can power from below change the world?

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VOLUME 73 • NUMBER 1 • FEBRUARY 2008OFFICIAL JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION

2007 ASA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

Frances Fox PivenCan Power from Below Change the World?

MARGINALIZATION IN GLOBAL CONTEXT

Eileen M. Otis Labor and Gender Organization in China

Christopher A. BailSymbolic Boundaries in 21 European Countries

RELIGION IN SOCIAL LIFE

D. Michael LindsayEvangelicals in the Power Elite

Paul LichtermanReligion and Civic Identity

Francesca BorgonoviReligious Pluralism, Giving, and Volunteering

DYNAMICS OF WAGE INEQUALITY

ChangHwan Kim and Arthur Sakamoto Intra-Occupational Wage Inequality

Sylvia FullerJob Mobility and Gender Wage Trajectories

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3285 ASR 1/7/08 10:32 AM

2007 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS001 Can Power from Below Change the World?

Frances Fox Piven

ARTICLES015 Beyond the Industrial Paradigm: Market-Embedded Labor and the Gender Organization of

Global Service Work in ChinaEileen M. Otis

037 The Configuration of Symbolic Boundaries against Immigrants in EuropeChristopher A. Bail

060 Evangelicals in the Power Elite: Elite Cohesion Advancing a MovementD. Michael Lindsay

083 Religion and the Construction of Civic IdentityPaul Lichterman

105 Divided We Stand, United We Fall: Religious Pluralism, Giving, and VolunteeringFrancesca Borgonovi

129 The Rise of Intra-Occupational Wage Inequality in the United States, 1983 to 2002ChangHwan Kim and Arthur Sakamoto

158 Job Mobility and Wage Trajectories for Men and Women in the United StatesSylvia Fuller

V O L U M E 7 3 • N U M B E R 1 • F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 8O F F I C I A L J O U R N A L O F T H E A M E R I C A N S O C I O L O G I C A L A S S O C I A T I O N

Much of my academic work has been aboutthe role of protest movements in generat-

ing reforms—reforms that ease the circum-stances of people at the bottom of Americansociety. And much of my work as a politicalactivist, the source of real joy in my life, hasbeen in collaboration with these movements.In this address, I build on that experience by the-oretically examining the kind of power that isat work when movements, in the United Statesand elsewhere, become a force for change. Ithink that the question of how power can beexerted from the lower reaches has never beenmore important. It will ultimately determinewhether another world is indeed possible.

Although this is not the way the story ofAmerican political development is usually told,protest movements have played a large role in

American history. This has been especially trueduring the great moments of equalizing reformsthat humanized our society, from the foundingof the republic, to the emancipation of the slaves,to the rise of the New Deal and Great Societyorder, to the civil rights acts of the 1960s, andso on. In the years leading up to theRevolutionary War, American elites restlessunder British rule struck up an alliance with “thepeople out-of-doors” or the mobs of the era.Without the support of the rabble, the war withEngland could not have been won.1 But theprice of the alliance was elite indulgence ofradical democratic ideas about the people’srights to self governance. Moreover, the dis-ruptive threat of the mob and their radicaldemocratic convictions were imprinted on the

2007 PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

Can Power from Below Change the World?

Frances Fox PivenGraduate Center, City University of New York

Prevailing perspectives on power cannot explain why political protests from the bottom

of societies sometimes result in reforms that reflect the grievances of the protestors. I

propose a new theory of “interdependent power” that provides such an explanation. I

argue that, contrary to common views, globalization actually increases the potential for

this kind of popular power.

AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 2008, VOL. 73 (February:1–14)

Direct correspondence to Frances Fox Piven([email protected]). I want to thank Lori Minniteand Fred Block for their comments on this address.

1 This point is now widely accepted. The pivotalwork was probably Becker (1909) (see also, Bailyn1965; Bridenbaugh 1955; Morgan 1956; Raphael2001; Schlesinger 1955; Young 1999).

provisions of the new state constitutions, andthen, more dimly, on those provisions of thenew federal constitution that spoke to popularrights and representation—provisions that hadto be conceded to win popular support for thenew national government.

To be sure, the process was complicated. Themob was powerful during the revolutionaryperiod because state power was weakened by thedeepening conflict between colonial elites, theBritish crown, and British merchant interestswho were influential with the crown. Statepower was also weakened by the vast distancethat separated the colonies from the governingapparatus and military forces of the mothercountry, and by the fragmentation of colonialgoverning authorities. Moreover, the buildingblocks of electoral representative democracythat were the achievement of the revolutionwere soon encased in the clientelist and tribal-ist politics developed by nineteenth-centurypolitical parties. Still, even a limited electoraldemocracy sometimes helped to moderate thepower born of wealth and force, at least whennew surges of protest forced conciliatoryresponses from electoral leaders.

Or consider the strange and even fanaticalabolitionists. Their boldness and single-mind-edness in pursuing the goal of immediate eman-cipation shattered the sectional compromisesthat had made national union possible in 1789.Movement activists were embedded in thechurches of a largely Protestant country. Theiragitated oratory broke apart the major denom-inations, preparing the way for the fragmentingof the intersectional parties of the third partysystem and ultimately driving the infuriatedslave states to secession. The achievements ofthe movement are undeniable. The national gov-ernment launched a war to preserve the union,which led to the emancipation of the slaves,and then, with the influence of Southern repre-sentatives removed by secession, at the war’s endCongress passed the 13th, 14th, and 15thamendments to the constitution.

