The Organizer believes that this book, especially the main supporting character “Mac,” really captures the mind of the very best Organizers. It’s a disturbing portrait, one in which you care so much about justice for everybody that you’re willing to use individuals as if they were no more than tools.
That said, The Organizer believes that this coldness is necessary against the overwhelming forces of power and riches that are used against the people.
It’s worthwhile for people considering this life to read this book and consider Mac’s worldview. Accept it or reject it. Say it’s the only way or it’s crazy. Either way, you have to confront this approach. Whatever you believe about how Mac works, his way has been the way of real revolutionaries before him. Even if you don’t like it in these pages, you probably admire some of the real world accomplishments by past Organizers who approached the work this way.
Filed under: national, organizing, organizing networks, professional, schools-of-thought
I haven’t had a chance to go through this in detail yet, but I would like to draw readers’ attention to the Organizers’ Forum.
My actual life as an Organizer has been really hot lately, so the blog has been cold. Hopefully I will have some great reflections for you all soon. In the meantime, I’d love for some readers to report on what they think about information on the site above.
Looking at their Board of Directors, I mostly see people I’m impressed by. Not so interested in hearing from support groups like the Center for Community Change or the Tides Foundation, but it’s nice to see major leaders in groups like DART, Gamaliel and major Unions on there.
The most interesting part of the site is the Dialogues, though. You can look forward to the Organizer reviewing this section in the near future.
Five of the Dialogues have interesting topics. Do we care about Organizing in South Africa, India or the crews’ road trip to Brazil? No. And the most recent dialogue touches on perhaps the Organizers’ least favorite, most beaten-into-the-ground topic in contemporary Organizing. If we discuss that Dialogue, you know our bias from the outset. I am going to rip it to shreds. I have not even read it yet but I’ve been-there/done-that enough times already. I know what they are going to say already. It’s like a broken record.
That said, Immigrant Organizing, The Future of Organizing, Corporate Campaigns — that’s all hot stuff. I want to see what they have to say. Soon. OR, you can read it now and write your own assessment here. Email it to theorganizer.wordpress@gmail.com and I might even just go ahead and post it as a guest entry. How’s that sound? I don’t even have to agree with it to post it. Just make it smart.
I was talking to my supervisor the other day about taking a group of our constituents out to meet with some decisionmakers before defining our demands on the issue we were set on undertaking. He laughed in my face. He said it was ridiculous to meet with politicians if you didn’t have demands.
I tried to argue that it does make sense. It’s called Community Research. You do it by talking to people, even the elected people, before deciding what exactly you want. It’s a show of power in it’s own way, but it’s also an effective way to get questions answered and one your base gets something out of participating in and will participate in (generally speaking, they won’t sit and read reports or legislation with you, in my experience).
He continued to scoff. So then the Organizer made a mistake. He explained that that’s how groups like the Industrial Areas Foundation set about cutting their issues once they have decided to take a big problem on.
Well, then he just dismissed the whole notion.
So here’s one thing all old school organizers have in common: if an unfamiliar practice comes from another school-of-thought, they dismiss it out of hand. Sad but true. Organizers only trust the ways of their own, even though all of us, even the most ridiculous networks and traditions, have had our fair share of successes. It frustrates me.
The Organizer did a little rally the other day. Before it started, he was passing out fliers to people as they passed by. Not much was going on (it all came out really well in the end, incidentally). A young man came up to me. African-American. Come to think of it, he might have been older than me. Not really sure. He did say he had six kids.
He asked me what I did for a living, and I told him I was an Organizer. He didn’t really know what that was so I said that I worked in politics. He beat around the bush a little, but he said he wanted to get involved in politics. I knew of some opportunities for people to pursue if they wanted to get started, so I suggested them to him. I could tell he wasn’t listening to them, though. I could tell he didn’t think they sounded impressive enough. Well, whatever. Maybe he knows a way where he can jump right to the big stuff, but I’d be pretty surprised.
He asked me who I thought was going to win the Presidental election next year. I told him I didn’t know. He asked me about some other big issue and I told him that I didn’t have a very well thought out opinion about it, either. I said I was more interested in the day-to-day issues of my own city.
He said, “Yeah, I guess you could say I just have a bigger vision.” Then he went off about how he didn’t want to see his kids end up like all the ones you see around town just hanging around, getting in trouble, no jobs. How it was all linked to big political issues that he couldn’t articulate all that well.
I nodded, waiting for him to leave. If I had a nickel for every poor mother who isn’t going to get involved in anything who ranted to me for twenty minutes about some poorly conceived conspiracy theory I could run my organization for a decade.
It made me think: it’s funny how political sophistication develops. When I was young, I found international and national politics very exciting. I knew plenty about the big issues but next to nothing about what was going on in my hometown. Now I’m just the opposite. I barely pay attention to whatever story the President or the Congress is leading the news media to muck through and lots of attention to my own city’s quagmire.
That young man looked at me and thought I just wasn’t sophisticated enough to think about the world all at once. When it comes to politics, though, the big picture is a curious myopia. I wanted to explain to this young man that only after years of day-to-day involvement in political life had I come to realize what Tip O’Neill told us long ago: “All politics is local.” The local stuff is where it gets really complicated, messy and fascinating. National politics is painted with rollers and the local stuff is rendered with the finest most delicate brushes. It takes a real mind to sort the local stuff out and to see the larger implications of what gets rolling in our own backyards.
