Is there a best kind of organizing? + camels, llamas + polyamory
+ combatting anti-Asian violence + Heroes fighting plagues + progressives exercising power skillfully
We are living in a golden age of social movements. As Erica Chenoweth argues in her paper “The Future of Nonviolent Resistance” — and demonstrates in the powerful chart below — nonviolent civil resistance has been surging in recent years worldwide.
Domestically, organizing and social movements have been culturally resonant – cool even – in a way they have not been for decades, thanks to the work of the Movement for Black Lives, the climate movement, the Fight for 15, the immigrant rights movement, and others. There has also been growing appreciation for the centrality of organizations that do the hard, unglamorous work of recruiting new people, training leaders, and laying the foundation for big moments. The work of community groups like New Georgia Project and unions like UNITE HERE, featured in previous issues of The Platypus, turned the Georgia Senate seats blue. Labor and community organizing groups nationwide powered a narrow victory for Joe Biden last fall. If we are feeling relief or hope in 2021, we have movements and organizations to thank. And if we are to imagine a progressive, just future, organizing, and movements provide the path.
Yet, organizing remains mysterious to many, and it is still far less respected and less supported as a vocation than lawyering or policy advocacy or running for office. Elites, including liberal elites, have trouble relating to organizing because their life experience is that change happens through individual action and expertise rather than through the power of organized groups. Our celebrity culture regularly misattributes collective accomplishments to charismatic individuals. This issue of The Platypus explores some cutting-edge questions in organizing.
All organizing operates from the principle that only organized people can defeat organized money. But there are vast differences in how organizing is practiced in different settings and among different constituencies. Is there a best kind of organizing? This question is debated fiercely by partisans in all traditions who uphold standards of the craft. A recent piece in The American Prospect by Theda Skocpol and Catherine Tervo, “Resistance Disconnect,” critiqued Indivisible, the group that formed in response to Trump’s election and galvanized energy around a savvy guide on how to impede right-wing action in Congress. They argue that Indivisible’s centralization and failure to invest in local leaders and chapters hobbled its efficacy. Several critical responses took issue with the authors’ arguments.
I’m sure there is a very long German word that captures the complexity of my feelings about the piece by Skocpol and Tervo. On the one hand, there is a need for more open and rigorous discussion of organizing. Leaving the Indivisible case aside, it’s hard to argue that the “nationalization” of organizing in recent years has been without real costs, understandable though it may have been in response to the menace of Trumpism. The greater, long-term investments in communities and states that Skocpol and Tervo argue for are surely essential to a durable progressive resurgence. However, I was troubled by the authors’ assessment of Indivisible based on a particular idea of what organizing should look like – the federated local and state model. This tendency to judge what exists by the yardstick of our own mental models of what things should look like has bedeviled the field for a generation. To put things a different way, when you criticize a camel for not being a llama, can you really see the animal in front of you clearly? It may be that the world needs more llamas, but berating camels isn’t going to achieve that. Different organizing structures facilitate and inhibit different kinds of change – in policy, politics, and narrative. Each model has limitations that are not reducible to choices by people working inside the model. For example, there are real limitations to the federated structures Skocpol and Tervo lionize – they have often been plagued by problems of racial exclusivity, bureaucratic unresponsiveness, tactical immobility, and capture by elite factions.
Is it possible to take a different approach to the necessary work of critically assessing organizing — to do it in a way that moves practice forward rather than reinforcing people’s existing biases? Perhaps we might judge the utility of a critique by its impact – does it improve practice or harden battle lines? The sheer variety of methods that have “worked” in recent years – in the sense of having moved many people to action, developed their capacities, and delivered tangible change – feels like an invitation to a different kind of conversation.
Mark Engler and Paul Engler offer a very useful framework in This Is an Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt is Shaping the 21st Century. They argue that there are three major traditions of bottom-up social change: 1) mass-based permanent organizations (like unions or many community organizations) that deliver incremental and concrete change through slow and patient work; 2) disruptive social movements that move the debate and deliver dramatic results in bursts when social contradictions are sharpened; and 3) a synthesis the Englers elaborate of “momentum-driven” movements like the ones for marriage equality or Otpor in Serbia. While no real-world organizing fits perfectly in any category, this framework provides a starting point for analysis. We might add to it additional approaches not discussed by the Englers, including 4) efforts to achieve governing power and 5) inside-outside strategies. My colleagues and I have developed such a 5-part typology for a graduate-level class we have co-taught for experienced organizers. The typology helps us understand the distinctive strengths and limitations of different modalities and illuminates different lineages of social change in the U.S. and around the world. It also helps foster better translation between practitioners in different traditions of organizing. Becoming aware of the range of possibilities available to us in our movement lineages can inspire some creative new mash-ups.
