training in preparation for a direct action. Sometimes, however, the training itself is the action.
Nonviolence training with a difference
An extract from the new edition of George Lakey’s book Facilitating Group Learning
Training workshops accelerate the building of courage, especially if trainers help participants become aware of the difference between the “comfort zone” and the “learning zone.” Training for Change facilitators admit they are doing less than their best when they allow people to stay in their comfort zones. Learning happens when participants, although objectively safe, are uncomfortable. – George Lakey, Source
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