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Many a times we have made a reference to movement politics and we get the usual answer it does not work. I will admit, if I was readying traditional elite histories, I'd be with you. Alas i am not. So let's explore some of those movements that relied on movement politics.
The first of this is actually the American Revolution. No, it did not emerge athena like from Zeus's head. No, the founding fathers did not meet in Philadelphia just because. They were part of a MOVEMENT that started a generation before. Gary Nash goes into this history very wel, as well as Howard Zinn. It was a series of assaults on the American colonies that led to this. It ranged from land rights, in New Jersey, to the First Great Revival, to the attacks on Boston's government, and of course the Stamp Act. But it was a MOVEMENT. If it was just the founders at Philadelphia without a reason for that, we'd still be subjects to the crown. and they would have hung high.
THen there is another movement, that one to end slavery. It started BEFORE the revolution. It took a few decades, ending with the Civil War. Those who started it, the Quakers, in Botston and Philadelphia, were long buried by the time it succeeded.
But... I can hear it... Civil Rights... it climaxed in the 60s, but it started in the 1920s.
Women sufragists, it did not finish with the women who started it. Susan B Anthony never cast a vote.
Labor... that is the longest, and it took over a century for it to finally succeed.
We will need to realize that if we are to succeed, we will not see the fruit of them labors. This is not a video game, nor an instant movie. In real life, if a movement is worth it, you do it for the end result, even if you never get to see the results of it. The American Revolution was the most instant gratification of those movements, and even that one... took over forty years.
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