Or consider for a moment the mass strikes ofthe labor movement of the 1930s—strikes thatwon the basic framework of an industrial rela-tions system that, at least for a time, broughtmany working people into what is called themiddle class and gave respect and self-respect,hitherto denied, to now unionized workers inautos, steel, rubber, and the mines (Metzgar

2000). Or the black freedom movement whoseextraordinary audacity in confronting the sys-tem of Southern apartheid led the federal gov-ernment to at long last pass the legislation thatimplemented the promises of the Reconstructionperiod. Or the antipoverty protests of the 1960sthat forced an expansion of American socialprograms so that the United States began tolook something like a social democracy. Or theVietnam antiwar movement, and especially itsG.I. component, that finally brought the war inSoutheast Asia to an end, and left in its wake theso-called “Vietnam syndrome,” which inhibit-ed the deployment of American military powerin the world, at least for awhile. Or the women’smovement, and the gay liberation movement,and their achievements in winning legal rightsand transforming American social life andculture.

Needless to say, the protestors never simplywon. Their demands have been inevitably mod-ulated and honed to mesh with ongoing insti-tutional arrangements and the powerful interestswith stakes in those institutions. Moreover, oncethese protests subsided, even the limited achieve-ments have been whittled back (which, while itis never acknowledged, is further evidence of theimportance of movements in spurring reform).Nevertheless, these setbacks notwithstanding,the reforms won by protest movements left theirmark. An electoral representative system per-sists, chattel slavery was not restored, theSouthern apartheid system is dismantled, andwhile labor is taking a beating, there are stillunions, and they may matter again in Americanpolitics.

Well, why these victories? What did theprotest movements do that forced conciliatoryresponses? Neither the literature on social move-ments nor the literature on American politicaldevelopment has a good answer to that question.When movements are discussed, they are oftencalled disruptive, which seems to mean noisy,maybe disorderly, and even violent. Of course,protest movements do make noise as they try tocommunicate their demands, with slogans, ban-ners, antics, rallies, and marches. These sorts ofactions give the movements some voice, and ifthe conditions are right, some electoral impact.Perhaps more important, the big gatherings, thechants, and the signs, boost the morale of move-ment participants. But the protests that markedAmerican history confronted formidable oppo-

2—–AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW

sition that voice alone could hardly have over-come. As for violence, while it was sometimesused defensively, American protests have gen-erally shunned violence and the strategic risksit generated.

Although I too have written about move-ments as disruptive, here I will use the term“interdependent” power, not because I want todisarm the reader, but because the word suggeststhe sociological basis of disruptive force. I wantto show the importance of this kind of power forthe analysis of movements and their impact onpolitics, by which I mean the perennial con-tests over the allocations of material and culturalbenefits that result directly or indirectly from theactions of governments. I also suggest that inter-dependent power is significant in other institu-tional arenas, most obviously in the economy,but also, for example, in the family, the church,and the local community. Indeed, these patternsof domination—sometimes referred to as “socialcontrol”—that prevail in other arenas very like-ly have consequences for the power contestswe recognize as politics. Finally, I consider theprospects for the emergence of interdependentpower as a transformative agent in contempo-rary politics, in the United States and in theworld. The potential for the exercise of powerfrom below must, I believe, command the atten-tion of sociologists. But are our intellectual tra-ditions and institutional locations suited toconduct such inquiries?

AN EXPANDED THEORY OF POWER2

Sociologists have worried a good deal over theconcept of power. I want to put to one sidemany of the interesting debates about definitionsof power, though, in favor of a familiar Weberianunderstanding. I treat power as the ability of anactor to sway the actions of another actor oractors, even against resistance. Sometimes thisis called the zero-sum assumption: what oneactor achieves is at the expense of other actors.It is, in the language of Anthony Giddens (1976),power as domination, and a property of socialinteraction.3 This usage was influential among

sociologists who became interested in conflictas the Parsonian paradigm faded in the 1960s.

The question that preoccupies theorists whoaccept this view is who has power, and why?And the answer to this question is generallyunderstood to depend on power resources, or thebases on which one actor is able to bend the willof others. Weber avoided the question, arguingthat the resources for power could not be gen-eralized, but depended on specific circum-stances. Since this position denies the possibilityof analyzing the patterned distribution of powerin social life, it has not been satisfactory tomany analysts. Instead, conflict theorists haveproliferated lists of the things and attributesthat give an actor the ability to sway other actors.Power is now seen as something that rests onpersonal skills, technical expertise, money or thecontrol of opportunities to make money, pres-tige or access to prestige, numbers of people, orthe capacity to mobilize numbers of people.Randall Collins (1975:60–61) summarizes thisperspective:

Look for the material things that affect interaction:the physical places, the modes of communication,the supply of weapons, devices for staging one’spublic impression, tools, and goods. Assess the rel-ative resources available to each individual: theirpotential for physical coercion, their access toother persons with whom to negotiate, their sex-ual attractiveness, their store of cultural devices forinvoking emotional solidarity, as well as the phys-ical arrangements just mentioned.|.|.|. The resourcesfor conflict are complex.

Collins’s catalog is familiar and not notablydifferent from Dahl’s (1961:226) “commonsense” list of “anything that can be used to swaythe specific choices or the strategies of anoth-er individual.”4 Mills (1956:9, 23) makes the

CAN POWER FROM BELOW CHANGE THE WORLD?—–3

2 This argument is elaborated in Piven and Cloward(2005).

3 For Giddens, however, the relationship of powerto conflict is contingent on whether resistance has tobe overcome.

4 Others have tried to classify resources accordingto some discriminating principle, as when Giddens(1976) distinguishes between “allocative resources”(control over material goods and the natural forcesthat can be harnessed in their production) and“authoritative resources” (control over the activitiesof human beings). Etzioni (1968:357–59) distin-guishes between utilitarian resources or materialinducements, coercive resources that can be used todo violence to bodies or psyches, and normative orsymbolic rewards or threats. Tilly (1978:69) takes amore strictly economic tack, emphasizing “the econ-omist’s factors of production: land, labor, capital,

important additional point that the “truly pow-erful” are those “who occupy the commandposts” of major institutions, since such institu-tions are the bases for great concentrations ofresources.5 Everyone appears to agree that onekind of resource can be used to gain another, asresources are “transferred, assembled, reallo-cated, exchanged” and invested.6 In sum, powerresources are the attributes or things that oneactor can use to coerce or induce another actor.7

I will refer to this view simply as the powerresources perspective.

