The Occupy Wall Street movement highlighted a rising tide of protest directly targeting corporate America. Since then, even the major media has covered housing rights activism aimed at exploitative lenders, strikes and other work actions against fast-food chains and low-wage retailers like Walmart, and boycott-and-divestment movements targeting the fossil fuels industry and companies linked to the Israeli occupation.

Activists’ decision to target corporations reflects a growing conviction that the government is unresponsive to popular demands because it is unwilling or unable to stop the abuses of the corporate world (this view is supported by recent statistical findings that “the public has little or no influence” on policy). While these movements can change corporate behavior, we believe that they can also influence government policy in ways that direct pressure on politicians cannot.

In the modern United States, few progressive reforms have been enacted and implemented without the consent and/or support of substantial sectors of the corporate elite. Inflicting pain on corporations through disruptive mass activism has historically been the best way to reduce corporate opposition to progressive changes, and in turn, the resistance of the politicians who represent them.

So while it is usually assumed that the best way to change government policies is to pressure politicians or elect different ones, movements are actually more effective when they target the corporate and institutional interests that control public policy behind the scenes.

How might this strategy of targeting corporations and institutions play out in current movements?

The recent fast-food and retail campaigns offer one example. Contrary to many analysts’ assumption that putting Democrats into office is the best way to substantially increase the minimum wage, workplace actions and protests targeting low-wage employers could be the best strategy. These actions focus public attention on low wages and help pave the way for local and state ballot referenda to raise the minimum wage.

More importantly, direct pressure — through boycotts, protests, labor strikes, or supply chain interruptions — on McDonald’s, Walmart, and other powerful firms can “adversely affect” their bottom line, especially given “increasing public focus on matters of income inequality,” as McDonald’s company documents recently warned. This pressure can simultaneously yield direct concessions: some fast-food and retail chains have reacted to recent protests by granting raises to unruly workers, and a few have promised company-wide increases.

But beyond this immediate impact, the changes wrought by direct protest can also neutralize the affected firms’ opposition to raising the minimum wage to the level they are (now) paying their workers. Some may even lobby the government for such an increase to reduce their competitive disadvantage. This logic motivated certain US businesses to support the 1891 Meat Inspection Act, the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act, and other landmark regulatory laws, because they saw the laws as forcing their competitors to honor standards they were already being forced to meet.

Climate activism targeting corporations could have a similar effect. Boycotts, lawsuits, labor actions, and divestment by cities, colleges, and pension funds can raise costs for big polluters and force a (partial) shift to greater renewable energy sources. This might not only relax their opposition to stronger regulations, but also lead them to support government policy that forces their competitors to adhere to standards they themselves are already meeting.

Movement pressure might also help push non-energy businesses — many of which face threats from the effects of climate change — to turn against fossil fuels interests. This strategy doesn’t require capitalists to experience a moral awakening — it simply requires them to view concessions to movement demands as a lesser evil.

Though most activists have not consciously adopted this strategy, we are already seeing some examples of its efficacy. Consider, for example, the contribution of local protests and legal action in halting the construction of 184 planned coal-fired power plants, which according to Marc Hertsgaard is “arguably the greatest climate victory” of recent years. This activism may have laid the foundation for the Obama administration’s regulations on power plant emissions — timid and woefully inadequate as they are — since the regulations would have impacted the very plants that had already been canceled.

More generally, the recent surge of anticorporate climate protest could substantially shift the cost-benefit analysis of both the big polluters and non–fossil fuels businesses, thus facilitating government climate reform.

This approach is not focused on individual consumption practices and does not appeal to an imaginary corporate conscience, as some mainstream environmental groups seek to do. Rather, it aims to impose costs on capitalists through organized mass action, thereby influencing the calculus of both capitalists and state officials.

Targeting corporations can even make sense when corporations aren’t the most visible enemies of reform, as in the immigrant rights struggle. In March 2011, dozens of Arizona-based corporate executives wrote a letter to state legislators asking that they refrain from passing further anti-immigrant bills like the infamous SB 1070, which was in 2010.

The problem, they explained, was that “boycotts were called against [the] state’s business community” in response to the law. The boycotts were so “harmful to [their] image” that “Arizona-based businesses saw contracts cancelled or were turned away from bidding,” and “sales outside of the state declined” (the boycotts also led many Mexican companies to stop trading with Arizona businesses).

