Practicing Emergent Strategies to Fight the Right and Resist Fascism

Philosopher, organizer, and beloved movement elder Grace Lee Boggs would often begin conversations by asking, “What time is it on the clock of the world?” According to Grace, one answer is that “in the midst of this epochal shift, we all need to practice visionary organizing.” For her, that meant moving beyond protest organizing: “Instead of viewing the US people as masses to be mobilized . . . we must have the courage to challenge ourselves to engage in activities that build a new and better world by improving the physical, psychological, political, and spiritual health of ourselves, our families, our communities, our cities, our world, and our planet.”⁹ In her view, visionary organizing “begins by creating images and stories of the future that help us imagine and create alternatives to the existing system.”¹⁰

In The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century, Grace writes with Scott Kurashige: “The tremendous changes we now need and yearn for in our daily lives… cannot come from those in power or from putting pressure on those in power. We ourselves have to foreshadow or prefigure them from the ground up.”¹¹ In other words, we need to stop looking exclusively to the same places we always have looked, doing the same things we have always done, being the same people we have always been. Instead, we must seek out new ways of thinking, doing, and being in everyday actions, with the intention of shifting large and complex systems and relations of power. We need to seek out as many portals as we can find into futures we cannot currently imagine and practice them every day.

I have come to believe that emergent strategies offer important clues to help us to find new paths forward, to step outside of what we know and into the futures we want to create, to survive, and to resist the futures racial capitalism and Right-wing forces seek to make inevitable.

Emergent Strategy and emergent strategies 

adrienne maree brown’s book, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, has served as an introduction to emergent strategies for hundreds of thousands of people, including me. (I use Emergent Strategy to refer to adrienne maree brown’s book of that name, and emergent strategies to refer to the broader body of work the book draws on.) It summarizes a broader set of ideas about how to create, shift, and change complex systems—including human society— through relatively simple interactions. Emergent strategies, as adrienne describes them, focus on starting small and making space for and learning from uncertainty, multiplicity, experimentation, adaptation, iteration, and decentralization. 

These ideas are not new—Emergent Strategy draws on a much deeper body of work rooted in the workings of the natural world, Indigenous lifeways, complexity science, change theory, Grace Lee Boggs’s later writings, the work of the Complex Movements Collective, and the observations of scholars and organizers across generations. In many ways, Emergent Strategy distills and invites us to hone key principles already at play in effective organizing efforts and movements. Emergent strategies, by definition, require attention to emergence—what becomes possible under certain conditions when we:

• start small and focus on critical connections, 
• build decentralized networks, 
• iterate and adapt with intention, and 
• cooperate toward collective sustainability, 

rather than trying to control or impose change through law, policy, and other top-down strategies. 

While this approach may feel counterintuitive given the scale of the problems we face and the growing political power of authoritarian forces, change scholars Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Frieze argue that emergence has made large-scale resistance and societal shifts possible. According to them, these shifts happened through “many local actions and decisions, most of which were invisible and unknown to each other, and none of which was powerful enough by itself to create change. But when these local changes coalesced, new power emerged. What could not be accomplished by diplomacy, politics, protests, or strategy suddenly happened.”¹²

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Practicing emergent strategies doesn’t mean that we no longer try to affect large systems. It “doesn’t mean eschewing the systemic for the interpersonal or vice versa. Emergence is an invitation to hold a dual focus.”¹⁴ As someone living in a time of climate collapse, mounting fascism, and rising rates of white-supremacist, gender-based, homophobic, transphobic, colonial, and anti-Black violence, I am painfully aware that large systems are increasingly constraining possibility at every scale. As a Black feminist, I am committed to what the Combahee River Collective Statement describes as “the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking,” and on the premise that “if Black women were free that would mean everyone else would have to be free because our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all systems of oppression.”¹⁵ None of the changes I want to see in the world are possible without eliminating a global economic system built on racial capitalism and the structural violence it requires and produces along the axes of race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, and nation, operating in the lives of Black women, trans and gender nonconforming people, and our communities everywhere. By definition, this requires large-scale, systemic change. 