Surely the place to start is to understand what organizers and grassroots leaders are up to and what they are trying to build on their own terms. What are the constraints they face, and where do they really have agency to make strategic choices? Inside the traditions of building permanent, mass organizations (union or community), for example, it’s possible to ask questions about the role of organizers and leaders, scale, financing, structure, growth, strategic capacity, and durability. Considering disruptive movements, one might ask a different set of questions altogether. From that generous beginning that seeks to first understand internal logics, it is possible then to get critical in a way that advances practice.
It’s also useful to widen the aperture, especially now. For example, the overall balance of activity from an eco-systemic view may be a problem – even if you believe, as I do, that a broad range of organizing approaches are appropriate to different contexts. Are we making enough efforts to recruit people who are not already ideologically “progressive” into mass organizations, or is too much attention devoted to the already “woke”? Is there enough organizing of low-income and working-class people, or are middle-class activists dominating? Are there new social contradictions that present new mass organizing opportunities? What is the connection between “bread and butter” fights on local workplace and community issues and national, ideological, and political change? Is there synergy between outside efforts that redefine what’s possible and inside/outside work to bring wins home? Are we doing too much “mobilizing” and not enough “organizing”? How can organizations and movements best relate – and how do both engage in electoral politics? Can big victories (like the Rescue Act) be a trampoline into movement and organization building?
Today’s issue of The Platypus brings together valuable pieces that advance the right kind of conversation about organizing. We also recommend regularly checking out a couple of online publications to keep up with organizing debates. Organizing Upgrade: Strategy for Left Organizers and The Forge: Organizing Strategy and Practice. Our next issue (for subscribers) will include more readings on a similar theme and a joyous jazz playlist.
— deepak bhargava
Reading Recommendations
We re-read one of the best organizing strategy pieces ever written, “The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty” by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, published in The Nation in 1966. The situation today is far different than it was then, but the Rescue Act presents massive organizing opportunities. Building a mass demand for and consciousness about the refundable child tax credit will be essential to make it permanent. The article is also a model for the kind of analysis of concrete historical conditions and institutional arrangements we need now. In a new introduction written in 2015, Piven says that she and Cloward were
influenced by the changing focus of the Movement. We tried to think through the institutional context in which the minority poor found themselves, from the distortions of the New Deal welfare programs that denied them assistance, to urban fiscal constraints and intergroup conflicts that paralyzed local governments, to the possibilities that locally-based movements could provoke reform by creating problems that reverberated upward in the federal grant-in-aid system. Our objective was not, as later critics of the Glenn Beck variety later charged, to propose a strategy to bring down American capitalism. We were not so ambitious. But we did think that the minority poor and their allies might create sufficient disturbance to force reforms in the American income support programs. And we were not entirely wrong.
You might also check out two engrossing interviews (here and here) by Kit Miller of her mother Maya Miller, a welfare activist in Nevada. Among other things, they describe the famous 1971 march of thousands of welfare mothers on the Las Vegas strip, led by welfare rights leader Ruby Duncan. It’s poetic that on the 50th anniversary of that event, Congress has enacted a part of the vision the marchers campaigned so effectively to achieve.
Celia (Cea) Weaver of Housing Justice for Allhas a brilliant piece out in New Labor Forum, “Universal Rent Control to Cancel Rent: Tenant Organizing in New York State.” She offers an incisive analysis of the real estate industry, the shifting terrain in Albany, and the development of a militant, multi-racial, and independent tenant movement. She explains how the landmark 2019 rent stabilization law was won and why Cancel Rent represents a new phase of the struggle.
In 2019, the realignment that existed in the housing movement also existed in the legislature, making reforming rent stabilization a priority for mainline Democrats, left-leaning progressives, and socialists alike. But today, the demand to cancel rent is different. Like rent stabilization, the demand to cancel rent questions the right to profit from real estate, particularly in the middle of a pandemic. Rather than a more narrow, technocratic conversation about affordability, “cancel rent” explicitly envisions a world that is free from landlord domination and rent-seeking. The “cancel rent” legislation, which does not prohibit collecting rent but does clear back rent accrued during the pandemic period, contains a landlord hardship fund—putting the onus on landlords to apply for aid, but requiring them to open their books to prove that they need it. In exchange for aid, landlords must consent to basic tenant protections, including allowing tenants the right to renew their lease with limited rent increases.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s extraordinary From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation situates the trajectory of the Black freedom movement in economic, political, and demographic changes in the 1960s and 1970s – and also in a set of choices made by key leaders. Writing in 2016 when the Ferguson uprising forced the Obama administration to change course, she assessed insurgent Black movements as a response to the limitations of choices made in earlier eras.
