They say that the heat is making people crazy, that the hurricane season is coming on strong, that bad vibrations are to blame for so many tragedies. But try to stay calm. Do not be afraid. Do not despair. Because darkness can’t last forever. Do you see that? That light that shines in the distance, the little light that looks like a star. That’s where we should go. That’s the way out of this hole.
—Temporada de Huracanes
What is to be done to confront monotonous and painful exploitation at work? After examining low-wage work at an Amazon fulfillment center, a McDonalds, and a call center, journalist Emily Guendelsberger, in On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane, ends with an impassionate call to collective action. It
won’t involve buying anything, or looking at a screen … It won’t involve anything that would be a good bumper sticker. It won’t be anything you can do online, or alone. So you’ll leave the house. You’ll meet other people who think the status quo is cruel and ridiculous—they’re literally everywhere. You’ll listen to their better worlds. You’ll start discussing not what’s stupid and awful, but how things can improve. You’ll fall in with a group of people devoted to a better world that looks mostly—though not entirely—the same as yours. You’ll come to feel a bond with them that’s even stronger than friendship. You’ll become part of something bigger than yourself—and, weirdly, you’ll feel more in control of your life than you have in years … you’ll start feeling like a human being again. You’ll know what to do from there.
Emily Guendelsberger is not alone in concluding with a call to arms. Sociologist Matthew Desmond tells us to join with others in becoming a “poverty abolitionist.” Referring to a wide variety of instances of people banding together to fight durable misery (the labor movement, the tenants’ movement, the civil rights movement, the Poor People’s Campaign, etc.), the author of Poverty, by America asserts that “behind every great blow dealt to the scourge of poverty, there have been ordinary Americans who have bound themselves to one another to accomplish extraordinary things … Poverty will be abolished in America only when a mass movement demands it so.” We must unite with others in protest, as the authors of these two well-regarded books suggest, because this works.
But how does collective action work? How does such action (i.e., concerted, conscious, and sustained efforts by ordinary people to change some aspect of society by extra-institutional means) make a difference? What does it look like on the ground? Although these two authors make convincing cases that it is worth trying, they do not provide specifics about the ways in which protest will produce a better life, that is, one that is less determined by lack of resources or less exploitative, alienating jobs.
Drawing upon a variety of theoretical frameworks and scrutinizing diverse cases of transgressive contention, the four books reviewed here provide original perspectives on collective action dynamics and the way in which these connect with specific results: a more democratic workplace, a less indebted life, a plot of land for your own, a more inclusive society.
When, how, and why does collective organizing achieve positive effects for those engaging in this difficult, and oftentimes risky, endeavor? These books zoom in on informative and inspiring examples of “things that work”—i.e., collective actions that have meaningful impacts for those participating and for society at large. While not a “recipe for success,” we take these diverse examples to start identifying common patterns of collective action that work to build power and fight oppression around the world.
Katherine Sobering’s The People’s Hotel examines the case of the Hotel Bauen, a previously private-run business, which workers reclaimed during a major economic crisis in 2001 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Using a combination of participant observation and archival research, Sobering documents how cooperative members organized and sustained work as a collective for approximately 18 years.
The book begins with a provocative assertion: social scientists have put most of their energy into identifying and cataloguing the reproduction of unequal social relationships. Far less attention has been paid to what she deems “equality projects”: collective efforts that seek to “question, redefine, or even dismantle categorical distinctions in order to promote more equal interpersonal relations.” Equality is not simply the absence of inequality, nor is it a state to be achieved; it is a process by which people and collectives work toward creating and sustaining more egalitarian relationships.
The Hotel Bauen did not begin as an equality project. In the run-up to hosting the 1978 soccer World Cup, Argentina’s military dictatorship loaned money to the private owners to create a luxury hotel in downtown Buenos Aires. The economic crisis in the early 2000s, however, led to its closure. At first, its workers did not contest this turn of events. Yet—in noticing irregularities in their unemployment payment and retirement pensions—they began to talk, and, then, meet up. Unable to get the free legal help they sought, the ex-employees turned to the National Movement of Recuperated Businesses (MNER). Activists from this organization took former Bauen workers to tour successful reclaimed workplaces and offered advice about how the same could be achieved with the hotel. This incipient organizing culminated in the workers occupying the Bauen, and, eventually, reopening it as a hotel owned by its workers.