The Organizer has been made aware of a controversy in Erie surrounding a Gamaliel Foundation affiliate, C.A.L.L.
The best I can gather about this contoversy is that C.A.L.L. pushed for money to redevelop Parade Street, Erie’s oldest street. Mainly, they wanted a grocery store. Which makes sense. The Organizer recognizes that grocery stores are key to neighborhood life.
When the money came in, they helped found a new organization, Invest Erie, to spend the money and get the grocery store built. Only it didn’t get done.
Here’s a fellow who has more to say about it and actually lives there. Click here.
No doubt this is a complex story, but the Organizer sees two problems with this campaign, from what we can discern about it on-line:
1) Why push for “some” grocery store when you could come out of the box pushing for a specific chain? It’s true, that narrows your options, but then when-and-if you win you actually win. This is one of those cases when in the early days of a campaign you think the strategy is best to cast a wide net. It’s a mistake, though. In this case, it looks like Invest Erie won the money, but they still couldn’t convince anyone to come. So they won, but then they never won.
Major bummer, right? Demands have got to be real tight. It can’t be: “We want a grocery store.” It needs to be, “We want Safeway!”
2) Back in the Alinsky days, they learned you need to push to get programs and initiatives started, but the organizations that win them don’t run them. They watch them. Setting up a second dummy org doesn’t count.
It’s mistake first because the program will take over your organizing. It’s also a mistake because if the program backfires it also backfires on your organizing organization.
I know C.A.L.L. is having a hard time organizing in Erie now because of this controversy, and that’s a shame. You win some campaigns, and you lose some. Erie is still better off having a good community member like C.A.L.L. than not, even if this backfired.
But longterm organizers like the Gamaliel folks should have known better than to let it all go down this way.
If you are lucky enough to talk to old school Organizers at The Industrial Areas Foundation, eventually they will get around to one of their favorite rules-of-thumb: if you get your campaign going right, the opposition will probably do your organizing for you.
What they mean is, if you make a demand of a target, they will often reply to your demand in such an offensive and derogatory or insensitive way, that it will tick your base off badly enough that they will fly to your next action. There’s some real truth in this. If you use the offensive reply as an organizing tool.
So I wish some IAF leaders would sit down with John Sweeney and teach him how to use the opposition to his advantage. On The Hill Blog, Sweeney bemoans all of Labor’s recent legal losses. The losses are pretty offensive when you break them down. Insulting to worker rights. But is organized Labor using it?
Change to Win argues that they aren’t. Someone needs to use it and use it right. Labor is still the largest organized base out there, except for maybe churches. They have the power to right this wrong, if they know how to work their people (people who have every reason to be worked and worked up!).
Filed under: Friends and Allies, electoral politics, general, leadership, local campaigns, organizing, politicians, schools-of-thought
It’s Election Time! Do-or-die days for a lot of Organizers out there. In fact, this is the only time that some political professionals actually do any organizing. Though in my opinion, electoral organizing is some of the lowest grade, lowest skill development organizing out there. At least, as it exists today. Back in the days of real machine politics, a person could find a meaningful place doing meaningful work in candidate campaigns, but these days no one trusts the average joe to do anything but grunt work, and the staffs don’t care about anything but news media and ad buys.
It’s not unusual for me to bemoan the fact that elections are the time of the greatest civic action among the citizens of the country. I think it’s a little irrational. You can put your energy into trying to get some man or woman elected, and you never know what you’re going to get. A candidate is a complicated mess. You can end up with a Bill Clinton, who surprises everyone by taking away welfare as an entitlement program. Or you can end up with a George Bush, Senior, who pushes the biggest tax increase anyone remembers.
Still, though, people think it’s do or die, and people who never participate in politics and never volunteer for causes get out there and work for candidates.
Not to criticize them, I think it illustrates something about organizing.
The smart Organizer knows that if you want to turn people out, if you want to build a base, you don’t do it with a good issue that people care about. I mean, you can turn out a lot of people that way, from time-to-time, but if you want to build something lasting you try to build leaders, instead. You do this, because you know that people will consistently do something that someone they view as a leader asks them to do. Leaders are consistent people. People follow people they see as consistent, that they can count on.
People don’t trust issues. They don’t know what they are going to get out of an issue. They don’t know if there is fine print somewhere, or if someone is pushing an issue for ulterior motives.
A lot of times, they don’t understand issues. They find them confusing. They see loopholes. Or they fear the loopholes they don’t see.
But people understand other people, and they will follow other people. They want to do the things people they have come to count on advise them to do.
That’s why I think it makes sense that people get more excited about elections (which may or may not have some sort of direct payoff to people down the road) than they do in issue campaigns (which often have very clear payoffs to certain communities, if they succeed). Elections are for candidates and candidates are people and that just works in better with folks at a gut level.
People make more sense to other people than issues. That’s why the average person who may or may not get involved in politics is more likely to contribute some time to a campaign effort than to issue activism.
It may not be ideal, but it does correspond with human nature. As Organizers, we are interested in dealing with people as they are, not as we wish they were or – worse yet – as we believe they ought to be.
