Part II: The Distortions of Lifestyle Politics (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

by: educationaction

Fri Jul 24, 2009 at 11:00


(This diary builds on the analysis of lifestyle activism in Part I to look at the related phenomena of lifestyle politics, using an example from the black community, based on the book, Black on the Block.  The author of that book, Mary Pattillo, joins us for the discussion.  So I invite everyone to take advantage of this opportunity. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)

In Part I "Self-Delusion and the Lie of Lifestyle Activism,"  I complained that middle-class "political" activity like:

--recycling,
--reducing "carbon footprints," or
--creating a compost piles in the backyard.

rarely contributes in any effective or coherent way to positive social change.  

Why?  Because:

1) Individuals' private acts, however well meant, have little or no impact on the actions of others (if no one knows you recycle, how does that encourage anyone else to recycle?); and

2) While publicly modeling actions can affect people, there is little evidence that a righteous lifestyle will lead many others to pick it up unless they were already so inclined.  

Real social change comes when people gain enough (usually collective) power to make structural changes in social structures or on the incentives that affect individual and group action.

Occasionally, a group of early adopters may get together and start actually organizing to generate enough power to make changes like these.  

But when this happens, the results can be perverse.  Take recycling, for example:

Early recyclers came together and convinced governments to pass laws to support and mandate recycling.  In this way they made real changes in people's daily lives.  It turns out, however, that recycling is an incredibly inefficient approach to reducing waste.  (Reducing waste on the front end, for example, is much more efficient) In fact, the recycling movement made its most important impact on American society by miseducating people about social change.

The impetus to "recycle" reinforces the problematic idea that alterations in one's individual lifestyle actually make much of a difference in the larger world.  Far from encouraging effective social action, the recycling movement has actually degraded progressives' capacity to generate real power.


In this follow-up diary, I look beyond the general arguments of Part I .

I discuss a fascinating case study of the ways lifestyle activism and politics can have distorting effects on social change, drawing from a recent book by the sociologist Mary Pattillo.  In Black on the Block she examines what happened when middle-class African Americans used lifestyle strategies in their effort to "reclaim" an impoverished central city neighborhood, North Kenwood-Oakland, in Chicago.  This example is especially fascinating because it shows how class-based preferences for lifestyle activism functioned among a group of middle-class African Americans also grappling with racial inequality.  

As a special treat, Dr. Pattillo has agreed to join our discussion.  A professor at Northwestern University, Dr. Pattillo is one of the most sophisticated analysts of the relationship between race and class in America, among other issues.  She is new to this odd world of blog dialogue, so keep that in mind.  

After the flip I summarize part of my argument from Part I, and then examine how Pattillo's fascinating case study helps illuminate and complicate my arguments.  
educationaction :: Part II: The Distortions of Lifestyle Politics (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

What is/isn't Lifestyle Activism


Eating organic food for your own health is not lifestyle activism.  Buying a Prius because it gets better gas mileage or because you think it's cool is not lifestyle activism.

Lifestyle activism occurs only when people eat organic food because they believe they are participating in a larger ecological movement, or drive Priuses to reduce their carbon footprint and to encourage others to do the same through their example.  When people seek to contribute to social change on a broader scale through their lifestyles, that's lifestyle activism.

Lifestyle Activism vs. Lifestyle Politics

While I was writing this diary, I realized that I needed to distinguish between

"lifestyle activism:" individual lifestyle changes designed to contribute to the betterment of the world, and

"lifestyle politics:" collective action that emerges out of lifestyle activism.  


Recycling a can is lifestyle activism.  Fighting to pass a law to make other people recycle is lifestyle politics.

Part I was about lifestyle "activism."  This diary focuses more on the dangers of lifestyle "politics."

Politics and Identity


As I noted in Part I, people often participate in social movements because the role of "activist" is a core aspect of their personal identity.  To be "themselves" they need to engage in social action.  The sources of this identity-based impetus to participation can emerge from a range of sources, including parental influence, personal history, or culture.  

But there is a catch-22 involved in the link between identity and political action.

On the one hand, an internalized sense that one "is" an activist can foster long-term commitments to social movements even in fallow periods.  If to be "me," I have to be an activist, I will not stop looking for opportunities to participate even when social action seems unlikely to succeed.  These kinds of activists can provide long-term, durable leadership in organizations.

On the other hand, identity-driven activism seems likely to focus on activities that do not conflict with other aspects of a person's identity.  Identity-activists will seek avenues for participation that integrate well with "who" else they are.  

Thus the catch-22.  Identity-driven activism may be more durable in the face of disappointment.  But it can be so durable, so unlinked to pragmatism, that the effectiveness of the activities chosen may not matter that much.  As a result, when there are significant effects, these can be enormously problematic-potentially causing more problems than they solve.

Lifestyle politics emerges out of this tension.  

Bringing a Middle-Class Lifestyle to the "Underclass"


Pattillo's book, Black on the Block tells the story of black middle-class professionals who moved back into the inner-city to "reclaim" it.  Like missionaries entering so-called lesser-developed regions of the world, the key tool these settlers bring with them to foster social change is their culture.  They bring themselves as models of better ways to act and be.  

(Pattillo's argument is much richer and broader than my summary, here.  For example, the intervention of middle-class African Americans is facilitated by commonalities of African American culture and histories of connection with the working-class.)  

As Pattillo notes, work on inner-city poverty over the last few decades has provided cover for this kind lifestyle activism.   William Julius Wilson , for example, has argued that a key variable sustaining long-term inner-city poverty is the lack of employed role-models.  While Wilson did not necessarily intend this, by formulating the problem of poverty in this way, he allowed a slippage between two key sources of poverty: one focused on the effects of social structures, and "the other on individual behavior" which are "not easily separated."  For those so inclined, then, Wilson's analysis can buttress beliefs that "poverty" should be "attributed to bad behavior" (Pattillo, 84-5).

A Desire to Be Part of the Solution


Pattillo argues that many middle-class blacks see themselves as part of a common "black" community with the working class, noting that "two-thirds of blacks believe that their fate is linked to that of other black people" (97).  As a result, "middle-class blacks" often believe that they have "an obligation to help the black poor" (97).  In fact, Pattillo suggests many middle-class blacks feel significant "guilt" about their inability to alleviate the "persistence of black poverty and suffering" (102).  This is a very different perspective than that held by most middle-class whites.

At the same time, however, "blacks with higher incomes (but not those with more education) are more likely to oppose policies aimed at economic distribution."  

For some middle-class blacks, therefore, lifestyle activism presents itself as a strategy for addressing poverty without actually engaging with the real structural causes of poverty.  Through lifestyle activism, they can reclaim "a poor black neighborhood with the flag of middle-class behaviors," while staying within their own comfort zone and avoiding the challenge of real redistributive efforts.  

It takes concerted and collective action to redirect the economy or politics at the local or national level, whereas it only takes parking your BMW in front of your house to be an example of financial  success for your less well-off neighbors. (Pattillo, p. 97)

Distorted Understandings and Ineffective Solutions


Pattillo notes that "the broken windows theory-the notion that disorder leads to crime-is all but discredited" in by extensive research.  However, it "has thoroughly permeated lay perspectives on crime" (262).  

In other words, while it is the wrong explanation, it is nonetheless the kind of explanation many people want to be correct.  

Why?  

In the case of the middle-class, because if the problem is "disorder," then a part of the answer can involve displays of middle-class social "respectability and . . . propriety" (262).  The broken windows theory of poverty justifies the solution they are most comfortable with.

Unintended Consequences and Middle-Class Organizing


Of course members of the middle class are perfectly capable of participating in collective struggles over power.  Try to locate a group home in a middle-class suburb, or de-track a suburban high school, or cut down a beloved suburban oak tree, and you will quickly see the wrath of the relatively privileged.  

Unless it sees its own privileges under attack, however, as Fred Rose notes, the middle class prefers to educate others about the truth and to model correct action.  

As middle-class settlers moved into North Kenwood-Oakland, the key problem that affected them directly was what they perceived as unacceptable levels of crime and disorder.  While their active efforts to alter this state of affairs did "improve" the community in some concrete ways, these changes did not address the core structural causes of the poverty that most affected their working-class neighbors.  In fact the easiest solution to problems of disorder was simply "to drive out what is seen as the offending class" (268).  

While the settlers came to "reclaim" the neighborhood for everyone," then, when they got to North Kenwood-Oakland, they ended up expending much of their energy to make it more comfortable for themselves.  They sought to make it reflective of their own understanding of the "correct" urban lifestyle.

To improve their new neighborhood, the settlers actively supported three key strategies.  They sought to limit public housing, they supported strict screening for new low-income renters in "mixed" public housing, and they brought in police from the University of Chicago to supplement the local district police.

Lifestyle Becomes Criminalized


For our purposes, the results of the anti-crime efforts are the most interesting.  As Pattillo notes, the university police specialized in "'quality of life' policing."  And as more egregious examples of crime fell, the university police and the settlers themselves increasingly targeted lifestyle issues.  

