First and foremost, you must center any campaign around social justice issues, not just demands. In other words, to gather meaningful support, both among the workers directly involved and the wider community indirectly involved, you need to carefully wrap your specific demands around broad social justice concerns.
A fabulous campaigner, Ron Carver, made me aware of this. For instance, if you seek higher wages, you need to frame your demand around the poor living conditions created by low wages. It’s not so much the right to higher wages, it’s more the impact of lower wages on people’s lives. Zohran Mamdani did that so well in his recent New York City mayoral campaign.
Next, you need to pay close attention to the details when doing power structure research. The forensic part of research is very important and also very difficult. That’s why the more advanced techniques we’ve developed for tracking and formalizing the information are hard to organize and make sense of. But without the details, you really don’t have a good practical analysis for developing a powerful analysis and effective tactics.
You have to weave between the big picture and the details and back out to the big picture. You need to constantly go back and forth between the forest and the trees. And if you have a hunch, you have to test the idea with more information to see if it makes sense. Then you go back out to the general and see if you have an analysis that makes sense. So there’s this back-and-forth process, which takes time.
Another thing I’ve learned is that the research for a corporate campaign can take time. Understanding the power elite is not going to happen in a day or two. It takes a significant amount of time to really understand what’s going on with power. Often the people who retain you to do the work, or the department you work in, put unrealistic demands on you. They want an answer in a day or two.
Well, I got news for you. You can get a general…
Auteur: Michael Locker
