A system's own methods can win victories within it but cannot bring about fundamental change in it.
Lorde made the argument at a 1979 conference in New York marking the anniversary of The Second Sex, in remarks published in Sister Outsider (1984). Criticising a feminist programme that included few Black or lesbian women, she argued that methods borrowed from the structure being opposed could bring temporary gains within it but not change it.
In practice
- A reform movement adopts the hierarchy and secrecy of the institution it opposes and, a decade later, is hard to tell apart from it.
- A team that wants a less political office decides to win by out-manoeuvring the office politicians.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is that methods carry values, so adopting an institution's methods means adopting some of its assumptions. Another is capture: people who master a system's tools acquire a stake in it.
- In its favour
- Describes a familiar pattern of reform movements absorbed by what they set out to change, consistent with research on co-optation and with Michels's iron law.
- Against it
- Many fundamental changes came through a system's own tools: courts, elections and legislation ended legal segregation and extended the franchise. Critics argue the maxim can steer people away from strategies that work.
- Standing
- Compare the Piven–Cloward disruption thesis and Michels's iron law of oligarchy.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- Competing accounts of how power works