I think leftists need to break with the notion that you build a movement through elections…. It’s kind of like the way that Trotskyist parties approach the stuff: the underlining presumption is that there is an extant base out there that exists for a Left political programme. And the problem is (perceived as) we haven’t got the right message, we haven’t packaged it the right way, we don’t have the right candidate who can galvanize people…..
The fact of the matter is that bases aren’t called together like that. There’s no naturally-formed constituency that exists. You’ve got to create it. You create it through organizing, through building alliances and relationships and solidarities through struggle over time.
It’s like the difference between organizing a union shop in a shop and running an election. Both depend on making house-calls, for instance. In electoral house-calling, the objective is to drop the literature and engage in as little interaction as you possibly can… In union organizing...you want somebody to invite you in, you want somebody to offer you a cup of coffee. You want to sit and talk with them and hear what they’re thinking, and build connections with them, and find out the kind of things that people want to struggle about.
That’s what that sort of organizing is. That’s the kind of work that will over time build alliances that can help people. Through the course of fighting for things that are important to them, people see the world a little differently, -even…broaden what people perceive to be the horizons of the possible.
You can’t do that through an election.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
(even) you can get catechism via podcast nowadays
Behind the News featured Adolph Reed two weeks ago, hot on the heels of Reed's unfuckwithable critique of "Obamaism" on the Black Agenda Report. Relatedly, Reed made a pronouncement that clarified my dissertation muddle and resonated with both my inner, leftist crannies and my constructivist, aesthetes-for-alinsky-style yearnings. Below is my severely chopped piece of transcript, hodge-podged together in a way to make Reed's radio parole resonate in a text-y, blogger-y langue:
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4 comments:
I agree for the most part, but would probably phrase the point (in more condensed form) as we treat elections as an ends rather than as a means to an ends. Elections can play a role in a broader organizing strategy, but if the work ends on election day, you've quit a marathon after the first 2 miles.
I have a limited background in this, but I think that, perhaps like Wobblie said, elections can feed into those more discreet bottom-up organizing efforts. With Obama, it was the first time I really gave a shit about a candidate enough to go about and canvas for him (incidentally I was assigned to a Knoxville,TN area golf club neighborhood). Now, I know that's not organizing, but it certainly has brought me closer to a desire to be involved on that level of discourse, ie, talking to people directly about making things better.
that was Jordan M,by the way.
Extreme mega dittoes.
If I may add, the organizing conversation has to be seen as a two-way street. By politicians and union organizers...by any organizers. One of the biggest challenges in running a "member-run" organization is "which members, when?"
Not only do you have to actively engage all members, rather than taking the static "those that show up make the decisions" approach, but you also have to have a human understanding of what people really want, what they will accept, what they won't accept, when they are telling you what you want to hear, how not to impose your own viewpoint, but also how to make them see other possibilities they didn't see.
This takes real skill and it is hard (if not impossible) to teach. To me, this is the challenge for the "organizing model."
Unfortunately, many of our brothers and sisters in politics and unions spend a lot of time discussing people voting "against their own interests." This kind of thinking does us little good.
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