Zack Exley

Maybe It’s Us (extended play version) 1 April, 2007

I wrote a post for TPMCafe’s thread started by Marshall Ganz on organizing. As usual, I got carried away and wrote too much. I cut it by half for them, but here below is the *extended play* version (I made a mark where the extra stuff starts)…

Organizer: Do you live over in that slummy building?
Tenant: Yeah. What about it?
Organizer: What the hell do you live there for?
Tenant: What do you mean, what do I live there for? Where else am I going to live? I’m on welfare.
Organizer: Oh, you mean you pay rent to live in that place?
Tenant: Come on, is this a put-on? Very funny! You know where you can live for free?
Organizer: Hmm. That place looks like it’s crawling with rats and bugs.
Tenant: It sure is.
Organizer: Did you ever try to get the landlord to do anything about it?
Tenant: Try to get him to do anything about anything!
Organizer: What if you didn’t pay your rent?
Tenant: They’d throw us out in ten minutes.
Organizer: Hmm. What if nobody in that building paid their rent?
Tenant: Well, they’d start to throw…Hey, you know, they’d have trouble throwing everybody out, wouldn’t they?
Organizer: Yeah, I guess they would.
Tenant: Hey, you know, maybe you got something—say, I’d like you to meet some of my friends. How about a drink.

—Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals.

“If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.”

—Lenin, November 27th, 1917.

Organizers these days tend to fall into one of two camps. The first are followers of Saul Alinsky, who is being remembered in this TPMCafe thread. They believe their job is not to lead, but to teach The People how to lead themselves (by practicing “leadership development” and “consciousness raising”). The other camp believes their job is to steamroller The People into doing what’s best for them (because they are not capable of leading themselves).

Please notice what these camps have in common: Both see themselves as separate from The People. Both see The People an object that must be treated by organizers in certain ways to achieve desired outcomes. One camp fancies itself more democratic; the other more realistic and results-oriented. They are unified in their belief that they each possess a special status apart from The People. To both, “We, The People” could only be a bit of good PR, not a sincere sentiment.

But aren’t organizers people too? What makes them so special that they do not include themselves in the category of The People? No one is ever explicit about it, but if you just look at the demographic of the people who get chosen for leadership on organizing staffs at progressive organizations and progressive-led unions, what makes them special is pretty clear: They are university-educated and middle-class (or at least middle-class bound).

The two camps are descended from two major, opposed, intellectual traditions of the 20th Century left. Most organizers are not aware of the history, but if you trace who was trained by or inspired by whom, going back just to the 40’s and 50’s you find the roots are not all that deep.

On the Alinskyite side of this middle-class progressive ideological split, organizers say: “We’re just assistants. We just give the people information and help them decide for themselves what they want to do—because democracy means just letting The People decide.” On the Leninist side, organizers say: “The People are too brainwashed and cowed to organize. That’s why it’s our job.”

In the 90’s, when I was going through the AFL-CIO Organizing Institute and working my first union organizing jobs around the country, every single one of my bosses and mentors were either trained directly by Alinsky, by a former-communist union leader, or by someone who had been trained by one. Most organizers around today could say the same—whether they know it or not—if they went through training in the 80’s or 90’s in the PIRGs, Citizen Action network, ACORN, the unions, the environmental movement or virtually any other sector of the progressive movement. Organizers trained in one or both of these traditions have gone on to become politicians (including Barack Obama), leaders of large progressive organizations and DC power brokers.

However, a new generation is coming up. Take MoveOn.org as an example: Neither of the founders, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, have any background with either tradition—they were software entrepreneurs. Eli Pariser, who graduated from college in this century and now is executive director of MoveOn, had no training or indoctrination in either tradition. The 2004 campaign cycle brought in a massive wave of organizers with no connection to either tradition. Nevertheless, both the Alinskyite and Leninist paradigms are quietly but forcefully asserting themselves on the new generation, as the heirs of both traditions are providing much guidance and orientation to the newcomers in all sorts of ways.

It’s not accurate to call the one tradition purely Alinskyite and the other purely Leninist. In reality, most organizers have a mish-mash of influences from both traditions. And Saul Alinsky (1909-1972) was just one of a whole cluster of similar-thinking activists who made a big dent on the American left. They never declared themselves or were recognized as a unified school of thought. But they do form a clear tradition in the American left. Others in this camp included: Myles Horton (1905-1990), the founder of the Highlander Folk School, which played an important role in the civil rights movement and Brazilian educator and organizer Paulo Freire (1921-1997), who provided the theoretical foundation for this unnamed school. Likewise, the Leninist tradition did not come only from Lenin, but from the broad European communist/socialist movement, finding its way to the American left though revolutionary immigrants and the great influence of revolutionary parties in the beginning of 20th century.

