(An old friend returns with more lessons on community organizing, from those who've lived it. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Most of the most powerful writing on community organizing is unpublished, or published in such limited fashion that it is extremely difficult to get ahold of. Mimeographs of these essays are shared among community organizers, but the general public has never seen them.
This post is the first in a new series that provides key excerpts from these essays addressing key concepts and challenges in organizing.
Organizer Mike Miller and I are pulling a range of these essays together for a planned edited volume. (Miller is head of the Organize! training center in San Francisco and author of the recently published A Community Organizer's Tale.)
First up is an essay by Richard Harmon, "Making an Offer We Can't Refuse." Harmon was co-director of the Industrial Areas Foundation with Ed Chambers after the death of Saul Alinsky, and currently (I believe) an organizer in Portland, OR.
In the selection that follows, Harmon describes how an organizer helps a new middle-class organizing group learn how power operates, describing a meeting with a local alderman that he calls "Joe Cullerton."
Today's Training Tuesday comes to us from the Organizing 2.0 Conference in New York back in December. During lunch, we were joined by Colin Delaney, of e.politics.com. He and Charles Lenchner, of the Working Families Party, held a conversation about how to translate lessons about new media from the Obama campaign to local campaigns.
This week, we have something new for our Training Tuesday series. We still have plenty of videos left to come from Democracy for America's Campaign Academy, but a couple weekends back, we attended the Organizing 2.0 conference in New York. This conference was a unique opportunity for activists to learn about new media and online organizing from some of the greatest online organizers around.
Last weekend, I attended the Organizing 2.0 conference in New York, put together by Charles Lenchner of the Working Families Party. This conference brought people together to hear from some of the greatest minds in the online organizing world. I came out of it with lots of great footage, and today we are previewing some of it. The majority of the footage, however, will be featured in our Training Tuesday series. So check back Tuesday at 6:00pm for more Organizing 2.0 footage. We are also collecting all our Organizing 2.0 footage onto one page here. But if you are reading this, then you really should find the time to watch these videos.
There is a lot of discussion right now about how Senators from small states hold too much power compared to the percent of population they represent. There's a lot of truth to this. Alex MacGillis of The Washington Post wrote in an analysis column in their Sunday Outlook section, and David Sirota and Nathan Newman have done good pieces on the topic as well. The simple facts are that the key gang of six negotiating health care in the Senate Finance Committee represent less than 3% of the nation's population; that the 10 largest states are home to over half the country's population but represent only 20% of the Senate; the 21 smallest states together have less total population than California does.
It's good that people are raising these issues, and pointing out this unfairness. The plain fact of the matter, though, is that absent a constitutional convention suddenly being held, there is no changing this particular injustice. It would take 2/3 of the Senate, after all, to pass a constitutional amendment to restructure the Senate, and virtually all of the Senators from small states would vote against it. So we are stuck for now.
What we ought to be focused on instead are strategies that might work.
(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)
--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.
(As someone who spent years trying to make lifestyle politics a foundation for something more, I could not agree more with what this diary has to say. A MUST read. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
[Title changed to fit with Part II]
On the door of my local co-op is a green sign that says:
It's easy to make a difference!
Then it tells how to recycle your batteries.
But, of course, the ecological impact of recycling one battery (or ten, or a hundred) is so miniscule as to make no discernable difference at all. It literally DOES NOT MATTER whether I recycle a battery or not.
This is true for so many things that we are urged to do as our civic contribution to the world. It is, in fact, NOT easy to make a difference.
The lie of lifestyle activism is important in part because it bleeds off much of the energy that does exist in the world for social action. It also reveals some of the ways we deceive ourselves about effective civic engagement.
(This excellent diary brings a great deal more depth to our understanding of what the term "progressive" means historically, and then shows how that accurate historical understanding illuminates deeper problems with Nate Silver's recent simplistic dichotomization. Lot's to think about here, folks! - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
This is a belated follow-up to Paul and David's critiques of Nate Silver's "Rationalist vs. Radical" progressivism. The dichotomies Silver laid out include:
Rationalist vs. Radical
Empirical vs. Normative
Sees politics as a battle of ideas vs. Sees politics as a battle of wills
Technocratic vs. Populist
Prone to elitism vs. Prone to demagoguery
Prone to co-optation vs. Difficult to organize
Optimistic vs. Pessimistic
Conversational vs. Action Oriented
The ensuing discussion focused mostly on how progressives think, or frame the world. I want to look, instead, at something different and potentially more important: how progressives have historically conceptualized ACTION.
