[ Bernie Sanders and the Squad have helped pave the way for open
socialists to win elected seats in multiple levels of government at a
scale that has not been seen in a century. Many progressives are
taking a new look at the importance of ideology.]
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HOW IDEOLOGY CAN HELP (OR HURT) MOVEMENTS TRYING TO BUILD POWER  
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Mark Engler and Paul Engler
September 22, 2023
Waging Nonviolence
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_ Bernie Sanders and the Squad have helped pave the way for open
socialists to win elected seats in multiple levels of government at a
scale that has not been seen in a century. Many progressives are
taking a new look at the importance of ideology. _

A People’s Action T-shirt highlights the group’s fight to reshape
ideology in the public sphere. (Facebook/Peoples Action/Jody Coss //
Waging Nonviolence),

 

What is ideology? And why does it matter in social movements?

In comparison with their counterparts in Europe, Latin America and
other parts of the world, movements in the United States have tended
to be relatively non-ideological — or at least  to present
themselves that way. Successive rounds of anti-Communist repression,
McCarthyism and Cold War hysteria led many organizers to downplay
overt commitments to any established system of leftist thought.

Consistent with this trend, community-based groups in the Alinskyite
organizing
[[link removed]] lineage
traditionally emphasized staying away from abstract ideology and
instead adopting what they saw as a more pragmatic approach: listening
to the demands being expressed in a community and organizing around
those issues, rather than bringing in any outside agenda. Elements of
the New Left in the 1960s — embedded in the civil rights, student
power, antiwar and feminist movements — worked to develop a
home-grown version of the American radical tradition that aimed to
sidestep the rigid doctrinal debates of earlier generations and
instead emphasize participatory democratic processes. Meanwhile,
groups that adopted more highly ideological orientations, whether
Trotskyist cadre organizations or countercultural anarchist
communities, were prone to self-isolation and marginality.

For the political opponents of the left, it has been a different
story. Right-wing pundits and politicians have hardly been reticent to
push a gospel of “free-market” individualism in the public sphere
— and also to build up an infrastructure of magazines, think tanks,
policy shops and candidate trainings that could translate their ideas
into reality. The result has been a marked imbalance in American life,
in which once-fringe conservatives ideas have frequently come to
define the mainstream.

Recently, however, there have been signs of positive change. Bernie
Sanders and the Squad have helped pave the way for open socialists to
win elected seats in multiple levels of government at a scale that has
not been seen in a century. Moreover, in the wake of Occupy Wall
Street, the Movement for Black Lives and the resistance to Donald
Trump, many community-based organizations have been moved to embrace
bigger ideas and to connect local campaigns to broader visions of
justice and liberation.

In other words, many progressives are taking a new look at the
importance of ideology, and they are asking how movements today can
use it as a tool to win lasting change.

Longtime political educator Harmony Goldberg has been a leader in
encouraging this exploration. Currently the director of praxis at
the Grassroots Power Project [[link removed]],
Goldberg has been training organizers on political analysis and
movement strategy for more than two decades. She began her political
work in the Bay Area in the 1990s where she helped found the School of
Unity and Liberation, or SOUL
[[link removed]]. Subsequently, she has
worked with organizing networks including the Right to the City
Alliance, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, and People’s
Action.

Having completed a PhD in cultural anthropology from the City
University of New York’s Graduate Center, Goldberg was a founding
editor of the strategy magazine _Organizing Upgrade _(now known
as _Convergence_ [[link removed]]) and is author of the
primer 
[[link removed]]“Hegemony, War of
Position, & Historic Bloc: A Brief Introduction to Antonio Gramsci’s
Strategic Concepts
[[link removed]].”

Recently, we spoke with Goldberg about ideology and its practical uses
— and misuses — for social movements today. Our conversation has
been edited for length and clarity.

LET’S START OFF WITH A STRAIGHTFORWARD QUESTION: WHAT IS IDEOLOGY?
HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE IT?

I think there are two overlapping meanings of ideology. The first
definition, and the one that people are most often referring to when
they use the word “ideology,” is an organized body of political
thought that gives us frameworks to help us think about making our
political work more effective. For example, we might think about
Marxism or anarchism or revolutionary nationalism when we are defining
ideology in this way. These explicit and often highly differentiated
political ideologies can create lines of differentiation on the left.

