6.3: Action Logic

Note

By Andrew Boyd. Originally published in Beautiful Trouble. https://beautifultrouble.org/toolbox/tool/action-logic

Your action should speak for itself. Its inner logic should be obvious to the outside eye. When a protest has good action logic, its dramatic challenge to power tells a clear and compelling story.

“Actions speak louder than words.”

Have you ever looked at a protest and wondered what the heck these people were so angry about? Perhaps it was a bunch of kids blockading an intersection. Who are they?

What do they want?

With good action logic, nobody needs to ask those questions; an outsider can look at what you’re doing and immediately understand why you’re doing it. For example, people doing a tree-sit so the forest cannot be cut down — the logic is clear and obvious. The action speaks for itself.

Action logic creates powerful stories that move hearts and change minds. Not only is it true that actions speak louder than words, but, particularly in a hostile media climate where activists are often flagrantly misrepresented, it’s important that our actions speak for themselves. It may sound paradoxical, but it often requires lots of thought and care to design actions that make intuitive sense.

Civil disobedience actions — for example the lunch counter sit-ins of the American civil rights movement — tend to have inherent action logic because their purpose is to violate an unjust law in order to highlight exactly that injustice. However, other forms of direct action, which sometimes break laws unrelated to their goal, often need to do some extra work to achieve clear action logic.

Communicative actions also need to foster action logic. The pedestrian death puppets action, in which student activists hung full-sized human foam core cut-outs over a dangerous highway in Beirut to draw attention to pedestrian fatalities, had powerful action logic. So did the single moms in Rhode Island, US, who pressured a public housing official for a day care centre by not just sitting-in at his office, but bringing their kids with them and, for a few hours, turning his office into the daycare centre they needed.

Most successful actions have this kind of inherent, transparent logic. They speak for themselves. When your action has this kind of clarity at its core, then no matter how the target responds or how things play out, the action will continue to make your point and make sense to observers.

Most famous application:

The lunch counter sit-ins during the civil rights movement had remarkable action logic. When legal segregation was enforced, black and white students violated the law by sitting at lunch counters and waiting to be served. Any outsider looking at the act immediately knew why they were there. They didn’t need to carry signs. In fact, their action foreshadowed victory and prefigured the world they wanted to live in: They were living the integration they wanted to.

Activity \(\PageIndex{1}\)

Reading Response Questions

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling. 

1. Explain the concept “action logic”
2. Pick some social action you know about or find one on line and describe the action logic
3. Evaluate what you think its organizers did well and what they could have done better. 

Attributions