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.It follows that the rules themselves often become the focus ofgroup and class contention, including the episodic exercise of disrup-tive power.Thus rules change over time, not only in response to newassertions of the power yielded by wealth and force, but also inresponse to mobilizations from below.As a result, while rules generallytend to inhibit the activation of disruptive power, some rules may alsoenable its use, or they at least may provide legitimacy and thereforesome protection for the exercise of interdependent power from below.22Only consider how regularly social movements go into battle chargingthat the actions or policies they are protesting are wrong because theyviolate the rules prescribed by law or custom.Nevertheless, a broad generalization emerges from these observa-tions.Because cooperative social relations are institutionalized in waysthat reflect reigning power inequalities, the actualization of interde-pendent power is often conditional on the ability of people to defy therules and dominant interpretations governing social relations. THE NATURE OF DISRUPTIVE POWER | 29Third, contributions to ongoing economic and political activitiesare often made by many individuals, and these multiple contributionsmust be coordinated for the effective mobilization of disruptive power.Workers, villagers, parishioners, or consumers have to act in concertbefore the withdrawal of their contributions exerts a disruptive effecton the factory or the church or the merchant.This is the classical prob-lem of solidarity, of organizing for joint action, that workers, voters, orcommunity residents confront when they try to deploy their leverageover those who depend on them, for their labor, or their votes, or theiracquiescence in the normal patterns of civic life.As numerous analysts have argued, the social relations created by astable institutional context may go far toward solving the coordinationproblem.When village social organization was relatively intact,Barrington Moore argued, it provided the solidarity that enabled peopleto act against the new impositions associated with the fall of the ancienrégime.23 E.P.Thompson made a similar point about the tight socialorganization of the English village, which was crucial first in the mount-ing of Luddite assaults on factories, and later in protecting the assailantsfrom informants.24 On the other hand, the importance of underlyingsocial organization is often overstated.25 Street mobs can mobilizequickly, taking advantage of public gatherings such as markets or hang-ings or simply crowded streets, and the participants may not know eachother personally, although they are likely to be able to read the signs ofgroup, class, or neighborhood identity that the crowd displays.Fourth, as noted earlier, social life is complicated, and political actiontakes form within a matrix of social relations.Those who try to mobi-lize disruptive power must overcome the constraints typically imposedby their multiple relations with others, as when would-be peasant insur-gents are constrained by the threat of religious excommunication, orwhen labor insurgents are constrained by family ties.English Methodistpreachers invoked for their parishioners the awesome threat of ever-lasting punishment in hell that would be visited on Luddite insurgentsin the early nineteenth century.Conversely, however, multiple ties may facilitate disruptive powerchallenges.26 The church that ordinarily preaches obedience to worldlyauthority may sometimes, for whatever reasons, encourage the rebels, 30 | CHAPTER 2as occurred during the course of the Solidarity movement in Poland,or during the civil rights movement in the United States.Wives andmothers who typically urge caution may become allies in the insur-gency, as in the fabled film Salt of the Earth.Even state authorities mayhelp to foment insurgency, as the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvaniadid when he told assembled steelworkers in Homestead in 1936 thatsteel was now open territory for union organizers and that they couldcount on government relief funds if they were to strike.27 Later thatsummer, the governor himself told a Labor Day rally in Pittsburgh thatnever during his administration would state troops be used to break astrike, and the skies returned the crowd s response. 28Fifth, when people attempt to exercise disruptive or interdepen-dent power, they have to see ways of enduring the suspension of thecooperative relationship on which they also depend, and to withstandany reprisals they may incur.This is less evident for the participants inmobbing or rioting, whose action is usually short-lived, and who arelikely to remain anonymous.But when workers strike, they need tofeed their families and pay the rent, and consumer boycotters need to beable to get by for a time without the goods or services they are refus-ing to purchase.Sixth and finally, people have to be able to withstand or face downthe threat of exit that is typically provoked by disruption.Husbandsconfronting rebellious wives may threaten to walk out, employers con-fronting striking workers may threaten to relocate or to replace work-ers, and so on.Even rioters risk precipitating the exit of partners tocooperative relationships, as when small businesses fled from slumneighborhoods in the wake of the ghetto riots of the 1960s
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