In their worst form, these ideologies are treated as universal
doctrines that are handed down across time, and they can become a
limiting factor in our practical work. In this approach, we may think
that ideology itself can give us “the answer.” But in their best
form, we can treat these kinds of explicit ideologies as the
accumulation of historical knowledge from real-world struggles. When
we approach ideology in this way, we see ourselves as being part of an
ongoing conversation within a specific political tradition, a
conversation between people who may be doing their political work in
different conditions but who share a set of tools that help them think
about that work in a systematic way. I think that’s the more
productive use of explicit ideologies.

Now, the other, simultaneous meaning of “ideology” refers to the
ideas that are out there in the world, in popular culture. In this
sense of the term, ideology is what we find when we ask, “What are
the structures of meaning that people use to make sense of their
world?” At the Grassroots Power Project, we will sometimes refer to
this broader and more public realm of ideology as “worldview.”  

IN THIS SECOND SENSE, IDEOLOGY IS NOT A SPECIALIZED BODY OF THOUGHT.
IT’S IDEAS THAT ARE ALL AROUND US IN OUR CULTURE.

Yes. And that’s the focus that theorists such as Antonio Gramsci
[[link removed]] and Stuart
Hall
[[link removed]] have
when they are thinking about ideology. The most important question to
them was not what was happening within the self-identified left
ideologically, but what was happening ideologically in the broader
society. In my opinion, this is the fundamental question we should be
focusing on when we think about ideology in our movements.

But I think it’s important to say that this is not usually how
we’re deploying the term “ideology” in the United States.
We’re usually deploying it in a left-facing, in-group, line-drawing
sort of way, without paying attention to these structures of meaning
in broader society. That’s one reason we end up in strategic
impasses when we think about the role of ideology in social movements.

WHAT HAS YOUR EXPERIENCE DOING POPULAR EDUCATION WITH MOVEMENT GROUPS
BEEN LIKE? ARE THERE THINGS THAT YOU’VE SEEN WORK AND THAT PEOPLE
REALLY LATCH ON TO?

During my early years in the Bay Area youth movement, when I was
helping to build SOUL, I was also a member of STORM
[[link removed]],
Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement, and that
shaped my early radicalism. During that period, I was forming my own
political ideology. while I was also training other people
politically. And my comrades and I were often focused on, “What is
the most correct analysis? And how do we communicate that as broadly
as possible?” And when your social movement work is with young
people, and particularly with young people from oppressed communities,
we can all move _very_ left _very_ quickly.

Now what did we mean by “most correct”? We usually meant, “What
is the most accurate critique of the system?” and “What is the
most left position?” That focus had some real pay-offs: We worked
hard to integrate radical critiques of patriarchy and white supremacy
into our critique of capitalism. We worked to develop an analysis that
was internationalist in orientation. I still agree with a lot of those
positions. They have helped me understand our world in a powerful way.

But I would say that, in retrospect, I look back at that time, and I
now see that I had a tendency to think that the job of political
education was to help people develop the best critique, either of
society or of the rest of the left. It was sort of a “the truth
shall set us free” orientation. Like, “if we are correct, then we
will win.” So our job was to get people as correct as possible.

Today, I don’t think that is the kind of political education that
strengthens the impact of left organizers within social movements or
within working class communities. Instead, it can encourage people to
work to develop a “purity” orientation that can make them not want
to work with anybody who doesn’t agree with them on every question.
That makes it incredibly difficult to build power, and it makes it
nearly impossible to relate to poor and working-class communities as
they really are. 
 

A Marxist bloc marching in London.  (Flickr/Socialist Appeal  //
 Waging Nonviolence)
WHAT IS YOUR PERSPECTIVE NOW ON THE PURPOSE OF POLITICAL EDUCATION?

At the Grassroots Power Project, we’ve actually started to call this
area of work “strategic education” to clarify that our work is not
to help people develop the strongest critique, but rather to help them
develop as strategists. Our job is to figure out how to make people as
ambitious and as strategically oriented to building power as possible.

Even when we’re looking at critiques of racial capitalism or
patriarchy, for example, our job is to look at those systems from the
angle of “How can we increase our peoples’ ambitions and
capacities to build more power among poor and working people?”