They sought to control activities traditionally prevalent among working-class members of the community.  Increasingly, sitting out in front of one's house because of a lack of air conditioning, hanging out on the streets and in parks because of a lack of other options, engaging in late night activities because of second and third shift jobs, etc., became "problems."  As Pattillo notes:  

Once headway has been made in lowering crime rates and erasing its signpost, the rhetoric easily shift[ed] . . . to the new terrain of lifestyles, values, tastes, and behaviors. . . .  The social and political clout, financial leverage, and activism of the gentrifiers ensure that their vision of appropriate neighborhood behavior reign. (295)  

Ironies of Lifestyle Politics in North Kenwood-Oakland


Many middle-class black settlers came to North Kenwood-Oakland as part of an honest desire to reclaim the neighborhood for everyone.  They sought to improve the lives of other oppressed African Americans.  

But their lifestyle politics ended up feeding a focus on the outward actions and cultures of the long-time residents, on getting them to act more like middle-class people, regardless of whether this performance would be actually linked to an improvement in their life conditions, or even possible without the middle-class material resources.  The settlers ended up seeking to recreate standard middle-class communities in which individual and social problems were either pushed out to other neighborhoods or kept behind closed doors.  

The deepest irony of this strategy of exclusion and control is that it is likely in the end to lead to the class gentrification of their neighborhood-just what many of the settlers believed they were trying to avoid when they arrived.

As Pattillo notes, the "new residents of North Kenwood-Oakland did not want to displace anybody."  In fact, in a perfect statement of the dangers of lifestyle activism, of the desire to be an "activist" without clear reference to the actual impact of this activism, she points out that "if all the poor people moved out, there would be no one who needed role modeling, no destitute neighborhood to reclaim, nobody to 'protect'" (99).

If they had actually succeeded in their effort to eliminate "difference" in their community, the settlers would have lost the capacity to join in common cause with the working-class residents of North Kenwood-Oakland.  They would have eliminated the possibility of discharging the "obligation they felt to help the black poor" (97).  They would need to move to a new neighborhood, become settlers again, if they wanted to be able to live an integrated identity supported by lifestyle activism.  Lifestyle politics would, if fully successful, destroy their capacity to engage in lifestyle activism and politics, and thus the identity-supporting potential of their new neighborhood.

The Distortions of Lifestyle Activism


As with the example of recycling, Pattillo's case study shows how pursuing strategies that fit well with "who" one is can have quite perverse results.  In Part I, I focused on how ineffective most lifestyle activism is.  The North Kenwood-Oakland and recycling examples show that lifestyle activism can generate real power for social change when it is transformed into lifestyle politics.  But it often ends up serving the lifestyle ends of activists and not the working-class people these strategies were seeking to help.

In the case of recycling, cadres of environmentalists created systems to encourage other people to engage in the kind of lifestyle activism they preferred themselves, with little reference to what would actually make a significant impact on the environment.  They ended up creating opportunities for lifestyle activism, and used the State to publicly validate the importance of their own lifestyle strategy.  As a result of their efforts, for example, kids in school now learn that setting up recycling boxes in the hallways is a significant contribution to social improvement.

In the case of North Kenwood-Oakland, middle-class settlers started by trying to reduce poverty and suffering by modeling a middle-class lifestyle for others, leaning on extremely problematic assumptions about the causes of poverty.  As in the recycling example, this lifestyle approach ended up turning into an effort to enforce lifestyle changes for others (making them change or pushing them out) whether this had any impact on actually improving others' lives or not.  As in recycling, changing others' lifestyles became the goal instead of a tool for addressing the ostensible core problem (poverty).

A non-lifestyle approach would have forced the settlers to go outside of their comfort zone.  A focus on things that would alter the life and employment chances of their existing neighbors would have required them to do more than just park a BMW outside their door.  But it would also have required them to do things that created identity tensions for them instead of simply supporting "who" they were when they arrived.  It would have involved fights for jobs and training instead of surface appearances and cultural mores.  It would have required work with poor people instead (or at very least in addition to) of efforts to reduce the predominance of poor people in the neighborhood as a strategy to improve the chances of the fewer poor people that remained.  To be sure, some new residents in North Kenwood-Oakland worked at these levels as well, but they could have been much more successful if the lifestyle activists had joined them.

Conclusion


At the end of Part I , I noted that:

If you want to make real social change, and you are a middle-class professional, you will almost inevitably need to get out of your comfort zone.  

It is likely that anything you actually want to do, anything that fits easily into your daily life, is not really worth much effort from a pragmatic point of view.

If you want to contribute to social change, you will need to face up to the fact that (unless you are very rich) what you do as an isolated individual DOES NOT MATTER.


Here, I extend on this conclusion:

Lifestyle activism rarely contributes much to social change.  It is problematic to the extent it bleeds off energy that could otherwise be used for effective action.

Lifestyle politics in contrast can be quite powerful. But in some ways this makes lifestyle politics even more problematic than lifestyle activism.  Ironically, the results of lifestyle politics can end up being quite destructive to the progressive aims they apparently sought to achieve.

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Part II: The Distortions of Lifestyle Politics (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing) | 100 comments
getting out our comfort zones (4.00 / 6)
First, thanks for that very good summary of my work.

I still live in North Kenwood-Oakland, the neighborhood where my book Black on the Block is set,and the examples of lifestyle politics continue everyday.  And not only do residents deploy such politics, but so do public agencies.

The head of the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA--the agency that builds and manages public housing in Chicago) has been coming to our community meetings for the past few months. He comes because community leaders have complained about the behavior of residents in the public housing buildings in the neighborhood, and about the upkeep of the buildings.  

When he comes, he repeats the same commitment: the CHA will demand of its residents that they conform to whatever are the behavioral standards of the neighborhood (with the frequent assumption that the "standards" are the ones set
by homeowners).  

This is right in line with lifestyle politics. Demand good behavior (e.g., no loitering, no loud music, no parties in the park, no children playing like kids without adults, no public drinking, close the parks at 9pm) and this will be good for public housing residents and their neighbors (including those who already "act right" who live in public housing and those outside of it).  

Most attendees at the meeting are happy to hear the CHA's commitment to making these demands and punishing (maybe even kicking out) residents who don't comply, even if that's
ultimately bad for those families.

But the head of the CHA knows that such lifestyle politics is a thin way to address the issues facing poor and working class families. So, at one meeting, he announced the CHA policy that they pay the community college tuition of all of their residents.

In response to that proclamation, I heard groans and exasperated sighs from the audience.

No one spoke out explicitly, but my interpretation of this disgruntled reaction (from some not all audience members) was that they felt that this was yet another example of public housing residents getting something for free that other people don't get.  Another free ride. Another government hand out. Another withdrawal from the contributions that "taxpayers" make into the public coffers.

Of course, to my mind, to the contrary, this kind of intervention is one that gets at the root causes of poverty (low education) and can lead to the "self-sufficiency" that people desire (as long as we also demand living wage jobs, support health coverage for all, make child care available, and make housing more affordable).  But, because to pay for community college tuition requires outlays of public dollars, people who are comfortable often resist such "sacrifices."

Of course the same thing is playing out right now in the health care reform debates. Earlier this week, I sat among a group of upper income professionals and one person moaned about the proposal to create a surtax on the wealthiest Americans to fund the expansion of health insurance coverage. "Careful, you're telling me a bit too much about how much you make," I joked, since the proposal would only levy the tax on individuals making more than $280k and households making more than $350k.  

But the sentiment was clear: I don't want to sacrifice anything to create greater social equality and to increase general social welfare.  

To make real change, we all have to get out of our comfort zones.

Those of us who are comfortable have to sacrifice. We have to not begrudge public housing residents for getting free community college tuition (paid for by the publicly funded CHA). And, even more, we have to argue FOR housing for poor families in our neighborhoods, and (to give a Chicago example) demand that if we can give a $500 million guarantee to the International Olympic Committee (in secret) then why can't we guarantee that money to schools or violence reduction or parks or mental health?

Lifestyle politics only plays dress up: dress up poor and working class neighborhoods in coffee shops; dress up poor and working people in hushed street conversations, pants pulled up to their navels, with water bottles in their hands.

But they still struggle to pay their bills, get to work, and give their kids good educations.  

Those of us who are comfortable economically have to get uncomfortable politically to make a real difference.

--Mary Pattillo

Thanks Mary! (4.00 / 2)
First for the work you've done, and second for agreeing to discuss it with us.

The response to the community college tuition payment raises a number of questions for me, the first of which concerns the almost diametrically opposed response we've seen on a few occasions when wealthy individuals have promised to pay for college if students graduate from high school. When such offers are made, they are almost universally lauded and regarded as exemplary gestures of civic virtue.  The contrast here is quite dramatic.

You point to another contrast--that with business subsidies, in this case for the Olympics.  It seems quite clear that what is being done in each of these cases gets seen in terms of a broader context of assumptions that are largely conservative, business-oriented and unquestioned.  But I'm saying this from a considerable social distance.  I wonder how this seems to you?

A second question I have is whether any of the middle-class blacks who've moved into the neighborhood have developed any sort of mentoring relationships, or any sort of involvement that would lead to more targeted support of individual youth?  And if so, do any of these people have any differences in their views?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
business oriented assumptions (4.00 / 3)
Paul,

I think you are right that people laud the generosity of wealthy individuals and non-profits who pay college tuition if kids graduate from high school. But this does not come from the public kitty, and thus does not require any "sacrifice" by "taxpayers."