In ongoing historical work towards a book I'm calling Social Class, Social Action, and the Failures of Progressive Democracy, I argue that there are actually three distinct forms of progressivism, all drawing from different interrelated aspects of middle-class culture: Administrative, Collaborative, and Personalist progressives. As with any categorizations, these have their own problems, but I think reflect key historical realities.
Not only do Silver's comparisons miss this three-fold complexity, but he also mixes in working-class models of social action as well.
(Here's another take on the general subject of expertise vs. actually even having a clue what the real problems are. From the onging series "Core Dilemmas of Community Organizing." - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
In the 1920s, after seeing how effective propaganda was during WWI, many progressives in America lost faith that ill-informed, gullible common citizens could really be trusted with democracy. The most famous "democratic realist" of the time, Walter Lippmann, argued that, as a result, we must
[impose] some form of expertness between the private citizen and the vast environment in which he is entangled (Public Opinion, p. 238)
In fact, he concluded that
the problems that vex democracy seem to be unmanageable by democratic methods. (The Phantom Public, p. 189)
This problem of how broad processes of democracy might grapple with problems that require expert knowledge is a classic challenge in politics.
I have little to say about how one might solve the problems Lippmann and others have raised then and after on a national scale. However, there are effective approaches for providing participants in local community organizing groups with the knowledge they need to make decisions about complex problems.
In this diary, I discuss what "democracy" often looks like, in my experience, in community organizing groups, and how we might bring "expert" knowledge together with grassroots democracy in ways that don't ultimately leave a few in charge of what actually gets decided.
This diary extends on earlier posts about the limits and possibilities of local democracy in community organizing groups. And it relates to some of Paul Rosenberg's recent post about similar issues.
Earlier this week John Oliver, a correspondent for the Daily Show, interviewed me for a story on community organizing and community organizers. The piece aired last night.
I think it did a good job showing the absurdity of the claims from the Right about organizing and organizers, especially as pushed by hackmeisters like Matthew Vadum, who was also in the segment.
For the record, I would never sell used cars. Take public transit, people!
This is a good diary from an actual Acorn organizer about the voter fraud debacle. It basically states the problem was not one of intent but people paid to register voters who were not invested in the process as a matter of cause.
(This diary from earlier in the week is more relevant than ever given the enormous gap we saw between the largely inchoate opposition to the Wall Street bailout and the bipartisan rush to pass a bill widely recognized as deeply flawed, at best. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
On the Comm-Org listserv , I recently asked how others might design a brief workshop to educate people who didn't know anything about organizing. One respondent questioned my "premise that we need to sell direct action organizing outside of the context of campaigns." He went on to argue that:
What sells the direct action organizing techniques are the victories of strong organizations that use direct action within their campaigns. And it is through the active campaigns in which we are recruiting and developing leaders that we teach direct action strategies and tactics.
In this post I argue that this "just do it and they'll get it" approach has failed.
Despite the existence of community organizing groups in many communities, almost no one knows what "organizing" is or why it might be relevant to them. Furthermore, I believe that this lack of basic understanding is one of the key barriers to the wider spread of organizing efforts in America. We need to explore different ways to disseminate information about organizing.
(Following on Chris's argument in "The End Of Bubba Dominance", if a religiously and racially diverse coalition is the future of American politics, will we actually be able to govern effectivel? Community organizing and national electoral politics are not the same thing, but neither are they totally unrelated. Hence, there's a lot of food for thought in this diary, even if community organizing isn't your primary focus. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
We would all like to be able to just sit down with diverse collections of citizens from all walks of life and work together to solve the problems we face. My last post , however, discussed research showing that diverse contexts are unlikely to generate robust, free, and equal democratic dialogue.
I also asserted that it is really difficult to train people to stop dominating each other. But I didn't really provide any evidence, and commenters were rightly skeptical.
This post looks at a book by Eric H. F. Law that gives a good description of the ways people from some groups unintentionally end up dominating in small groups while others are silenced. Law's book shows how subtle the dynamics of domination can be.
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