Spotting Co-optation & Building More Resilient Movements | CC Dispatch #17

Welcome to Dispatch #17! This week we are discussing one of the largest women’s movements in recent history, what co-optation is and how it impacts social movements, as well as ways to fight back against it. Let's get into it!

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Little (Movement) Wins

The Women Who Fought Nuclear War

Revealing History

The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was a 19-year long land occupation outside of the RAF (Royal Air Force) Greenham Common military base in the UK which became a symbol of the global struggle against nuclear weapons. After WW2, during the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union were locked in an arms race to develop nuclear weapons, making the risk of nuclear war very real. In 1979, NATO, the US-led coalition of Western nations, purchased land from the UK government in a rural part of England called the Greenham Commons as part of their Cold War strategy: In case the US ever went to war with the Soviet Union, they wanted to store nuclear missiles in the UK so they could nuke the Soviets faster from a shorter range.

But the problem was - Greenham Common was originally meant to be communal land for everybody, and the plan would bring nuclear weapons onto British soil, putting all British citizens at risk. In response, a group of women called Women for Life on Earth marched over 100 miles from Cardiff to the new military base in 1981. They soon realized marching wouldn’t be enough so they set up an occupation outside the base that would last nearly two decades. Despite constant attempts to evict them, harassment from far-right groups, and legal challenges - they won. In 1987, the US and Soviet Union signed the INF treaty which called for the dismantling of short range nuclear missiles and the work of the women at Greenham Commons Peace Camp was a major factor in the treaty getting signed.

Here's What We Can Learn:

1. Leveraging Existing Narratives: One of their core strategies was using women’s status in patriarchal society as caretakers and mothers to their advantage. They’d decorate the fence around the military base with toys, dress in black and “mourn” the lost lives of children, and hang pictures of their children on the fence. They used the spiderweb as a key symbol to signify their fragility and resilience, and loved to dress as witches to redefine the idea of an “evil witch.”
2. Horizontal Organization: The occupation quickly grew into 7 separate camps stationed at each fenced gate. Each was named after a different color of the rainbow and had their own personalities. They employed an autonomous style of organizing where anyone could come up with an idea, but had to convince others to join them. Their issues were settled through committees that came to common consensus together.
3. Tenacity: Greenham women faced constant attempts by the police to evict them but they would always come back and rebuild. Sometimes there were just a handful of women at camp and other times there were thousands.
4. Nonviolent but Disruptive Actions: Greenham women were committed to nonviolence but would frequently cause mass disturbances at the base by blockading roads, tearing down the fence, staging protest picnics, or disabling equipment. They would stage mass demonstrations numbering in the tens of thousands, at times completely encircling the base.
5. The Power of Merging Movements: The camp quickly voted to make the movement exclusively for women and to take a specifically feminist angle with their messaging and organizing, fusing the feminist and anti-nuclear movements. Doing so gave people multiple ways to connect with their movement, either out of a love for children, women’s empowerment, or a desire to stop nuclear war, turning what could seem like a foreign policy issue (nuclear war) into something very personal for many.

The People's Dictionary: Pre-Figurative Politics

Prefigurative politics is a method of political organizing where groups reflect the values and principles they envision for the future within their current organizing practices. Simply put, it’s using our own lives to practice the change we want to see. Instead of waiting for a functional democracy, start participating in upholding democracy. Instead of waiting to see more solidarity, start engaging more with our communities regularly. Instead of waiting for hierarchal systems to change, start building more horizontal systems. Instead of wishing for more unity, start improving our abilities to have navigate tough conversations. According to political theorist Adrian Kreutz:

“As a form of activism, prefigurativism highlights the idea that your means match the ends you can expect. It highlights that social structures enacted in the here-and-now, in the small confines of our organisations, institutions and rituals mirror the wider social structures we can expect to see in the post-revolutionary future.”