And I think you're right on the second point -- that basically "corporate welfare" is seen much more positively than cash or any other kind of assistance to poor families. We always buy into the idea that the economic growth generated by such investments as the Olympics will have a much greater impact than direct investments in individual families.  The allure of the "this will create jobs" language is seen most clearly in the debates around locating new Wal-Mart stores in central cities.  There are deep schisms between community activists who want those jobs (and retail options) no matter what, and others who say that no jobs is better than hundreds of crappy jobs.  But the jobs generation promise is what motivates people to support various kinds of corporate welfare.

Finally, on your last question about middle class blacks who have created mentoring relationships -- definitely. The somewhat negative story emphasized here is only half the story I tell in my book, which is more broadly about the "middleman" role played by middle class blacks. They both provide positive resources and act as hands-on mentors and role models AND simultaneously serve as lifestyle police.  

[ Parent ]
On This Last Point (4.00 / 2)
Is there some sort of relationship?  Do those who get more involved in doing something--meaning that they actually do make some sort of sacrifice--tend to have any differences in terms of understanding the downside of the lifestyle policing side of things?

And a related question--what sort of feedback, if any, have you gotten from the neighborhood about your writing?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
There is evidence that doing can come before believing (4.00 / 1)
THat if you get people to act, that then changes their understanding of what is possible and what should be done.  The question is what kind of action would address these distorted beliefs.  The voyeuristic experience of volunteering in a soup kitchen doesn't do it.  The experience of reading Kozol's Savage Inequalities doesn't do it.  Clearly I think that we need to provide more experiences in collective action across class/race.  But this is enormously difficult to do and the resources just haven't been there in most places to make it happen.  

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)
[ Parent ]
The core question is how (4.00 / 4)
What can we do that will help a larger % of people understand how their own privilege distorts their view of what needs to be done?  

I'm not talking about huge shifts, here.  But it seems to me that even small shifts in the perspectives of those with the capacity to be significant leaders could make a difference.  

Many of the people you describe do, in fact, care a lot about making a difference for the less privileged.  But at the same time they have convinced themselves that actions that--when you look at them even a little bit honestly--are mostly self-serving and ineffective.  

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
books like kozol's (4.00 / 1)
I think the most powerful way to change people's perspective is to remind them of the humanity of folks who struggle everyday against serious odds. Jonathon Kozol's books on education (Shame of the Nation, for example), work to do this. And Barbara Ehrenreich's books Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch are other good examples. Movies and tv and visual journalism would be even better. And talking to people face to face is the best. The more we can convey this humanity of poor and working class people (and that no matter how virtuous and hard-working they are they still hit up against societal barriers to making ends meet) the more I think people's minds can be changed.  

And that's why I actually do think that many middle class black professionals have a certain empathy on this front because the data show that middle class blacks are more likely to have a poor sibling than middle class whites, and are more likely to have grown up poor. This familiarity creates the kind of empathy that is important.

But it ain't easy. I think I have the right perspective on some of these things, but really acting boldly and getting out of my comfort zone ain't easy. I don't want to march (especially if the weather's bad). And arguing for universal national health care (as opposed to what is being suggested now) often feels like a really futile cause.  

I write in my book that the most die-hard public housing activists began to be severely ostracized and people thought they were paranoid.  They looked crazy arguing for something that had come to be so vilified in Chicago and across the country. But they were arguing instead for the principal that people have a right to decent, safe, affordable housing in a country as rich as ours.

[ Parent ]
Years ago (4.00 / 1)
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men had that effect on me. So did almost anything by Studs Terkel, and A Letter From Birmingham Jail, among many others.

Ideas matter, even if it does take a near cataclysm to persuade a politically significant number of people to act on them.

[ Parent ]
The ideas do matter in helping us understand (4.00 / 1)
that there is a problem.  But they don't seem to make that much difference in generating effective action.

I think Mary's point about William J. Wilson's work is right on target.  He didn't exactly say that providing role models was a solution to inner-city poverty.  But people read him that way.  They wanted to read him that way.

Or Upton Sinclair's the Jungle which led to the food and drug administration but not unions for suffering workers.

Or Kozol's Savage Inequalities which seemed to have little actual impact on the kinds of problems he discussed.  In fact, a key part of that book was his discussion about how even when lawsuits were won around school funding, these were inevitably subverted.

Ideas are part of the puzzle, but "we" professionals like to think that they have more power than they do.  It's changing people's embodied sense of what they should do and of what is possible and of what is effective that is necessary.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
The challenge is (4.00 / 2)
that since so many of us spend so much of our day working, in a world where ever more work is required to acquire ever more consumer goods, where can political action be fit into people's list of priorities?

Indeed, i'm feeling kind of guilty now that perhaps the internet (allowing us to be angry on line) has also supplanted any energy or willingness to get out of our comfort zone to act politically radical.  how easy it has been to point and click and add my name to various moveon.org demands for more progressive policies. but that's definitely not out of my comfort zone.

[ Parent ]
Yes (4.00 / 1)
Although there is something to be said for sending $ to Moveon.  It is a contribution to a collective group that might actually make a difference.  In fact, I bet it's money they really want when you sign these petitions more than they want names.  My suspicion.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)
[ Parent ]
My Problem With MoveOn (4.00 / 1)
is that they don't seem to have any discernible organizing strategy over the long run.  If you have that many people willing to at least do something, then doesn't it make sense to give a lot of thought about how to leverage them into doing more?  Even without thinking about moving people out of their comfort zones, this would seem to be elementary.

And, of course, they are ideally situated for supporting people in moving out of their comfort zones.  But if they can't even strategize about leveraging involvement in baby steps, then what are the chances of that?

God, if only they had 1/10th the killer instinct of Focus on the Family!

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Are individuals in our society really "isolated"? (0.00 / 0)
Certainly, some feel isolated, some feel totally alone. But, how many other people are working every day to allow each of us to maintain the lifestyle that we pursue? Whether want to admit it or not, we are dependent on others for our very existence.

100's? Thousands? As much as you might like to separate people from the results of their actions so that you can use that isolated straw person to construct your arguments, the interconnectedness of human societies is a real thing.

No argument about the "comfort zone" issue, but that's a different concept than your embrace of the mythological "isolated individual".

I'm not sure this changes anything else you talk about, but its a bit difficult to for me to comprehend an argument that is based on this kind of misconception. Truthfully, despite reading most of your posts, I don't grasp what point you are trying to make. Well, beyond, the "get out of your comfort zone" thing.


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

Not Sure What You're Saying Here (0.00 / 0)
The point wasn't that we are isolated, in terms of living like self-sufficient hermits.  The isolation referred to was that of how we act:

what you do as an isolated individual DOES NOT MATTER.

This is about as clear as can be.  And I know you're no dummy.  So something deeper must be bothering you.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I don't buy that statement (4.00 / 1)
On a number of levels. 1) the concept of an isolated individual, even in actions, is a myth. So accepting that frame undercuts the rest of the argument from my perspective.

2) If there is no such thing as an isolated individual, then the statement that the actions of that hypothetical being "do not matter" has no basis.

3) This statement is offered with no support, only the emphatic insistence that it is accurate.

4) Alternatively, if we buy the concept that human behaviors can be modeled more or less accurately by mathematics and if we accept that chaos theory and non-euclidian geometries are valid mathematical concepts, then we have to get rid of the notion that any of us act in isolation. If the fluttering of a butterfly's wing in Arizona can influence the weather in Moscow, then telling folks that the actions they take in their own lives "do not matter" is clearly inaccurate.

5) Many implicitly accept the opposite view on a regular basis, albeit when the overall tone suits their purposes. The "lifestyle choices" of Americans that promote urban and suburban sprawl, over-consumption of resources, and waste of valuble assets are cited as root causes of the nation's, even the world's, problems. Yet, by the analyses presented here, we are told that our actions do not matter. Why should only the negative aspects of our "lifestyles" add into the nature of our culture and not the positive? Is this some new form of nihilism?

Maybe its a perspective issue. I don't see such division between lifestyle and politics. If you're not living your politics, what principles guide your lifestyle choices? Isn't that what, "walking the talk" means?


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

[ Parent ]
Isolated Individual (4.00 / 4)
In an absolute sense, you are correct.  But we are not speaking about absolutes, here.  We are talking about the relative conditions of a particular kind of action.  

When I recycle a can in my own home and no one knows it, that seems as much like "isolated" action as I can imagine.  The action is both largely pointless (who cares if I recycle the can) and ineffectual on a social level (no one knows I do it so no one is influenced).

Further, individuals can be more or less isolated.  For example, poor communities early in the 20th century were much more organized in different ways than they are today for a range of reasons.  It is accurate to say that in a relative sense, poor people in the inner city are more isolated.  And this is a critical problem for efforts to generate collective action.

You may keep fluttering your butterfly wing in the privacy of your own home.  I am not going to place much hope in its impact.

The point is not nihilism, but the opposite.  The realization that different kinds of actions have different kinds of effects in the world.  And that when we praise ourselves for recycling a can we are being not nihilist, but narcissistic.  We are taking much more credit than we deserve.