The protagonists of these collective actions are not only signaling a “way out of this hole”; they are practically enacting it in their daily political work.
This is where a few years later, Sobering would spend time as an ethnographer. In the reclaimed Bauen, she made beds, cleaned toilets, waited tables, swept floors, attended the reception desk day and night, and joined the workers who owned and ran the hotel in their many meetings as they attempted to build a more humane and just workplace.
This reallocation of power was also accompanied by what Sobering terms “symbolic leveling.” That is, the worker-owners of the Bauen promoted new ways of understanding what they were doing. They recognized their work as a political act, asserting that each employee had an equal stake in running the hotel. In this sense, Sobering terms the worker cooperative as an “activist workplace,” one that has incorporated social movement practices into its everyday routines and interactions.
Sobering explores in-depth four processes that accompanied the hotel as an equality project: democratic decision-making, workplace participation, job rotation, and pay equality. Each section identifies both formal and informal means by which these principles were implemented.
For example, political equality was formalized into the Workers Assembly, where each employee has a voice. But just as important as this formal assembly, Sobering found, was the informal communication channels (rumors and “water cooler talk”) where coworkers debated the fairness of elections. In this sense, what Sobering terms “selective formalization” was key to how worker cooperative sustained equality. This selective formalization is an asset, as much as it is an obstacle.
Take the example of job rotation: While employees generally started as housekeepers or in maintenance, they could be moved from reception to administration to event planning, based on the hotel’s needs and personal preferences. This practice promoted equality by undermining the divide between skilled and unskilled labor, affirming that any employee could fill whichever position regardless of background experience or education.
Yet, the job rotation policy was not formally written anywhere. This allowed workers great freedom, in terms of being able to be switched into different positions at any moment. But it also gave a considerable amount of discretion to the hotel’s administrative council, which made these decisions. Still, despite the fuzziness around the how and when of job rotations, the practice promoted occupational mobility within the cooperative, questioning status distinctions based on credentials, education, or previous experience—not to mention equality, given that each worker earned the same base pay regardless of position.
By charting out the opportunities and challenges presented by these different equalizing practices, Sobering argues that organizational transformation is possible. By taking over the hotel, the workers disrupted the traditional owner-employee power dynamics. As such, the workers created and sustained a more equal distribution of opportunities. Overall, the Bauen shows us that equality projects can work—while also demonstrating that changing the way an organization runs requires persistence. That is, the worker-owners had to continuously struggle to implement formal and informal practices, in ways that promoted equality and allowed the cooperative to continue to exist.
Importantly, while organizational transformation is in part internal, the Bauen was also affected by external political and economic circumstances. Sobering makes clear that the cooperative continued to operate for as long as it did in a “legal gray zone” in part because the government was unwilling to make a formal decision about its fate. This state of limbo allowed cooperative members to create fairer relationships within their workplace; and, while the hotel eventually closed nearly two decades later, it successfully provided a lasting model of alternative practices that work.
Another example of successful alternative practices of work and ownership can be found in Non-Performing Loans, Non-Performing People, in which Melissa García-Lamarca examines the mortgage crisis in Spain. While housing is recognized as a human right, real estate speculation and precarity have only been increasing.
García-Lamarca describes how the state has stepped back from providing housing, giving the market free reign. Many have turned to mortgages to secure houses, incurring debts that cannot be paid; this, in turn, has led to waves of foreclosures and evictions. In this context, García-Lamarca asks how people obtain and live with mortgage debt, and how they jointly fight against this indebted existence by transforming debt from an individual into a collective problem.
García-Lamarca adopts a Marxist lens to make sense of the housing crisis on a macro level, where the state’s retreat and market’s advance are understood as neoliberal policies that lead to capital accumulation. On a more micro level—that of daily experiences—García-Lamarca turns to Foucault: she characterizes the mortgage as a technology of power, used to regulate and discipline life. In this sense, capital accumulation is legitimated by creating an “indebted subjectivity”—non-performing people—who live in (and acquiesce to living in) perpetual debt.