The knowledge that what happens at the small-scale replicates, coalesces into, and shapes larger social structures and systems simply shifts the primary focus of transformation to our relationships, interactions, networks, and communities instead of strategies that rely exclusively on mass mobilization and top-down legislative and policy initiatives. Emergent strategies invite us to act based on shared values and principles at a smaller scale, and to connect our actions across time and space into networks with the power to shape complex systems. They remind us that we are constantly learning and adapting to changing conditions at the individual and collective levels. They point to critical guidance offered by the natural world on building resilience under pressure through decentralization, cooperation, and interdependence. They urge us to ask generative questions; move beyond binaries; value uncertainty; practice while learning from our mistakes; and to create more possibilities. They invite us to engage our radical imaginations and to center joy and pleasure in our efforts. 

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Why Emergent Strategies Matter in a Time of Fascism 

Even if you are not convinced that emergent strategies can play an important role building toward the worlds we want, there are still important reasons to learn about them. In fact, I have come to believe that we can’t afford to not to be emergent strategists in this time—because emergent strategies are part of how we got to where we are. Over the past six decades, the religious Right has leveraged the power of relatively small interactions—in church basements and prayer circles, over harvest and coffee—to shape the systems and conditions we are now living. While the use of law, policy, political parties, think tanks, and judicial appointments to advance Right-wing agendas is more visible, these strategies represent the tip of the iceberg in terms of how the Right built the power they are now exercising in an attempt to dominate what they describe as the seven mountains or pillars of society: economy, education, family life, religion, media, culture, and government.¹⁹ While our collective focus has rightly been on authoritarian, top-down Christian evangelical efforts, led by charismatic leaders, to pass legislation to ban abortion and gender-affirming care, attempt to eradicate the public existence of trans and queer people, to take over and overturn systems of government, and to impose a white-supremacist, patriarchal Christian theocracy, there is much more at play. 

The Christian Right has adopted the strategy of calling on its followers to “go and make disciples” and to “invade” each of these seven arenas with the intention of shifting larger systems further toward white supremacy and cisheteropatriarchy. Supporters are encouraged to advance theocratic values through critical connections: in their workplaces, faith communities, social media posts, and conversations with families and friends.²⁰ Neo-Nazis are similarly deploying decentralized strategies reliant on small groups of people to form “a web, instead of a chain of command.”²¹ ¡No Pasarán!: Antifascist Dispatches from a World in Crisis contributors Emmi Bevensee and Frank Miroslav write, “One of the most concerning developments is the shift by various strands of fascism into becoming more horizontal and to using distributed organizing mechanisms . . . There are a number of reasons this kind of distributed white terror is becoming more popular; the most obvious of which is that it works.”²² In a particularly alarming turn, the Patriot movement is bastardizing “dual power” approaches that originate in revolutionary struggles of the Global South and focus on both challenging state power and building prefigurative community institutions.²³ In the Patriots’ case, they do so by creating militias and common law courts that prefigure the dictatorship they seek to impose on broader society.²⁴ Alt-Right groups are likewise seeking to dismantle centralized states while upholding patriarchal non-state “tribal” systems rooted in male dominance.²⁵ In other words, Right-wing movements are also manifesting decentralized, adaptive, and iterative approaches to shaping the world that build on critical connections and networks to shift larger systems. 

As a result, as organizer and strategist Suzanne Pharr, longtime student of Right-wing, white-supremacist movements, puts it, “They are so pervasive as to be obscured and normalized to the extent that they are simultaneously everywhere all the time and difficult to detect.”²⁶ Like a virus, they infect communities, replicate themselves, and spread.²⁷ To resist, Pharr calls us to engage in local work aimed at transforming individuals and communities, to recognize that “the bridges we build one by one between individuals are the strongest,” to understand our struggle as one of fundamental values, and to move with the knowledge that “every step toward liberation must have liberation in it.”²⁸ As organizer Shane Burley writes in ¡No Pasarán!, “The antidote to fascism in all its manifestations is community-building.”²⁹ Emmi Bevensee and Frank Miroslav argue that, “Whereas fascists use complexity to promote their violent and overly simplistic worldview, antifascists can use complexity to cultivate richly diverse and evolving networks of resistance.” In other words, to fight a competing world vision that is rapidly spreading in part through what could be characterized as emergent strategies, we need to at least understand and practice them ourselves.