When we are developing ideological study or political education, we
should always force ourselves to start with the question: “What’s
the strategic intervention we’re trying to move?” And therefore,
“What are we teaching that moves people in that direction, and how
are we teaching it?” There’s always a focus on strategy, ambition
and impact. That is very different from starting with, “What’s the
correct position and the correct analysis? What is the most left
stance?” My belief is that those don’t need to be oppositional
questions in the end, but the first set of questions will be more
effective in strengthening our ability to have impact in the real
world.

LET US PLAY DEVIL’S ADVOCATE AND TAKE THE POSITION OF THOSE WHO
WOULD SAY THAT IDEOLOGY ISN’T NECESSARY OR THAT IT DOESN’T REALLY
MATTER FOR MOVEMENTS. I SEE THIS COMING FROM A FEW DIFFERENT PLACES.
ONE IS THE ALINSKYITE TRADITION OF COMMUNITY ORGANIZING, WHICH FOCUSES
ON LISTENING TO AND ORGANIZING AROUND THE ISSUES THAT PEOPLE IN THE
COMMUNITY ARTICULATE THEMSELVES, RATHER THAN HAVING ORGANIZERS COME IN
WITH A PREDETERMINED SET OF BELIEFS.

HOW WOULD YOU RESPOND TO THAT SORT OF BASELINE POSITION, WHICH MIGHT
SEE ITSELF AS A BIAS TOWARD PRAGMATISM OVER IDEOLOGY?

I don’t think that pure anti-ideological stance has as much hold
today as it did in the 1940s or the 1970s, when it emerged in backlash
to left movements. Community organizing has been evolving through its
own experience with the changing political landscape. Even very
“pragmatic” organizers have moved left over the past decade or so.
Because it’s actually pragmatically necessary to address the fact
that our enemy has been waging a class war and a racial agenda against
us, and they’ve been winning. 

For example, People’s Action is a network that came out of that kind
of tradition, and the Grassroots Power Project has worked really
closely with them as they’ve gone through a process of change on
this front. 

HOW WOULD YOU CHARACTERIZE THAT PROCESS?

When we started working with one of their legacy organizations —
National People’s Action, as it was known back then — we helped
their organizers and leaders to think about the political terrain that
they’d been fighting on for the past 20 or 30 years. We heard that
they’d been caught in defensive battles to protect gains that had
already been won, and that opportunities to make more positive
advances were disappearing.

We did trainings about how that came to be: because a set of
billionaires and corporate leaders had an explicit ideology and
strategy that they have been pushing for the past 40 years, in
alliance with social conservatives and white nationalists. Those
actors accomplished a radical reorganization of our economy and
society — what we usually call “neoliberalism.” And that shaped
the political terrain that all these single-issue battles are fought
on. They made it so that community groups couldn’t actually win
their campaigns in the same way that they did in the 1960s or even the
1980s.  

And central to that strategy was that these neoliberals reshaped the
terrain of meaning out in the world, what we called the broader use of
the term “ideology.” They’ve made it so that individualism and
free market ideas are just overwhelmingly dominant in the public
debate.

Looking at this helped People’s Action’s organizers and leaders to
see that we’re going to be in trouble if we don’t have a public
“ideology” that is a counter to that. That didn’t mean that they
were going to adopt an explicit formal ideology and have all of their
members start reading groups to study “Capital_._”_ _It was more
like, “Okay, we need to fight on this terrain of ideas. We need to
tell a different story about race in this country, about government,
about the relationship between different communities of poor and
working people and about our antagonism with the corporations.”

These were ideas that were already in the DNA of People’s Action.
But these processes of reflection and training have made them more
clear and full-throated. It helped them to commit to entering into the
fight to reshape ideology in the public sphere. They call this the
“battle of big ideas.” 

WHAT HAS THE RIGHT DONE THAT IS IDEOLOGICAL THAT THE LEFT DOESN’T
DO?

The right’s ideological work faces outward, which is different from
the left, whose ideology often ends up facing inward. We can see the
impact of their work to influence public ideology and reshape public
narratives over time. It’s all of Ronald Reagan’s lines:
“Government is not the solution to the problem; government is the
problem.” It’s “trickle-down” economics and the idea that “a
rising tide lifts all boats.” The ideology of neoliberalism had its
formal tenets outlined primarily by academics, but politicians and
strategic communicators also shaped them. Those tenets provided a
guiding structure for what the right pushed as public narrative.