How do people fight this indebted subjectivity? To understand how some may break free from this existence, García-Lamarca invokes Ranciere’s “political subjectivation,” a process in which people are politicized over time through “collectively learned practices ‘from below.’” In particular, García-Lamarca focuses on the emergence and operation of the “Platform for Mortgage Affected People” (PAH). In 2009, antiglobalization activists founded the collective in response to the burst in the real estate bubble. In reality, this movement grew out of other groups, which realized that the critical moment demanded “redefining” the organization and framing of resistance.
These books share a way of going about understanding joint political action: sticking close to the rough ground level of politics, attentively observing and listening to what its protagonists do and say.
To do so, these new PAHs dedicated themselves to organizing mutual aid meetings. Rather than work to resolve one’s mortgage debt situation individually with a lawyer or bank representative, the assemblies provided a space to work through these issues collectively. From her ethnographic observations of these meetings, García-Lamarca took note of their unstructured format. Participants would sit in a circle; they would tell their stories and share their feelings of shame, guilt, and fear; and they would offer information and support to those in different stages of debt, foreclosure, and eviction.
Beyond these gatherings, the PAH collectives also engaged in direct action. On the one hand, they advocated for changes in the law. On the other, they negotiated directly with the bank for mortgage relief. And, when these efforts failed, they took more transgressive steps: they stopped evictions, occupied banks, and took over empty bank-owned properties.
PAH successfully turned mortgage debt from an individual into a collective problem—for those who participated, at least. Activists embraced wins on both the micro and macro scale. For example, in their assemblies, participants shared “‘little big victories’” (like obtaining mortgage debt forgiveness or a social rent contract with the bank), while also recognizing the value of their active participation, in working to both improve their own situation and share their knowledge with others.
In fact, the assemblies purposefully struggled against becoming “assistentialis[t],” that is, when participation began to resemble client-like relationships, in which PAH intermediaries would “handle” the problems for members. Adopting measures, such as rotating those in charge of negotiating with banks, they reinforced the idea that all members were “active agents who can solve their own case, through struggle that is supported and strengthened by the collective.”
On the more macro scale, García-Lamarca describes the group’s success in a “politics of postponement.” PAH worked to block evictions at the moment, delaying the physical displacement of people from their homes. While offering an immediate solution to those in need, the strategy also gave the PAH time: time to negotiate social rents with the bank; time to make visible the government’s failure to guarantee the right to housing; time to continue mobilizing members to achieve more “medium- or long-term solution[s]”; and so on.
García-Lamarca explains that, not only did the “Stop Evictions campaign” prevent over two thousand evictions, but it also gave the group access to high-up contacts in the banks to negotiate more collective solutions to evictions. Likewise, their occupation of banks and bank-owned housing provided similar relief. While reforms may not have been “sweeping,” the movement recuperated 55 buildings across Spain, rehousing approximately 2,500 people.
In another examination of land-based activism, Delivery as Dispossession looks at the question of why the South African state tolerates certain land occupations and not others. Typically the answer was thought to be that the government would evict highly visible settlements. Through an ethnographic, systematic comparison between two land occupations, Siqalo and Kapteinsklip, Zachary Levenson shows that this is not always true. In fact, the state tolerated the more contentious and well-known Siqalo settlement, while evicting the less visible Kapteinsklip case.
The key difference was the articulation of the project of occupation; that is, the way the group conceived of and worked toward their goal and, importantly, the way the state interpreted this articulation. The Siqalo occupiers related to their interest in land collectively rather than individually. The Kapteinsklip residents, on the other hand, thought of themselves as “homeowners in the making,” focusing more on obtaining their personal land titles, rather than protecting the settlement. Consequently, when the occupation dispute went to the courts, the judges delivered a favorable ruling to the former, seeing the Siqalo occupiers as unified. The Kapteinsklip group, alternatively, were perceived as opportunistic “queue jumpers,” unwilling to wait in the (never-ending) line for public housing options.