The sheer proliferation of lists of powerresources, from money to popularity to numbersto spare time, has sometimes been the basis forarguing for a considerable indeterminacy in thepatterning of power.8 Everyone has something,the pluralists argue, and even those that havevery little have at least their numbers. Typically,however, the kinds of goods and traits singledout by analysts as key resources are not wide-ly distributed, rather they are concentrated at thetop of the social hierarchy. It follows that poweris also concentrated at the top. The reasoning isstraightforward: Wealth, prestige, and the instru-ments of physical coercion are all reliable basesfor dominating others. Since these traits andgoods are, everyone agrees, distributed by socialrank, it follows that people with higher socialrank inevitably have more power, and peoplewith lower social rank have less. In other words,

since the resources that are the basis for theeffective exercise of power are stratified, so ispower stratified, and those who have more accu-mulate still more.

This understanding of who has power, andwhy, is clearly serviceable most of the time.The rich and the highly placed, including thosewho control armies and police, usually do pre-vail in any contest with those who have none ofthose things—but not always. Sometimes peo-ple without things or status or wealth do succeedin forcing institutional changes that reflect, ifoften only dimly, the needs and aspirations ofpeople lower in the social order. The riotingcrowds that besieged late medieval cities forcedthe creation of early systems of relief (De Swaan1988; Hill 1952; Jutte 1994; Lis and Soly 1979;Piven and Cloward 1971). As Europe and theUnited States industrialized, striking workersforced the construction of systems of labor pro-tections. The participants in the black freedommovement challenged white mobs and Bourbonpoliticians and won the changes in law andpractice that dismantled American apartheid.Masses of ordinary people defied the armedguards and literally hacked down the legendaryBerlin wall. And only very recently, the roadblockades of the unemployed workers in thepiquetero movement in Argentina forced thegovernment to initiate the first unemploymentsubsidies in the history of Latin America. Thishelped to spur a far broader insurgency thattoppled a succession of presidents (Auyero2005; Sitrin 2006:8–16). Highland AymaricIndians of Bolivia brought down two govern-ments and the current regime has taken stepstoward at least a partial nationalization of gasand oil. Why are people without what we usu-ally call power resources able to win anything,ever?9


perhaps technical expertise as well.” Mann (1986)identif ies economic power based on materialresources, military power based on physical coercion,ideological power, and political power based on a ter-ritorial administrative apparatus.

5 “Power,” says Domhoff (2007:97), whose workfollows in the “power structure” tradition that Millspioneered, is “rooted in organizations, not in indi-viduals.”

6 The language here is taken from Oberschall(1973:28); for the identical point in different lan-guage, see Dahl (1961:227). The obvious point thatwealth, status, and power are each means to the oth-ers was originally made by Weber and is discussedin Wrong (1979:229).

7 Other and more elaborate lists of resources canbe found in Lasswell and Kaplan (1950:83–92).

8 Dahl (1961:226), for example, begins his own listwith “control over an individual’s time.” By this sortof reasoning, the unemployed should be expected toexert substantial influence.

9 Social movement analysts display a certainambivalence in dealing with this issue. On the onehand, most U.S. movement scholars are clearly sym-pathetic to movements and regard them as a form ofpolitics. On the other hand, the studies of the impactof movements on policy, or of the dynamics throughwhich that impact is achieved, remain thin. Perhapsthis is at least partly due to the fact that movementanalysts are uncertain about the theoretical basis of

INTERDEPENDENT POWER

I propose that there is another kind of powerbased not on resources, things, or attributes,but rooted in the social and cooperative relationsin which people are enmeshed by virtue ofgroup life. Think of societies as composed ofnetworks of cooperative relations, more or lessinstitutionalized, through which mating andreproduction is organized, or production anddistribution, the socialization of the young, orthe allocation and enforcement of state author-ity.10 Social life is cooperative life, and in prin-ciple, all people who make contributions tothese systems of cooperation have potentialpower over others who depend on them. Thiskind of interdependent power is not concen-trated at the top but is potentially widespread.Even people with none of the assets or attributeswe usually associate with power do things onwhich others depend.11 They clean the toilets ormine the coal or tend the babies. Even when theyare unemployed and idle, others depend on themto comply with the norms of civic life.

Stable networks of cooperation inevitablycome to be governed by the rules and ideas wecall institutions. And institutions also becomesites of contention and the exercise of interde-pendent power. Yet this is not obvious if wetake too deterministic a view of social life.Institutions are Janus-faced: they help to shapethe identities and purposes of people, and theysocialize people to conform with the institu-

tional rules on which daily life depends.However, as Dennis Wrong (1979) argued sometime ago, people continue to pursue other endsthan those promoted by the regimens of insti-tutional life, whether because they are prompt-ed by facets of human desire that escapesocialization, or because they are exposed todiverse institutional environments that cultivateother ends.12 All this is, I think, uncontroversial.My crucial assumption, however, is that becausepeople have diverse (and contentious) ends, andbecause they are at the same time social andcooperative creatures, they will inevitably try touse their relations with others in pursuit of thoseends, even against opposition. More to the point,institutional life socializes people to conform-ity, while at the same time, institutions yieldthe participants in social and cooperative activ-ities the power to act on diverse and conflict-ing purposes, even in defiance of the rules.

