(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.
(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.
(Difficult questions, at a very knitty-gritty level. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Another progressive democratic dream is that of a multicultural community of free dialogue. Instead of conflict between different groups, all in their own spaces, why can't we simply come together to collaborate? Every participant could value the myriad differences of each member, learning from each other's unique capacities. Together we could create spaces where everyone could participate as equals.
Research indicates, however, that spaces of free multicultural collaboration are very difficult to create. Monocultural, monoclass, etc. groups and communities actually work together much better than diverse ones. Ironically, diversity actually tends to reduce social trust and the likelihood that participants will engage with each other as whole persons.
These findings have important implications for community organizing efforts that seek to generate power across different groups. This research seems to support arguments I have made earlier that some separation between different cultural, class, racial, etc., groups is likely more productive for long term social action efforts.
But those who are surprised (shocked!) often seem to fundamentally misunderstand what electoral politics is about. You can only be this upset about someone's actions if you don't understand what it means to elect a democratic president--if your expectations were unreasonably high in the first place. As kanzeon points out above, treating the Obama election like a "movement" is a real mistake.
IMHO, a significant proportion of the lefty blogosphere seems not to understand what electoral politics is and isn't likely to accomplish. This is extremely problematic, threatening hopes for building a strong movement for real social change in this country.
(A bit lengthly, but, as usual, will make you think. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Progressives tend to genuflect before "democracy." If "the people" are to be involved, if there is to be a "grassroots" effort, the assumption is that a process of inclusive democratic decision-making has been followed.
As I have noted before, the progressive vision of a world fully driven by egalitarian democratic participation is a dream, a fantasy. The truth is that democracy is expensive. Extensive resources are required every time one seeks to involve large numbers of people in decision-making. Only very privileged people could think that this could happen on a continual basis. Historically, poor people's movements have been much more hierarchical than progressives (including many progressive scholars and historians) have imagined.
Of course, democratic participation is critically important. In labor unions and elsewhere, working-class propensities for hierarchy have too often resulted in clearly non-democratic, and even authoritarian regimes. Given pragmatic limitations in resources, then, community organizing groups must choose carefully those moments when robust democratic participation seems required, and when it seems less important.
In this diary, I explore the implications of the "cost" of democratic participation for community organizing.
(Another thoght-provoking diary in this series. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
[See updates below]
The media and the net has focused on Obama's background as a community organizer, and his community organizer approach to campaigning. His is supposed to be a "bottom up" instead of a "top down" approach. One newspaper argued that "regardless of the outcome . . . the Obama campaign will leave behind a new generation of trained community activists." In fact Marshall Ganz, the designer of Obama's organizing approach states that "We're training a whole bunch of new leaders."
In this post, I argue that what Obama is doing has little to do with the core tradition of community organizing that I have been talking about in this series, and that he was trained in himself. His approach is unlikely to "leave . . . a cadre of activists behind" that can generate power outside of the context of Obama's machine.
Traditional organizing seeks to create local groups whose direction is determined by local leaders. Leaders elicit stories about the desires of many potential members, creating a broad network of relationships based in common goals. Obama's approach is essentially the opposite. Leaders go out in the community to tell people their stories in an effort to bring them over to Obama.
Let me stress that my point, here, is not to critique the Obama campaign. In fact, I'm generally an Obama supporter, although not a particularly strong one [written prior to his winning the primary]. Efforts to mobilize voters are probably necessarily quite different from efforts to create strong local organizations. But in part because few people in the media seem to really understand the distinction between these, many stories blur this distinction in problematic ways. And the distinction is critical, because the campaign model, in its very structure, is directly opposed to the goals of community organizing in crucial ways. (To some extent this post is related to Paul Rosenberg's earlier posts on Obama as a classic progressive.)
(Another installment in this excelelnt series! - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Community organizers have been criticized for jumping from narrow issue to narrow issue without much sense of the "big picture." Too often organizing groups lack a coherent sense of the kind of social changes that would create the world they would like to have. They know how to demand discrete changes, but don't think enough about how to string these changes together into broad social transformation. In this post, I explore some challenges and tensions involved in bringing coherent actions in the present together with longer-term visions of social justice.
Those new to these posts may want to read Part I and Part II of "What is Organizing?" See the full series here. A paper giving an overview of current organizing challenges and a possible solution can be found here .
(Open Left's "Dark Side of The Moon" continues... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Effective local social action organizations are inevitably unique in many ways. How, then, do you replicate success in myriad different locations? In this post I discuss some tensions involved in the model adopted by major community organizing groups in America to spread local organizations across the nation.
Those new to these posts may want to read Part I and Part II of "What is Organizing?" See the full series here. A paper giving an overview of current organizing challenges and a possible solution can be found here . Note that this post is more "introductory" than other recent ones.
