Frances Fox Piven Challenging Authority, How Ordinary People Change America (2008)

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.To besure, miners, manufacturing workers, and dockers have lost numbers.However, these diminishing numbers are now lodged in systems of pro-duction that outsourcing and just-in-time inventories have made far morefragile.And the Internet and service workers who are becoming morenumerous have only begun to explore the potential of their disruptivepower in a densely interwoven national and international economy.A consideration of the importance of repertoires in guiding popu-lar collective action directs us to the possibility that there can be a largegap between institutionally created possibilities for power and the actualstrategies that emerge.In the real world, the translation of institutionalchange into new popular political repertoires is fraught with difficulty.For one thing, as the term repertoire suggests, once-constructed strate-gies tend to persist because they become imprinted in cultural mem-ory and habit, because they are reiterated by the organizations andleaders formed in past conflicts, and because strategies are shaped andconstrained by the rules promulgated in response to earlier conflicts.People inevitably cling to accustomed modes of action, particularlywhen these have been at least partly successful in realizing their inter-ests.This drag of the past is particularly true of subordinate groups,and it constrains the adjustment of strategy to changes in big struc-tures. Only slowly, through the experience of defeat and repression onthe one hand, and the contingencies of imagination, invention, and thewelling up of anger and defiance on the other, do new repertoiresemerge that respond to new institutional conditions.C H A P T E RTHREEwThe Mob and the StateDisruptive Power and theConstruction of American Electoral-Representative ArrangementsHE ELEMENTAL disruptive challenge takes the form of themob, of the physical threat of the defiant crowd, and disorderlyTcrowds figure largely in the history of disruptive movements,especially before the emergence of electoral-representative arrange-ments.The mob or the riot had, in fact, been a feature of communalpolitics for centuries, and it continues to this day to be a characteris-tic form of popular political action, particularly in the SouthernHemisphere and among the American poor.Perhaps at first glance, theriot seems not to fit my understanding of disruptive power as rootedin institutionalized relationships, but even the riot depends on the with-drawal of cooperation, in this case cooperation in the routines of com-munal or civic life.The unruly mob played a large, albeit complicated, role in theAmerican revolutionary war.Crowd actions were familiar in the eigh-teenth century, and mobbing, as it was called, was the main reper-toire that the American colonists brought with them from Europe, afeature, says James Morone, of eighteenth-century communal life,both in the New World and the Old. 1In the years leading up to the Revolutionary War, American elitesrestless with British rule struck up an alliance with the mob, an alliance3738 | CHAPTER 3that came to be justified by radical democratic ideas about the people srights to self-governance.Without the support of the mob, of the rab-ble, the war with England could not have been won.2 It was they, afterall, who provided the troops who fought the war.Moreover, the influ-ence of the mob was imprinted on the provisions of the new state con-stitutions that reflected the reigning principles of radical democracy,and then, more dimly, on those provisions of the new federal constitu-tion which spoke to popular rights and representation, provisions thathad to be conceded to win support for the new national government.The mobs of the revolutionary era struck out at local targets,against press gangs, landowners, local gentry, or cargo ships.But theoutcome of their actions, of their attempts to exercise power, wereimportantly determined by the responses of more distant governments,including colonial governments, the British government, and ultimatelythe state-building elites who designed the American government.I willsay more about the interplay of disruption and government responsein the revolutionary era shortly, but before I do, I want to make somegeneral observations about the large role that governments play in thedynamics of mobilizing disruptive power and in shaping the outcomesof disruptive challenges.Government, because it is the seat of law, and of the legitimate useof force that makes the law so potent, is almost always involved in thepolitics of disruptive movements.Sometimes government is the directtarget of the disruptors, but even if it is not, even when the targets arethe landowners or the industrialists, the role of government loomslarge.For one thing, the framework of rules or constraints which delim-its the exercise of popular power in the workplace or the communityis ultimately lodged in government.Government has the legal author-ity and coercive force to define who can do what to whom, and thus tocurb but sometimes to permit the exercise of power in interdepen-dent relations.3Government therefore plays a large role in managing often sup-pressing, but sometimes legitimating disruptive power challengeswhen these occur.But if the challenge surmounts these restraints, gov-ernment can also become acutely vulnerable even when it is not thetarget of the challengers [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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