To support these arguments, Levenson draws on political theory. Namely, he invokes Gramsci’s division of civil society from political society to make sense of how the state makes decisions. He emphasizes, however, that the separation is methodological, given that both civil and political society coexist in the same empirical location. In other words, state decision-making is not isolated from the influence of civil society. Far from technocratic and impersonal, different government agents act on the basis of shared understandings, which are informed by the organization and articulation of civil society groups.
Levenson differentiates between “serial” and “fused groups.” The former relate to their object in an individualized manner. Instead of fighting together for what they desire—as the “fused” collectives do—they partner or wait for the state to process their separate claims. The fused groups, on the other hand, view the state as an antagonist, and thus they band together in opposition to the government to make a collective demand.
As a “fused group,” the Siqalo occupiers, rather than waiting for the government to authorize their status as homeowners, pointed to its failure in guaranteeing a constitutional right to housing. Thus, they banded together to act against a common enemy, rather than making deals or splitting into factions to protect individual interests.
A few dynamics proved central to their success in building and sustaining this collective. Siqalo leaders had prior experience in the anti-apartheid movement and had faced state repression for participating in other land occupations; thus, they did not expect the state to act as a collaborator and were able to quickly mobilize in opposition.
Moreover, while initially one charismatic leader was key to organizing the process, the settlement created a new representative body that counteracted tension arising from preferential treatment of this individual. Additionally, the collective steadfastly rejected the interference of political parties, which likely prevented competition over benefits, such as special help in negotiating access to titles. Moreover, everyone was invited to join in the “liberation project” and, as part of this expansive, inclusive vision, they maintained their identity as “occupiers,” rather than splitting into factions along racial lines.
In sum, the Siqalo occupation took strides to remain unified as a collective. As a result, despite the squatters’ antagonistic views of the government, the courts saw them as acting morally. Levenson compares this to the state’s perception of the other “serialized” occupiers who were seen as not a united force but rather squabbling individuals who were trying to “jump the queue” for public housing. Key to the positive recognition of the Siqalo occupiers, then, is the organizational form, which seemed more “orderly”—and thus “deserving”—in the eyes of the government.
Although the threat of eviction still looms over Siqalo, residents have continued to mobilize, now around demands for basic amenities, such as water and electricity. In this sense, the fused articulation of the group has allowed the settlement to persist for now. As in Sobering’s and García-Lamarca’s analyses, success is indeed a process, not a definite state.
Finally, in Prisms of the People, Han Hahrie, Elizabeth McKenna, and Michelle Oyakawa team up to study how grassroots leaders and organizations “successfully met the challenge of building a constituency and turning the actions of that constituency into power.” Focusing on a variety of grassroots organizations, coalitions, and community initiatives in Arizona, Minnesota, Ohio, Virginia, Kentucky, and Nevada, they argue that the strategic choices made by leaders in organizing people are key to achieving long-term success. Using a comparative qualitative method, the researchers find that, though context varied greatly, their successful cases shared organizational choices.
They label these designs as “prisms of people power.” When a beam of light strikes a prism, refraction separates the light that comes out the other side; the prism’s internal design affects how the refraction occurs. Now, prisms of people power, the authors argue, function in a similar way. At the prism’s core lies a set of design choices about how to build constituencies. These decisions shape the light that emerges—that is, the organization’s ability to exercise power in the public domain. In other words, what happens inside the grassroots organizations—how they balance between commitment and flexibility, ideology and pragmatism, among other things—constrains the kind of power the organization is able to build and sustain over time.
Internal dynamics of organization, initiatives, and coalitions are deeply imbricated with their external power, understood to be not “only about winning elections or passing policies” but also “about getting a seat at the decision-making table, shaping the terms of debate, and impacting the underlying narratives that determine the way people interpret and understand political issues.” In this sense, where success may capture one-off victories, power is a protracted struggle.
Power through people is the most independent source of authority, the authors argue, because it is rooted in accountability to an authentic constituency, rather than access to decision-makers. In this sense, through their prisms, leaders were able to cultivate “a set of strategic choices that enabled them to act with flexibility they needed in their David-like bids to beat their Goliath.”