The threat to their profits led them to insist on a change in public policy. The result? Within a week, the Republican-controlled legislature rejected five bills designed to further criminalize immigrants.

This approach is not a magic bullet for movement success. There are many components to a successful organizing strategy, and external conditions also matter. Corporate responses to activism vary by industry and by company, depending on the targets’ links to other companies, among other factors. Progressive movements must take these into account in crafting a strategy.

But the historical record is replete with examples that show the effectiveness of targeting the institutions (usually, but not always, corporations) that backstop the political resistance to progressive policies.

Consider the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), which essentially legalized private-sector unions. Most corporate leaders opposed the bill when it passed Congress, and it went unenforced for the first two years. But in 1937, numerous large corporations reversed course and turned to the new National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) to quell the unrest in their workplaces. The surge of labor agitation that erupted in 1935–37 — including nearly nine thousand strikes across the country — was responsible for this change of position.

In the auto industry, for instance, rival factions within the United Auto Workers union engaged in alternating work stoppages, drastically reducing output and threatening the industry’s profits. In this context, auto companies came to see NLRB-sanctioned unions as the lesser evil, preferable to the ongoing disruption of strikes. Auto manufacturers — and, ultimately, management in other large corporations — sought out the NLRB, thus legitimizing it and allowing for the implementation of the NLRA.

The Jim Crow system of segregation ended in much the same way: mass pressure on key business interests led to progressive changes in government policy. The bus boycotters, sit-in participants, and Freedom Riders targeted vulnerable economic institutions and, for the most part, did not focus their energies on public officials. In many places in the South, protesters definitively disrupted the local economy, imposing costs that businesses could not endure. Management not only ended segregation in their own facilities, but also softened their opposition to changes in government policy.

Civil rights historian Charles Payne comments that among Southern whites confronted with disruptive protests, “the group most consistently playing the progressive role turns out to have been businesspeople,” since protests “were not healthy for the bottom line.”

After the failed campaign that focused on local government in Albany, Georgia, in 1961–62, Martin Luther King Jr himself concluded that the campaign should have targeted “the businesses in the city,” saying that “the political power structure listens to the economic power structure.” The 1963 campaign in Birmingham followed that advice, leading to the abolition of downtown segregation, and proved crucial to later legislative victories.

In both cases, movements seeking changes in government policy compelled their economic adversaries to accept those changes by threatening to undermine their profits or even their existence. The enemies of reform — large manufacturers in the 1930s, segregated businesses in the 1960s — eventually came to prefer progressive policy change over labor strikes, boycotts, and other disruption.

Once sufficiently threatened, they either relaxed their opposition to policy change or actively promoted it, leading to decisive shifts in politicians’ behavior. In these cases, it was the posture of business leaders that triggered the policy reform — not the election of sympathetic politicians.

The importance of direct institutional pressure as compared to the political affiliations of officeholders is also exemplified by the behavior of the explicitly conservative Nixon administration. Nixon desegregated more public schools in the South than the Kennedy and Johnson administrations combined, increased domestic social spending more than any president since World War II, advocated a guaranteed minimum income, expanded Social Security, and established food stamps, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

These programs and policies didn’t stem from Nixon’s own beliefs — they were the results of a political context that left him little room to maneuver. That context included not just the Civil Rights and Black Liberation Movements but also surging environmental, antipoverty, feminist, LGBT, antiwar, and workers’ movements.

For the most part, these movements did not spend their time pressuring the Washington establishment or engaging in sustained electoral campaigns. They instead sought to develop institutional pressure against the corporations and agencies that created the problems they sought to address. The policy changes emerged from the political maneuvering — notably by the targeted institutions — that resulted from this pressure.

Though only indirectly focused on the federal government, the 1960s movements, like the 1930s labor movement, resulted in progressive policy changes that had been unthinkable ten years earlier. They also led to significant changes in government institutions and capacities: an empowered NLRB by the late 1930s and a viable civil rights enforcement apparatus by the late 1960s.

All future presidents, regardless of party, would be constrained by those institutions (though the institutions would be subject to continual attack, and eventually weakened — a point to which we will return).