Kitchens, Sex and Money: Why Movement Breakups Happen (and Why Maybe It’s Not Such a Bad Thing)

We’ve all been there…

About the project: 

We’re pleased to present What Do We Want? a new podcast about the psychology of activism and the weird, wild and wonderful things that bring movements together… and drive them apart! You can subscribe now by RSS, on Spotify, on Apple or on another hideous corporate platform, or listen on our website.

Under the banner of Sense & Solidarity, we (Sarah and Max) regularly lead workshops for activists where we try and talk about strategy. But everyone wants to do therapy! Maybe that’s not so surprising. Being an activist is hard: you’re swimming against the current and typically forced to witness a heartbreaking world we often appear helpless to change. 

If we’re honest, what most people want to debrief in our workshops are breakups: when movements fall apart. They want to understand why that guy got canceled, why there are now 14 smaller groups for the same cause, and what to do about the damn shared bank account. 

That’s why we dedicated the first episode of, What Do We Want, to the topic of heartbreak in movements for radical social change and collective liberation. 

Each episode of this show, we focus on the stuff our participants tell us is vexing them and bring together Sarah’s research on the politics of cognitive sciences with Max’s research on movements and the radical imagination. Subscribe now - we’ll be releasing episodes on conspiracy, shame, pleasure, despair and fantasy in November.

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Don’t Try and Seduce Everyone

            You might be wondering if “breakups” or “heartbreak” are the right words. We think so.  The reality is that activism isn’t just ‘sexy’, it’s also erotic in the broader, richer sense of the world: at its best, it expands and enriches life, it gives us a thrill of creative collective potential. Even the most austere and “serious” movement organizations provide their participants with this thrill. It would be easy to dismiss this as cheesy and romantic, but it’s real, and it doesn’t do us any favors to ignore it.  

To cut a long story short, activists and people who care about movements need to think a lot more about desire and, more generally, those complex feelings that bring people together (and drive them apart). .  People rarely become activists because some smart or well-spoken person convinces with reasons to do something about a social problem. Rather, as in the world of dating, a lot about what attracts is that ineffable sense of possibility.Does that mean that social movement recruiters ought to show a little more skin? No, (though we won’t judge!). But there are things we can learn from the world of romance when it comes to thinking about what attracts people to movements.

This episode, Sarah digs into fascinating research released by the nerds behind dating app OKCupid. The researchers attached to the company warn readers of their blog that a big mistake many users is to try to appeal to too many potential matches, rather than being their weird selves (by the way, if you read the OKCupid data blog, you’re definitely our type). The data suggests that people who show off their quirks get many more messages than those who don’t, even if they are, statistically speaking, the same level of “hot”. To be a “hot eight”, instead of a less-hot eight, you want to play up what’s weird and polarising about you. It’s niching down that helps us find our people, not appealing to the widest crowd. 

Max relates this to some of their weirdest stuff he’s seen in his more than 30 years of activism, including groups with extreme or seemingly deranged slogans like, infamously “Nukes for North Korea.” This seemingly terrible strategy is actually brilliant given that group’s vanguardist goals: they actually wanted to repel and alienate the vast majority of people, and only attract the 1-2% who might just be looking for a group that isn’t afraid to stand behind a profoundly unpopular position. Max also relates this to the strategy of many scam artists. What scammers know is that, when you send out a million pitches, you really only want to sift through 100 responses and to select from among those the perfect “mark” to target. It’s all about reaching the right person with the right pitch.

From all this, social movements (and lonely singles or hungry polys) can learn to be more intentional, strategic and selective about whom we’re trying to attract to our movements. A movement that tries to be for everyone is doomed.

Keeping the Romance Alive When the Kitchen’s a Mess

The challenge, of course, of both romantic relationships and social movements is keeping things going once the “new relationship energy” fades. After the initial romantic flame has subsided into the slow burn, once the adrenaline and creativity and hope have been tempered, plenty of movements start to fracture and schism on the faultlines between their most valuable and volatile components: human beings. In his work, Max has observed that movements (like romantic relationships) tend to fall apart around money, sex and kitchens.