Thus, while conflict theorists emphasize thatcapitalists have power over workers becausethey control investment and the opportunities foremployment that investment generates (and theycan call out the goons, the troops, the press, orthe courts), a focus on interdependent power letsus see that workers also have potential powerover capitalists because they staff the assemblylines on which production depends. In the samevein, landlords have power over their tenantsbecause they own the fields the tenants till, buttenants have power over landlords because with-out their labor the fields are idle. State elites caninvoke the authority of the law and the force ofthe troops, but they also depend on votingpublics. Husbands and wives, priests and theirparishioners, masters and slaves, all face thisdynamic. Both sides of all these relations havethe potential for exercising interdependentpower, and at least in principle, the ability toexert power over others by withdrawing orthreatening to withdraw from social cooperation.

In fact, interdependent power is implicit inmuch of what we usually think about powerfrom below. In the contemporary era, we havegenerally relied on two suggestive theories toexplain the periodic exercise of popular power;theories that are variously elaborated in the


movement power (see, e.g., Amenta, Halfmann, andYoung 1999; Burstein, Einwohner, and Hollander1995; Cress and Snow 2000; Giugni 1998; McAdam,McCarthy, and Zald 1988). Generalizations are ofcourse hazardous, and there are important excep-tions to my generalization (e.g., Gamson 1975;Goldstone 1980; Gurr 1980; Tarrow 1994). Empiricalstudies of the civil rights movement also attempt todraw conclusions about outcomes, although analysesof the detailed mechanisms through which protestscontributed to legislated outcomes are generally lack-ing (see, e.g., Andrews 2001).

10 Mann’s (1986:17) proposal that we “conceive ofsocieties as federated, overlapping, intersecting ratherthan as simple totalities” complements this under-standing of power.

11 The foundational statement about the depen-dence of the high on the low is Hegel’s discussion ofthe relationship between master and servant (seeFriedrich 1953:399–411).

12 On the transmission of ideas from one institu-tional setting to another, see Sewell (1992).

arguments of intellectuals and also deeplyimprinted in popular belief. One is simply thetheory of political democracy as it has developedsince the seventeenth century. Ordinary peoplehave power over state elites through electoralrepresentative institutions that mediate betweenthe citizenry and the state. People, or at leastmany of them, have votes, and periodic elec-tions, at which those votes are tallied, makepolitical officials dependent on popular majori-ties to remain in positions of state authority.Elections thus anchor state leaders to the vot-ers on whom they must rely to remain in com-mand of government. The vote means thatpeople have power, some power, because polit-ical elites depend on them.

The other big theory, expressed in both intel-lectual and folk versions, is a theory of laborpower, most eloquently argued by Marx andEngels in The Communist Manifesto. The devel-opment of capitalism, the argument goes, gaverise to mass production industries and to the vastnumber of factory workers on whose laborpower those industries rely. Because factoryproduction depends on them, workers can exer-cise leverage by striking, by “shutting it down.”Moreover, the growth of mass production indus-tries steadily increases the number of workerswho have this kind of power. This growth cre-ates solidarities among the workers, even whilethe experience of mass production generatesever deeper divisions between capital and labor,singling out capital as the target for workeranger. Labor power also has an institutionalizedexpression in the formation of unions and apanoply of labor rights incorporated into law andregulation.13

THE IMPORTANCE OFINTERDEPENDENT POWER THEN AND NOW

The episodic and complex history of the expan-sion of political and labor rights in Europe, theUnited States, Latin America, and elsewherecan be told as the history of state responses tothe mobilization of both the popular poweryielded by the development of electoral repre-

sentative institutions and the power yielded bythe industrial workplace. Each kind of power canaffect the other. Workplace strikes are far morelikely to be met with a degree of conciliation ifstate elites restrain from using force to sup-press the strikers because they worry about theelectoral repercussions among sympathetic vot-ing constituencies. The reverse is of course alsotrue. When elites feel free to summon the troops,strikes are far less likely to be successful, as thehistory of defeated nineteenth and early-twen-tieth century strikes in the United States demon-strates (Piven and Cloward 1977).

It is not only the state’s monopoly over thelegitimate use of violence that can make laborpower conditional on electoral power. The massstrikes of the 1930s forced the concessions toorganized labor embodied in the Wagner Act,but in the succeeding decades, it was the influ-ence of organized labor in electoral politics thathelped protect at least some of these gains. Theextraordinary electoral and lobbying mobiliza-tions attempted by American unions in recentyears are obviously an effort to regain the influ-ence yielded by electoral power at a time whenlabor power has declined.

Similarly, the history of the welfare state canbe told as a history of successive concessionsmade necessary by eruptions of both laborpower and electoral power. In fact, I think thestory is unreasonably simplified when moreunruly expressions of popular power areignored. Nevertheless, there is truth in the bigpicture that characterizes the economic securi-ty afforded working and poor people by publicincome supports and service programs as theprice paid by political and economic elites forthe integration and cooperation of large swathsof the population, a price made necessary byperiodic eruptions of democratic and laborpower.

