What to Get in the Next Uprising
Not temporary policies. Permanent power.
This week, Verizon became the latest major company to end its internal DEI program—a move made in order to win government approval for a $20 billion acquisition. In scrapping its diversity program, it joins a long list of corporations, universities, law firms, and government contractors of all types. Many of these organizations were doubtlessly happy to have an excuse to get out of the equity business. Some, perhaps, were upset. All are cowardly. None are a surprise.
“DEI,” a term most at home in the world of corporate HR, had the distinction of being despised by both the right and the left. The left loathed it because it was so clearly a weak and bureaucratic version of what anti-racism—which is to say, basic fairness—should mean. The right loathed it because they are racists. On this issue, the racists are winning. The Trump-fueled eradication of DEI is important not because it is shocking that corporate America folded up its paper-thin public relations program as soon as it threatened their profits; rather, it is a valuable lesson in what is and is not worth considering a “win” in response to a mass national uprising.
There have been two times in the past 20 years when the truly powerful sector of American society—the people who control the capital—have been scared of The People. One was in 2008 and 2009, when the Great Recession struck in force, and it seemed like we might be on the verge of another Great Depression, and rich people got too nervous to flaunt luxury goods because they feared that the pitchforks might come out. Unfortunately, the political moment of opportunity of that crisis was not paired with a robust social movement that could take advantage of it. Occupy, the movement spawned by that crisis, did not arise in full until 2011. Though the underlying issues had not been solved by then, the financial system had been stabilized enough that the people in charge were no longer nervous about total collapse, followed by their mansions being burned down. Occupy’s noble battle against inequality was an uphill fight. The dynamics that led to the crisis, and that produced the inequality, have not been substantially altered in the past 15 years.
The other time that a nationwide uprising genuinely had corporate America and its political allies on their heels was in 2020, after the murder of George Floyd. The ensuing Black Lives Matter protests were (depending how you measure it) the largest protest movement in US history. Tens of millions of people were in the streets. It transcended the ordinary bounds of police brutality protests, which often rest wholly on the shoulders of those who are themselves the victims of police brutality. In 2020, BLM became a wave that enveloped all levels of society. Democratic senators awkwardly donned Kente cloths and kneeled in the Capitol. Police were kneeling with protesters. Mitt fucking Romney marched in the streets! I point these things out not to give them credence as some sort of heartfelt gestures, but to illustrate the undeniable power that BLM had on American culture for a few months of 2020. The cause was so obviously just—and the energy of The People so omnipresent and overwhelming—that The System (for lack of a better term) momentarily accepted that this was something that could not be directly opposed.
Instead of standing up and fighting against the BLM movement, the powers that be instead busied themselves with figuring out how to channel it into the least meaningful possible ways. Thus, corporate DEI. Thus, the NFL painting “END RACISM” in the end zones. Thus, former United States president Barack Obama counseling NBA players who had launched a wildcat strike to end their strike in exchange for the bureaucratic farce of a “a social justice coalition” focused on
”promoting civic engagement and advocating for meaningful police and criminal justice reform.” In aggregate, the power structure that produced and benefited from the racism and inequality that led to George Floyd’s death did a remarkable job of maintaining itself unscathed while pretending to reform itself in response to the BLM movement. The coup de grace—the pinnacle of the shit-eating, obsequious “my fingers were crossed” insincerity of BLM reactions—was the Democratic Party’s incredible ability to organize itself to run against the canard of “defunding the police” in the fall 2020 elections, mere months after their decrepit old knees had struggled to raise them from their spots somberly kneeling in the rotunda. Fuckers.
The strenuous effort of the power structure to dissipate the energy of threatening social movements with the least possible impact is inevitable. And, to some extent, this effort will always be assisted by the fact that enormous and sudden social uprisings, as a rule, are not run by some central organization that can set demands and undertake organized and systematic negotiations on behalf of the entire movement. What happens in the real world is that, at best, many different existing organizations can take advantage of the moment of opportunity created by a mass uprising and use it to gain something real for the cause. “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” the saying goes. Today’s final collapse of the showy half-measures that were won in 2020 is a chance for all of us to think carefully about what our own organizations can ask for the next time the people in charge get briefly scared.
