Activism
Guobin Yang
First published in 1976, Raymond Williams’s Keywords captures the spirit of his times. The 110 entries in the first edition include radical, revolution, and violence. Liberation is one of the 21 entries added to the second edition in 1983. These words linked together the worldwide revolutionary movements of the 1960s and early 1970s.
From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, however, the absence of the word activism in Williams’s classic is conspicuous. In the decades since its first publication, but especially since the 1990s, activism has become a popular word in contemporary cultural and political discourse. It is used not only by citizens and civil society organizations, but also by government bureaucracies, international agencies, and even business corporations. Furthermore, the growing popularity of activism is accompanied by the declining use of revolution and liberation, or at least declining up until the “Occupy” movement and the Arab Spring protests. What does the ascendance of activism reveal about contemporary culture, society, and politics?
An Ambiguous Word
Activism is an ambiguous word. It can mean both radical, revolutionary action and nonrevolutionary, community action; action in the service of the nation-state and in opposition to it. This ambiguity has existed since its first usages in the early twentieth century. The German philosopher Rudolf Eucken used the term in his 1907 book The Fundamentals of a New Philosophy of Life to refer to “the theory or belief that truth is arrived at through action or active striving after the spiritual life” (OED, 3rd ed.). In continental Europe during World War I, activism meant “advocacy of a policy of supporting Germany in the war; pro-German feeling or activity” (OED, 3rd ed.). The word in 1920 began to take on the more general meaning of “the policy of active participation or engagement in a particular sphere of activity; spec. the use of vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change.” By 1960 the term could have an almost incendiary connotation, as in “The sizzling flame of activism is visible in both the agricultural and pastoral districts” (OED, 3rd ed.). About activism as a service to the nation-state, Hoofd (2008) writes:
Etymologically, ‘activism’ has strong affinities not only with an essentially transcendental philosophy of life, but also with nationalism and industrialization. Indeed, it appears that ‘activism’ was an economic strategy originally employed for the benefit of the nation-state in which its citizens could enjoy the largest amount of ‘spiritual freedom’ through actively encouraged but closely monitored economic competition.
Activism thus had several different meanings in its history—a philosophical orientation to life, an economic strategy to mobilize citizens for national industrialization, a pro-German activity during World War I, and a vigorous political activity.
In its contemporary usage, activism generally refers to citizens’ political activities ranging from high-cost, high-risk protests and revolutionary movements (McAdam 1986) to everyday practices aimed at protecting the environment (Almanzar, Sullivan-Catlin, and Deane 1998) and to corporatized NGO activism (Spade 2011). Its popularity undoubtedly has something to do with its multiple, ambiguous meanings, which make the word suitable for different purposes.
Over the past thirty years, activism has also become less likely to mean radical and revolutionary action and more likely to mean moderate civic action. Many social movements and activism studies support this hypothesis (Meyer and Tarrow 1998; Samson et al. 2005; Spade 2011). A glance at the frequency of the term and its associated words also helps: consider Google Ngram Viewer, which contains 5.2 million scanned books published between 1550 and 2008, with 500 billion words in total and 361 billion in English (Michel et al. 2010). As a hypothesis, suppose that a stronger association of activism with revolution or protest rather than NGO or civil society implies a more radical connotation, whereas a declining association with terms like revolution may indicate a less radical connotation. Now observe in figures 1 and 2 the patterns of usage in Google Ngram Viewer for activism in comparison with revolution and protest and with NGO and civil society from 1950 to 2008.
Figure 1 shows that the use of revolution declined steadily after the 1970s in proportion with the rising frequency of activism, with protest holding relatively steady. Figure 2 shows a remarkable parallel rise in the use of activism, NGO, and civil society. If NGO and civil society activism tends to be moderate, institutionalized, and even corporatized (Samson et al. 2005; Spade 2011; Dauvergne and LeBaron 2014), rather than radical and revolutionary, then the usage patterns suggest that from 1950 to 2008, especially after the 1990s, activism has mellowed to indicate moderate rather than radical forms of action.
Figure 1. Use of activism, revolution, and protest in Google Ngram Viewer, 1950–2008.
Figure 2. Use of activism, NGO, and civil society in Google Ngram Viewer, 1950–2008.