How do those in power stay in power? In the world of global capitalism, those at the top are naturally incentivized to keep things the way they are even as resistance grows from below. While we write a lot about how we can organize ourselves as a single global working class, it’s equally as valuable to understand the tactics that will be used against us. There is a wide range of different techniques, but they generally fall into 3 categories:

• Repression - violent police crackdowns, suppression of free speech, banning opposition parties, voter disenfranchisement, etc.
• Infiltration - when government agents or bad actors enter a group to sow division internally and discredit the group publicly.
• Co-optation - the selective absorbing of revolutionary ideas, symbols, and leaders into the mainstream to neutralize opposition and renew faith in the status quo

Ruling classes in any autocratic regime around the world will use a mixture of each of these categories. In this article we want to focus on co-optation because it is often the most subtle process of the 3, one that is happening all the time in all areas of life and is just as effective at squashing social movements.

What is Co-optation?

Co-optation is how those in power adapt to the changing times. Dissenting voices and anti-establishment ideas are incorporated into mainstream culture, but in the process are effectively declawed and separated from their original revolutionary intent. This gives the illusion that the ruling class is listening to us and is responsive to our needs, while nothing is actually done to address real systemic issues. Sociologist William Gamson defined co-optation as "challengers gaining access to the public policy process but without achieving actual policy changes.”

Within capitalist societies, the most prevalent place we see co-optation happening is in advertising, art, and the media, as corporations try to match their language with the latest trends of the moment to sell more products. A few examples:

• In Advertising: American advertisers successfully capitalized on the anti-war counter-culture of the 1960s to rebrand the Volkswagen from the Nazi car to the Love Bug.
• In Art: Fine art was once a key avenue of personal expression against the system (see: Picasso’s Guernica). Today, the most celebrated (that is, highest paid) contemporary artists are largely apolitical and focus on individual expression rather than systemic critique.
• In Performance: Historically, clowning and puppetry were mediums where performers could subvert the power dynamics of normal life by doing things that would be unacceptable in normal society. Today, both are specifically relegated to the realm of comedy (or, conversely, horror) with barely a trace of the art-form’s anti-establishment roots.
• In Music: House music emerged in Chicago, USA from queer Black DJs providing a safe space for the most marginalized. Today, massive corporate raves (of mostly white DJs) capitalize on the same desire for escape and acceptance, but now with an exorbitant ticket price.
• In Health: The concept of “self-care,” a tradition rooted in Black radical feminism, is now used to sell expensive beauty products and spa days.
• In Politics: The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by US police carried clear demands for representation, reparations, and abolition. Political leaders responded with watered-down DEI initiatives, painted streets, and promises of police reform (all while increasing police budgets).

We speak from an American perspective, but there are surely parallels wherever you are in the world.

The Impacts of Co-optation

To us, co-optation is probably the most insidious in politics. When political leaders acknowledge our troubles, use our language, or elect / appoint comrades to high-level positions, it can feel like a victory, but it’s often completely hollow. In reality, the ruling class is not interested in our advice, just our endorsement, and this hurts movements in 3 big ways:

• It undermines the authenticity and effectiveness of movement leaders - when movement leaders are promoted to positions of authority, they often lose credibility from their supporters now that they must operate “within the system.”
• It funnels energy, attention, and funding back into the existing systems of power rather than building new ones.
• It splits the unity of a movement between the more moderate and radical supporters - Moderate supporters may feel the concessions from the State are enough and demobilize, allowing the State to paint the more radical supporters as unreasonable.

Today, political leaders (and corporations) are adopting the language of “mutual aid”, “diversity”, and “community”, rallying potential supporters to fight against the oligarchy, but then funneling those people right back into the same systems that created oligarchs in the first place. Grassroots movements gaining real momentum nationally are quickly getting co-opted by larger PACs or Non-Profits with access to more capital, watering down their demands and losing the faith of more radical supporters.

This dilution of anti-establishment ideas and messages lets leaders avoid addressing systemic issues head-on, which often leads to a backlash that makes things worse than before. To return to the US example: the Biden presidential campaign made big promises of a Green New Deal, canceling student debt, expanding the Supreme Court, Universal Healthcare, and a slew of other popular Leftist policies. These promises won him the office but then none of it happened, and the continued frustration with the status quo paved the way for Trump’s resurgence. In the UK, a similar pattern is unfolding: the center-left Labour party came to power using language of “protecting the working class” but failed to hold firm on their promises. Now, the far-right Reform UK Party is expected to make massive gains in the next election.