One key flaw shared by many things that were offered in response to the BLM uprising—corporate DEI programs, cheery PR campaigns against racism, internal committees committed to having meetings about this stuff, statements of intent by powerful organizations saying that They Believed In Things and Would Do Things—is that they left control of their outcomes not in the hands of the people who were asking for change, but in the hands of the organizations that those people wanted to change. And so those same organizations have been able to let these measures wither away as soon as the coast was clear, politically speaking. A big company commits to a DEI program, and hires staff for it—and then cancels it all when the pressure is off. This, in a nutshell, is what happened in corporate America, on Wall Street, and in the Democratic Party alike. These institutions did not want to change in the first place. Great pressure was created to demand change. So they said “yes, we will change,” while maintaining control over the nature of that change themselves. Predictably, it was a charade. As soon as the direction of pressure shifted, so too did the actions of the institutions.
The lesson in this is that the thing to win from powerful institutions is not a specific policy, but power itself. You don’t ask for an institution to make a decision that you like—you demand the ability to make the decisions. You don’t ask the Democrats to file a nice bill that they can later abandon; you demand particular personnel be installed in particular positions, where they can wield power directly. You don’t settle for a commitment to spend money on a problem; you get the money deposited into an account over which you have direct control. You don’t let a company create a DEI program that they fund and oversee as they like; you establish a union at the company, which the company has no control of, and make the company cede power over particular decisions to the union in clearly established ways.
This will look different in different types of organizations, in different places, in different forums. The important thing is the principle. When, at long last, conditions in the world conspire to grant you a moment of leverage, do not settle for something that can be withdrawn as soon as the conditions of the world change. Demand your own piece of the power. In practice, this usually means holding an influential position, controlling an amount of money, signing a binding contract that grants you a defined set of powers, or some combination of all of these things. Board seats. Equity stakes. Union contracts. Guaranteed democratic voting processes for decisions. Etcetera. You want to emerge from your moment of opportunity holding more of the power structure’s territory than you did before. Assume that the system you oppose is going to screw you as soon as they feel able, and design your ask in a way that is robust to this eventuality.
I will give you one small and inconsequential example. When we were unionizing the online media industry, we found that many companies would offer to create “diversity committees” in response to our demands for things like “fairness in hiring and promotion.” The company’s preference would be that these committees amounted to some of us and some of them sitting down periodically and talking about stuff in an advisory way, leaving them with the power to act, or not. We learned to avoid this trap by winning, in some of our union contracts, a set budget for diversity initiatives and control over that budget by the union. Instead of the company endlessly stalling, or spending the money on stuff that would mostly give them good PR, we got them to give money to a committee of workers who would then decide how to spend it to accomplish our goals. We did not solve racism, but you get the point. There is a qualitative difference between something that your enemy controls, and something that your enemy is forced to grant you the right to control.
If there is anything positive to be gained from the ongoing racist murder of “DEI,” let it be this: They are spending a lot of their time trying to smash something that was never that great to begin with. We can learn a lesson from the arc of the past five years that will allow us to do a much more effective job of changing the world for the better in the future. Sooner or later, people will be back in the streets. Sooner or later, public anger will be great enough that the people in charge get legitimately nervous again. When that happens, we will know what to focus on: power. Don’t settle for crumbs when you can get the whole fucking cake-baking oven.
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Related reading: Leverage Is Everything; How to Murder a Good Idea With Conventional Wisdom; Talk Louder About Defunding the Police; There’s No Justice Without Power.
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Great article and a great point.
Another thing to note is that one of the reasons we were able to have so many people gather in protest in 2020 was that people were working from home, and so therefore had the freedom to go where they wanted when they wanted.
When the protest started to get too much potential, a surprising amount of return-to-the-office mandates suddenly popped up, with no medical data offered to back the change.
I think they want us in their commercial buildings 40hrs a week so they can make rent, and so we can’t just leave and go fight for power.
Yes!
So often even when we muster power in workplaces, commmunities, and broader movements we fall back inside the same limiting systems.
A coupe micro examples to go along with your union experience Hamilton- when I was a local UAW President bargaining contracts we would generate a certain amount of leverage to force employers to make some concessions. I remember when the light bulb lit up for me that some issues add material gain- always important- but other issues helped us build our power for the long term- ultimately leading to better material gains.
Small things like the right to do significant union orientation in work time. When I was with 1199, at one nursing home we bargained for a monthly work time union “information session.”
The UAW allowed an impressive system of negotiated union staff helping w EAP, benefits etc to slide into a certain level of political nepotism and demobilizing BUT using leverage to OWN our workplaces and our movements,
to build organization is a much appreciated critical distinction.
One last example from the community side. We had effectively elected a fully progressive local government only to realize how circumscribed we were by State and National laws and by our tax system. Passing lefty resolutions or making small incremental progressive change was ok, but using resources to seed and support
grassroots neighborhood and tenant organizing helped drive bigger change and imbed political progress.