Six People You Need To Start A Revolution

Successful change movements run on diversity. Here are the essential skill sets no revolution can win without.

With the 99% Spring up and rolling and set to bring 100,000 new activists to the party this weekend, there's some increased friction between various progressive groups who are working to expand the movement this year.

It's a good time to remember that mass movements are — by design and necessity — big and diverse, encompassing lots of different kinds of people who bring all kinds of skills, resources, interests and priorities to the table. As progressives, we've always believed that that diversity is our most important strength.

There's not enough that can be said about the genius of Occupy at raising America's awareness of the corporatization of our culture, and defining and framing the predations of the 1 percent against the 99 percent as the defining conflict of our age. But now it's time to take the message out of the parks and streets and into the American mainstream. If the goal is to build a truly diverse nationwide movement that will change the foundations of the American economy, getting more established groups like MoveOn.org, Rebuild the Dream and the labor unions involved can only be a good thing.

For the revolution to spread, the Occupy protestors need to be joined by other people — very specific kinds of other people, in fact. Centuries of social change theorists going back to Marx and before have figured out that successful revolutions require certain recurring character types and skill sets. History tells us that the relationships between these very different groups are more often than not fractious and prickly -- and, in fact, revolutions (like the French Revolution) can very easily fail when they're seized and overwhelmed by vicious infighting between people who are nominally on the same side.

(A sober reminder: The Terror was, at its core, a purge against "co-optation": Robespierre was determined to preserve the purity of the revolution at all costs. A majority of the people who went to the guillotine, including, ultimately, Robespierre himself, were on the side of the revolution.)

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