I don’t mean to say that either camp harbors any ill-will or intentional disrespect for The People. In fact both camps believe that history revolves around The People. This is just a matter of a technical underestimation of The People. The idea is that The People lacks something—something required for organizing. And these two camps believe that only they are the ones who can provide it.

The big difference is that the Alinskyites insist on waiting for The People to become enlightened, while the Leninists want to plough ahead without them. This explains the insistence on localism/smallism among Alinskyite organizing communities that Marshal Ganz described at the beginning of this thread:

At a time when problems of local communities were increasingly driven by national if not global forces, these [Alinskyite] groups remained insistently local. At a time when the moral initiative has been seized by the right, they continued to speak language of “self-interest.” And at time when a New Deal style “table” at which interest groups could bargain had vanished, they took an interest group approach to formulation of program, tactics, and strategy. As a result, their influence as a whole was less than the sum of their parts.

The way they tell it, the Alinskyites base their organizing on “dialoguing” (Friere’s term), in which organizers lead the oppressed to discover liberation for themselves (see the Alinsky dialog above). They see themselves (an elite band of conscious intellectuals) as working to educate and enlighten the working class in order that it can free itself—teaching people to recognize and comprehend their oppression, and to see that a better world is possible. They’re not interested in action unless the strategy for the action comes from (or at least appears to come from) The People itself. Like the man in the dialog above, The People is not aware of its oppression, and doesn’t understand the answer is to stick together and fight back. These fundamental life lessons need to be taught by the organizer in the Alinskyite reality. You see this assumption in Alinsky-inspired organizing models and throughout Alinsky’s writings. It’s all through Paulo Freire’s writing too. Just to give one example:

[The oppressed's] perception of themselves as oppressed is submerged in the reality of their oppression. At this level, their perceptions if themselves as opposites of the oppressor does not signify engagement in a struggle to overcome the contradiction, the one pole aspires not to liberation but to identification with its opposite pole. (Paolo Friere Reader, pg. 47)

It’s impossible to overstate the influence of the Freireian paradigm on today’s left, and his work is full of hundreds of such examples of explicit, pessimistic, blanket negation of collective working class agency and intelligence.

The Leninists, for their part, believe a vanguard of specially trained organizers must liberate the oppressed, whether they understand what’s happening to them or not. They see themselves (an elite band of conscious intellectuals) as working to free the working class through daring political strategy (update: insider DC politicking)—workers’ consciousnesses will be raised after the revolution, or after the union election (or, in the case of Democratic politics, never). According to this camp, social change must be achieved without the conscious participation of The People because there is no chance of The People becoming conscious anytime soon.

In my own organizing experiences—both in labor organizing and “online organizing”—I’ve been lucky enough to be confronted by groups of people who have forced me to reject this underestimation of The People. Despite myself, and after long resistance, I found that underestimating The People is an exercise in self-fulfilling expectations. (For some examples fleshed out, see this post.)

Eventually, I tried organizing with the expectation that groups of “ordinary people” were in fact capable of brilliant organizing. And I found my expectations fulfilled again! From then on, over and over—in the unions, MoveOn, Dean and elsewhere—I’ve had some opportunities to work with teams who assumed there were enough organic leaders among every group—leaders with the strength and skills to organize and win. And each time those teams were rewarded by amazing, already-skilled leaders rising to the tasks at hand. The only thing those groups sometimes lacked, was prior technical knowledge of specific strategies to win specific campaigns (e.g. knowledge of how anti-union campaigns worked, or knowledge of legislative intricacies and lobbying details).

So are we really encountering “The Return of the Organizer?” Let’s hope so. But let’s also hope that it’s not the same late-20th century organizer in whose face real leaders slammed their doors. If “The Organizer” is returning, let’s pray that it’s an organizer who knows that every nook and cranny of “The People” are packed with amazing leaders who have already been to hell and back and are quite ready to organize their communities on their own, with just a bit of specialized strategic guidance from (we hope) qualified outside organizers.

