Organizers Lead the Movement

Organizers lead movements. They are the strategists, they operate behind the scenes and develop the plans to perfection.
They negotiate the options and come up with a decisive plan of action.
They have worked out the moves back and forth and also the endgame before the game begins.

Leaders are recruited

Once in a while the conditions are ripe for movement. Those who are planning the next move come to a time when people need a leadership focus and a browsing of key figures produce a standout who will be groomed for the leadership role. One skill required is oratory and another is a public image. Real organizers shun away from these activities.

Children can lead

In 1980 I attended a meeting in the Westridge Civic Center, Mitchells Plain, Cape Town. It was called to bring together the Teachers, Parents and the youth. The youth were protesting and parents wanted them safe in schools while parents pleaded that freedom is attainable through an adequate education. Students had followed slogans like "Liberation before Education." The adults wanted to bring the students to a meeting and make some sensible arguments to persuade them to stop protesting and return to school. In response to the presentations from the stage by Parents, Teachers and Community members a youth in the rafters responded, "I am prepared to die so that my unborn children will be free."

Mass Movements must Move People

A mass movement must move people. It needs to connect to the Psyche of large groups of people. It must reach the emotions that drive passions. Mass movements may start with rationality but must move to emotions to make real progress.

Clear and Meaningful Goals Required

Goals of a movement must be meaningful and clear. National Liberation Movements were handed very clear and meaningful goals on a plate when they were so openly excluded from every social and political involvement in their own childrens future.
The successful movements showed the oppressive entities that they need to create cloud cover on their exploitive plans. Today it is easy to find injusice and exploitation but it is more difficult to find clear and meaningful goals to achieve social justice. As the arguments have become more convoluted the need for clear and meaningful goals have not diminished. The creative challenge for builders of movements is to interpret the complex and present it in simple and meaninful ways.

Sparking a movement

A mass movement begins with one person. One person can identify what many others are suffering. That one person has to deal with it somehow. That person can choose a heroic response that will add to suffering or will be seen as an inspiration to others. How that heroic action is interpreted is not under the control of any person or group. Actions that spark movements are sincere and without reward. The reward come with history, when others find inspiration and in fact adopt similar behaviors independently. Once a small group decide it is time to confront an injustice the mass movement starts taking shape.

Identifying a movement

One of the ways to identify a movement is to observe the authority responses to criticism. When the authorities clamp down with an iron fist the topic is a candidate for a movement. It does not guarantee a movement. But the alternative seems to indicate a lack of a movement. When the authorities do not clamp down at all on outrageous behavior. Some right wing faith based protesters and their supporters claim their actions as part of a social movement while the authorities accommodate, accommodate, accommodate. They don't have the spark required to make a movement no matter how much they provoke authorities.

Need for People's Movements

Every year is a needy year for movements all over the world. There is a constant array of injustice that prevails. However, there have been a few decades of prosperity in the west that overshadowed the dormant needs. During the Tech Bubble, while companies in the technology sector rode the Internet wave of prosperity and stocks seemed to go higher and higher with no sense of rhyme or reason, the mantra was to buy a computer, invest online and become rich.
When that bubble burst and after the suicides there was a more reasonable prosperity that set in built on the tech young billionaire and millionaire clubs.
Today there is no doubt that the economy of greed has caught up with the hunger of need. Everyone is a wall street investment away from poverty. those who depended on pension funds that disappeared or Bernie Madoff that never appeared, the rich and the middle class has joined the starving masses.
Now the government and the businesses have been unmasked as being in the game to support each other while every citizen must fend for themselves. Not only do ordinary citizens openly have to find their own way out of this mess they are being tapped to fund government and large corporations out of their mess that they together created.
They pay lip service to serving the poor. In reality they don;t even know how to respect people beneath their class. They only respect power and so a people's movement that flexes the muscles of ordinary citizens is due to rise. Check out the steps and stages of a mass movement.