The Class Struggle: Upgrade Your Activism: The Evidence-Based Path from Protest to Power

https://cmarmitage.substack.com/p/upgrade-your-activism-the-evidence-bf9

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We marched. We chanted. And the wars continued. Now what?

Note from the author: Below you’ll find an article, followed by an effective activism call to action, followed by our expansive FREE library of booklets, books, and model legislation for activists, organizers, and legislators.

I know activists who have protested every American military action since the Korean War. They’ve spent decades hitting the streets to try and end needless death and destruction. Their moral determination is powerful, and they’ve kept resistance alive when others surrendered to apathy.

And yet America fought those wars anyway. We marched. We chanted. And the wars continued.

None of that time was wasted, and no one’s commitment is in question. These protests mattered, they built community, preserved moral witness, and showed that not everyone consented to violence. The statistical record says something different about outcomes: disorganized street protests, the default mode of American resistance, demonstrably do not topple regimes or force systemic change. The forces we’re fighting, defense contractors with billion-dollar budgets, lobbyists who write the laws, and politicians who profit from perpetual war, don’t lose sleep over our marches. The data is unambiguous that isolated demonstrations, regardless of size, rarely achieve their stated political goals when confronting entrenched power backed by unlimited money.

The research I’m citing focuses primarily on regime change and major policy shifts. Protests can serve other vital functions like building community, shifting discourse, and demonstrating solidarity. But if your goal is systemic change, then read on.

Thankfully, we know what does work.

Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan compiled rigorous data from 323 major resistance campaigns between 1900 and 2006. Their research revealed the specific mechanisms that transform moral outrage into political victory. They documented which tactics succeed, which fail, and why.

Strategic competence, not passion or righteousness, separates the movements that change history from the movements that become footnotes. And strategy can be learned.

Let’s establish our premises clearly. Political power rests on pillars of support including military, economic elites, civil servants, media, and other institutions that enable governance. Governments change behavior when the cost of maintaining the status quo exceeds the cost of reform. Street protests alone rarely impose sufficient costs or remove pillars of support.

Omar Wasow’s 2020 study used rainfall as a natural experiment, since bad weather randomly changed protest conditions, allowing researchers to establish causation. He found that nonviolent civil rights protests moved elites, press coverage, public opinion, and votes toward the movement, while violent unrest moved votes away from it. And the protests that produced those gains were not stand-alone marches; they were part of sustained campaigns involving economic boycotts, sit-ins, and systematic civil disobedience.

Let’s consider Occupy Wall Street. At its peak, it had inspired protests in 951 cities across 82 countries. It dominated media coverage for months. It shifted public discourse on inequality. Yet it achieved zero concrete policy changes, because it refused to move beyond occupation to the tactics that actually threaten power. That means sustained economic disruption, systematic non-cooperation, and parallel institution building.

Contrast this with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. For 381 days, Black residents who comprised 75% of bus riders refused to use public transportation. The city lost money daily. Bus drivers faced layoffs. Downtown businesses saw revenue collapse. Broad strategic and legally damaging tactics ultimately led to powerful system wide desegregation.

The mechanism for change is straightforward: protests express dissent, but power concedes only when its fundamental interests are threatened. The fact is, corporations and organizations know when their actions will be unpopular and result in marches. They anticipate it and are entirely prepared for it. They know the strategies and are unconcerned when they know where we will be and how to manage it.

The 3.5% action number from Chenoweth and Stephan’s research has been quoted often. However, that 3.5% doesn’t mean getting 3.5% to show up for a single action. It means 3.5% of the population actively participates in a sustained campaign over approximately three years. Chenoweth is explicit: “The campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation in the methods they use.”

The media widely misrepresented this research, in a sort of “congratulations, 3.5% of the country protested against Trump today. Research shows that you have now defeated fascism and can go home and stay there!”

Gene Sharp documented 198 methods of nonviolent action. Successful campaigns use dozens simultaneously. These include economic boycotts and strikes, tax resistance, alternative institutions, civil disobedience, social non-cooperation, and parallel governance structures.

The Serbian Otpor movement that toppled Milošević understood this. They began with low-risk tactics like graffiti, street theater, and pranks that many could join. They gradually escalated to strikes, boycotts, and parallel institutions. When they finally called for mass demonstrations, they had already eroded the regime’s pillars of support.

The 3.5% threshold works because it triggers what social scientists call a “coordination cascade.” When people see enough others resisting, the perceived risk drops below the perceived benefit.

But reaching 3.5% sustained participation requires infrastructure most American movements lack.

Politicians can ignore protests. They cannot ignore economic hemorrhaging. The United Farm Workers’ grape boycott reduced grape sales by 20% nationally. Grocery chains dropped contracts. Growers negotiated because they had no choice.

The key insight is that economic disruption must be sustained and targeted. One-day strikes are symbolic. Indefinite strikes that halt production force negotiation. This requires strike funds to support participants, alternative food distribution networks, community mutual aid systems, and clear demands tied to specific concessions.

The South African anti-apartheid movement understood this. Black workers continued earning paychecks from white businesses but boycotted white products. After months of devastating losses, business elites forced the government to negotiate.

Isolated movements fail where connected movements succeed. The civil rights movement won because it united Black churches, labor unions, student organizations, and white liberal groups. Churches provided meeting spaces and moral authority. Unions brought economic leverage and organizing experience while students supplied energy and risk tolerance. Liberal allies offered legal expertise and media connections.

Building coalitions requires what veteran organizer Jane McAlevey, who successfully unionized thousands of workers, calls “whole worker organizing.” This means engaging people through their multiple identities and interests, not just their political beliefs. A person might not join as an activist but will join as a parent concerned about schools, a worker seeking dignity, or a congregation member following their faith.