An Ambivalent Age
The ambiguity of the increasingly popular keyword appears to serve well the politics and purposes in the current age of ambivalence. That ambivalence is a condition of modernity is already a thesis well developed in the works of classic social theorists from Marx to Weber (Smart 1999), although the post-1989, post–Cold War world entered a period of “new ambivalence” (Beck 1997). This “new ambivalence” rests on the unmooring of traditions and traditional communities, the breakdown of old boundaries of the public and the private, the collapse of faith in human progress, the retreat of grand, emancipatory politics and the rise of life politics, and what Beck calls the “reversal of politics and non-politics” where “the political becomes non-political and the non-political political” (Beck 1992: 186). The causes for this upheavel include, in brief, the shift from industrialization to postindustrialization in global economies, the crisis of the nation-state under the onslaught of globalization, the diffusion of new forms and patterns of communication associated with the development of internet and mobile technologies, and, over and above all these, the disembedding of institutions and the advent of a society of risk (Giddens 1990; Beck 1992). In essence, as Beck puts it, this new ambivalence is the consequence of the “gradual or eruptive collapse of previously applicable basic certainties” for practically all fields of social activity (Beck 1997, 11).
These influences express themselves in political participation complexly. On the one hand, aspirations for political struggle continue to take both radical and nonradical forms. The Zapatista revolt and the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle in the 1990s, for example, were radical eruptions—as were the more recent Occupy Wall Street and Arab Spring protests. On the other hand, the history of activism and protest since the 1990s remains marked more by moderation than by radicalism in both Western democracies and other countries.
In Western democracies, popular political radicalism declined in the wake of the protest cycle of the 1960s and 1970s. What have appeared instead are “social movement societies,” where protest becomes increasingly institutionalized and bureaucratized, and “civic” rather than disruptive. Meyer and Tarrow (1998, 20), editors of the volume The Social Movement Society, write, “Although disruption appears to be the most effective political tool of the disadvantaged, the majority of episodes of movement activity we see today disrupt few routines.” A study of over four thousand events in the Chicago area from 1970 to 2000 finds that “sixties-style” protest declined, while hybrid events combining public claims making with civic forms of behavior increased (Samson et al. 2005). The most distinctive pattern of the post-1970s landscape of citizen participation is collective civic action, not disruptive action (see participation).
In China and the former Soviet bloc, large-scale protest activities declined after the “Velvet Revolution” and the Tiananmen student protests in 1989. History was proclaimed to have ended and revolution a relic of the past. In the wake of the Tiananmen protests, even Chinese intellectuals who had supported the Tiananmen movement bid “farewell to revolution,” advocating instead reform as a method of political change and a prominent practice since the 1990s (Li and Liu 1995). Deradicalized civic action, such as NGO activism, also became more common than radical protest as revolutionary aspirations gave way to reformist agendas (Yang 2009).
Of course, moderation does not capture all the ambivalent trends of contemporary activism, such as the rise of the outsourcing of grassroots politics (Fisher 2006), the “nonprofitization” of social movements (Spade 2011, 40), and the corporatization of activism (Dauvergne and LeBaron 2014). Some activist organizations outsource their political campaigns to commercial campaign organizations, much as big corporations outsource their jobs and products to overseas factories. Others collaborate with businesses in pursuit of dubious goals, as when environmental organizations partner with oil companies to protect the environment. Deeply troubling to critics, “activist organizations have increasingly come to look, think, and act like corporations” in the last two decades (Dauvergne and LeBaron 2014, 1).
The Internet Brings Hope
At the same time the internet has introduced a range of new practices known as cyberactivism, hacktivism, internet activism, digital activism, and online activism. Symptomatic of the large world-historic transformations sketched above, these forms promise for many retransformation toward a more radical grassroots politics.
Online or cyberactivism (McCaughey and Ayers 2003) dates back to at least the mid-1990s (Jordan and Taylor 2004, 13) and the hacker communities of the 1980s or earlier (Turkle 1984; Levy 1984; Bowcott and Hamilton 1990). Hacktivism seeks radical ways of “beating the system” in particular (Bowcott and Hamilton 1990). And the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) used online electronic bulletin board systems (BBS) and newsgroups for protest in the mid-1990s (Wolfson 2014). During the Tiananmen student protests in 1989, Chinese students in North America and Europe used newsgroups on Usenet to mobilize support for protesters in China (Yang 2009, 28–29). By the mid-1990s, cybercultural and activist communities were proclaiming the power of the new technologies with manifestos: Timothy May issued his “Crypto Anarchist Manifesto” in 1992; in 1996, John Perry Barlow published his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” while the Critical Art Ensemble (1996) published its manual for electronic civic disobedience; and in 1997, dissidents in China launched what they thought of as the first electronic magazine with the bold statement that computer networks had changed the equation between the autocrats and their struggles for freedom and democracy (Yang 2009, 92).