If you walk the walk in your own home, but don't get out of your comfort zone to make real change for people who are really suffering, frankly I don't care if you walk the walk.  If you throw out cans in your own home but work to actively change the lives of those who are suffering, I'm much more interested in you.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
Well, when you say it like that (0.00 / 0)
it makes alot more sense.

Still, if we accept for a moment that recycling cans is, overall, a net benefit to the world, then whether it is done privately, publically, or for financial incentive, is irrelevant because a good thing was done. That is almost the opposite of saying that individual actions "do not matter". In fact, its saying that individual motivations do not matter, as long as the actions are positive.

The issue of whether, or not, recycling cans is a net benefit to the environment is another question. So, if your point is that practioners of "lifestyle politics" are lacking because the actions they take are not, on the whole, positive I encourage you to make that point more directly. No need to get caught up in whole issue of individuals and isolation.


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

[ Parent ]
Recycling is not enough of a net (4.00 / 1)
benefit to spend a lot of resources trying to change how people "are" so that they recycle.  But it's what people want to "be" so we focus on it and ignore more effective efforts.

The isolation issue remains important, because it's collective efforts that generate the power necessary to make structural changes that, IMHO, is most important.  So the belief that we can do things individually and that will make an impact becuase lots of other individuals are (we hope) doing it is problematic.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
Then recycling is not a good example (0.00 / 0)
I'll agree that collective action is likely to be more effective than non-collective action. That's almost a non-brainer. But where you lose me is when you conclude that just because this is so, individual actions mean nothing.

I don't even have to rehash the butterfly effect and how that concept pretty much makes your postulate of an isolated individual a quaint, out-dated, thoroughly discredited myth. As an example, consider our current conversation. We could convince ourselves that we are two individuals engage in a serious discussion of important topics. But, how many other human beings does it take for us to have this conversation in this format? Not only the site managers, the folks that maintain the servers that host this site, the people that wrote the software, the people that designed and built our computers, and so on. Despite all the outward appearances, we are not alone in this endeavor.

Let's say a bunch of individuals are collecting cans and making compost piles, for whatever reason you might assign to their actions. Somewhere in the dark shadows that shroud their inner motivations at least a few are doing these things because they have become aware that humans - just like them - are not acting as good stewards of our planet. The kids that see recycling bins in their hallways everyday are more aware that environmental damage is a very real thing that effects their lives every day, than are the kids that walk through spotless hallways that someone else cleaned. Awareness is important. Now, when those kids hear some kind of message (maybe even from some group of dedicated activists that cannot be derided as "lifestyle" activists) about why it is essential that humans take collective action to clean up after our industrial free-for-all they just might be more attuned to take that message to heart. Its like preparing the soil before planting seeds.  

"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

[ Parent ]
Stop Abusing The Butterlies, Already! Or I'll Tell Philip K. Dick On You! (0.00 / 0)
Non-linear math is a beautiful thing, but its symbolic representations are easily misunderstood or misapplied.  The "butterfly effect" is a perfect example.  Dynamical systems in general are very poorly understood, they're incredibly complex, and most of our understanding comes from relatively simple models, which are powerful, but generally only tell us about the sorts of things that can happen.  (There are numerous specific system models, parametized to model things like traffic flows, weather patterns, even global climate.  But what they tell us about specific systems is not readily generalizable, without extensive qualification, if at all.)

The "butterfly effect" illustrates one possibility about how small changes in initial conditions can have large impacts on later states of being.  There are all sorts of dynamical systems in which this is the case.  OTOH, there are dynamical systems in which this is the case for some initial conditions but not for others.  And there are dynamical systems in which this is not the case for any initial systems.  The fact that a general effect is known to exist does not prove that the effect applies to what you are doing in any particular situation.

But there's another point, arguably even more basic:  the whole point of the dynamical model is that micro-changes in initial conditions produce unpredictable macro-changes in later states.  It's not a cause-and-effect relationship that you can count on to produce the change you want.  Recycling a can in Iowa could "cause" a riot in Bangalore.  WTF good does that do?

So stop with the butterfly effect, already.

The possibility of distant, dramatic effects we cannot predict is something to keep in mind, just because it's healthy to help keep our egos in check.  We really don't have as much control, as much knowledge, and as much independence as we like to think.  But that possibility does not validate whatever it is we are doing in our lives, however small.  For all we know, the small thing we are doing will destroy the world, right?  You have read your Philip K. Dick, haven't you?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
speaking of each little thing we do (4.00 / 3)
researchers are getting more interested in how each of our individual decisions are what lead to the kinds of structural inequalities we see (e.g., racial and class segregation in schools and housing).

Each well-off person is making the best decision for their family or child when they choose into a neighborhood or a school that has great test scores, high property values, etc. No one would begrudge them that. But it's what Charles Tilly calls "opportunity hoarding" and it is what creates the result that "them that's got shall get, them that's not shall lose..."  

[ Parent ]
Right (4.00 / 1)
And, of course, the systems and structures we live within affect the incentives behind these choices.  If you can change those systems, you can potentially change the incentives.  Although, of course, it's often tough to know ahead of time exactly how changes will play out or how people will "game" the system.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)
[ Parent ]
This Majes Me Think In Terms Of Gosta Esping's 3 Worlds Of Welfare Capitalism (4.00 / 2)
Specifically, the difference in rationale between the social democratic welfare state and the liberal welfare state.  The social democratic welfare state is motivated by egalitarian norms, and crafts its policies to reflect that.  It will provide some special treatment for professionals, perhaps, but only, ultimately, for the purpose of keeping them onboard.

This is quite different from the rational of liberal welfare states, whose main purpose is to clean up the messes of the market so that the market can just keep on doing its thing--including setting the tone in terms of social norms that leads to making opportunity hoarding seem like the only natural thing to do.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Damn (4.00 / 1)
I was going to try to make a point like this, but you've got a MUCH better handle on the butterfly theory.  And I was too lazy to play it out :)

But right.  A key issue is that when you flap your butterfly wings you have no control over what effect it has.  And it may not have any effect on highly robust systems and structures.  (You can wave your butterfly wings at the Empire State Building all day.  It won't fall down).

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
"No control" is not the same as "not mattering" (0.00 / 0)


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."
[ Parent ]
Two Points (4.00 / 1)
First, you've already been told several times that this was meant in relative terms.

Second, if you can't control the impact, if the impact is, in fact, indeterminate (i.e. it's not just your fault you can't control it, it's in the very nature of things), then it can only be said to matter in a way that doesn't matter to you.

And there's definitely something the matter with that formulation.  

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I'm Struck By The Power of Lifestyle Politics In The Lives Of Those Who Adopt It (4.00 / 4)
And it makes reflect on how the labor movement and civil rights movement may owe a good deal of their success from finding ways--however fleetingly--of harnessing lifestyle politics, and anchoring it around a different kind of identity and comfort zone.

Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, I grew up on their music, and they were part of cultural tradition that helped create a broader sense of community that created a different baseline for people.  And they were intensely targeted for political repression.  This kind of analysis you are presenting seems to throw new light on why that was so.

The labor movement certainly lost a good deal of its oomph as it lost all sense of a distinctive cultural movement, and became more and more of a grey bureaucracy.

Any thoughts?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

I am struggling with this issue (4.00 / 1)
Clearly there have been moments when the identities of the middle class have been recruited for effective forms of social action.  

However, even in the 1960s, this kind of lifestyle politics/activism reared its ugly head.

First, in the work of SDS in poor communities, where they attemped to create the kind of "flat" democratic society that most appealed to them, but were almost entirely ineffectual.  

Second, in the way that experiences in the South during the 1964 Freedom Summer were transformed into non-political forms of communes and free schools in the North.  

Even SNCC operated out of a problematic idea of democracy, a "beloved community" that rejected leadership and mass action.  The point is not that they didn't accomplish anything.  But without the work of more pragmatic leaders working at least partly within the working-class traditions of mass action, they would have accomplished little beyond radicalizing a few in the South.  

On the other hand, you may be right that it is only by harnessing the possibilities inherent in the relationship between identity and activism that we can hope to recruit members of the middle class to social activism.

The question then becomes, how do we recruit these desires while at the same time diverting their form away from destructive and ineffectual avenues.

I'm not sure how to get beyond the catch-22 I discuss above.  But it's a critical question.

I've noted to you earlier that I think the solution has something to do with changing our understanding of our own unacknowledged privilege in the world--something Mary focuses on as well.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
To Take Another Example From The 60s (4.00 / 1)
Addressing your last paragraph, the draft--and the fact that millions had student deferments--meant that there was extremely widespread awareness of privilege, as well as the knowledge that that privilege was precarious, and largely unearned.

A very large number of those getting those deferments were either first-generation college students, coming from working-class families who owned their first home as a result of the labor movement, or were following fathers who were first-generation college students via the GI Bill.  They were not the more deeply cocooned sort of middle class that even their younger siblings would start to be a decade later, with a whole lot more Leave It To Beaver and Mickey Mouse Club under their belts.

So, in a sense, they were a product of social transition confronted with the threat of a mass draft--a very unusual social situation, out of which a wide range of different responses came, but there was definitely some of that wide range that seems to fit your bill.  The problem was--in addition to the qualifications already noted--this identity/lifestyle politics was highly dependent on the student setting, and readily dissipated over the summer, much less once they graduated into "the real world."