_____

I’m not talking about saying, “just let them do it without our intervention.” I’m talking about including oneself, as an organizer, in the group that you’re working with and simply recognizing that you have something that others in the group don’t: strategic and tactical experience with union campaigns, electoral campaigns, or whatever. Each time I’ve seen organizers proceed that way, I’ve seen groups suddenly demonstrate an abundance of leaders who:

• Did not need their consciousness raised;
• Were already quite aware of their oppression;
• Already understood “sticking together” and “fighting back;”
• Already knew how to lead their coworkers or neighbors;
• Already knew how to stand up to their boss, landlord, etc…;
• Already were more than willing to make enormous sacrifices for a winning plan to make real change (so long as someone had one).

In my view, the split between these “Trust the People” organizing efforts that I’ve been fortunate enough to witness and the Alinskyite and Leninist approaches comes down to a difference over a quantity and quality of leadership among “ordinary Americans.” We simply gambled that there was substantially more organizing skill among groups of workers than conventional organizing wisdom taught us to expect. It might sound like quibbling about details—but it actually makes all the difference in the world.

If you underestimate the amount of organizing ability among people, your campaign will not take full advantage of people’s abilities. That is the problem and solution: the reason we’re losing so many campaigns, and failing to create a renewed mass movement around any cause is that we are not accessing the full potential of the groups of workers we’re trying to organize. If we just access that full potential, then we will not only win some more campaigns, but also open the door to organizing on a truly mass scale—a scale which has unfortunately become utterly unimaginable over the last several decades.

When I raised all this with other organizers in the labor movement and the progressive movement, I’d usually meet ridicule. Those coming from the Leninist tradition, would accuse me of taking a naïve “workerist” position (“the worker is always right”). Meanwhile, organizers from the Alinskyite tradition would accuse us of anti-democratic or short-cut organizing. “Don’t tell the workers your strategy, let them figure it out for themselves.” (i.e. trick them into thinking it was their idea through the process of dialoging exemplified above.)

In our “Trust the People” organizing, we didn’t naively believe “the workers are always right.” That is a ridiculous abstraction. But we did believe that the (abundant) grassroots leaders among The People were almost always right about things that were inside their own regular experience. They knew better than us how to talk to their coworkers, write campaign literature for their coworkers, run meetings of their coworkers. And we found that when we tried to “train” (aka “develop”) them, we usually just broke their stride—causing natural talent to appear to disappear.

And when it came to things outside of their direct experience, leaders were more than capable of considering strategy and making wise decisions about it. For example, in union organizing campaigns, leaders saw flaws in our top-level strategy, fought with us, and we’d sometimes give in. Often I had to relent on the issue of continuing house visits all the way through a campaign. In doing so, I was breaking the organizing orthodoxy I was trained in, but acknowledging (hoping) that the leaders could be right that something in my strategy was wrong. And in that case, they were always right. But sometimes the same leaders were wrong about top-level strategy. Through those fights, it became as clear as day that we were not organizers “outside” of The people, but rather just some people on the organizing committee—just some people who belonged to The People. Sure, we had some specialized knowledge, but so did every other member of those organizing committees.

“The People” does not refer to the simple aggregate of all people. There is a structure to The People—complex, constantly shifting, and chaotic. But a structure nonetheless. “The People” refers to all the structures of grassroots leaderships, and all the potential courses of action of all those grassroots leaderships. A mass movement happens when one of those dormant, potential grassroots leaderships becomes active, actual. The People is therefore always a mass movement waiting to happen, because mass movement is one possible future course of action. Every workplace is a union waiting to happen. Every country is a revolution waiting to happen. Or, of course, The People can also be a nightmare waiting to happen.

Thinking of society and social change in this way helps explain how the character of a whole nation can snap dramatically from one extreme to another. Thomas Frank’s famous What’s the Matter With Kansas was an enthralling story of a whole region of the country snapping from Socialist to Extreme Conservative in scarcely more than one generation. It’s common to chalk that kind of thing up to “the madness of crowds” or to the famous mystical pendulum that swings Left one generation and then Right the next. But it’s better explained this way: first socialists, then a new brand of conservatives, each mobilized different (but overlapping) sets of grassroots leaderships. They organized them, led them and made two very different futures come true. In each case of successful mass organizing there were people who went—as members of and participants in The People—and organized other leaders toward certain ends.