Other terms have followed the rapid proliferation and diffusion of global network technologies, such as tactical media (Garcia and Lovink 1997), radical media (Downing 2000), new media activism (Kahn and Kellner 2004; Lievrouw 2011), alternative media (Couldry and Curran 2003; Lievrouw 2011), hacktivism (Denning 1999; Jordan and Taylor 2004; Coleman 2013), networked social movements (Castells 2012), and online connective action (Bennett and Segerberg 2013). The outcomes of online activism discourse, however, remain far from clear. After over two decades of struggle and contestation, the meanings and significance of online activism are more ambivalent than ever, while the push for its politicization is often offset by the pull toward depoliticization. A closer comparison of these terms reveals both a profound fascination and deep anxieties.
The Ambiguity of Online Activism
Online activism is just as ambiguous as conventional activism. Email and web petitions, the hacking of websites, the Indymedia movement, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the Arab Spring protests have all been called online or digital activism. But a cyberactivist may also be just a regular computer user seeking to get other people onto the “information superhighway” by any number of everyday activities, such as these ten: (1) join something; (2) use the local library (to go online); (3) respect other people’s bandwidth; (4) be all you can be—be “out” online; (5) learn a second language; (6) give your knowledge away free; (7) help a journalist; (8) get your mother on email; (9) encourage a kid; and (10) adopt a Newbie (Coyle 1994).
At other times, one person’s online activism could be another’s revolution and a third person’s crime. The military often views hacking as an act of cyberwarfare, cyberterrorism, or cybercrime (Vegh 2003, 81). Online activism is sometimes dismissed on the ground that it is not as effective as “real” activism on the streets; at other times, street protests are characterized as networked digital protests simply because Facebook and Twitter were used to organize the protests offline. The result is the conflation of the more radical types of online activism with more moderate varieties. Far from a naive confusion of the meanings of a word, this conflation represents a history of political struggle over the meanings and practices of online activism.
Although the trend is neither straightforward nor irreversible, the more radical elements of online activism are becoming underplayed, if not dislodged, in activism discourse. Governments seek to criminalize radical online activists, and corporations seek to co-opt them. Thus over time, hacktivism has begun to connote illegality rather than its early evocations of countercultural creativity and individual heroism (Jordan 1999; Taylor 1999; Turner 2008). Radical cyberactivist organizations and practices like Indymedia and the Occupy Wall Street movement were subject to policing (Downing 2000; Pickard 2006; Sullivan, Spicer, and Böhm 2011; Gillham, Edwards, and Noakes 2013; Sauter 2014). In addition, online activism appears increasingly channeled into conventional institutional politics: “The digirati needs to learn how to make friends and win influence in Washington,” Richard F. O’Donnell (1996) warned in 1996; “Otherwise they would be courting irrelevance.” The online movement Moveon.org, for example, has become a member-based nonprofit organization. Like mirror images (see mirror), policing and mainstreaming have sped the absorption of online activism into normal institutional politics, undercutting its subversive potential as an extrainstitutional praxis. As in activism, so in online activism: the early radical aspirations of cyberactivism and hacktivism have weakened.
Online Activism in China
In his introduction to the 1976 edition of Keywords, Williams notes a limitation to his book: many keywords have developed important meanings in other languages, but, with few exceptions, these meanings go unnoticed in his analysis. Williams stresses the comparative study of how the keyword meanings go through complicated developments. In this spirit, let us examine a cluster of Chinese words related to online activism to reveal comparative meanings with the English language.
Until recent decades, activism was uncommon in the mainland Chinese vocabulary. Its literal translation, xingdong zhuyi 
appeared in academic articles in the late 1980s and early 1990s introducing histories of Western and Korean student activism; the term would not enter everyday language until later.1 The term activist, however, has been a keyword in official Chinese discourse since at least the Mao era: an activist actively participates in projects and campaigns sponsored by the government. In other words, an activist actively serves, not opposes, the nation-state. A dissident or protester is the opposite of an activist in this original Chinese sense.
Although varieties of online activism (in the Western sense) began to emerge in China in the 1990s, there were no standard concepts to describe them then. The Chinese word for protest, kangyi, was sometimes used. One of the most influential online forums in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Strong Nation forum, was originally set up as the “Protest Forum,” to rally, for example, against the NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslavia in 1999.