That ideology has a political-economic assessment of the nature of the
system. It has political-economic aspirations. And it has a strategic
orientation about how to achieve those aspirations. So they have a set
of ideas — an ideology — that they’re moving. Not only do they
have ideas, but they’ve systematically invested in building a media
infrastructure. They have a set of shared, strategic practices that
they use to engage with the world.

GETTING BACK TO BEING A DEVIL’S ADVOCATE, PEOPLE WHO SEE THEMSELVES
AS MORE PRAGMATIC STILL MIGHT LOOK AT THE LEFT AND SAY, “WELL, THESE
OVERLY IDEOLOGICAL GROUPS ON THE LEFT COME IN AND THEY DON’T MEET
PEOPLE WHERE THEY’RE AT.” OR, “THEY’RE BAD AT FORMING
COALITIONS, BECAUSE THEY HAVE THIS WHOLE SET OF LITMUS TESTS ABOUT
THEIR BELIEFS, AND THEY DON’T WANT TO WORK WITH OTHER PEOPLE WHO
MIGHT HAVE SOME DISAGREEMENTS.” SO HOW DO YOU ADDRESS THOSE KINDS OF
PROBLEMS WITH IDEOLOGY?

I think these are real issues. That’s why I say it’s important for
us to be clear about what we mean by ideology — and about what is a
functional use of ideology in political work. It’s correct to say
that the things you described are dysfunctional uses of ideology in
political work. A functional use would be listening to where people
are at and figuring out how to make that part of your mission.

Communists in the 1930s listened to what people were wanting and
fought on those issues. But they had a framework that they put those
issues into, and they had a process that they moved people through
over time to understand where those issues really came from. So I
think there’s a way to be rooted in popular struggle and also have
an ideological framework.

On the left in the United States, we frankly have all kinds of
ideological debates without caring about the working class at all. I
think an anti-capitalist politic that does not care about the working
class is never going to succeed. And that’s dominant on the left at
this moment.

WHAT’S AN EXAMPLE YOU SEE OF PEOPLE HAVING IDEOLOGY BUT NOT CARING
ABOUT THE WORKING CLASS?

The language that people use is one example. People learned
terminology in college or in study groups, and it is often clarifying
and helpful terminology in that context. But instead of listening to
where people are at and translating those ideas so that they feel
relevant in more everyday contexts, they use that same terminology
that they learned in school or in study groups. Another example is all
of the political purity tests that take place inside of organizations
today. We can also see it in the tendency of organizations to face
inwards and engage in endless ideological debates, instead of facing
outwards toward communities.

Now that is not inevitable. As I’ve said, I think that we can
“do” ideology in ways that are grounded in reality, that are
outward-facing and that are impactful on broader conditions. There are
methods for that, but they require some real discipline and structure.
They require a deep commitment to the difficult spadework of changing
the mass nature of politics in this country. And they require the
intention to orient towards poor and working people, towards the
people as a whole.

Ideology can orient us in either direction, and it depends on how we
approach it. There are organizations that are grappling with these
tensions in an honest and productive way, even when it gets messy.
Dream Defenders has been a good example of that honest grappling with
this difficult contradiction. To address strategic questions they were
grappling with as they became a leading force in the Movement for
Black Lives, they took up a study of more formal ideologies. That
helped them answer some political and strategic questions. They then
took a breath and looked up and realized, “We have become more
alienated from the base that we should be trying to develop. Let’s
work to correct that.” That’s the dynamic and mass-facing approach
to ideological work that we need to encourage.

ARE THERE OTHER GROUPS BEYOND THE DREAM DEFENDERS YOU SEE OUT THERE
THAT INSPIRE YOU?

There are a lot of hopeful seeds out there. I’d call them seeds. I
think People’s Action has numerous examples of this. They have 
[[link removed]]Alinskyite
organizing principles in their history — or you could just call it a
“base-building” DNA. That organizing model has historically
trashed electoral work, because it saw it as something that would get
you to buy into the system as opposed to keeping people as direct
action warriors. But they’ve started investing more in political
work. Because their analysis of the neoliberal strategy led them to
recognize that they want to keep the direct action work alive, but
they also want to shape the agenda. And that’s going to require them
to take on political work.