Potential grassroots leaderships exist in America right now ready to elect progressives, fight for national health care, repeal draconian drug laws, or to accomplish any of the left’s (forgotten) Big Goals. If the left trusted those grassroots leaderships, and learned how to work with them as colleagues, then they’d win on all those issues. The Left’s agenda is right in line with what the vast majority of Americans want: a living wage, fair trade, universal health care, freedom from discrimination, safe working conditions, protection of their civil liberties, beefed up funding for education, more democracy, and so on. If the left was as good as the right at organizing its already-existing grassroots leadership then the left would be unstoppable.

Most young activists have murky knowledge of the history of activism and social movements. It’s not their fault—those topics are not taught in school anymore. One thing they might not know is that up until about 50 or 60 years ago, it was common for millions of Americans to challenge corporations in nationwide, coordinated actions.

Try to imagine that happening today. Imagine all the workers of Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Target and a dozen other big department stores taking physical possession of their stores until their demand for a living wage was granted. It happened in the 1940’s: the mostly young, mostly female employees of the big department store chains invented a new tactic for the labor movement called the “sit-down strike.” They locked the doors from the inside, fed themselves with snacks off the shelves and held the stores for weeks. Because the president refused to order the National Guard to carry out commando assaults against the teenage girls occupying the stores, the companies had no choice but to negotiate. Just imagine how many girls—maybe your grandmother was one of them—experienced the exhilarating feeling of facing off with a lawyer from the company negotiating new wages and benefits. Imagine the sheepish look on his face as he said, “YES…Yes…yes….”

After department store workers nationwide invented the sit-down strike, autoworkers in Michigan used the same tactic to organize the Big Three automakers by locking themselves into their factories and shutting down production. This time the president might have been willing to order the National Guard to attack. He almost did it. But when the soldiers got to the factories, the workers’ wives, girlfriends and daughters, calling themselves the “Ladies Auxiliary,” stood in the way—armed with the family shotgun.

In a series of violent national and regional organizing drives and strikes like those, huge chunks of the working class pulled themselves up into the middle class. A new America was born.

After that, as the story goes, American workers became complacent. They were bought-off by high wages. They moved out to the suburbs, bought televisions and learned how to be good consumers by watching idealized, apolitical versions of themselves in the first sitcoms. They began to believe in capitalism. They became defenders of the system—or at least accepters of the system. The American people ceased to be an anti-corporate or anti-capitalist people, as they had been before.

But how do we know that the last, dismal part of that story is true? Well…we just know, don’t we? But how…why? Was there an opinion poll? Are there pro-status quo clubs in churches and workplaces? Are the people shooting down political candidates who attack the status quo and advocate for real change? We have no idea, because no one has tried in decades—maybe in a century. We have no clue what the American people are up for. We have no idea how they’d react to a campaign to challenge the system on a grand scale, because no one has presented them with that option in forever.

The ubiquitous view among activists that American workers are apolitical is based on the what activists see on TV. It’s terribly ironic: capitalism uses TV to try to mold human beings into perfect consumers; activists watch TV and assume, without any hesitation, that it’s worked.

But what if the human spirit has an immune system? What if the fight-back spirit of The People hasn’t changed between the 30’s today. Then what has changed? Why are there no more million-worker strikes? Why does America seem to be going along unquestioning? Maybe it’s not the workers.

Well, maybe it’s us.

I can’t provide empirical evidence for my position any more than anyone else can provide evidence for the mainstream position that The People are brainwashed and cowed. No empiricism can be valid concerning entities such as “The People,” which are made up of millions of mysterious souls. Like it or not, all knowledge concerning such entities can only take the form of stories that we tell to help guide action. The question is: what story are you going to tell yourself about The People? The story of ignorant, complacent, misguided people standing in the way of their own best interests? Or the story of an arrogant, out-of-touch left inadvertently standing in the way of social change?

In the progressive movement, our lack of faith in the people has lead to the obsession with building an army of workaholic careerist college grads who inevitably burn out after a few years. The People do not need a college grad vanguard. But neither do they need a swarm of pesky activists asking, “But what do you think we should do?” The alternative to steamrollering over grassroots leaderships is not to step away from your own unique leadership roll, but rather to play it well in partnership with leaders and in recognition that you yourself are a grassroots leader.

There are infinite possible futures. What course of action can we progressive organizers take to help get humanity to one of the good ones? If we decide that The People is the problem, then we might as well all head to grad school to study Lefebvre or something, shouldn’t we? However, if we decide that our own left culture is the problem, then we can do something about it. Can’t we?