GLOBALIZATION

Still, you might say, that was then, and the gamehas changed. Our world has been transformedby the complex of developments we call glob-alization. Before globalization, by which I meanneoliberal globalization, we had at least someconfidence that our government could imple-ment reforms, if pressed hard enough by theinterplay of labor power and electoral politics.We also had at least some confidence that work-


13 This is what Wright (2000) calls the structuralpower of workers. For a further development of thisidea, see Silver (2003).

ers and their unions could temper corporatepolicies. Now the ability of governments tocontrol crucial market actors, including multi-national corporations and international finan-ciers, has been weakened by the mobility ofcapital, at the same time as accelerating tradehas spurred worldwide competition for cheap-er and cheaper labor. Without the temperinginfluences of democratic power and labor power,are we doomed to a future controlled by reck-lessly greedy business and political leaders, andthe spiraling inequality and environmentaldepredation that results? I don’t think so. Infact, I am at least somewhat optimistic about ourfuture. And that is because I think the sourcesof power that produced reform in the past are notdiminished by globalization at all.

In principle, interdependent power increaseswith centralization and specialization—for theobvious reason that as the division of laboradvances, webs of cooperation grow wider andmore intricate, and the cooperative projectinvolves more and diverse contributions frommore and diverse people.14 Globalization,neoliberal or not, means just this: increasedspecialization and integration in complex andfar-reaching systems of cooperation and inter-dependence, with the potential that popularpower will also become more far-reaching andavailable to more people. The evidence sug-gests that popular power’s potential has expand-ed far beyond the specific institutional locationsthat informed our ideas about democratic powerand labor power.

Throughout most of the world’s history, iso-lated villagers have had little influence overdistant imperial centers. In recent years, though,indigenous highlanders repeatedly blocked theroads to La Paz, successive Bolivian govern-ments fell, and multinational energy corpora-tions, and the world, took notice. Similarly,when militants from the Ogoni and Ijaw peoplesof the oil-rich Nigerian Delta protested theruinous depredations of the international oilcompanies—holding oil workers hostage andblowing up oil and gas facilities—the conse-quences were a sharp reduction of oil produc-

tion and a run-up of oil prices (Mouawad 2007a,2007b). The world took notice and the exampleseems to be spreading to other oil-rich regions.In Nigeria, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Venezuela,the contest is over oil; in Peru and Chile it is overcopper. Indeed, when Peruvian copper minersstruck in early May of 2007, copper prices inNew York jumped to their highest level in 11months (Munshi 2007). While most are acute-ly aware of the wide reverberations of the actionsof multinational investors and currency specu-lators, many ordinary people also play an impor-tant part in the complex and fragile exchangesthat constitute neoliberal globalization—andbecause they do, they have potential power.

These observations suggest a very differentperspective than the usual wisdom about neolib-eral globalization and the decline of democrat-ic and labor power. To be sure, globalizationenormously expands investor opportunities forexit from relations with any particular group ofworking people. With the click of a mouse, cap-ital can be moved to low-wage and low-costparts of the world. But the very arrangementsthat make exit easier also create new and morefragile interdependencies. Outsourcing is two-sided. On one hand, it loosens the dependenceof employers on domestic workers. On the otherhand, it binds employers to many other workersin far-flung and extended chains of production.These chains, in turn, depend on complex sys-tems of electronic communication and trans-portation that are themselves acutely vulnerableto disruption. The old idea that logistical work-ers located at the key nodes of industrial systemsof production have great potential labor powerhas in a sense been writ large. Many workers,including those who run the far-flung trans-portation systems, those lodged at all the pointsin vastly extended chains of production, andthose in “just-in-time” systems of productionthat the Internet has facilitated, may have poten-tial interdependent power.

And not just workers. In a scenario that hasbecome familiar in China and India, farmersrecently refused to sell their land to make wayfor a petro-chemical plant in a Special EconomicZone south of Calcutta. They forced the Indianauthorities to shelve the plan, intended to lureforeign investors, at least for the time being.Fourteen farmers were shot dead in the conflict.Nevertheless, the head of the Muslim groupleading the protests announced triumphantly,


14 Durkheim ([1933] 1964:39) made this pointabout what he characterized as “one of the funda-mental bases of the social order” of the nineteenthcentury.

“We have taught the government a lesson theywill never forget” (Page 2007). Tens of thou-sands of similar farmer protests in China, andthe resulting bloody clashes, have reportedlyprompted the national government to launchsome 90,000 investigations and to impose“administrative punishments” on some of thelocal governments who evict farmers andhouseholders because they are greedy for newinvestment (Cheng 2007). China also has plansfor heavier fines for illegal developments.Overall, the much touted number of 74,000mass protests officially acknowledged in Chinain 2004 has prompted a new concern withsocial inequality in ruling circles, as well assome new programs to moderate inequalities.15

The widespread reverberations of localprotests can be remarkable. When people fromthe Argentine town of Gualeguaychu blockedthe international bridge linking Uruguay withArgentina, they were protesting against theconstruction of a paper mill they said wouldpollute the environment and hurt tourism andfishing along the Uruguay River. The plantwas to be built by a Finnish company, with aloan from the World Bank. The protests notonly threatened the plant, but also theUruguayan economy, exposed fissures in theMercosur trade alliance, activated internationalNGOs, and prompted Spain’s King Juan Carlosto offer himself as a mediator.16

THE STRATEGY PROBLEM

Still, the actualization of interdependent poweris never easy. I am arguing that this kind ofpower may have increased, but it has alwaysexisted and has always been widely dispersed.Yet the good things in life, which the deploy-ment of interdependent power might lead to,have not been widely dispersed because inter-

dependent power usually remains latent. Theactualization of interdependent power typi-cally requires that people break the rules thatgovern the institutions in which they partici-pate, if only because those rules are designedto suppress interdependent power. People mustalso recognize that they have some power, thatelites also depend on the masses. People haveto organize, to contrive ways of acting in con-cert, at least insofar as concerted action is nec-essary to make their power effective. Theinhibiting effect of other relations, with fam-ily, church, or party, have to be suppressed orovercome. The protesting group must have thecapacity to endure the interruption of the coop-erative relations on which they also depend.