So they’re saying, “We’re going to overcome this purist, direct
action versus electoral-organizing division, and we’re going to
build an electoral program because we’ve gone through a political
assessment about what’s needed.” And I think that’s a good
example of maturing. I think People’s Action has been broadening
their scope of organizing because of what I would consider not so much
an explicit ideology, but a functional ideology.

I have also seen many organizers mature through their engagement with
LeftRoots which has taken hundreds of organizers — mainly organizers
from oppressed communities — through a process of study and
reflection on strategy. This has helped to ground people in the bigger
picture while they do their organizing in more specific conditions. 

AMONG THESE COMMUNITY ORGANIZING GROUPS THAT HAVE SHOWN INCREASING
INTEREST IN ELECTORAL POLITICS OVER THE PAST DECADE, WE’VE SEEN AN
EFFORT TO CREATE MODELS OF HOW WE CAN ELECT PEOPLE WHO WILL BE
“movement candidates
[[link removed]]”
OR “MOVEMENT POLITICIANS.” DO YOU THINK HAVING SOME SORT OF
EXPLICIT IDEOLOGICAL PROGRAM IS PART OF WHAT MIGHT MAKE A MOVEMENT
POLITICIAN BEHAVE DIFFERENTLY IN OFFICE THAN JUST A STANDARD ELECTED
OFFICIAL?

I think this is a good example of why ideology matters. When elected
officials go into office, if they know that the dominant approach to
governance today is based on a neoliberal ideology, they will be much
more prepared to navigate those dynamics than somebody who thinks,
“I have good ideas. I’m going to go in and implement my agenda.”

When electeds go into office knowing that they’re up against an
opposing ideology, they can understand that this is going to be a
long-term project, and that they can’t just put out the right idea
and expect to succeed. They’re going to need a real base of people
to come along with them, to help expand the edges of what is possible.
And elected officials are going to have to use their bully pulpit to
promote our ideas and help to bring that larger base into being.
Because our enemies have an agenda, and they have institutions that
are actively moving that opposing agenda.

When elected officials understand what they’re going to come up
against once they’re inside, it helps them and it helps the
organizations that they’re allied with to navigate the tensions in a
more deliberate way. So the electeds need an “ideology,” and so do
the groups that bring them to power. For example, if you have a clear
sense of the nature of the state in our capitalist society, you’re
not going to have that illusion that one person is going to go in
there and just hold their line and succeed because their ideas are
correct.

Now I don’t think we have enough of a coherent ideology for electeds
to say, “And here’s the thing we’re advancing instead.” Our
agenda is more organic right now. It’s nascent, but it’s not
systematic. I think we would actually do well to have a clear agenda
that we’re all trying to move. But that’s not the state of our
work right now.

IN TERMS OF YOUR IDEAL VISION FOR TRAINING OR POPULAR EDUCATION, WHAT
WOULD IT LOOK LIKE IF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS WERE DOING IT WELL?

In my ideal situation, I think there would be clear political
interventions that would be intentionally cross-organizational to help
systematize and manifest the relationships between issues — in the
sense of, “We are all trying to reclaim government for the common
good. We are trying to advance this story of race, class and gender in
the United States. Now how do we do that in a way that’s owned by
multiple organizations that are trying to do real work on the
ground?”

It would create an aligned “governing paradigm” that we’re all
advancing that takes us beyond neoliberalism. And the training would
serve as an inroad for thousands of people to plug into that aligned
work, across issues and constituencies. 

As an example of this kind of approach, we can look at the role that
Americans for Prosperity plays on the right. Conservatives go into
their training programs from across different right-wing issue areas,
and they come out fused into unitary warriors for a common paradigm,
with shared values and methodologies.

We need our own version of that. The right is doing a different
version of class politics that is, frankly, terrifying. We need
something else that can speak to working-class people across race and
region. The Democrats aren’t going to do it. We need to be out there
trying to win people over, not to win the left over.

_Research assistance provided by Sean Welch and Sophia Zaia._

_[MARK ENGLER is a writer based in Philadelphia, an editorial board
member at Dissent, and co-author of "This Is An Uprising: How
Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping the Twenty-first Century
[[link removed]]" (Nation Books). He can be
reached via the website www.DemocracyUprising.com
[[link removed]]._

_PAUL ENGLER is the director of the Center for the Working Poor in Los
Angeles, and a co-founder of the Momentum Training
[[link removed]], and co-author, with Mark Engler,
of "This Is An Uprising [[link removed]]."]_

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