Since the late 1990s, several terms have migrated from English into Chinese to describe online activism. Translated back into English, one would mean literally “online movements” (wangluo yundong). Another is a literal translation of online activism (wangluo xingdong zhuyi). Perhaps the most interesting Chinese term is new media events (xin meiti shijian). An extension of the concept of “media events” in the works of Dayan and Katz (1992) and others, new media events is the title of an influential Chinese-language collection of essays about online activism (Qiu and Chan 2011) (see event). The term has legs in Chinese academic and media discourse, partly because it avoids the charged political connotations of online activism versus online protest and thus suits China’s political context.
Government officials soon invented their own term—internet mass incidents—for describing, managing, and containing online activism, which is modeled after the term mass incidents, an official label for protest activities. Mass incidents and internet mass incidents carry clear negative meanings as part of a cluster of new official labels coined for talking about and managing online activism.
As in Western democracies, so in Chinese online activism: ambivalence abounds. Perhaps the best example of discursive uncertainty is the term human flesh search. This ghastly phrase was first the name of a popular online forum that mobilized and crowdsourced users, online and off, to search for solutions to queries of interest to the forum and community members (see community, forum). The term then came to be applied to a large number of users pooling their collective wisdom to carry out a specific task, such as exposing a corrupt government official by revealing his private information. Like doxxing, the online practice of “compiling and releasing a dossier of personal information on someone” (Honan 2014), the means of this form of activism is morally ambiguous, ranging from online vigilantism with disturbing violations of privacy to an outlet for healthful expressions of social grievances and discontent.
Some US-China Comparisons
The Chinese government’s approach to online activism suggests that online activism appears more radical and subversive in China than in the United States. This is puzzling, since the United States is a democracy and China not, and since the Chinese government censors the internet and the United States does not.2 I will argue that this follows because online activism in the United States has been more institutionalized, whereas in China it remains largely noninstitutional or extrainstitutional in practice. Differences in political systems as well as political culture help unravel this puzzle.
For example, most cases of online activism in China occur by means of unorganized, individual participation, whereas in the United States, activism that is primarily confined to the internet is more likely to be dismissed as a “lazy” activism, dubbed as slacktivism or clicktivism. Activism in the West without the support of established civil society organizations is more likely to be viewed as ineffective.
Some scholars counter that since clicktivism, such as mass emails sent by advocacy organizations, is only a single tactic in a whole repertoire of action used by advocacy groups, it is unhelpful to understand it in isolation from the rest of the advocacy repertoire (Karpf 2012). Even this valid point, however, tacitly acknowledges that digital-only activism sits on the lowest rung of the citizen participation reputation ladder.
If there is a ladder of engagement in China, then the online type of internet activism would rank much higher there than in the United States. In China, ordinary internet users and dissidents alike see the internet as essential to political expression and use it as such. When they protest online, their voices may resonate enough to challenge government policies and officials’ behavior. For this reason, online protests, officially labeled as internet mass incidents, are viewed as serious threats to the legitimacy of the party-state and are carefully censored and controlled.
These differences reflect the relative strength of institutionalized social movements and civil society in the United States compared to the same in China. In China, online activism was born into a weak civil society in the late 1990s, when NGOs were beginning to emerge, but with only minimal influence in interest articulation. Street protests faced serious risks, and the state owned and controlled the mass media. Meanwhile, public frustration and anger over social injustices and government corruption were deepening. Under these circumstances, citizens took to the internet to sound their voice: by the early 2000s, a culture of online contention had formed in China, but one in which individual citizens participate in unorganized ways rather than through civil society organizations.
By contrast, in the United States, online activism arose embedded in a long tradition of nonprofit, community, and social movement organizations. Online activism in the United States is only one means by which nonprofit and civil society organizations recruit members, raise funds, conduct publicity campaigns, and build communities (Hick and McNutt 2002; McNutt and Menon 2008; Guo and Saxton 2014). United for Peace and Justice, for example, organized the 400,000-strong protest against the war in Iraq on January 27, 2007, using the web (Earl and Kimport 2011). The news here is not so much the web as the UFPJ, a coalition of over 1,300 groups.
Given this institutional context, spontaneous and unorganized forms of online action—or what would be termed internet mass incidents by Chinese officials—are also likely to be viewed with suspicion and moral alarm by the American public.3 For example, the unorganized but collective efforts in 4Chan and Reddit online communities to search for the Boston bombing suspects after April 15, 2013, a kind of online collective action not unlike the online muckraking directed against corrupt government officials in China, was met with public criticism and cries of vigilantism (see, e.g., Madrigal 2013). It is a most curious fact, then, that Chinese officials and the American public share a similar hermeneutic of suspicion toward unorganized new media events.