To actualize interdependent power undernew conditions, strategies have to be developedto manage all these obstacles.17 Over time, agiven set of strategies can become familiarand available—like scripts that can be drawnon in subsequent challenges. But as institu-tional arrangements change, as they havechanged in our time, new strategies aredemanded. The realization of potential powermust then wait on the invention of new strate-gies. This process is made more diff icultbecause the strategy scripts that solved prob-lems in the past have staying power. Thesescripts persist because they are imprinted onmemory and habit, reinforced by the recollec-tion of past victories, and reiterated by theorganizations and leaders thrust up in pastconflicts.18 In sum, globalization does notmean that popular power has dissipated (i.e.,it is not the case that dominant groups nolonger require contributions from subordinategroups), but rather new strategies for mobi-lizing and deploying interdependent powerfrom below have to be crafted. And there isactually evidence that this is happening.


15 Daniel Bell (2007:21) writes, “In October 2006,for the first time in twenty-five years, a plenary ses-sion of the CCP’s Central Committee devoted itselfspecifically to the study of social issues .|.|. [signal-ing] a shift from no-holds-barred growth to a moresustainable model that would boost social and eco-nomic equality.”

16 See coverage by Benedict Mander in theFinancial Times. He was stationed in Montevideo dur-ing the first months of 2007 (see also Futures andCommodity Market News 2006).

17 Such strategies have to be developed both on thetop-side and the bottom-side of interdependent rela-tions. For reasons discussed elsewhere, dominantgroups are in a better position to adapt their strate-gies to take advantage of new conditions (see Pivenand Cloward 2005).

18 Others have made this point. Jasper (1997), forexample, talks about the tendency of groups to drawon familiar and limited tactics from among the broadrange of choices open to them.

First, breaking the rules. I said that the insti-tutions that generate the potential for interde-pendent power also generate the rules, ideas,and routines that inhibit the realization of thatpower. To be sure, rules are a basic postulateof collective life, shielding people against thetotally unexpected, distilling collective knowl-edge, and making possible the complex formsof cooperation on which society rests. Butrules are also instruments of power, and rule-making is a strategy by which dominantgroups, drawing on the full range of powerresources available to them, inhibit subordinategroups from activating the distinctive powerrooted in interdependence. These rules grantwide scope to dominant groups but limit whatsubordinate groups can do in cooperative rela-tions. Think of the long history of laws that tieworkers to their employers—feudal laws thatobligated the vassal to work the lord’s domain,the Statute of Laborers of 1349, laws pro-hibiting vagrancy and begging, the myriadlaws regarding theft and fraud, and the laws thatprohibited workers from forming unions orstriking (and which still exist today in the formof union contract obligations or laws pro-hibiting public sector strikes). In all of theseinstances, rule-making stabilized power bysuppressing interdependent power from below.

Of course, the rules themselves can becomethe focus of contention, and rule changes resultnot only from the deployment of powerresources, but also in response to mobilizationsfrom below. Some rules may actually reflect akind of compromise, simultaneously limitingand legitimating the exercise of interdepen-dent power from below (for example, laws thatspecify the conditions for legal strikes). Evenin these instances, however, because the rulesreflect reigning power inequalities, the real-ization of interdependent power is often con-ditional on the ability of people to defy therules and the dominant interpretations that jus-tify them.

Over time, rules become intertwined withdeep interpretations of social life that justifyconformity, despite the power disadvantagethat results. The force of the interpretationsassociated with market-dominated globaliza-tion is likely to be weakened, though, by thevery fact of the newness of these arrange-ments, and by the fact that these interpretationsare imposed in the face of traditional social

arrangements and the traditional ideas thatlegitimate them. In other words, the clash withtradition provides people with alternatives.Consider how often social movements go intobattle charging that the actions or policies theyare protesting are wrong because they violatethe rules prescribed by law or custom.19

Second, consider the problem of recogniz-ing the fact of interdependence—the potentialfor power from below—in the face of rulingclass definitions that privilege the contributionsof dominant groups to social life and may eveneradicate the contributions of lower statusgroups. Economic and political interdepen-dencies are real in the sense that they havereal ramifications in the material bases ofsocial life and in the exercise of coercive force.But they are also cultural constructions. Themonetary contributions of husbands to fami-ly relations have always been given much moreemphasis than the domestic services of wives;the contributions of entrepreneurial capital aregiven more weight than the productive labor ofworkers; and so on. Before people are likely towithdraw their contributions as a strategy forexercising power, they need to recognize thelarge part those contributions play in mating,economic, political, or religious relationships.

This step in the mobilization of interde-pendent power is contingent on how peopleunderstand the social relations in which theyare enmeshed. The development of the indus-trial workers movement in Europe and NorthAmerica was conditional on the emergence ofa worker subculture that made exactly thispoint—that workers were central to econom-ic growth. “It is we who plowed the prairies,built the cities where they trade, dug the minesand built the workshops, endless miles or rail-road laid,” goes the old labor song.

The neo-laissez faire doctrine that justifiesmarket-led globalization can be seen as therevival of a species of natural law that obliter-


19 For example, in April 2007, a number of indige-nous subsistence communities in northern Guatemalaheld a “Consulta Popular” on two questions: the con-struction of the Xalala Dam, which would displace18 local communities, and permission to explore foroil in the Quiche Department. The Consulta is a tra-ditional decision-making process; 91 percent voted“no” (see Kern 2007).

ates worker power by reducing it to marketexchange. Like nineteenth-century laissezfaire, it asserts the inevitable preeminence ofmarket calculations, and it warns of the poten-tially hazardous consequences of interferencewith the dynamics of markets or market “law.”On the other side, however, the exploitation ofnatural resources by multinational corpora-tions has triggered a rash of protests across theglobal south, perhaps because abstracted argu-ments about markets and market law are out-weighed by the palpable reality of customaryuses of the land and traditional cultural justi-fications.