The most significant transformation in all of Black life over the last fifty years has been the emergence of a Black elite, bolstered by the Black political class, that has been responsible for administering cuts and managing meager budgets on the backs of Black constituents. . . . After forty years of this electoral strategy, Black elected officials’ inability to alter the poverty, unemployment, and housing and food insecurity their constituents face casts significant doubt on the existing electoral system as a viable vehicle for Black liberation.
A Scientific American article “Killings by Police Declined After Black Lives Matters Protest” cites a new study that shows that protest delivers crucial gains:
Since Black Lives Matter protests gained national prominence following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., the movement has spread to hundreds of cities and towns across the U.S. Now a new study shows police homicides have significantly decreased in most cities where such protests occurred.
“Black Lives Matter represents a trend that goes beyond the decentralization that existed within the Civil Rights Movement,” says Aldon Morris, a sociologist at Northwestern University, who was not involved in the new study. “The question becomes, ‘Are Black Lives Matter protests having any real effect in terms of generating change?’ The data show very clearly that where you had Black Lives Matter protests, killing of people by the police decreased. It’s inescapable from this study that protest matters—that it can generate change.”
In his crucial piece “Organizing New People by Listening,” George Goehl delivers the hard truth that we won’t prevail if we only recruit activists to our movements who already agree with us about everything.
Let’s create spaces that welcome and develop the still waking. We all got to where we are through a process: life experience, political education, being part of organizations. Let’s bring as many people into that process as possible.
The social movements of today have propelled change that organizing in a vacuum could never touch. Seizing the energy from movements has been a powerful way to grow our organizations. What got us here is not necessarily what will get us over the top. To deliver on the promise of this moment, we have to reach millions who are not part of our growing choir. Let’s wrestle with how to do both—bring in those energized by the moment and speak to those who are not (at least not yet). We will be more grounded and powerful as a result.
Arnie Graf’s Lessons Learned: Stories from a Lifetime of Organizing is one of the best books exploring the principles of organizing, through the lens of real campaigns and leaders, that I’ve ever read. You should buy it!
Erica Chenoweth has a new book out that we’re eager to read Civil Resistance: What Everyone Needs to Know.
Finally, Deepak is teaching Charles Payne’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom this week. It’s profound – especially Chapter 8: “Slow and Respectful Work: Organizing and Organizers.”
Savvy Corner
Eight hundred AAPI and other BIPOC organizations issued this important collective statement about anti-Asian violence.
For centuries, our communities have been frequently scapegoated for issues perpetuated by sexism, xenophobia, capitalism, and colonialism. Asians were brought to the United States to boost the supply of labor and keep wages low, while being silenced by discriminatory laws and policies. From the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, to the forced migration of refugees from U.S.-led military conflict in Southeast Asia, to post-9/11 surveillance targeting Muslim and South Asian communities, to ICE raids on Southeast Asian communities and Asian-owned businesses, Asian American communities have been under attack by white supremacy.
Working class communities of color are disproportionately suffering from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The Trump administration’s relentless scapegoating of Asians for the pandemic has only exacerbated the impact on Asian business owners and frontline workers and inflamed existing racism. The hypersexualization of Asian American women and the broad normalization of violence against women of color, immigrant women, and poor women make Asian American women particularly vulnerable. Hate incidents against Asian Americans rose by nearly 150% in 2020, with Asian American women twice as likely to be targeted.
Davin L. Phoenix’s The Anger Gap (discussed in a prior issue of The Platypus) suggests that the fear engendered in AAPI communities by escalating threats and violence may result in a new wave of political mobilization. He shows that Asian Americans, uniquely among ethnic and racial groups in America, respond to fear with political action. He suggests that the “tenuousness of AAPI’s collective incorporation within American politics, combined with cues about politics received from socialization within non-US political systems, may contribute to making anxiety over politics a pivotal force in shaping this group’s political decision making.” Phoenix also argues that anger is uniquely motivating as a source of solidarity among communities of color, and that’s been evident in the response of non-AAPI communities this week.
