Gitlin’s lessons for effective activism

I had the privilege of being one of Todd Gitlin’s last doctoral students. Over nearly eight years, we shared countless hours in one-on-one meetings, first in his office in the basement of Pulitzer Hall at Columbia University and later via Skype during my fieldwork. The purpose of these meetings was to discuss the progress of my dissertation. Yet, more often than not, we found ourselves drifting into his activist years during the sixties, the political issues of the day, and the challenges facing left-wing politics. But even if not always directly related to my academic work, these conversations still found their way into my dissertation and beyond. In fact, few things have had as big an influence on my academic and personal life as our meetings, not least our spontaneous digressions along with the sharp insights he offered and the probing questions he posed.

Since Michael Schudson will be speaking to Todd’s legacy as a teacher and a mentor, I will not dwell on the privilege of being his student. The memories from fellow students Michael will share could have come from any of us, though perhaps not expressed quite as eloquently. My focus, instead, will be on Todd’s insights into a key question in my dissertation: the challenges faced by social movements as they strive to balance expressive action, driven by deeply-held values or moral principles, and strategic action, focused on achieving tangible results. With the rise of the internet, there was hope that these two conflicting aspects of activism could be more readily reconciled. The expectation was that digital platforms would facilitate the creation of horizontal organizational structures within social movements, reflecting their participatory values, while also helping them achieve real-world impact.

In my dissertation, I explored this question in the context of the Spanish Indignados movement of 2011. Like their counterparts in the Global Justice Movement and Occupy Wall Street, the Indignados initially displayed a strong aversion to hierarchical organization and conventional political structures, favoring participatory methods over traditional forms of representation. They were determined to “change the world without taking power.” Yet, as they faced challenges related to the Government’s severe austerity agenda and the complexity of sustaining mobilization beyond the initial outburst of self-organization, a consensus grew that achieving meaningful change required some degree of engagement with electoral politics. This realization led to the creation of Podemos, a “movement-party” party that innovatively used digital platforms to blend the movement’s founding ideals with the practicalities of formal politics.

Todd had much to say about this topic. Although his work did not specifically focus on how digital platforms are reshaping collective action, the dilemmas of organization and strategy were a major concern of his, both as an activist and an intellectual. In fact, when I embarked on my dissertation in 2013, the British Journal of Sociology had recently published an exchange between Todd and Craig Calhoun centered around these dilemmas in the context of Occupy Wall Street (Calhoun, 2013; Gitlin, 2013a, 2013b). At the core of their discussion was the tension between Occupy’s emphasis on open, participatory democracy and the need for effective strategy and organization.

In this exchange, Todd takes a more critical stance on Occupy’s organizational philosophy than Calhoun. He acknowledges that Occupy had a sizable impact on the 2012 presidential election and succeeded in driving the political center toward the left. However, he also emphasizes that, partly because of its reluctance to adopt formal organizational structures, Occupy “stalled in its attempt to make a transition from a moment to a movement” (Gitlin, 2013a, p. 3). This became apparent when the encampments were dismantled and the social media platforms that had helped draw people into the camps proved insufficient to sustain momentum. According to Todd, Occupy’s inability or unwillingness to tap into experienced networks and establish a stabilizing organizational backbone undermined its capacity to translate small victories into sustained actions with potential for lasting impact.

Calhoun agrees with Todd that avoiding formal organizational structures was a “liability for building an enduring movement” (2013, pp. 35–36). However, he warns against interpreting Occupy “only in terms of a kind of movement than it was not” (p. 37). He criticizes Todd for imposing what he perceives as a narrow, utilitarian framework onto Occupy, contending that the movement “did not try and fail in this area, it tried something else” (p. 37). For Calhoun, Occupy’s identity was rooted in a prefigurative politics that prioritized creating spaces where alternative social relations could be practiced, rather than merely achieving specific policy goals or institutional reforms. He sees Occupy less as an “organizational effort—a movement—than a dramatic performance” (p. 37).

This divergence of opinion echoes an earlier disagreement between Todd and Wini Breines over the core values and successes of Students for a Democratic Society. In her book The Great Refusal, Breines (1989, p. xiv) challenges Todd and other critics of the new left’s anti-organizational impulse, accusing them of relying on an “instrumental” measure of success in American politics that equates the absence of an enduring and effective organizational structure with “failure.” Breines contends that this view neglects the movement’s radical challenge to the existing social order and its achievements in fostering alternative democratic cultures, ways of interaction and community-building. Much like Calhoun, Breines emphasizes the importance of prefigurative politics, even when there is no long-lasting institutional legacy.

In this brief presentation, I will not be taking sides in these debates. Instead, my aim is to shed light on Todd’s position regarding the dilemmas of organization and strategy, along with the problem of how outside energy can become engaged in inside politics. To elucidate this, I will primarily draw on Letters to a Young Activist, a book inspired by Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet in which Todd offers advice to a fictional young activist grappling with the complexities of bringing about radical change (Gitlin, 2009).

Todd’s views can be organized into two main points. The first emphasizes the vital interplay between two types of activists: outsiders and insiders. Outsiders are often young, passionate and driven by moral convictions, while insiders tend to be older professionals, including many academics and lawyers, who “believe themselves to be mastering the art of the possible” (Gitlin, 2009, p. 94). For a protest movement to succeed, these two groups must work “in tandem,” even if they are not fully aware of it (p. 94). Insiders should remain open and receptive to the calls for justice emanating from social movements. Meanwhile, outsiders need to articulate manageable demands, allowing their most thoughtful and articulate representatives to take the lead without punishing them for being competent.