Third, contributions to ongoing economicand political activities are often made by manyindividuals, and these multiple contributionsmust be coordinated for the effective mobi-lization of disruptive power. Workers, villagers,parishioners, or consumers have to act in con-cert before the withdrawal of their contribu-tions exerts a disruptive effect on the factory,the church, or the merchant. This is the oldproblem of building solidarity, of organizingfor joint action, that workers, voters, and com-munity residents confront when they try todeploy their leverage over those who dependon them for their labor, their votes, or theiracquiescence in the normal patterns of civiclife. (One of the advantages that capitalistshave always had over workers is simply thatcapitalists may not have to organize to exercisetheir interdependent power.)

As has often been pointed out, the socialrelations created by a stable institutional con-text may go far toward solving the coordina-tion problem. The classic Marxist analysis ofworker power argued that worker solidaritywas created by the mines and factories ofindustrial capitalism, which drew peopletogether in a shared setting where they woulddevelop common grievances and commonantagonists. Now, however, at least in the moth-er countries of industrial capitalism thatinspired this argument, the numbers of minersand industrial workers are shrinking, alongwith their fabled power, as corporations shiftproduction to low-wage countries in the glob-al south. Strategists from the old unions aresearching for ways of overcoming this weak-ness by coordinating labor action across bor-ders. Although a good deal of this seems to takethe form of proclamations and wishful think-

ing, there are some examples of fledglingalliances that may have more solidity.20

The emerging new movement formations aremore localized than the old industrial unions,and they seem to have more in common with thevillage social organizations that BarringtonMoore (1965:470–74) argued generated the sol-idarity that enabled people to protest the hard-ships associated with the fall of the ancienregime. The new local groups, though, mayhave an advantage denied to European villagersliving through the transition from feudalism tocommercial capitalism. The new groups areconnected to each other, as well as to worldaudiences, in networks that rely on the Internet.The campaigns of the Ijaw and Ogoni militantsin the Nigerian delta relied on $2 and $3 phones,and the official spokesman for the Movementfor the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, knownas Jomo Gbomo, communicated with foreignjournalists by e-mail (Junger 2007). TheZapatista protests in Chiapas, begun in 1992,also made wide use of the Internet and res-onated among indigenous peoples across theglobe. Shefner (2007) concludes that whilethese protests had limited direct influence, theyhelped catalyze a broad democratization move-ment in Mexico. There are also new organiza-tional forms developing that take account ofthe informal character of work in much of theglobal south. These groups eschew organizingdrives against multiple small employers in favorof campaigns targeting governments anddemanding government regulation of the work-place (Agarwala 2006). This is clearly an effortto avoid the dissipation of efforts to which


20 The International Association of Machinists andthe International Metalworkers Federation announcedan agreement in April of 2007 to form a GlobalUnion Alliance representing Boeing workers in theUnited States, Canada, Australia, Germany, Italy,Sweden, and Japan. The Steelworkers recentlyannounced merger negotiations with two of Britain’slargest unions (Meyerson 2007). The ServiceEmployees International Union also has interna-tionalist plans that emphasize a strategy in whichstrong unions in one country use their bargainingpower or their treasuries to win organizing rightsfrom multinational firms for workers in other coun-tries (Lerner 2003) (for a sober assessment seeMoody 1997 and Piven and Cloward 2000).

organizing in the informal sector would likelylead.

As a number of these examples suggest, itmay be the case that too much importance hasbeen given to the solidarities created by under-lying and preexisting social organization, and tothe “organization” of movements themselves.As I have written elsewhere with RichardCloward (Piven and Cloward 1992), “Riotsrequire little more by way of organization thannumbers, propinquity, and some communica-tion. Most patterns of human settlement .|.|. sup-ply these structural requirements.”21 Street mobscan mobilize quickly, taking advantage of pub-lic gatherings such as markets, hangings, or sim-ply crowded streets, and the participants maynot know each other personally, although they arelikely to be able to read the signs of group, class,or neighborhood identity that the crowd displays.

Many of the protests against neoliberal glob-alization have just this character of the instantly-formed crowd or mob. Adolfo Gilly recentlycommented on this, speaking of protests in LatinAmerica: “These movements are made up ofyoung people, many of them from the informalsector. They have no unions built by their fathers,they live in the slums instead of the village or theworking class neighborhood. They have to organ-ize in a different way. And they are more free thanwe were!”22 Marina Sitrin (2006:31), writingabout the Argentinean protests of 2001, says, “Itwas a rebellion without leadership, either byestablished parties or by a newly emerged elite.|.|.|.People didn’t know where they were marching,or why they were marching, they were just so fedup with this typically neoliberal system thatMenem implemented.” The chapters of a newStudents for a Democratic Society that havesprung up recently in the United States display

a similar stance (Phelps 2007). The group isdeliberately antibureaucratic and antihierarchical,with no national leaders, and this freedom fromcentralized control is part of its appeal. Moregenerally, the global justice movement has stri-dently disavowed the organizational forms asso-ciated with the labor movement, opting insteadfor more spontaneous direct action, sometimescalled horizontalism, or for looser methods ofcommunicating and coordinating collectiveaction as “spokes and wheels” rather than asorganizational pyramids.

