Mark Phillips: The American Question

12/1/02: Grassroots lobbying via Internet.

A new wave of grassroots lobbying groups such as MoveOn are making excellent use of Internet technologies as organizing tools. The Internet eliminates the traditional logistical burden of petitioning, for instance, allowing potentially unlimited numbers of signatures to be collected quickly at almost no expense.

With the cost and difficulty of petitioning radically diminished, is petition-based lobbying a useful thing to do?

Probably not. Real-world experience with large-scale "grassroots" lobbying campaigns intended to influence legislation seem to suggest that the effort is wasted.

The example which is the most naked may also have been the most significant in shaping the culture of post-WWII American class struggle. This was the AFL-CIO's massive campaign to defeat the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.

The Taft-Hartley Act is class-struggle legislation at its most open. The Act curbs labor's strike power by outlawing mass picketing, secondary strikes, wildcat strikes, and other tactics which harness labor's only advantages, their numbers and solidarity. It significantly curbs labor's ability to organize. Yet it was passed at a time when organized labor represented the largest voting block in American history, organized into an enormous Political Action Committee which is in many ways the model for grassroots lobbying efforts since.

As Piven and Cloward put it in their book Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail,

In other words, the unions had succeeded in following the prescribed American model for political influence; they had enlisted ever larger numbers of workers as members, and had combined the financial and voting resources of those members to exert influence through the channels of the electoral system. The question is, what did they get for their troubles?

Not much. When the United Mine Workers struck in 1943, President Roosevelt seized the mines, demanding legislation that would permit the federal government to draft strikers. Meanwhile Congress passed the Smith-Connolly Act curbing strikes. Of 219 Democratic congressmen who voted for Smith-Connolly, 191 had been elected with financial and grassroots electoral support from PAC. Piven and Cloward continue,

By 1945, the CIO claimed 6 million members, the AFL claimed nearly 7 million. If ever there was a time for labor to demonstrate the force of organized voting numbers in electoral politics, a force no longer constrained by the imperatives of war and the spirit of patriotism, now was the time. As it turned out, the force of organized voting numbers could not even ward off the Taft-Hartley Act.

When Truman vetoed the Act, the House overrode his veto by 331 to 83. Most of the Democratic House members voting to override had been elected with significant support from PAC. Piven and Cloward note,

This dismal overall record in electoral and legislative politics was accomplished by the largest issue-oriented voting bloc in the nation. In the decade between the Wagner Act that signified labor's political muscle, and the Taft-Hartley Act that signified its helplessness, the ranks of organized labor had increased until one-third of the population was union affiliated. During that decade the unions' organizational apparatus had also enlarged and become increasingly sophisticated and increasingly committed to electoral politics on all levels. But neither this vast bloc of voters nor the sophisticated machinery of their organization could muster power sufficient even to resist the erosion of the gains won earlier, in the days before the unions had organized.

And they conclude,

Industrial workers are [...] the exemplary case by which to test beliefs about the effectiveness of mass-based organization in political spheres. Through organization, labor ostensibly commanded vast resources for political influence: millions of organized voters and multimillion-dollar treasuries from dues. Still, these resources yielded them little in the electoral process.

Circumstances are even more unfavorable for petition-based lobbying efforts. While the industrial workers' movement had real organizational coherence, petition-based lobbying has none. MoveOn and organizations like it are unable to suggest to legislators that there might be consequences for ignoring the views of their petitioners. The likelihood of effectiveness seems minimal.

More fundamentally, lobbying groups such as MoveOn lack strategic analysis of the institutions they attempt to influence. They accept the electoral apparatus at its word, at face value. History seems to suggest that in the absence of significant mass movements in the streets and factories this acceptance is naive.

A more sophisticated approach might combine electoral struggle with massive extra-electoral pressure. An intriguing model is that of the South African resistance to Apartheid, which married a strategic electoral presence (the African National Congress) with an overwhelmingly massive organization of industrial solidarity (the Congress of South African Trade Unions) into a dual movement, at once electoral and street, political and industrial, reformist and militant. In this model the two movement wings reinforce each other symbiotically. The street movement gains political representation through the political wing; the political movement takes on real clout when backed by street pressure. In the context of a state form based on electoral "representation" this is an intriguing approach. Petition-based lobbying divorced from massive extra-electoral pressure is probably not.

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