(One in a series of posts on Mark & Paul Engler’s 2016 book, This Is An Uprising: How Nonviolent Revolt Is Shaping The Twenty-First Century.)
In the United States, organizing for change has evolved along two largely separate tracks. (This is not true in all countries/cultures.) For example, civil rights historian Charles Payne, in his book I’ve Got The Light Of Freedom, distinguishes between the “community mobilizing” tradition and the “community organizing” tradition that flowed together to create the Mississippi freedom movement of the 1960s.
The Englers use Saul Alinsky and Frances Fox Piven as stand-ins for what they call the “structure” and “mass protest” schools of organizing, and summarize Alinsky’s and Piven’s basic stances as follows:
“Alinsky was a guru in the art of the slow, incremental building of community groups. Like organizers in the labor movement, his approach focused on person-by-person recruitment, careful leadership development, and the creation of stable institutional bodies that could leverage the power of their members over time….”
“Piven, in contrast, has become a leading defender of unruly broad-based disobedience, undertaken outside the confines of any formal organization. She emphasizes the disruptive power of mass mobilizations that coalesce quickly, draw in participants not previously involved in organizing, and leave established elites scrambling to adjust to a new political landscape.” (p. 32)
The Englers summarize Alinsky’s teachings as they’re laid out in his two major works, Reveille For Radicals and Rules For Radicals, and as they’ve been codified by his disciples in the years since his death (in 1972).
“The Alinskyite tradition held that community organizations should be pragmatic, nonpartisan, and ideologically diverse—that they should put pressure on all politicians, not express loyalty to any.” (p. 36)
“Beyond setting expectations for time frame, a dedication to ‘organizations not movements’ is reflected in several other Alinskyite norms….
First, Alinsky believed in identifying local centers of power, particularly churches, and using them as bases for community groups….
Second, instead of picking a galvanizing, morally loaded, and possibly divisive national issue to organize around—as might a mass movement—Alinsky advocated action around narrow local demands….
Throughout his career, Alinsky spoke the language of self-interest. He looked to build democratic power among people seeking to improve the conditions of their own lives. He was suspicious of volunteer activists who were motivated by abstract values or ideology, individuals drawn to high-profile moral crusades. Such suspicion would become a third norm in the Alinskyite tradition related to its distrust of ‘movements’….
The community organizers who took up Alinsky’s mantle were burnt on short-term protest, and they were willing to pursue a less glamorous route to change. What did they want? Lasting, community-based reform. When did they want it? Over the long haul. (pp. 37-39)
Piven, along with her long-time colleague and husband Richard Cloward, laid out her views on social movements and change most famously in Poor People’s Movements, a detailed study of four 20th century cases of mass protest leading to change in the US—-“unemployed workers early in the Great Depression, the industrial strikes that gave rise to the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) later in the 1930s, the civil rights movement in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, and the activism of the National Welfare Rights Organization in the 1960s and 1970s”. (p. 45)
From their studies, Piven and Cloward concluded that “poor people could achieve little through the routines of conventional electoral and interest group politics” and that left them with “what we called disruption, the breakdowns that resulted when people defied the rules and institutional routines that ordinarily governed life.” (p. 45)
What’s more, they argued “not only that formal structures failed to produce disruptive outbreaks but also that these structures actually detracted from mass protest when it did occur.” (p. 45)
As the Englers elaborate, “…(A)lthough bureaucratic institutions may have benefits, they also bring constraints.Because organizations have to worry about self-preservation, they become averse to risk taking. Because they enjoy some access to formal avenues of power, they ten to overestimate what they can accomplish from inside the system. As a result, they forget the disruptive energy that propelled them to power to begin with, and so they often end up playing a counterproductive role.” (pp. 46-47)
They also note that Alinsky and Piven, more than many of their followers, recognize the value in each other’s approaches. Piven once stated, “Organizations are not movements. But organizations can institutionalize and legalize the gains won through disruptive mobilization.” (p. 50) Alinsky, for his part, recognized that “using mass mobilization to produce spikes in social unrest is a process that follows a different set of rules than conventional organization…and yet (he) was willing to experiment with their possibilities.” (p. 55)
The Englers point out that both Alinsky and Piven offer tantalizingly (at best) or frustratingly (at worst) vague insights into how large-scale change happens. At the end of Poor People’s Movements for example, Piven & Cloward write, “One can never predict with certainty when the ‘heavings and rumblings of the social foundations’ will force up large-scale defiance, but if organizers and leaders want to help those movements emerge, they must always proceed as if protest were possible. They may fail. The time may not be right. But then, they may sometimes succeed.” (pp. 55-56)
What did they want? Large-scale defiance. When did they want it? Whenever it might possibly emerge. (Not exactly a rousing call to arms.)
“The recognition of structure and mass protest as two distinct forms of action allows for dialogue between different schools of thought—and it ultimately creates the potential for a synthesis,” conclude the Englers. (p. 56) That synthesis, they suggest, is a hybrid model of organizing called civil resistance.
Crossposted at: https:/masscommons.wordpress.com