Fourth, when people attempt to exercise dis-ruptive or interdependent power, they have tosee ways of enduring the suspension of the coop-erative relationship on which they depend, and towithstand any reprisals they may incur. This isless evident for participants in actions like mob-bing or rioting, where the action is usually short-lived and the participants are likely to remainanonymous. But when workers strike, they needto feed their families and pay the rent; consumerboycotters need to get by for a time without thegoods or services they are refusing to purchase.People may even have to face down the threat ofexit that is often provoked by disruption.Husbands confronting rebellious wives maythreaten to walk out; employers confronting strik-ing workers may threaten to relocate or to replaceworkers, and so on. Even rioters risk precipitat-ing the exit of their partners in cooperative rela-tionships, as when small businesses fled fromslum neighborhoods in the wake of the Americanghetto riots of the 1960s.

The natural resource wars in Latin Americaand Africa sparked by local protests seem tohave fewer repercussions of this kind. To besure, foreign payments may fall, but since amain grievance of the protestors is typicallythat they receive few benefits from these pay-ments, there may be little lost to local people bythe suspension. And when outside investment innatural resources is accompanied by a flood ofexports that overwhelm indigenous industry,deterring foreign involvement may be a netgain.23 In any case, in the only slightly longer


21 While the inability of organized labor in theUnited States to protect labor rights is widely attrib-uted to the shrinking percentage of the labor force thatis organized, French unions have experienced a par-allel decline in numbers and yet continue to exert con-siderable power in French politics because theycontinue to be capable of mass mobilizations(Bounead 2007).

22 I am reproducing Gilly’s comments from mynotes, taken during a panel at the Left Global Forum,meeting at Cooper Union in New York City on March11, 2007.

23 Chinese goods are now flowing into Africa, forexample, and wiping out local manufacturers(Polgreen and French 2007). This pattern replicatesthe nineteenth-century destruction of the Indian tex-tile industry by a flood of British imports.

run, there are likely to be alternative bidders forthese resources, and in Africa and SouthAmerica, Chinese bidders have in fact beenquick to appear.24

Fifth, as noted earlier, social life is compli-cated, and political action takes form within amatrix of social relations. Those who try tomobilize disruptive power must overcome theconstraints typically imposed by their multiplerelations with others, as when would-be peas-ant insurgents are constrained by the threat ofreligious excommunication, or when labor insur-gents are constrained by family responsibili-ties. English Methodist preachers invoked fortheir parishioners the awesome threat of ever-lasting punishment in hell that would be visit-ed on Luddite insurgents in the early-nineteenthcentury. Under some conditions, however, mul-tiple ties may facilitate disruptive power chal-lenges.25 The church that ordinarily preachesobedience to worldly authority may sometimes,perhaps simply to hold the allegiance of dis-contented parishioners, encourage the rebels, asoccurred during the Solidarity movement inPoland, the civil rights movement in the UnitedStates, and in Chiapas when Bishop SamuelRuiz and his diocese lent support to the emerg-ing indigenous insurgency.

CONCLUSION

All this said, I hasten to add that I am not pre-dicting the dawn of global democracy or glob-al socialism. What I am predicting is an era ofturmoil and uncertainty. Moreover, like all formsof power, interdependent power has a dark side,and it has always had a dark side. The hungryand diseased mobs who terrified the burghers

of late-medieval Europe were not enlighten-ment thinkers, nor are the suicide bombers thrustforward by a resurgent Islam. Even the strugglesof the Western Federation of Miners had a darkside, as they fought state and company violencewith their own violence. Still, the defiant move-ments from the bottom that are fueled by inter-dependent power hold at least the hope that theneeds and dreams of the great masses of theplanet’s people will make their imprint on thenew societies for which we wish. Of course, theprocess of reform will be complicated and theoutcomes shaped not only by interdependentpower, but also by the complex institutionalstructures we inherit, cultural memory, and theconcentrated power resources of aggrandizingelites. All that said, without the tempering influ-ence of movements from below and the inter-dependent power they wield, our future isominous.

Sociologists have a contribution to make infostering interdependent power. Our sociolog-ical preoccupations equip us to trace the con-temporary patterns of social interdependencethat are weaving the world together. We candescribe these patterns in ways that reveal thecontributions to social life of the majorities ofthe world’s people, and we can also measure thecosts these majorities bear as neoliberal glob-alization advances. We can draw on our tradi-tional preoccupations with institutions to showthat the defiant actions of movements are com-prehensible because rules are not simply a basicpostulate of social life. Rather, rules reflect thepower inequalities in our societies, and becausethey do, they can suppress the actualization ofinterdependent power from below. Finally, associologists it is reasonable, indeed I think it isinevitable, that our moral commitments illumi-nate our work. At the least, we are committedto the basic requirements of societal well-beingthat are eroded by rising inequality and insecu-rity, war, and environmental destruction.

Frances Fox Piven is a Distinguished Professor atthe Graduate Center of the City University of NewYork, where she teaches in both the sociology andpolitical science programs. She is the author, mostrecently, of Challenging Authority: How OrdinaryPeople Change America (2006). She is also theauthor, together with Richard Cloward, of Regulatingthe Poor (1993), Poor People’s Movements (1977),and Why Americans Still Don’t Vote, and WhyPoliticians Like it that Way (2000).


24 Most Western oil companies withdrew from theSudan in the 1990s in response to pressure fromhuman rights groups and harassment by local rebels.Chinese, Malaysian, and Indian companies took theirplace (Moro 2007). The Asian companies, though, arelikely to be subject to the same protests. In Ethiopia,a Chinese-run oil field was stormed by the OgadenNational Liberation Front in April 2007 (Gettleman2007).

25 Kalyvas’s (2003:475) discussion of civil warsprovides a useful analogy: “[Civil wars] are not bina-ry conflicts but complex and ambiguous processesthat foster an apparently massive, though variable,mix of identities and actions.”

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