activism vs autonomy

Here is the amazon link to 'The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works', a book whose review I just found really insightful. It's by a sociologist who interviewed about 100 committed anti-abortion activists to try to find out about how they got involved and what keeps them going.

The gist is, activism is more often the cause of the pro-lifers' beliefs than the result:

their beliefs about abortion became solidified, important, and fully developed during interactions with other activists after initial activism.

 Three sub things:

1) There are surprising parallels between right wing religious pro-life activism and left wing secular anti-fees activism. For example:

 Activists are also not uniform about how to end abortion; these beliefs create what Munson calls “social movement streams” of mutually exclusive individuals and organizations demarcated by their focus on how to end abortion—whether through formal politics (e.g., lobbying elected officials), direct action (protesting outside abortion clinics), individual outreach (providing counseling through crisis pregnancy centers), or public outreach (trying to teach the general public why abortion is wrong)...These streams structure and cause conflict within the movement, and activists tend to belong to the streams where their initial activism began.

2) Whether or not people join a cause seems to depend less on their pre-activism beliefs than on accidents: happening to attend a meeting, being at a vulnerable point in their life etc:

Rather than being drawn to the movement by strong beliefs about the morality of abortion, many activists’ careers began through direct and often coincidental contact with movement participants at turning points in their lives, or times of transition such as geographical relocation or assuming new roles ... Many of Munson's participants actually held pro-choice beliefs or were indifferent to the issue of abortion before becoming activists ... Even activists who were initially sympathetic to the pro-life movement only had vague and undeveloped ideas about abortion before becoming highly involved in the movement

Activism is often a really good thing - it has caused and is currently causing lots of beneficial political changes, maybe even most of them - but it also predictably reduces your autonomy to such an extent that, whatever your prior views, it is a fair bet that if you turn up at a few pro-life protests you will end up believing abortion is wrong. This strikes me as quite a big issue for movements like anarchism that encourage both activism and autonomy. Also a reason not to demonise EDL members I think: it could have been you!

Anyway I'm fascinated by the whole topic and am now reading the book on google books. Surprisingly enough LSE library doesn't seem to have it...

Also I heard about the book via Rortybomb, which is an incredible blog