(More! More! More! The Never-Ending Series continues... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
It's not unusual for idealistic college students to graduate from college envisioning a life working for social change. But, as Dana Fisher notes in Activism, Inc., paid opportunities for this kind of work, even low-paying ones, are few and far between. Here, I examine the tensions and often destructive issues involved in privileged students' desire for fulfilling, socially engaged, jobs, and in well-meaning efforts to respond to these desires.
(Another installment in this excellent series. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Externally, community organizing groups split the world into an always flexible "us" and "them." Until fairly recently, the group I work with, at least, didn't look very closely at the internal fractures we had across boundaries of race and class. However the social and cultural power of privileged and less privileged members can create destructive patterns if they are not dealt with directly from the beginning.
In my limited experience in Wisconsin with CHANGE--a congregational organizing group that is a member of the national National Organizing network--I have watched a range of race and class issues emerge that were not dealt with effectively. (Later I'll talk about how intermediary organizations like National Organizing work with local groups).
From what I have read elsewhere (see also this and this ), a reluctance to focus specifically on race and class in favor of more pragmatic and general visions of "self interest" and coalition building has been a problem with mainline community organizing groups more generally. This has led to the development of new groups outside of the larger national groups that deal more directly with issues of racial identity, nationalism etc. More recently, I know that groups like National Organizing have begun to address these issues more directly, but since my participation has been mostly limited to local work in our education committee, I am not a part of these wider discussions in the network.
(I Don't care if it's not apathy. It's a BIG problem. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
With the incredible problems facing poor people in the United States, it is easy to look out on the lack of resistance, the silence in the streets, and assume the problem is apathy. "These people just don't care."
Here, I argue that "apathy" is not a useful way to understand why collective action is so lacking.
(Another instalment in this excellent series that's garnering more and more attention as time goes on. Don't be left out... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
People from different cultures have different ways of organizing themselves for collective action. Here, I talk about differences between people from working-class and middle-class professional backgrounds.
It's important to stress that I am not talking about individuals, but instead cultural patterns that play out (or don't) uniquely in different contexts. These patterns can illuminate why groups act the way they do, but they can't predict how any individual will act, and don't capture everything (and sometimes don't say much at all) about a particular group. In this post I am talking about approaches to social action fairly broadly, and not simply within the tradition of Alinsky-based organizing.
(Another in this important series. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
It may surprise many readers that most of the largest progressive community organizing groups in America are coalitions of churches.
In this post, I discuss why progressive community organizing in this country has ended up working so much through churches. I also start to examine a few benefits and problems with this approach. In later posts will discuss other issues related to the continuing intersection between organizing and religion in America.
These seem like key issues to discuss at this anniversary of Reverend MLK's death and amidst all the reminiscence of the civil rights movement, which was so fundamentally based in churches.
Every tradition of social action has its own ways of making sense of the world. Community organizing, for example, generally understands social action as an ongoing series of battles over power and resources and the less powerful as a repository of potential agency. When social service agencies look out at the world, in contrast, they see suffering, a vast collection of people in need of help.
In this post, I lay out some of the key concepts that "frame" the environment for community organizers, that help them make choices about strategy, recruitment, and action. This is Part II of an introduction to the model of community organizing currently dominant in the United States. See Part I: What is Community Organizing, What isn't Community Organizing. I will come back to more "dilemmas" of organizing in later posts, but it seemed useful to create a shared context for this discussion in these more descriptive posts.
(Blogging isn't organizing, either. But the two can intersect, and/or interact. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Popular conceptions of civic action in America have become extremely impoverished. While struggle goes on in many arenas of our society, coherent traditions of community organizing in America have mostly faded to myth in the popular imagination.
Old black-and-white newsreels of marching students, brave sharecroppers, and police-wielded water cannons from the 1960s flicker through our minds. But these images have lost most of their concrete meaning and contain few coherent lessons for social action.
I've been writing about community organizing, but I haven't been clear about exactly what I mean by this. There is no single effective model of "community organizing." Currently, however, the approach Saul Alinsky developed in the 1930s on the back streets of Chicago has become dominant in America-for good or ill. I call the current version of this model "post-Alinsky" since it has been significantly developed and changed by people like Ed Chambers, Ernie Cortes, Heather Booth, and others who came after Alinsky.
(It's no accident that people don't know what "organizing" means... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Americans think of community participation almost entirely terms of social service to individuals. This is a tragedy, and a key factor preventing strong progressive action for change.
If you go to a volunteer center in an American city and ask how you can get involved in a social action project to fight collectively against police brutality, or for more school funding, you will likely be met with blank stares. That's not "volunteering." Volunteers "help," they don't fight.
If you go talk to a non-profit leader in America about community organizing, you will probably be treated like a nut. "You mean, like Martin Luther King stuff?"