Yes, kitchens. Because social movements, like romantic relationships, involve many tasks of care, and keeping people going. In their book The Radical Imagination Max and his collaborator Alex Khansnabish observe that even the most rigid, business-like and no-nonsense movement or organization is also a space of friendship, romance, conviviality, community and (hopefully) care. They are, in other words, infrastructures of what feminist theorists call social reproduction: spaces where social, biological and cultural life is made and remade. 

Social reproduction is crucially important, but it’s hard work and often less fun. Long-term activism doesn’t feel as fun as the early falling-in-love phase. Some of it is even going to be uncomfortable. But that’s necessary! Sarah is fond of quoting a speech by Bernice Johnson Reagon, a legendary civil rights organizer (and one of the key protagonists behind the music ensemble Sweet Honey and the Rock) who complains that so many activists believe or demand that movement work ought to feel good, ought to feel like home, ought to feel like love.

 “Coalition work is not work done in your home. Coalition work has to be done in the streets. And it is some of the most dangerous work you can do. And you shouldn’t look for comfort. Some people will come to a coalition and they rate the success of the coalition on whether or not they feel good when they get there. They’re not looking for a coalition; they’re looking for a home! They’re looking for a bottle with some milk in it and a nipple, which does not happen in a coalition.”

The coalitions Reagon’s is talking about are different from activist groups (coalitions are provisional strategic assemblies of smaller groups), but the point still holds: many of us long to come home from a cruel, uncaring world to which we feel we have been exiled. Activist groups can only offer this some of the time; and they require discomfort and work as time goes on. 

For More and Better Schisms

Movement breakups are often more devastating than romantic breakups, but perhaps for the same reason. Beyond just the loss of a relationship, they represent the loss of a potential future. 

              That said, there are lots of reasons why movements sometimes ought  to schism or split, even in dramatic (but hopefully not cruel) ways. In Max and Alex’s research, they observed that often ineffective groups and coalitions were being held together out of a sense of obligation, based on the idea that the Left can only succeed through unity. But the history of radical social change indicates that movements don’t automatically win when they are more unified. 

In fact, often organizations and movements might be better served by having better arguments and by splitting on clear ideological and strategic fault-lines. Then each new group can focus on pursuing a sharper, more precise strategy, recruiting different groups of people, and entering into coalitions more clearly and intentionally.

But don’t expect it to be easy. In one of her day jobs, Sarah directs research and does content development for mental health apps and recently learned a lot about the psychology of breakups for one product tailored to those suffering that all-too-human affliction. Our brains store our negative memories of people and things in more diffuse ways, which makes them harder to access. This means we are liable to romanticize the past! And when we’re first falling in love, the part of the brain that is good at identifying threats gets deactivated, which means we only spot problematic aspects  and “toxic traints” of our exes later on... 

The same is likely true of our relationships to social movements, to a degree: it’s likely that at the end of a movement, we’re stuck feeling nostalgic about our political “exes” and still working hard to try to piece together why it can’t work (and maybe never could have).  

The Depressive Position

              All relationships end, sometimes with death, usually for much less dramatic but still hurtful human causes. Most movements fail and fall apart. 

We should enjoy the eros of activism and sustain it while it can last, relying on pleasure, romance, and conviviality where we can. Yet a narrow focus on making activism “fun” in these ways can lead to unrealistic expectations. 

How to hold both things at the same time? Ideally, we would enter what the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, who specialized in the transformation of children into adults, termed the “depressive position”. This is the mature psychological ability to reconcile our painful ambivalence about others, who will always both delight and disappoint us. Part of growing up is recognising that things are neither fully good or fully bad, not worth romanticising nor wholly hating and rejecting. We just have to move forward with attachments knowing they are a mixed bag.

For people who work in movements, it’s important to cultivate romance, friendship, care, curiosity, adaptability and reflexiveness, just as it is key to the success of any human relationship that yearns for liberation. 

We are making a world out of the most impossible of all possible materials: people.

Speaking of people, we spoke to one of our favourites, Lola Olufemi, at the end of this podcast, and heard what she had to say too.

 Listen to the whole podcast for more! You can see show notes, thank yous, key terms and questions to ponder here: http://senseandsolidarity.org/podcast. And of course…