You can also read Deepak’s piece about the murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla and the role of hate crimes in fostering right-wing politics here:
Seen through this wider lens, the January 6th insurrection is not an aberration, but the culmination of a campaign of terror and violence directed against Black, brown, immigrant, and Muslim communities. Most Americans think of hate crimes and violence by right-wing groups as something marginal to the “real business” of politics and policy. However, much of the modern Republican Party has been deliberately fomenting a continuous rebellion against the civil rights revolution of the 1960s, from Nixon’s southern strategy to Reagan’s dog whistles on welfare and crime, and under Trump, they very nearly succeeded. Violence by lone wolves and organized hate groups has been essential rather than incidental to their plan.
We were delighted to read the Politico Playbook article “What Ron Klain told progressives behind closed doors,” which demonstrates how valuable it is to have progressive, movement organizers like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus) in positions of power:
We should pause for a second to reflect on the power of the CPC right now. A few years ago, the group was viewed as a bunch of radicals with no clout. Now they’re flexing and commanding the attention of the White House. Biden called Jayapal after the American Rescue Plan passed, and she told him she wants these kinds of meetings to happen regularly. Now CPC has not one but twomeetings at the White House in a span of a few days (another is expected by the end of the week).
In addition to Jayapal, the members who attended the Klain meeting were Reps. ILHAN OMAR (D-Minn.), MARK POCAN (D-Wis.), BARBARA LEE (D-Calif.) and CORI BUSH (D-Mo.), per two sources.
Delights and Provocations
Some of you only read this far for the polyamory. You know who you are! Andrew Solomon has a gobsmacking piece in The New Yorker this week, “How Polyamorists and Polygamists Are Challenging Family Norms,” that traverses the spectrum from genderqueer outposts to Mormon country.
Queer theorists have complained that Obergefell valorizes the family values associated with monogamous marriage and thereby demeans people who resist those values. But others see it as the first step toward more radical change. “Obergefell is a veritable encomium for marriage as both a central human right and a fundamental constitutional right,” Joseph J. Fischel, an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Yale, has written. “We, as an LGBT movement, should be ethically committed to endorsing poly relations and other experiments in intimacy.” He argues for “relational autonomy” without regard for “gender, numerosity, or affective attachment.”
The campaigns of both polygamists and polyamorists to have their unions recognized point to the larger questions that swarm around marriage battles: what are the government’s interests in marriage and family, and why does a bureaucratic system sustain such a relentless focus on who has sexual relationships with whom? Surveys in the past decade have consistently found that four to five per cent of American adults—more than ten million people—already practice some form of consensual nonmonogamy, and the true number, given people’s reticence about stigmatized behaviors, is almost certainly higher. . . .
Andy talked about a watershed moment for gay rights, in 1989—the case of Braschi v. Stahl. Miguel Braschi was being evicted from the rent-controlled apartment he and his partner shared, after the partner died, of AIDS. The landlord contended that the lease was transferrable only to family, and that Braschi wasn’t family. Braschi sued. The judge issued a stunningly progressive ruling saying that family should be based on the reality of daily life—these two men lived together, shared finances, took care of each other—and not on “fictitious legal distinctions,” such as marriage certificates. In Andy’s view, the subsequent campaign for gay marriage represented a missed opportunity. “In 1989, he said that a marriage certificate was a fictitious legal distinction,” Andy said with wonder. “The gay-rights movement took that and said, ‘Actually, no, we’re just going to throw that out and try and get married. That seems like a better plan.’ Imagine if we had taken that idea—that legal protections for family should be granted based on the reality of daily family life and interdependence and networks of mutual care rather than on fictitious legal distinctions—and run with it.”
We watched documentaries about two plagues – AIDS and Covid-19 – that moved us deeply.
United in Anger: A History of Act-Up reveals the nitty-gritty organizing and media genius of ACT-UP, centering more radical voices and the leadership of women and people of color. It explicitly names the spectrum of emotions – not just rage, but also desire, joy, and grief – that powered the movement. And it usefully explores the methods activists used to work with these emotions, including actions, meetings, visuals, and sound.
54 Days: America and the Pandemic is a powerful documentary showing the failure of our government to protect us, with devastating consequences, in the early days of the pandemic. Dr. Oxiris Barbot, NYC’s Health Commissioner at the time, is a hero whose courage saved many New Yorkers’ lives. She talks honestly of her conflict with our hapless mayor, Bill de Blasio.