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The first thing is understanding why that is an important observation, because a lot of people who are unfamiliar with organizing, through no fault of their own, have little idea that it’s often the failed attempts that lead to the bigger successes. Big, successful marches that are connected to social movements — especially in the 1960s — don’t come from heaven. They have to be built and organized.

Sometimes that lesson today can be distorted, because you can have lots of money from foundations that swoop in and make all of these resources available, but you still have the same problem: if it’s not connected to ongoing organization or organizing, then it’s a flash in a pan that can bring attention to a particular issue but doesn’t create the means to actually do anything about it.

Zinn is trying to do two things. One is to distill the way that consciousness develops. The Albany, Georgia, example is perennially held up as one of the failures of the Civil Rights Movement because it didn’t create the kind of spectacle that Martin Luther King relied on to bring the news media in and gain the attention of the federal government as a way to pressure federal officials to force Southern officials to comply with federal law. In Albany, the sheriff just put people in jail without a huge confrontation, and he was lauded for not beating local activists.

Because of this, it’s seen as an unsuccessful campaign in comparison to Selma or Birmingham or other well-known victories. But Zinn, as a participant in the Albany campaign, had a different viewpoint: he recognized how the efforts of local people to involve themselves in movement activities that involved overcoming an enormous, at times crippling, fear of the political, legal, and economic establishment in that town meant that even though, in these particular campaigns, there was not a “victorious outcome,” local people were transformed. They had overcome their fear. And once they had overcome their fear, they were halfway there. Because the political establishment in that town and across the South relied on fear that had been developed over decades of brutality to maintain the status quo. With that fear broken, and people realizing that they could actually dismantle the status quo locally, there was a victory.

The bigger question is, how do people overcome the reluctance that stems from the idea that we can’t change our own circumstance? That’s a crucial part of consciousness — that willingness not just to participate in a march here and there but for people to really invest themselves in a social movement and a political project aimed at transforming their own conditions.

With Vietnam, he talks about the frustration of organizing demonstrations early on in the war that get very little traction. Hundreds of people may show up to a demonstration, but clearly that is not enough to pose any kind of challenge to the American war machine. So he walks readers through two things.

One is that there are things that organizers can do over a period of time that can make for more effective organization. There’s a process by which people learn how to better get the word out about a particular action. Over time, relationships can develop that put you in a position to be able to reach wider numbers of people than you may be able to initially.

But there’s also social factors at play that have nothing to do with your organizing ability. And it’s voluntarist to believe that organizers can just call mass movements into being. Those are shaped by forces outside of our control.

But this is the utility of this book. It’s explaining that social change is a combination of objective and subjective factors. And if we are positioned in such a way that we can take advantage of that, we can sometimes make change happen, but many times it has nothing to do with us.

So the acceleration of the Vietnam War is a factor that helps to drive the growth of the antiwar movement. But because you had committed activists that had been involved from the very beginning, they were able to take advantage of that situation to not just watch the demonstrations get bigger, but call the demonstrations. Someone had to be willing to organize the teachings that Zinn participated in. So you see all of the different elements that go into creating the conditions for an effective movement.

Zinn could have written an autobiography that was a thousand pages long. But he wrote a relatively modest volume, two hundred-some pages. In those pages, he focuses on these different campaigns. Because he’s not just writing to celebrate himself — he’s writing, based in his experience, to be useful to a new generation of activists, of people who would be radicalizing, who asked, “What do we do? How do we do it?” There’s no prescription or map to having a successful movement, but there are things that we can learn from history about organizing, how consciousness changes, and how the convergence of those things can create the conditions for a movement of ordinary people that holds the power to transform a situation.