Yet, I think there may be some valuable lessons we can take from that, as today's world seems to be introducing an awful lot of the turbulence and instability, while the ubiquity of social media can serve to extend the experience of group identity that was readily lost once students left campus.

Indeed, I just heard a fascinating radio interview this week that touched on the potential of social networks related to this.  I haven't done my followup work on it, so I don't want to say much more right now.  But it did focus primarily on youth-centered phenomena, which I took to be a very important factor, as that's the period of life in which identity formation is playing a much bigger role, as opposed to just paying the bills and protecting the identity one already has formed.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
The draft is a fascinating (4.00 / 1)
example.  I've never thought about it that way much.  

This approach would involve placing everyone in "the same boat" in more concrete ways.  Of course, becuase of privilege this is much harder to do.  Of course, this was true in the draft as well.  

Perhaps a key tool of the conservatives is making sure that the middle-class doesn't get threatened by the same kinds of things the working class faces.  Like Mary's example of health care.  The privileged with health care are not worried about losing health care so much (although more and more are) but about losing their gold plated possibilities.  

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
It Wasn't Just That Everyone Was In The Same Boat (4.00 / 3)
They were in "similar enough" boats.  And the minor differences only served to heighten the awareness of the overall injustice and absurdity.  Just like today with John Stewart and Stephen Colbert.  "Alice's Restaurant" was a huge hit, and radio stations would play it in its entirety.

People dwelt in the absurdity.  Today, they are dwelling in escape from it.  That's what needs changing.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Nicely put (0.00 / 0)
[ Parent ]
Distinctive Cultural Movement (4.00 / 2)
That particular point seems very important.  The development of a particular set of cultural mores.

I am reminded, somehow, of the tobacco ads that people finally were able to develop that actually did change how young people perceive cigarettes.  Is there a way to harness some particularly compelling narratives to start to shift this tendency, and are there ways to get this messaging out there?  

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
I would add that there is a great sense of history in the music of (4.00 / 2)
Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, and Woody Guthrie, which is in near total counterpoint to the notion of lifestyle activism, which defines itself moment to moment, trend to trend. Not only community, but enduring community and a sense of legacy is a masterful foe against this kind of entirely capitalist-bred, faux-resistant kind of idiocy.
[ Parent ]
Paul Robeson definitely got our of his comfort zone! (4.00 / 2)
Lifestyle activism is different from what might be called the soundtrack of revolution. Paul Robeson was not engaged in lifestyle politics. He got well out of his comfort zone, and paid a high price for it (passport revoked, black listed, etc) for speaking and protesting for socialist causes.  

Culture (music, art, dance, poetry) can bolster hardcore politics (lobbying, protest, civil disobedience) and that's not what we're talking about as lifestyle politics.

[ Parent ]
Exactly. I was understanding it as an important counterpoint to lifestyle politics. (4.00 / 2)

[ Parent ]
But It's Clearly Related (4.00 / 2)
Robeson was, in fact, creating an alternative lifestyle politics for people--a lifestyle of struggle and cross-racial community.  The Peekskill Riots were a clear reaction against that.  Ditto, on a broader scale, the blacklist that not only affected Hollywood, but also kept Pete Seeger and others off of TV and radio for more than a decade.

This is what I'm trying to get at, and I think it's part of what's got Chicago Dyke so bugged below.  Part of the whole point of the struggle is provide people with the tools to make meaning in their own lives, rather than have others determine the value, worth and meaning of their own lives.  For all the limitations--and even perverse impacts--of the black middle-class that you discuss, there is still a positive core that derives from this self-definition.  The problem is that this core is insufficiently nurtured by critical self-examination and confrontation with its limitations as you have drawn them out.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Not either/or, both/and (4.00 / 1)
This is the bridge over troubled waters, right enough. Well said, Paul.
[ Parent ]
Yes (4.00 / 1)
This is why one of my interests is finding ways to expand the number of people who understand the perspective of organizing.  The point is not that this is some magical tool, or perfect vision.  But it does provide a sense that a different way of being is possible.  And that different way of understanding "who" one could be in conjunction with other people has been systematically eliminated from our cultural environment.  The fall of unions and the shift to business union models has had the same effect.  

It seems to me that it is this kind of knowledge--about how one could act with real advice about how to begin--rather than about how crappy the world is for some people that has a likelihood of actually affecting social struggle.  

Put it this way--people in power don't care if people read Kozol.  They do care if people read Alinsky.  And they do care if contexts are created in which Alinsky-like experiences are had.  Thus the march for breast cancer, etc.  

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
very interesting point (4.00 / 1)
And indeed perhaps this is why we've seen such effort put into "community policing" in which the police bureaucracy is always present at community meetings and thus is better able to coopt the direction of activism.

Do you think the same thing is true of the deep involvement of large foundation is "community capacity building" and other such efforts? Do these private foundations steer community energy in ineffectual directions? (I actually made the critique of the New Communities Project in Chicago that none of the organizing was going towards lobbying for certain policies and instead were all focused on "leveraging" investments from outside actors). Or do you think foundations are a key part of organizing?

[ Parent ]
Of course they do (4.00 / 1)
Foundations are scared of organizing. Scared of the pressure they get when they support organizing.  Right now there is a real crisis in organizing as foundations pull $ back.  People in my city are being fired right and left.

Service is a happy thing to fund.  Give people food.  Etc.  

Foundations love stuff like "asset-based community development," models that assume we can all get together and collaborate.

Foundations are somewhat (but not entirely) more comfortable with advocacy work.  

Related story about community policing:

There is/was a program in our city called "weed and seed."  They had organizers who walked around and knocked on doors and tried to find people who had problems.  Then they would try to solve these people's problems.

Fascinatingly, this is an anti organizing approach.  Find the squeaky wheels and make sure they don't get too pissed off.  In organizing, you actually want people to get mad.  You want the squeaky wheels.  

Another not relevant side note.  I was in the car about an hour ago and heard a report about the science of emotion.  Interestingly, they pointed out that anger is an emotion that actually makes you more optimistic.  Paul pointed to some research in an earlier thread about other research about emotions like disgust.  Alinsky always focused on making people angry, although he tried to leverage and focus that anger in particular ways ("Cold Anger").  

The professor on NPR pointed to this article (pdf) "Portrait of an angry decision maker"  Haven't read it: http://www.google.com/url?sa=t...

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
"Anger Is An Energy" As Johnny Rotten Said (4.00 / 2)
As I've mentioned before, Los Angeles has an exception that proves the rule in the form of the Liberty Hill Foundation.  (Liberty Hill was where Upton Sinclair was arrested for reading the First Amendment to a group of longshoremen.)  LHF specifically aims to fund groups that no one else will fund, groups that are empowering the marginalized, and groups that are fighting for change, not just dealing with present conditions.

There's an important lesson here: the fact that LHF exists makes it much more possible for people to support organizing.  There really are a lot more progressive with money out there who will support this sort of thing if the alternative is clearly presented to them.

That's why cutting through the confusion about organizing vs. everything else is so important.  It's not that everything else is without value.  It's that everything else is relatively easy to grasp, and non-confrontational.  This organizing stuff is hard.  And some people out there will support it precisely because of that... if there's someone out there to help highlight the value of the option.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
EXACTLY! (4.00 / 1)
[ Parent ]
And whenever it goes past the faux "rebel" lifestyle politics of james dean posters and (0.00 / 0)
loud music it gets banned. Not banned they haver top pass a law, but "banned" as in one company owns 80% of the radio market and Jackson Brown beomes the disappeared because he starts doing songs like "Lives in Balance" He is only seen and heard if you look for him on the internet.

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.
[ Parent ]
or when John McCain supporters use his songs without permission (4.00 / 3)


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."
[ Parent ]
The main drawback of these diaries (0.00 / 0)
is the lack of presentation of workable alternatives, which makes people defensive and antagonistic to your thesis.  Perhaps you, Paul, or others would devote a series of diaries to types of social action (of course including community organizing) that are more effective and how to go about doing them.
There's One Central Point Here (4.00 / 3)
The common theme of these diaries is that there's just no substitute for organizing to confront power, and build countervailing power.

While it's a good idea to look at strategies that work, the larger question becomes "work to do what?"  And part of the purpose of these diaries is to sharpen our thinking in asking that larger question.

I actually have written a number of different diaries addressing what works, such as those discussing multi-factor geographical analysis, whether it's health factors in South LA or opportunity in the NYC area.  I would argue that unless one has the sort of understanding that these multifactor approaches provide, one is not well-prepared for taking a strategy that works at one level, and avoiding the trap of it becoming some form of dead end.

So, while I think your suggestion is a good one, I think that carrying it out responsibly involves a good deal of prep work beforehand.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
That is true (4.00 / 2)
of these two diaries.  But is not a fair characterization of the series (I hope).  I have and will continue to make multiple recommendations about how we could make social struggle more effective.  For example, I'm thinking of writing the next entry about how community organizing groups could better leverage less confrontational volunteer experiences to maintain a wider collection of participants.  My comments are speculative--ideas for things that I'd like to see tried out--but at least they are constructive.  

