| Note: This relates to an earlier post in my Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing series, "Social Class and Social Action."
Administrative Progressivism
This is the model that mostly won the day in the bureaucracies of the world after the turn of the 20th century. This is an expert model-"we know more than you so we should tell you what to do."
At best, the administrative progressives envisioned a paternal process of social change, as those few who know best create a better world for the ignorant masses. At worst they bought into the "scientific management" movement promoted by Taylor, in which workers became "hands" and middle-class managers became the "minds" of industrial work. Even Taylor, however, seemed to believe that this mind/hands model would end up being best for everyone-because it was the most efficient model, everyone would end up getting more for less.
At least some of what Silver puts on the side of the "rationalist" progressives seems to imply this kind of expert control model, as he indicates himself: "prone to elitism."
Collaborative Progressives
This group drew from the models of progressive classrooms, professional associations, and the less hierarchical relationships between white-collar workers. They envisioned a society designed around the collaborative method, seeking a flat "democratic" society in which everyone could participate equally in the collaborative development of a better world.
In the collaborative vision, individuals were supposed to actualize themselves by contributing their unique capacities and perspectives to shared efforts.
John Dewey, the most sophisticated proponent, acknowledged that he couldn't figure out how this model derived from small groups would work on a broad societal scale-in fact he showed pretty conclusively in The Public and Its Problems that it couldn't. But he and other collaborative progressives were unwilling to give up on their essentially utopian visions. He kept hoping that even though no one had ever been able to solve the problem of how a local model of collaboration would provide a structure to organize an enormous society, someone might solve it in the future.
Why wouldn't he and other collaborative progressives give up in the face of overwhelming evidence that their vision was unworkable?
The crucial problem was one of social lag. If they gave in to a vision of the world that assumed the existence of unending conflict was an inevitable part of human society at least for the foreseeable future, as unions and other working-class movements did, they would have to teach people social practices that would ill prepare them to achieve the kind of utopia they wanted. Teaching people in society to "fight" would point them away from the kinds of collaborative practices they valued, and actually make it more difficult (perhaps impossible) to ever achieve their utopia.
Thus, in their classrooms and elsewhere, they were willing to take the risk (for the working class, among others) that not teaching them to fight in solidarity as mass collectives would doom them to long term oppression. (See this article (paywall, sorry) for a more detailed overview.)
Personalist Progressives
The personalists emerged out of the romantic stream of thought in America. Like collaborative progressives, they sought to develop egalitarian communities, but they were less interested in joint work and collective action. Instead, they sought to develop social contexts in which each individual engaged authentically with every other, and educational context that sought to foster individual expression to the fullest extent possible. The personalists also envisioned a society built on this model, but didn't worry too much about the specifics. They hoped that social change would just "happen" if they created the right kind of persons. But they mostly didn't sweat the details too much.
Where the collaborative progressives focused on the need for people to work together on joint projects, the personalists focused on the importance of allowing people to actualize their individuality within egalitarian communities.
In their education and in their social theory, the personalists focus on a world without charismatic leaders, without leaders at all in the sense that a working-class union or other standard action organization would understand them. Theirs is a view of individual actualization within a "beloved community"--a term used by SNCC in the south, taken up by SDS in the North, and drawn from one of the 1920s personalists, Randolph Bourne. Interestingly, these folks were not professors but independent intellectuals, as were the writers of the 1960s, for whom the key thinker was Paul Goodman. There are some fascinating similarities across these two eras that have not been fully explored.
This romantic vision emerged most powerfully in the 20th century in the 1920s in the work of the "young intellectuals": Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford (who was active in the 60s) and Waldo Frank. Mostly forgotten. Then it reemerged in the 1960s in the highly intellectual and anti-leader organizing models of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), for whom key intellectual influences were Ella Baker and Paul Goodman.
The evidence of the impact of SNCC in the South is that it did have a somewhat transformative impact on what African Americans in some areas saw as "possible" for them, and did create a strong base for future organizing in some areas, but it did not (and was not supposed to) lead to mass action. In Birmingham, actually, SNCC was reduced to begging Martin Luther King (who they disdained, and referred to as "the Lawd" in reference to their opposition to charismatic leaders) to "lead" people on marches. They didn't have the capacity to do so themselves. Importantly, SNCC's effectiveness in pursuing its "beloved community" model largely resulted from their fairly sophisticated combination of collaborative and personalist visions.
