Co-optation has been a major problem for social movements. The environmental movement, for example, was a rapidly-growing force in the 1970s–using ambitious direct action to seize the nation’s attention. Then corporate foundations entered the space. These co-opters helped to reshape a powerful grassroots movement into a greenwashing platform for companies like McDonald’s and Walmart. A drive to purge co-opters might have prevented the environmental movement from being captured.
WAYNE HSIUNG: Movements are driven by two competing forces: the drive to embrace defectors, and the drive to purge co-opters. The first force seeks to expand the pie and reach new people, especially those who previously supported the status quo (defectors). The second force prevents it from being infiltrated by people secretly seeking to defend the status quo (co-opters). These two forces often come into conflict. Effective movements must balance the tension between these two forces: recruit defectors but only to the extent that it does not allow co-opters to compromise the movement’s vision and integrity…
Co-optation has been a major problem for social movements. The environmental movement, for example, was a rapidly-growing force in the 1970s–using ambitious direct action to seize the nation’s attention. Then corporate foundations entered the space. These co-opters helped to reshape a powerful grassroots movement into a greenwashing platform for companies like McDonald’s and Walmart. Real political change was stalled. It was not until the rise of mass climate protest in the 2010s that the movement became an effective force again. A drive to purge co-opters might have prevented the environmental movement from being captured.
And yet there is evidence on the other side of this debate, too. Erica Chenoweth at Harvard analyzed 323 cases of social movements and found that embracing defectors has been crucial for success. No one is more credible, in critiquing a system, than someone who was once part of it. The Civil Rights Movement won when it embraced a racist Southern politician — Lyndon B. Johnson, who was once infamous for keeping a snake in his trunk to scare Black people — to join its fight for equal rights.
But how does one balance the drive to embrace defectors with the need to purge co-opters? It’s first worth noting that grassroots movements are very quick to purge co-opters but rarely embrace defectors. This is because power in the grassroots comes from moral authority, and there is little moral authority to be gained by working with defectors. Defectors are, by definition, morally compromised. Grassroots movements are thus biased towards purges, even of people who truly want to help…
The solution to this… is to distinguish defectors and co-opters. And there is, in fact, a simple two-part test that can help determine the difference between the two.
Is the potential ally offering support without demanding changes to the movement’s vision and strategy?
Is the potential ally offering support that causes division in the existing regime’s pillars of support?
If the answer to these questions is “Yes,” then you are probably not dealing with a co-opter…
Effective movements need to apply tests like these to balance the tension between the drive to purge and the drive to embrace. But progressive movements have mostly failed to do this. From Black Lives Matter to MeToo, they are too often relentlessly focused on purging co-opters without much thought put into recruiting defectors. SOURCE…
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