It behooves outsiders to contact insiders, argue with them, learn something from them, challenge them and resist the all-or-nothing temptation to demonize them. Equally, it behooves insiders to listen to outsiders, not just to cool them out.

(p. 96)

In essence, Todd argues that insiders and outsiders need each other. Both should cultivate a “necessary division of labor” where outsiders provide the passion and direction while insiders “roll up their sleeves to get to work, possibly better funded and more urgently than before” (p. 98).

The second point is that, while intentions are important in activism, the actual results are what ultimately count. Adopting a Weberian stance, Todd advocates for an ethic of responsibility over an ethic of ultimate ends. “The activist,” he asserts, “works toward improvement, not salvation” (p. 10). While he recognizes that militancy can spark feelings of excitement and passion, driving people to take action, he maintains that the justification for activism cannot just be that it feels good or is emotionally gratifying. Activists must carefully consider what actually happens as a result of their actions.

What matters is the results. We do not go looking for alibis. We cannot invent the world we are going to change. We cannot disinvent unsatisfactory souls. Our purity of heart is no argument. The poor who suffer most when we fail cannot afford to dine out on our purity of heart. All we have at our disposal is our own action––not least, the campaigns that put people in power.

(p. 81)

In this, Todd’s perspective was not unlike that of Saul Alinsky. In his book Rules for Radicals, which Todd highly recommended to me, Alinsky (1989, p. 25) argues that when faced with the choice between one’s individual conscience and the greater good of humanity, the decision “must always be for the latter.” One who sacrifices the mass good for his personal conscience, he maintains, holds a peculiar conception of personal salvation; this person “doesn’t care enough for people to be ‘corrupted’ for them” (p. 25). To drive home his point, Alinsky cites Goethe’s words about the compromises that the practical revolutionary must be willing to make: “conscience is the virtue of observers and not of agents of action” (p. 25).

Todd did not start off as a pragmatic activist. In his early 20s, he was dismissive of calls for compromise, leaning instead toward an idealistic and impassioned approach. He was convinced that militant action was necessary to “transform the circumstances, make the impossible somewhat more possible” (Gitlin, 2009, p. 86). However, he explains how political developments led him to change his mind, particularly the backlash against the student movement’s militancy in the late sixties, the Right’s steady climb to power, and the Left’s insularity (p. 86).

Judging by the open letter published in The Nation by 81 former members of Students for a Democratic Society criticizing former Bernie Sanders supporters and Democratic Socialists of America for refusing to endorse Joe Biden in the 2020 Presidential election, Todd never reverted to his earlier position. The letter underscores the moral and political obligation to defeat Trump, insisting on the stark contrast between a “capitalist democrat” and a “protofascist.” It also alludes to Weber’s famous 1919 lecture Politics as a Vocation, where he made the case to young leftists that, as Todd and his coauthors summarize it, “the best politics must be painfully aware of the consequences of action, not just intentions.”

This conviction aligns with the guidance Todd provides in his Letters:

Perhaps the whole subject of elections bores you as it once bored me. Waiting in line to vote is so much stodgier, so much less fun than filling the streets and other colorful street actions. But you had better pay close attention to election campaigns, for their outcomes will pay close attention to you and your prospects. However imperfect the choices, you will live with them, the boundaries of your results will be coloured by them. So you can’t afford to measure the good of an action by how much fun it is.

(Gitlin, 2009, p. 80)

To be sure, the Letters also warn of the pitfalls of excessive prudence: “if you always compromise and your enemies don’t, the center will keep edging away from you” (Gitlin, 2009, p. 87). Yet Todd does not advocate for holding on to an uncompromising position either, noting that “bullheadedness doesn’t prevail automatically” (p. 88). Ultimately, he counsels the young activist to be “thoughtful enough” to recognize the value in outcomes that are “not as good as you want but probably as good as it gets” (p. 88). Once those outcomes are achieved, he adds, it is time to “get back to work—criticizing, mobilizing, organizing, listening, considering.”

It may be true that, as Calhoun suggests, Occupy had no issue in being more a dramatic performance than a long-standing organized force for change. But this is precisely what Todd was wary of: activism that prioritizes short-lived, spontaneous protest over sustained, strategic actions. For Todd, the question “’What do you want?’ must always be coupled with “How do you propose to get it?”” (Gitlin, 2009, p. 49). This explains his skepticism toward activist approaches that overlook the importance of practical outcomes in favor of realizing the ideal society in the present. While recognizing the essential roles that moral conviction and idealism play in galvanizing support for a cause, Todd believed that effective activism should not only articulate inspiring visions but also realistically work toward reshaping the institutional fabric of society—an area where both the student movement and Occupy fell short.

The question remains: Can digital platforms help in building movements that retain their prefigurative aspirations while still translating their vision into strategies for institutional change? Todd may not have tackled this question directly, but his emphasis on the symbiotic relationship between outsiders and insiders, along with his advice—echoing Weber—to combine “passion” with “perspective” and avoid romantic intoxication (2009, p. 85), stands as a valuable guide for social movements to make the most of the opportunities provided by digital tools.

Closing with the words of Rabbi Tarfon, as Todd did in his book The Sixties, feels particularly apt: “It was not granted you to complete the task, and yet you may not give it up”’ (Gitlin, 1987, p. 438). Even though Todd is no longer with us, his legacy lives on in the work of many students, activists, and scholars he has influenced. His teachings will continue to guide us as we navigate the challenges of bringing about change in these demanding times.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).