How We Defend Against Co-optation

Co-optation works because it convinces people that the current system can adapt to solve our problems, so perhaps one of the best ways to defend against it is in how we organize. This is part of what makes prefigurative politics such an important part of organizing today that’s been employed everywhere from the Zapatistas in Mexico to the occupations in Egypt during the Arab Spring. By actively building new systems while fighting the current one, we can better resist the temptations from those trying to hold onto power. We must be bold and clear in our demands, and fiercely unapologetic and imaginative in our vision for the future. We should be wary and ask ourselves as we find groups to organize with or actions to participate in:

• Do the demands of a group call for systemic change, or a return to a “normal”?
• Are their actions strategic & disruptive, or do they operate within state-sanctioned limits?
• Are leaders/organizers open to criticism? Are they transparent in who they are and how they operate?
• Who funds the organizers or leaders? The people, corporations, large political action committees? Are they aligned with your cause?

We can (and should) also reclaim the spaces that were co-opted from us and use them to our advantage. For example, while clowning is just seen as silly games to most, that didn’t stop the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army from assembling to use their clowning as a tool for resistance (and to great effect). Similarly in the UK, the Reclaim the Streets movement regularly partnered with underground rave groups to hold guerrilla protest parties that attracted national attention. When the State co-opts us, we can subvert them back.

But a final word of caution: the fear of co-optation must not keep us from strategic cooperation. When trying to figure out which path is better, overthrowing the system completely or changing it from the inside, the answer is often a combination of both. So the solution here is not to separate ourselves from anyone who may not agree with us completely. We can’t expect perfection, from allies or in our victories. Instead we must be realistic and make decisions based on present conditions instead of ideological purity. How can we accept more people where they’re at and guide them into embracing our views and goals? We should make strategic alliances when the time is right, and move away when it isn’t. Seize power where we can, but always use it with a better future in mind.

Artists Confronting Inequalities

Abby Palen (they/them) is an award-winning creative multi-media artist, activist, puppeteer, storyteller, and upcycled art teacher using their skills to raise political awareness in everyday places.

With the help of 35 other artists, Abby created an anti-war art installation composed of upcycled materials and displayed in the Chicago Cultural Arts Center in protest of the US government and its ongoing complicity in the Gaza Genocide. Through this puppet installation, “U.S.-Israel War Machine,” Abby and their group of protest artists leverage puppetry’s revolutionary roots to creatively and directly call out the close partnership between the US and Israel during the genocide.

The artwork sparked so much public discourse that the Chicago City Council tried to get Abby’s art installation removed from the museum on grounds that the work was “anti-semitic.” Ultimately, City Council was unsuccessful thanks to the support of the Department of Cultural Affairs who protected Abby’s art as a form of free speech.

Visit Abby's Website | Follow Abby on Instagram

Resources & Tools

Please share these links with anyone that might find them helpful:

• 🧩 The Citizens Handbook | A helpful collection of resources for developing effective horizontal and vertical organizing systems that includes some great info on grassroots rot prevention.
• 🧩 Blueprints for Revolution | A comprehensive practical guide to help you learn how to start getting revolutionary, wherever you are in the world.
• 🧩 The Direct Action Guide | A step-by-step guide on organizing and carrying out creative protest actions.
• 🤝 Methods for Winning Over Opponents | If you're trying to build community, coalition, influence, or just wanna help someone to come around to your point of view, this is a great place to start.
• 🌍 Local Farm Finder | A handy map to find farm, ranch, market, or farm stands across Canada, US, and Mexico by My Health Forward
• 📱 Keybase | A great alternative to Slack that has end-to-end encryption.

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About Little Wins Studio

Founded by Elisa & Ray, Little Wins is a Los Angeles-based creative communications studio using the power of multimedia design & storytelling to raise our collective consciousness, connect communities across cultures and classes, and motivate others to improve our world. We do this because we want to see a more engaged, liberated, and regenerative world where all people have access to the knowledge and tools needed to thrive.