In fact, I am currently involved in the creation of a community organizing coalition in my city, bringing together nearly all significant community organizing groups to think about how we can create a more coherent vision of social action in Milwaukee.  

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
You've mostly sold me on community organizing (0.00 / 0)
as an effective approach for social action at the local level, but its much less clear to me what the best strategies are at the regional, state, or national levels or which of these levels it is best to devote the majority of our efforts.
[ Parent ]
Yes there is a real scale problem (4.00 / 2)
and community organizers have not solved it very well, if at all.  

ACORN is something of an exception, in that it is organized and centralized nationally.  But this centralization may create other problems.

Some other community organizing groups have been able to have a national impact at particular moments.  And there are state coalitions of organizing groups that have had an impact.

I think it is likely that national efforts are necessarily more centralized.  But I really don't have a good handle on that.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
Allthough it is direct about the fact that there is a lot of (4.00 / 2)
comfort being tkaen by people, pride, about their ability to do the 'right' things, ie: recycle that one can. It ios merely saying, that pride, that comfort is not helping the overall project of balancing the environemnt in diversity and complexity and robustness,. That pride, that comfort, hurts the drive to change, because it comforts you. That is the point.

The fact that I felt my comfort slipping away, and the urgency to do more, in a more effective way rose.

That is how this set of discussions, the article and Ms, Patillo's work affected me. I lost comfort. And the terrible feelings about the situation we are in, felt worse.

That is sanity. Sanity about your (our) awful predicament is not happiness.

I still love my grandchildren, and get joy from their company, but I know I can feel less comfort than yesterday about their and your future.

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.

[ Parent ]
But Reframing the Debate (4.00 / 1)
is right, I think, that sanity comes from also having coherent alternative avenues for action.  

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)
[ Parent ]
If people merely distrust the comfort and pride (4.00 / 1)
 that comes from any avenue that doesnt challenge the origin of the crisis, then it is more than enough.

More would be appreciated, but I am grateful for the insight by itself.  

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.

[ Parent ]
I disagree. (0.00 / 0)
I suspect that you are an exception and telling most people that behavior they believed was helping was in actuality not will likely only lead to feelings of being overwhelmed, with frustration and apathy setting in unless you can rekindle their hope with alternative, better approaches.  Community organizing at the local level is one effective but fairly demanding approach.  What are others?
[ Parent ]
I think another is using our voices (4.00 / 4)
within "halls of power" to say the unpopular thing. That is, when everyone in the neighborhood is calling for the drug treatment center to be closed, we can be the voice that says that drug treatment centers are critical resources for all kinds of people and here is as good a place as any.

When everyone in the city is saying that "good riddance" to the "eye sore" of public housing, we can be the voice that says that nationally, 9 million renter households who earn less than 30% of area median income compete for 6.2 million affordable apartments/homes, so we need MORE not less public housing.

If we can increase the number of such voices "inside the system" (which I try to do as I train future professionals as a college professor) then we can create change.  I think this change is of the incremental and small type (it's not revolution) but it's not inconsequential.

[ Parent ]
Sure (4.00 / 2)
And the other side is creating more collective organizations that can speak with power to power.  The problem with people like us (e.g., professors) is that we speak to power without any power most of the time.  

I am amazed at how much I have been able to accomplish by being part of a collective action organization, how much access I have been able to get without ever really foregrounding the fact that I am a professor (or even telling them at all).  And this is prior to any real effort to generate active collective power.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
Well, there are multiple levels of (4.00 / 2)
participation.  Including sending $ to key organizations.  Engaging with politics on a local and larger level.  Etc.  

Interestingly, I remember someone telling me of a talk that someone gave at a graduation who said, "Look, if you really want to make a difference, don't be a social worker.  Make a lot of money and then you'll have power."

This, of course, is unfair to the role of social workers.  As other people have pointed out, being political or powerful is not the same as doing good in the world.  

But there is a sense in which he is right.

Organizers say there are two kinds of power: Organized people and organized $$.  

So any answer to your question "what can I do" will involve one of these two realms (always both, to some extent).  Exactly what kind of participation depends on the person, etc.

But it's important to try to be honest with ourselves about the potential impact of our participation.  Are we  

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
Great Expectations (4.00 / 2)
Why am I reminded of the Victorian era in Britain? I suspect that we all know why. Workhouses and temperance unions, Christian orphanages and lectures to the downtrodden on abstinence and personal responsibility of all kinds, delivered from every meddlesome pulpit imaginable. Dickens documented its hypocrisies, and it effects on the poor, both good and bad, pretty thoroughly. He was also scathing in his none-too-subtle assertion that the poor often had a better idea of what was being done to them, and by whom, than any of their would-be benefactors.

And yet...the mere fact that so many of the better-off were engaged directly, and reported what they observed, probably led to an increasingly favorable environment for Parliament to act, especially when pushed by working men's associations, industrial labor unions and the like.

We have even more recent examples, which many of us witnessed or even took part in, of the civil rights struggle for African Americans, which began, you might say, with Frederick Douglass, and ended, more or less, with the passage of the national legislation of the Sixties.

Legal civil rights are no solution, of course, unless the government is willing to enforce them, and they're only part of the puzzle anyway. The broader struggle has always been one of class. Oppression based on race has certainly been a particularly poignant part of the tragedy in this country, but it's never been all of it, as Martin Luther King pointed out to us with more eloquence than most.

Whether you believe that we shall overcome eventually, if we just keep at it, or take what I sometimes think of as the Hindu view -- that these things run in cycles, and that we've fallen into another trough, where evils long-suppressed are spoken of openly again to cheering crowds, I think we make a mistake in being overly critical of those who haven't yet fully seen the light. After all, if the poor are thought to learn by rubbing elbows with the middle classes willing to rub elbows with them, surely the reverse is true, and that may give us a broader base to stand on when reaching for the true goal. (And how we reach that goal, lest anyone misunderstand me, has nothing to do with lecturing the poor about their bad behavior, and everything to do with forcing the rich and powerful to abandon theirs, just as educationaction and Ms. Pattillo suggest.)

definitely historical precedent (4.00 / 1)
Excellent point that this kind of lifestyle politics is not new, and was surely the reigning philosophy of the immigrants rights activists in the early 1900s and early black activists who emphasized "respectability" as the route to black progress.

And I have often wanted to write something on what the middle class get by rubbing elbows with the poor. very important point indeed.  Thanks

[ Parent ]
I think you got at an important (0.00 / 0)
part of what they get from being with the poor in your book.  Clearly it relieves some identity pressures and guilt as you note.  Otherwise, clearly, they don't want to "rub elbows" with the poor--the elbows of the poor and working-class are too dirty--unless they don't act like the poor anymore.  You know better because of your immersion in the experience behind the book, but there is an odd kind of abstraction to the poverty the lifestyle activists you describe are "dealing" with.  I do think there is a broader issue/argument to be addressed, there.

The issue is somewhat different for white professionals, who do not, I think, feel a similar shared identity with the poor.  But some of the same mechanisms are at play.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
I think there are many valuable lessons (4.00 / 2)
in the practices of poor and working class families. In the neighborhood I studied I think of things like: the importance of the extended family; the creativity and enjoyment of spontaneous, unstructured leisure time; the incredible possibilities of descriptive informal language (including curse words, slang, Black English) to express complex emotions and relationships; the practices of resistance to exploitation.  I don't want to romanticize, and people across the class spectrum have a wide array of performances in their repertoires. But we shouldn't always assume that just because middle and upper income folks do "it" a certain way, that that's the best way to live for our mental, social and spiritual health.
[ Parent ]
But do very many people (4.00 / 1)
learn these lessons by proximity?  Sounds like your research indicates that not many do.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)
[ Parent ]
I think it's a mixed bag (4.00 / 2)
Proximity breeds both hyper-criticism since you have to be adamant about making distinctions between yourself and your neighbors lest you get confused for them.  This was the sentiment of respectability among some black women's church organizations in the mid 20th century.  Showing ones respectability illustrated ones worthiness of political, social and economic rights; and ones respectability was most apparent in contrast to the backward behaviors of the poor, the southern born, the uneducated, etc.

But, I also think that proximity breeds personal knowledge and understanding, empathy, commitment and connection. this is the linked fate i discuss, and the beginning premise that something must be done. Indeed, it fuels righteous anger (to make a connection to a conversation above).

[ Parent ]
I would love to hear more of your thinking about this, (4.00 / 1)
as you see it in your data.  This last point did not really come across for me in the way you frame it here.  But I was not necessarily reading for this point, either.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)
[ Parent ]
The whole chapter on the case against public housing (4.00 / 1)
is about how middle class activists saw themselves as co-victims with poor black public housing residents in the city's determination to concentrate public housing in black neighborhoods. Their language was very structural in their demand that the city not re-do the racial discrimination that the CHA and HUD were found guilty of in the Gautreaux lawsuit.

Of course this is not uncomplicated, since they were fighting AGAINST public housing. But their rhetoric and motives were exactly to undo years of racial and class segregation.

Another example is how I start the book -- with a groundbreaking ceremony for new affordable housing. All the organizational leaders that built early affordable housing were middle class blacks.