Transforming Activism after 2010?
How have the Arab Spring protests that started in 2010 and the global “Occupy” movement in 2011 affected the meaning of activism?
Despite disagreements about the political outcomes of these protests, there are clear signs that both movements, in their revolutionary scale and speed of popular mobilization worldwide, have reinfused radicalism and vigorous political activity back into the English sense of activism. They adopted radical forms of action, most notably the sustained occupation of central public spaces and demonstrations in cities around the world, from New York to Cairo to Madrid. And despite the refusal to make any programmatic demand in the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the movements aspired to systematic and thus revolutionary change. And certainly, since the Arab Spring and the “Occupy” movement, the language of revolution has reentered public discourse with a refreshed sense of moral legitimacy. From Facebook Revolution and Twitter Revolution to networked revolution and the revolution of dignity, the language of revolution has suffused the language of activism and protest movements (Castells 2012; Gitlin 2013).
The radical means of the Arab Spring protests are clear,4 given that governments were overthrown and blood was shed. But what about Occupy Wall Street (OWS)? In discussing the radicalism of OWS, analysts have pointed to its dedication to free assembly (Gitlin 2013), to the populist expressions of feelings, passions, and invocations of “the people” (Calhoun 2013), to the ideal of direct democracy (Castells 2012), and to the practice of a new form of “political disobedience” (Harcourt 2013).
Encapsulated in these features of the radical “Occupy” movement is a conundrum of contemporary activism.5 As Harcourt explains, political disobedience is “a type of political as opposed to civil disobedience that fundamentally rejects the ideological landscape that has dominated our collective imagination, in the United States at least, since before the Cold War” (Harcourt 2013, 46). It “resists the very way in which we are governed”:
It disobeys not only our civil structure of laws and political institutions, but politics writ large. The Occupy movement rejects conventional political rationality, discourse, and strategies. It does not lobby Congress. It defies the party system. It refuses to align or identify itself along traditional political lines. It refuses even to formulate a reform agenda or to endorse the platform of any existing political group. Defying convention, it embraces the idea of being “leaderless.” It aspires to rhizomic, nonhierarchical governing structures. And it turns its back on conventional political ideologies. Occupy Wall Street is politically disobedient to the core—it even resists attempts to be categorized politically. The Occupy movement, in sum, confounds our traditional understandings and predictable political categories. (Harcourt 2013, 47)
Perhaps nothing can be more radical than an overt rejection of and abstinence from the existing system: the “Occupy” movement may be transforming the contemporary meaning of activism.
In order to resist being “categorized politically,” the “Occupy” movement has sought to express itself in nonconventional political forms. A new political disobedience turns out to be nonpolitical in the conventional sense. Harcourt’s analysis is convincing, but in it we encounter a conundrum facing radical revolutionaries and activists under the current capitalist hegemony. And this is the same conundrum that faces many NGO activists engaged in today’s “conventional” political activism: to bring about change, one has to work with the system; NGOs have to play by the rules rather than against them; organizations have to ally with rather than against governments and corporations. The result is often co-optation. Especially since the heightened securitization of activism and dissent after 9/11 (Dauvergne and LeBaron 2014), it is increasingly difficult for social movement organizations to work against the system. Given all this, it is too early to tell whether the global wave of popular protests since 2010 has transformed or radicalized what we mean by activism. Its effects will likely remain temporary and ambivalent.
See in this volume: cloud, community, democracy, event, mirror, participation, personalization, sharing
See in Williams: liberation, progressive, radical, reactionary, reform, revolution, violence
Notes
1From 1991 to 1993, the Chinese academic journal Youth Studies (qingnian yanjiu) published a series of translated articles on student activism in foreign countries, probably to help Chinese researchers better understand Chinese student activism.
2Of course, it is necessary to distinguish between internet censorship and surveillance, noting the post-Snowden revelations about the widespread practices of online surveillance in the United States.
3The rise of hashtag activism, however, may signal the growing significance of individual civic participation on social media. See Clark (2014).
4But see Bayat (2013, 599) for a forceful argument that the Arab Spring protests were not revolutions, but “refo-lutions,” by which he means “revolutionary movements that wished to compel the incumbent regimes to reform themselves.”
5I thank Rosemary Clark and Jonathan Pace for sharing their views about Harcourt’s analysis of “political disobedience” in our extended discussions about the “Occupy” movement in the spring of 2014.
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