The researchers situate their study squarely in the tradition of social movement scholarship. Rather than asking questions of what organizations need to be successful—as do resource mobilization theorists—they wonder how organizations turn what they have into what they need. The chief resource of interest in this case is people themselves. They argue that the way leaders organize—how they build constituencies, in other words—affects the strategic choices they can make when weathering uncertainty. This focus on constituencies reflects research done on social networks and relationships in social movements. Yet, the authors push further: they ask how leaders engage in ways that both build new ties and transform previously private relationships into shared public commitments to act.
When, how, and why does collective organizing achieve positive effects for those engaging in this difficult, and oftentimes risky, endeavor?
To develop and test the “prisms of people power” concept, the authors designed a “‘most different’” case study (cases of grassroots activism across states, seemingly dissimilar in every aspect except their outcome: their ability to shift power). To trace the process in each example, they turn to a range of methods: interviews, surveys, ethnographic observations, analysis of internal organizational documents and databases; and examination of publicly available data. Moreover, to measure “power shifts,” they used network surveys, assessments of legislative data, and text-as-data tools.
In a sea of differences, the authors began to detect certain patterns and similarities in organizational design choices. Leaders took different decisions to build flexible, independent, and committed constituencies. Take one example, the Arizona case. The governor was to sign SB 1070, a conservative immigration policy. A handful of grassroots leaders (whose names were unknown on the larger political scene) took a novel course of action: they organized a vigil outside the Arizona state capitol, a demonstration that lasted 104 days. And, while SB 1070 passed into law, the vigil created a collective context in which women, high school students, and young undocumented leaders became committed to one another rather than to a passing legislative battle. Despite this initial “failure,” those involved painstakingly cultivated long-term political power by building a diverse coalition of immigrants’ rights groups that then won a series of victories on the local and state level. These successes include delaying the implementation of SB 1070 through lawsuits, recalling a key public figure behind its creation, winning five city council seats in Phoenix, passing a municipal ID ordinance and new minimum wage law, and removing the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, among others.
In this sense, the leaders made a strategic choice to move beyond more standardized, impersonal actions, like phone banks and petitions, for example. And, though it “failed” in the short term, it succeeded in building power. That is, it developed an interconnected movement of leaders and pro-immigrant organizations—a constituency capable of achieving long-term wins and shaping policy in the state over time.
Prisms of the People is a thorough account of the many ways in which people can become power through their collective actions. Grassroots organizations and their leaders are able to do so when they are “grounded in constituencies that had committed to standing together, to becoming something new together that they could not be alone.” One of the many virtues of the book is to show, in a granular way, how this is practically achieved in contexts of high uncertainty and among structurally disadvantaged populations.
While these books draw upon diverse theoretical traditions, they share a way of going about understanding joint political action: sticking close to the rough ground level of politics, attentively observing and listening to what its protagonists do and say. In doing so, they unearth fascinating (and promising) political dynamics.
Although there is no “recipe” or one single set of factors to explain the persistence (much less, the success) of collective action, taken together, these books hint at pertinent processes at work: addressing concrete problems while framing them as collective rather than individual; engaging in public, contentious politics, while adopting organizational forms that cultivate the construction of constituents’ power; conceiving people as agents of social change instead of merely numbers to be mobilized; and engaging the state strategically while appropriating existing opportunities and making a variety of alliances, to name a few.
Reasons for hopelessness abound in the four countries where these researchers conducted their case studies—as in many other places around the globe. Right-wing fanaticism, misogynism, racism, climate-change denialism are on the ascent; the hurricane season, as referred to by the film’s narrator, is indeed “coming strong.”
The four books reviewed here, however, provide not only glimmers of hope but concrete collective ways out of relentless despair. There is plenty to learn from the struggles these authors so vividly portray. The protagonists of these collective actions are not only signaling a “way out of this hole”; they are practically enacting it in their daily political work. 
Featured image: Platform for Mortgage Affected People Activists in Barcelona (2013). Photograph by Jove / Wikimedia