At an interactional level, here's a longer example from the book (pp 87-88)

The Encounter
Emmett Coleman moved to North Kenwood with his wife and daughters in 1983. He was a bit ahead of the real rush, but his boss, who was well connected with higher-ups in city planning, advised him that the move would pay off financially. "Everyone else was saying don't do it, you know. Hoodlums and thugs, you know. And dope. And it's slum and blighted." Twenty years later he concluded that his decision to buy the house was a good one. He also recognized how common it was to be torn by contradictory advice from the optimists and the naysayers. "Each buppie family that I talked with tells the same story. Their friends were apprehensive at first and then in recent years, you know, recent months [their friends ask], `Are there any more properties around?'" Coleman also got confirmation of what he expected: all the supposed hoodlums and thugs weren't as bad as they were rumored to be. His early "encounters," like the one narrated below, went off without a hitch.

"Like I said, I was working in a corporate setting, so I had to wear a suit. So the first day I moved over here, my wife was out of town with the kids and I got off the bus at 43rd and Berkeley and all the brothers were out there. You know what I mean. There was a tavern up there, so you know. I looked kind of conspicuous because in those days people would dress, you know, rebelliously and what not. . . . [So] I'm in a business suit and I get off the bus. And this wasn't pretended, it was just instinctive. When I got off the bus, I said, "Hey fellas! I got some time on the transfer. Anybody need a transfer?" [And they responded,] "Yeah, mellow. Thanks, man." And [I] went on down the street. And I thought about that afterwards. I said, "Hey, you fell right in." . . . And my point is, it wasn't pretended. It was just automatic. It was just, you know, it was just there."

The lilt of Coleman's voice is not perceptible on the written page, and it's hard to re-create how the word "fellas" fit into the black slang of the 1980s. When read, the exchange makes Coleman sound kind of square. But this is misleading. Coleman told this story to make a point about how he "knew something about urban problems and urban living," having grown up in Chicago's Black Belt in the 1940s. As an adult moving up the corporate ladder he lived in integrated Hyde Park, but he had not forgotten how to maneuver in the social world of working-class and poor black neighborhoods. It was in his body. It was in his voice. "It was just there." In the conceptual framework of anthropologist John L. Jackson, it was "sincere." His performance required "trust over proof"--the trust of the "fellas" who accepted the transfer, and the trust of me and my readers (you) that it was as heartfelt and comfortable as he claimed and experienced it to be.  

[ Parent ]
I think that you may be too doctrinaire on this point (4.00 / 4)
In America, as opposed to Europe, this is much less true than one is led to believe from your insistence on it. Many white professionals don't have middle class roots (although that's certainly less true now than it was a couple of generations ago) and thanks to their families, not all of them have forgotten or lost contact with them.

Also, not all white professionals only know about the lives of the underclass from reading about them, but in their early years, at least, both lived and worked among them. This definitely changes attitudes, just as volunteering to work on voter registration in the South changed them for those who went, or getting shot at in Viet Nam did for those who survived the experience, or participating in the domestic activism which arose in, but was not limited to, the campus protests in the Sixties.

And yes, I'm thinking of myself as an example, but I don't believe that I'm the only one out there. I'm not entirely comfortable around poor folks I don't know for a number of cultural reasons. You can imagine what they are, no doubt, as they're largely artifacts of human nature. Add them all up and you could probably describe them as mutual suspicion of one another's motives, which it seems to me are unavoidable in first, or casual encounters. On the other hand, I don't think that we belong to a different species, or that poor people have inferior morals, or need to be instructed on how to live, and I have no ideological or personal objections with getting to know them, or working with them on issues of mutual interest.

It's why I've always preferred to live in mixed-income and mixed-race neighborhoods, even when I could afford not to, and have always lamented their passing from the scene, even in cities where they used to be unavoidable. It's also why I like riding subways and buses where they still exist.

To sum up, no matter what people's preconceptions are when they deliberately put themselves in unfamiliar environments, I'm not convinced that familiarity necessarily breeds contempt. On the other hand, I'm absolutely certain that isolation does.

[ Parent ]
i agree with your point (4.00 / 3)
My only point was that there are huge racial disparities in the connection to poor people among middle class folks. My research (with Colleen Heflin) published in Social Science Review ("Poverty in the Family" SSR v. 35, 2006), using a national longitudinal data set, shows that:

Among middle class young adults in the late 1990s:

34% of middle class blacks had been poor as adolescents
8% of middle class whites had been poor as adolescents

41% of middle class blacks had a sibling who was poor
16% of middle class whites had a sibling who was poor

[ Parent ]
A key truth (4.00 / 1)
Despite the New Deal, despite African Americans' long fought-for legislative victories of the Sixties, despite the Great Society, there's still a terrible gap, it's true. Which is why I've toyed with the thought that if there's to be any silver lining at all in our current economic troubles, it'll come in pushing the fragments of our long Social Darwinist nightmare back together again.

I'd have preferred that we'd have gotten reacquainted with one another in our union halls, or in our neighborhood schools and our universities, in the Federal Civil Service and on our assembly lines -- hell, even in in the military (which until the all-volunteer force was put in place, may have done a better job than any of our other institutions in forcing class and race to yield to a common purpose.) It saddens me, and it pisses me off that the only place now where we're likely to see solidarity is in the bread line.

[ Parent ]
Good point (4.00 / 2)
My worry is not that people recycle.  It's that recycling (and the like) has become a convenient way for people not to have to grapple with the challenging issues of really engaging with power.  

It is true, however, that different people get to useful destinations by different paths.  The environmental movement, for example, is more conscious today than it was in the past (as I understand) of the need to work across class gulfs than it was in the past.

But when there is a specific way of thinking that seems to be preventing the emergence of actually effective models of action, I think we need to address it, and address it strongly.  

The problem comes not when some people believe these problematic perspectives.  The problem is when nearly all do.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
speak for yourself, punk (0.00 / 0)
Individuals' private acts, however well meant, have little or no impact on the actions of others (if no one knows you recycle, how does that encourage anyone else to recycle?)

wrong.

in my own case, starting my compost piles (cause i recycle for several households in the neighborhood) has caused no less than five other neighbors to do the same. positive quatloo credit for environmental impact in my case and scale, personally? major.

i accomplish a lot by doing some of the things you deride as wasted effort. not as much as would be accomplished by shutting down a big MIC boondoggle or ending the occupation of iraq, sure. but you're not going to downplay nor make me feel insignificant about what i've done.

my next thing is going to be to shame/cajole/influence the neighborhood by my example of thermal, wind and solar power for my house. never underestimate the power of Keeping Up with the Joneses in amurka. it's not the best, or only way to make a difference, just a small one that should be encouraged.

i'll continue to read the rest of the essay and comments now. just had to jump in.

I will stick with my perspective (4.00 / 1)
You are free to yours.

But so what if 5 people have a compost pile?  So what if you have a wind turbine on you house?  

I think these are legitimate questions to ask.  

If you think that this way of operating will 1) lead masses of people to have compost piles and wind turbines, or 2) will somehow lead to collective action against the STRUCTURES that create the problems that home wind turbines and compost piles are solutions to, then I'll be more on your side.

But as I argued in Part I, there is little evidence that #1 is a realistic goal.

And, as I argued here, it is not clear that #2 social action to make sure people compost their garbage (in the same model of making sure people recycle) is a useful avenue for action.  It misconcieves the problem on the model of something that individuals can react to in their own homes.

Clearly it makes you angry.  You want to think that what you are doing is important.  Maybe it is.  I think I've provided reasonable arguments that it's pretty problematic.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
I do not want, chicagodyke to give up her compost pile. (4.00 / 2)
Nor do you I am sure. And this is not an attack on people with compost piles.

It is a discussion about dealing with the massive problem we face as humans' and as captives inside an economic engine that devastates as it provides.

The point is that, some of these behaviours, ameliorating some local evidence, satiate the feeling that we have to do something about the crisis of our economic model. And those feelings should not be satiated.

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.

[ Parent ]
I just wanted to make sure you saw this Thank You (0.00 / 0)
I have played the wedding video you posted, sent it on to people.  I want you to know it keeps making me unreasonably happy whenever I play it...even though I don't know your friends at all.

Thank you

"Incrementalism isn't a different path to the same place, it could be a different path to a different place"
Stoller

[ Parent ]
Oh gosh - they are not my friends, I wish I was at that wedding (0.00 / 0)
It made believe that so much was possible. I showed my wife later in the day and she said (throat caught) laughing "This is the way it should be! So full of Joy!" She said meaning the whole world.

It does feel to me like a postcard of a possible future. But it isnt my family, I too am a lucky interloper.

And it has gone massively viral, hitting the front pages of  Huffpost sometime today.

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.

[ Parent ]
Right (0.00 / 0)
[ Parent ]
um, what? (0.00 / 0)
The impetus to "recycle" reinforces the problematic idea that alterations in one's individual lifestyle actually make much of a difference in the larger world.  Far from encouraging effective social action, the recycling movement has actually degraded progressives' capacity to generate real power.

i guess i'll have to go over to Part I to see all the stats, links and peer reviewed anaysis that backs up this claim. i'm sure you have some.  

The limits of recycling (4.00 / 1)
are pretty well established.  See Mark Matson's graphs lower down.  But you are right that I didn't provide lots of data.

Have any counter examples?

