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Storytelling as Organizing: How to Rescue the Left from its Crisis of
Imagination
|
By Adam Kader
|
January 10, 2011
|
In an
editorial
in
In These Times'
November 2009 issue, reflecting on the right’s success at re-framing the
healthcare reform debate in its favor, Kevin O’Donnell wrote, “When it comes to
messaging, Republicans believe in science. Democrats don’t.” To their
detriment, “Democrats cling to the idea, disproved by science and electoral
experience, that if you present the facts, people will reason their way to the
right conclusion.” Republicans, on the other hand, know to use “simple words,
short sentences and a heavy dose of repetition.”
Must one be this cynical in order to win a campaign or a policy battle? Is the
way to beat conservatives on important issues to “race to the bottom,” debasing
rhetoric, and treating the public as imbeciles? Fortunately, for those looking
for a more generous understanding of public discourse, there’s
Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-based Strategy to
Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World (PM Press,
2010), by Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning.
Reinsborough and Canning provide another way of looking at “the battle of the
narrative.” Like O’Donnell, any experienced activist knows that framing the
issue matters to any campaign's success. But rather than “dumbing down”
progressive campaign messaging, Reinsborough and Canning argue for a
story-based strategy that deconstructs dominant narratives and constructs new ones
that challenge assumptions and move citizens to action.
The authors encourage readers to re-imagine both how change
can happen and what can be changed. They introduce a series of concepts “to win
campaigns, build movements, and change the world” based on Marxist philosopher
Antonio Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, which posits that powerful interests
exert control through dominant culture so that the status-quo becomes “common
sense.” If campaigns are to change the status-quo, the authors argue, they must
be communicated in ways that fall outside the narrative categories created by
the status quo.
Just as a successful campaign can change the material conditions of society,
Reinsborough and Canning argue, so can it change the way society thinks—it
creates change on the level of meaning. In the same way that a direct action
physically interrupts a target’s business-as-usual, a campaign has a deeper
impact when it also interrupts the dominant narrative about the campaign
issue.
Consider Re:Imagining Change’s
example of Greenpeace’s Save the Whales Campaign. When Greenpeace activists
took action by literally placing themselves between whaling ships and the
whales, it “showed it was the activists, not the whalers, who were the
courageous people on small boats risking their lives—not to kill whales, but to
save them. In this new narrative, whales were not big and evil; rather it was
the giant whaling ships that were the dangerous monsters. The whales were the
helpless victims and became sympathetic and worthy of protection...The story
changed and the roles of hero, victim, and villain shifted.”
Successful campaigns utilize a “meme,” or a unit of “self-replicating cultural
information such as slogans (Just Do It!), iconic images (Abu Ghraib torture),
catch phrases (“wardrobe malfunction”) or symbols (the peace sign). Just as
engines of dominant culture create memes, so can social change groups.
Re:Imagining Change's
accessible language and hands-on exercises make it ideal for busy community and
political organizers. My favorite feature of the book is the “Reflections” box
included in each chapter. An example:
What are some assumptions in the dominant culture you think
need to be changed? Make a list. You can carry this assumption list
with you and keep a running tab of times when they show up, or when you surface
new ones. Choose one assumption to work with for the moment...Are there
institutions where it lives? Are there ways it is felt in popular
culture? Now think about actions you could take to challenge that
assumption and change the story. Are there physical points of intervention that
could expose this assumption?
The exercise pushed me to step back and consider a campaign
that my organization,
Arise Chicago,
and other worker centers around the country are engaged in. The fight against
the exploitation of low-wage earners is not new, but our “anti-wage theft
campaign” is because of its use of the “wage theft” meme. Before, institutions
like the Department of Labor and the mainstream media referred to the phenomena
of worker exploitation as “non-payment of wages.”
Several years ago, however, worker centers designed the “wage theft”
meme. This meme overthrows the dominant assumption that wages are the
property of the boss, to be shared with workers. Rather, in this new
narrative, wages are the property of workers that have been stolen by the
boss.
The wage theft meme is deeply effective, because a common defense narrative
spun by an employer caught for not paying his workers is that these are hard
economic times; that in a difficult business climate everyone has to tighten
their belts—that the boss is doing everything he can to keep things
running.
The public is sympathetic to this defense. The employer is understood as
benevolent; he is the job provider, the one who can save our economy—the
workers, protesting, are ungrateful! They should be thankful to be employed at
all in this bad economy! The audience of this dominant narrative will identify
with the employer, who is the one struggling to stay alive in this
economy. The workers are troublemakers, trying to take wages away from
the employer, a property owner, just like you and me!
But through the wage theft meme, workers, not employers, become the victims of
the bad economic climate. The boss, not the workers, becomes the unreasonable
one. The self-respecting public will identify with the righteous worker
who is trying to stand up for their right to recover their private
property. Using the wage theft meme, when my organization fights an
employer who is not paying minimum wage, overtime wage, or wage at all, we also
are fighting some of the assumptions embedded in the dominant narrative about
labor. Accordingly, the media has begun to use the meme when they report on our
campaigns and legislators have incorporated the phrase “wage theft” in the
names of bills.
All of this is to say that
Re:Imagining
Change has inspired me to evaluate the choices we’re making in
designing and communicating our organizing campaigns. Other progressive
organizers should strive to do the same. The left is losing the battle over
narrative, which means we often lose the larger war over legislation and fiscal
policy. Think of common current rhetoric surrounding climate change legislation
(“it kills jobs”), public sector jobs (“we have to cut back to decrease the
deficit”), gender parity (“it will result in frivolous lawsuits”), etc.
Indeed, Sally Kohn of Movement Vision Lab writes: “Over the past year, much of
the left has jealously ogled the Tea Party and its apparently up-out-of-nowhere
grassroots movement energy.” Kohn locates the origin of this energy in the
proliferation of “an attractive story of power and vision—a story in which
everyday activists can see themselves and engage.”
That the left needs to develop strong, compelling, narratives is clear.
Re:Imagining Change is the
resource that can show us exactly how to do so.
Adam Kader, the
director of the Arise Chicago Worker Center, blogs for Labor Notes.