In the North, in working-class white neighborhoods, SDS created the almost completely ineffectual ERAP organizations. These failed in large part because they were much more personalist and less "pragmatic" than SNCC, seeking to impose their leaderless vision on those they worked with. They had less of a focus on the pragmatics of joint action. Some groups could hardly ever get anything done--at one point according to Miller, they spent two days discussing whether they should take a day off and go to the beach. An iconic photograph shows one of their key "leaders" gazing intently into the lens, with everyone else falling asleep around her.
In fact, it is hard to imagine particularly effective, strictly personalist political movements. The communes of the counter-culture were probably the best examples of the social implications of personalism. It's no accident that personalists tend not to talk very concretely about social change. (At best, thinkers like Goodman embraced a kind of privileged anarchism, mostly evacuated of any socialist vision.)
Back to Silver
From the perspective I'm discussing, here, it seems clear that Silver is mixing different kinds of progressivism. For example, it is the personalists and not the collaborative administrative progressives that are "difficult to organize," even if collaborative progressives' organization is fairly loose. Other aspects of his dichotomy seem to refer to the administrative progressives alone. More generally, all progressives tend to be optimistic to a fault, although the administratives, of course, have little faith in "the people."
From the way he frames his dichotomy, it seems like Silver is drawing from a particular interpretation of the experience of the 1960s. And his framing not only misunderstands the complexity of progressivism, it mixes in aspects of working-class culture as well. For example, few of the intellectual progressives ever saw politics as "a battle of wills." Nor did they "marshal an army" depending on what he means. The Vietnam War Movement, for example, was less like an "army," and more a loose collection of interrelated individuals and organizations. Administrative progressives run bureaucracies, but still seek rational, collaborative solutions. Labor unions marshal "armies."
To some extent, Silver is mixing up the "personalist" progressives of the SDS and early SNCC era, and the later dogmatic leaders of the Black Power movement and groups like the Weathermen. It is informative to note that the Black Power movement was fundamentally (and explicitly) an urban working-class movement, and that it was the working-class that emerged as increasingly influential in the South (in the form of Deacons for Defense, for example). The early personalists were quite optimistic--they only became cynical later on, and that's when their strategic approach shifted--and many of them simply "dropped out."
And it also raises questions about what exactly Silver means by progressivism. In his discussion of his dichotomy, he equates Marxist perspectives with that of the progressives. But the progressives, as I understand them, have rarely, if ever, been Marxist. As fairly comfortable middle-class professionals, they have never had much interest in attacking capitalism directly. Were the Marxist ideologues who emerged late in the 1960s "progressives?" I don't know the history of that aspect well enough to say, but I doubt it, although they drew from aspects of the "I know better than you" administrative progressive attitude. (Paul-I'll bet you know the Marxist moment better than me-what do you think?)
In this later post, he argues that he was actually talking about "populists" as his "radical" progressives, but that doesn't really capture the distinctions he laid out either. See Paul's detailed discussions of populism here and elsewhere.
Silver is mixing so much up in his analysis that I'm not really sure what he's talking about.
If people are interested in a more nuanced discussion of intersections between different kinds of progressivism and working-class visions of action in the Civil Rights Movement, you can see this draft case study chapter from my book. It shows how these abstractions become intertwined in unexpected ways in the real world.
(FYI my "Social Class and Social Action" book had a contract with a major (not to be named) academic press until I recently told them it was no longer just a philosophy book about John Dewey, and they decided they weren't interested. So now I'm shopping it around again. I'd love to hear if anyone out there has suggestions.)
(Also, I've been too buried to get back to my community organizing series. When I have time that won't take me away from finishing the damn book, I plan to write a two-part series on "The Lie of Lifestyle Activism", a piece on "The Leader Function in Social Action" [taken from the book], and a discussion of the challenges of maintaining volunteer involvement in community organizing, among other topics. See the full series here.) |
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