Horizontal, leaderless movements generate initial energy but cannot sustain pressure or negotiate victories. Occupy refused to designate representatives or articulate demands. When politicians asked, “What do you want?” no one could answer authoritatively.

That’s part of the reason that here at the Existentialist Republic we like to encourage folks to join existing groups and bring those organizations the discover here. The result is we can cooperatively build increasingly sophisticated opposition infrastructure without necessitating the construction of additional large and complex organizations.

Successful movements benefit from clear demand structures for strategic decisions, designated negotiators with defined authority, formal processes for ratifying agreements, leadership development pipelines, and institutional memory preservation.

The Montgomery Improvement Association, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee provided this infrastructure for the civil rights movement. Without them, Birmingham and Selma would have been isolated incidents rather than catalysts for federal legislation.

Repeating the same tactic breeds habituation. Authorities adapt, the media loses interest, and participants burn out.

Successful campaigns follow an escalation ladder.

I have to say it one more time, because it if you remember one sentence from this article, this is the one. If you want to have a successful social movement then you must escalate your membership/numbers, tactics, demands, and methods until they are successful. That’s a necessary process.

Consciousness raising through education and small meetings comes first, then coalition building to connect organizations, then demonstrations of resolve through initial protests, then economic pressure via boycotts and strikes, and finally civil disobedience by breaking unjust laws en masse.

These tactics ultimately lead to security forces and elites recognizing the power dynamic shifting and joining the side that seems most likely to win. That should be us.

Each stage builds on the previous. Skipping steps usually fails. Jumping to civil disobedience without economic pressure lacks leverage. Mass protests without prior organizing become one-day events.

Several American organizations understand and implement these principles:

Momentum Community trains organizers in combining structure-based organizing with mass mobilization. They’ve trained leaders from Black Lives Matter, Sunrise Movement, and #MeToo.

Beautiful Trouble provides tactical resources, training, and strategy consultation. Their toolbox includes detailed guides for over 200 tactics with case studies of success and failure.

Training for Change offers intensive workshops on direct action, strategy, and campaign planning. Veterans of the Movement for a New Society who helped topple multiple authoritarian regimes founded it.

Midwest Academy teaches comprehensive organizing skills: power mapping, campaign strategy, coalition building, and negotiation. They’ve trained organizers who’ve won hundreds of local and state campaigns.

The Ayni Institute specializes in mass protest techniques that trigger moments when political weather changes and previously impossible reforms become inevitable.

United Vision for Idaho demonstrates state-level implementation, combining electoral organizing, legislative advocacy, and direct action to block extremist legislation in a red state.

Your immediate actions this week should be to connect with these organizations. Assess your tactical diversity. If you’re only using 3 to 5 tactics from Sharp’s list of 198, you’re under-equipped.

Over the next month, attend a training. Momentum offers monthly online sessions. Beautiful Trouble has free webinars. Build your bench. You need 10 committed organizers for every 100 participants. Recruit and train them now. Establish strike funds and mutual aid networks, because economic tactics require economic support.

The evidence is unambiguous. Spontaneous, disconnected, tactically limited protests do not topple regimes or force systemic change. What does work is strategic, sustained, multi-tactic campaigns with disciplined persistence, economic leverage, and organizational infrastructure. The dataset of 323 resistance campaigns assembled by Chenoweth and Stephan verifies it.

The oligarchs and authoritarians you’re fighting understand this. They’ve spent 50 years building infrastructure, taking local positions, and executing long-term strategy. They didn’t achieve their goals through righteous anger. They achieved them through patient, strategic, coordinated action.

Your opponents are counting on you to remain disorganized, reactive, and tactically limited. They’re counting on you to exhaust yourself with symbolic protests that threaten nothing.

But we have a choice because the tools exist, the knowledge is available, and the organizations are ready to train us.

It’s time to start toppling some tyrants.

Every element here deserves its own deep dive, and I plan to explore them in future articles. If you have data, resources, or organizing experience to share, please comment below. We need all the intelligence we can gather for this fight. Questions are always welcome.

I wrote a full-length version of this playbook. My book Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Dismantling American Fascism takes the research above and turns it into concrete campaigns you can run where you live, and my E.A.R.R. guide gives you the recruiting cycle that grows a group of three into a group of three hundred: Educate, Activate, Recruit, Repeat. All of this and more can be found for free at the bottom of this article.

If you can subscribe to The Existentialist Republic by clicking the link below, then you’re ensuring these resource stay in front of millions of activists. Don’t let this be the reason you skip a meal or miss rent, but if you can press that button then you keep this machine destroying fascism. Thank you for being here! - Chris

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Call To Action

Difficulty: 4/10

Category: ICE Out

You can run the first rung of the escalation ladder this week, and it costs as much as a pizza. Invite two friends over, order the pizza, watch a movie, play video games, maybe start a Dungeons and Dragons group, and before the movie starts, spend ten minutes on one question: what are the three of us willing to do together this month? That conversation is consciousness raising and coalition building at the smallest multi-person scale, and it is where organizers come from.

Then make one call. ICE agents who commit assault, unlawful detention, or property destruction are subject to state criminal law like anyone else, and your state attorney general should know that you expect the law to be enforced even when it is difficult. Call the office and make these points in your own words:

Give your name and your city, and say you are a constituent.
Say that a federal badge does not place anyone above the state criminal code.
Say that you want the office to investigate and prosecute ICE agents who commit crimes under state law, and name the categories that concern you: assault, unlawful detention, property destruction.

By clicking this sentence you can buy a physical copy of my book “Toppling Tyrants: A Field Guide to Removing Fascism in America”

You can get a FREE PDF of the book in the BMAC shop for $0.00 by clicking on this sentence.