Web Page:
http://educationaction.org
Email:
schutz[at]uwm[dot]edu
Bio:
My name is Aaron Schutz and I'm an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. My current focus is on community organizing, and I've worked closely with community organizing groups in Milwaukee for a number of years.
(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Most of the most powerful writing on community organizing is unpublished, or published in such limited fashion that it is extremely difficult to get ahold of.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.”
In Part I, I argued that this may be a promising moment for sparking a social movement around the "right to a job" in America, despite all appearances to the contrary.
the dilemma of your post is the getting from here to there. You call for organizations and organizers to do this and that. But getting them to do this and that is not going to happen in the absence of some kind of organization dedicated to getting them to do this and that. . . .
[Y]ou have to do more. You have to start wrestling with how to get from here to there.
In this post, I try, with some trepidation, to do just that, to envision what kind of organization could "spark" a social movement in this country.
Community Organizing Groups Are Inherently “Conservative”
Carefully weighing the power they have, organizers seek measurable “wins” that will allow them to build power. Step by step, they seek to strengthen their “organizations” into durable voices for poor and oppressed people. Organizers seek that little crack where they can pry open the power structure just a little bit more.
Discovering a new issue requires careful research. Organizers and leaders learn to put on their green eyeshades and survey the plusses and minuses of each possibility. Hard-eyed pragmatism is the way of community organizing.
Movements Are More Like Uncontrolled Explosions
Movements burst on the scene, often without warning, when people won’t tolerate the status quo anymore. A movement is always more organized than it generally looks on the outside, but it is not “an” organization. In movements, a shifting collection of organizations, individuals, groups, and leaders come together for fluid, unpredictable mass struggle.
The Limits of Organizing
Frances Fox Piven and her late colleague Richard Cloward famously dismissed organizing as mostly ineffectual. Real change, they argued, only comes when movements explode.
Visionary movements have dramatically changed American society. Pragmatic organizing has not.
A Movement Moment?
It is hard to see any movement in the offing in America. Poor people, especially, are beat down. Tired. Isolated. Overwhelmed. Unorganized. Apathetic.
But did anyone really predict the movements of the past? (A Civil Rights movement in the deep South in the 1950s? How ridiculous.)
The truth is that movements rarely simply “happen.” Existing resistance organizations almost always catalyze and nurture the emergence of movements.
Is it time for organizers to put away their cost-benefit analyses and power charts, at least for a few targeted issues?
Is now the time to fight for what we really need instead of for often mediocre (if still important) scraps that are all we think we can wrest from the powerful?
I explore these questions on the flip.
(For those new to this series see summaries of the organizing model: Part I and Part II .)
(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.
(I’ve said it many times, the key to lasting long-term political change is building infrastructure for the long haul. On the most basic level, it means investing in organizing. The time to start is now. – promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
(Update: new studies/Needmor ratio fixed, some new language)
Enormous piles of money went to progressive and left-leaning politicians this year. Clearly many on the left are willing to invest in efforts to foster social change.
Where can that money go now that the political season has ended?
People usually give money for social improvement to charity: women’s shelters, drug treatment, hospitals, foot pantries . . . .
But one dollar going to charity produces not much more than a dollar in actual services (even with matching funds).
Research indicates that a dollar given to organizing can generate enormous returns.
After the flip, I talk about this research on the returns to organizing, and an effort I am beginning to try to improve funding for organizing in my city, which I would love to have comments on. I also point to established organizations people could contribute to right now, and to places funders can go for advice on funding organizing. This post extends on and (sorry) repeats aspects of an earlier discussion about funding in this series.
(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.
(The FISA betrayal as a “teachable moment”, maybe… – promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Welcome to the joke that is your “movement.”
— kanzeon
Some on the liberal Net are seething about Obama’s FISA capitulation. I was pissed off as well.
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 .
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