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
where are mark matson's graphs? (4.00 / 1)

[ Parent ]
Scroll Down in Part I (0.00 / 0)
He put the graphs in near the bottom.

But he linked to this other post:

http://www.motherjones.com/kev...

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
maybe i should just go write a blog post. (4.00 / 1)
sigh.

Recycling a can is lifestyle activism.  Fighting to pass a law to make other people recycle is lifestyle politics.

which of course just privileges politics above all other forms of social expression, action and impact. yes, they're important. no, it's not the only way to change a condition or aspect of a social environment.

...sorry, i'm clearly having real issues with this essay and i'll shut up now. i may find the motivation to do a detailed response, but i think the assertions here are so incorrect it's hard for me to remain rational.  

Aaron will know better (4.00 / 2)
I am not the author of the first part on recycling, but I think one of the points is that "recycling" has become a relatively painless way to allow many of us to feel like we are being environmental activists, even thought a MUCH more effective action would be to drastically reduce our consumption in the first place -- or demand that firms don't package things in such a wasteful way in the first place.  

So, recycling allows me a comfortable way not to think about the fact that I life in an 1800 square foot apartment for JUST ME.  It's wasteful.  But to downsize to something more reasonable (perhaps the 500 square feet in which a single Parisian may live) gets me out of my comfort zone, but really helps to eliminate energy waste etc.

[ Parent ]
because it's impossible to walk and chew gum at the same time (4.00 / 3)
and they don't accomplish simultaneously different things.

...whatever. i grok your point, mpattillo. i just can't stand being lectured. "you're not doing enough! my project is the Most Important in the whole world! nobody makes a difference but me!" etc.

telling people they're wrong and bad for doing the right thing, however "insignificant" = not a winning strategy. i understand orders of magnitude, of scale. i can appreciate them all, at the same time, even.  

[ Parent ]
"i live in a glass house" (4.00 / 3)
so i agree that folks shouldn't throw stones.  that's a metaphor of course, but the example i gave above about living in an 1800 square foot apartment for just me was really about me (not a hypothetical).

so my approach is to share my own shortcomings toward political perfection in order then to be able to participate in a conversation where we all challenge each other to be more reflective about how our behavior can best reach a goal of a more equitable and just society.

[ Parent ]
First Off, I Really Appreciate Your Participation (4.00 / 3)
Even though--or rather, particularly because I think educationaction is making a very important point with this diary series.  It's just this sort of deep challenge that brings out the greatest value of communicating this in blog format.

However, where I think you're talking past one another it this: the diary is critiquing a pattern of justified complacency that pats itself on the back for doing feel-good things whose limited impact is precisely what makes them ideal in terms of striking a balance point that doesn't really threaten the status quo, though it may "nudge" it a bit ala Cass Sunstein.

And that's not you at all.  The fact that you compost is not an end in itself.  And that's what's being critiqued here.

I speak as someone who spent a lot of time in the 70s working to start and build up food coops in three different states.  I was working on the premise that changing people's everyday lives and relationships was important political work.  But the longer I worked, the more entrenched I found self-satisfied middle-class attitudes in Birkenstocks prevailing. That was not what I was in it for.  At some point, I had to realize that my politics did not reflect the politics of those around me who were calling the shots, and I had to engage elsewhere.  

So it's not the lifestyle activism per se that's troubling to me--speaking only for myself here.  It's the turn toward an ultimately conservative, even, at times, a reactionary direction, that concerns me.  And this is what's being highlighted here.

As indicated by my comments above, I remain quite interested in questions about what can be done to forge lifestyle activism of a truly progressive nature.  While I think there's a constant of deceiving ourselves about the efficacy of such action without pushing the boundaries, I agree wholeheartedly with you about the possibility that lies there.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Right (4.00 / 2)
Lifestyle activism is not the problem.

Misconcieving lifestyle activism as accomplishing things it clearly does not do is the problem.  If you're not fooling yourself about what you are accomplishing, then there's a different argument to be made.

The point is not that politics of some kind is "better" per se.  The point is that I'm asking people to justify their investment in particular forms of activism.  If you can't justify it on it's pragmatic effects, it seems like that's a problem. If you can, well, fine.

Mary's point about the glass house is totally relevant here.  It's not like I'm some hero or anything.  I'm not at all--as privileged as any other white professional.  But that does not make these issues unimportant.  

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
I meant to come back to this: this walk and chew gum issue (4.00 / 2)
is actually important, I think.  I read some research (can't remember where) that people will take one action to prevent something from happening, but won't take two.

These are studies, for example, of farmers worried about a drought.  THey do one thing, but not two fairly simple things that might make a difference.

So it seems that there is some truth to the walk and chew gum issue.

So if everyone is chewing gum, it may not be as effective to say "well, you ought to walk as well."  You may need as well to help them see the limitations of gum chewing as a solution to their problem.  They may still chew gum, but if they can't "count" it as "doing something" about a problem, then they may do something else as their "one thing."

Obviously this is two simple--people do do more than one thing, and it avoids issues of culture, etc.  But the research did seem fairly robust if I remember correctly.  Can't for the life of me remember where I read it.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
I'd Be Very Interested To See That Research (0.00 / 0)
So much for 5-point plans, eh?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
I find this interesting/depressing (4.00 / 2)
because I'm a perfect example of what you identify as problematic activity--and this makes me attach less value (rightly) to the little things that I do do, and consider just abandoning them entirely. I want social change, but no, I'm not gonna leave my comfort zone. I've spent decades building this damned comfort zone, and it's only half-finished.

Great article, thanks.

I would hope that you do not "give up your compost pile" (4.00 / 3)
It is a discussion about dealing with the massive problem we face as humans' and as captives inside an economic engine that devastates as it provides.

The point is that, some of these behaviours, ameliorating some local evidence, satiate the feeling that we have to do something about the crisis of our economic model. And those feelings should not be satiated.

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.

[ Parent ]
Again, right (4.00 / 1)
having a compost pile can serve all kinds of different purposes for people.  Lots of people love gardening.  It feeds their soul.  I don't mean at all to denigrate this.

Just don't use it as a replacement for actually dealing with the political/social/material problems that beset us--if that is something you would like to be doing.  

Although, remember that being able to have a garden because it feeds your soul may be part of your privilege--privilege of time, privilege of space, privilege of money.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
Well, I'm not going to give up my pile-- (0.00 / 0)
but not because of love. Because that's my lifestyle. I'm a composting kinda guy. I don't think it replaces actually dealing with anything except more-common dump runs--but neither do my v-neck sweaters, and I'm not giving them up, either!

I'm not sure what your point is about privilege, though. Remembering that one is privileged seems even less efficacious than composting!

[ Parent ]
V-Neck Sweaters, Eh? (0.00 / 0)
We'll be sure to add that to your dossier.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Those of us who are comfortable economically have to get uncomfortable politically to make a real difference. (4.00 / 2)
Damn!
Thank all the people involved in bringing these incredibly insightful, well organized and motivating pieces to opeleft.com and discussion in general. And damn Im glad there is an openleft at all.
A big thank you to educationaction and Mary Pattillo. There is so much here I am printing it up and putting it in the bathroom and living room so I can work through some of the insights,

I can feel the heat on some of the stuff I have ion my life, some of my assumptions, and twitched to defend as I read it.

Well done.

More later I hope.

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.

Left out the link to Ms. Patillo's quote (4.00 / 1)
The subject of my post above is taken from Ms. Patillo's response above:
Lifestyle politics only plays dress up: dress up poor and working class neighborhoods in coffee shops; dress up poor and working people in hushed street conversations, pants pulled up to their navels, with water bottles in their hands.

But they still struggle to pay their bills, get to work, and give their kids good educations.  

Those of us who are comfortable economically have to get uncomfortable politically to make a real difference.

Which summed up a great deal of the discussion succinctly, and in admiration I place it as the subject.

Here is the direct link to the quoted post, although you can just scroll up to it.

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.

[ Parent ]
Part of what is fascinating about Mary's Study (4.00 / 2)
is that it gets us beyond what "we" do as individuals, towards the ways in which lifestyle activism of the recycling or North Kenwood-Oakland ilk is a projection in many ways of the individual lifestyle activism many of us value.  

I, also, love the "dress up" example.  Recycling is kind of like this as well.  Get rid of all those depressing cans in regular trash cans.  Instead order them out and remove something that makes us feel bad about ourselves.  "Dress Up" the problem in our house, so that we don't have to worry about the actual significant causes of waste.  

It becomes a fantasy of control by controlling appearances instead of actual reality.

I'll be off for a while.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
Social norms? (0.00 / 0)
There is a theory that argues it was not the lawsuits that led to the downfall of big tobacco, but rather the changing social norms of society.  These diaries remind me of that argument.  Has the role of educational and advocacy groups in social change been discussed in much detail here at openleft or elsewhere?  Are these groups effective?  Links appreciated.
Did they "change" (4.00 / 1)
or were they "changed?"  And "changed" by what?  How?  And what can we learn from this that would help us intervene in problematic thinking about effective social action and collective struggle?

My bet is you are right about your larger point, but I don't know the history well enough.

--Aaron Schutz (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing)

[ Parent ]
Part II: The Distortions of Lifestyle Politics (Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing) | 100 comments
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