Taking back control: a note on Matthew Bolton’s “How To Resist” (2017)

Matthew Bolton has been at the heart of Citizens UK‘s successful Living Wage campaign. In 2017 he published a really valuable book: How to Resist: Turn Protest to Power (Bloomsbury, London).

The case can be made that this book has the wrong title, and Matthew says as much right at the start: “in the word ‘resist’ there’s a danger of starting off on the back foot, of handing over the initiative to others: someone else has the plan and we are just reacting to it” (page 2). The book isn’t about resistance; it is “about how those without much power can come together and change things” through community organising, which it presents as “a method and tactics for how people can take on those with financial power and authority, and win” (page 3). What matters for Matthew is not just the winning, though: it’s about democracy.

Democracy doesn’t just mean ‘to vote’, it means people power. It means embedding political action into our day-to-day lives, in our communities and workplaces. It is a vision of a society where power is distributed amongst the people, not concentrated in the hands of the few. It’s not an end state, but a constant struggle for people to fight for a seat around the decision-making table. (pages 4-5)

Matthew astutely links this to the Brexit vote and the election of Trump, two political events with the idea of ‘taking back control’ at their heart. His book presents a method for taking back control: “Not through a once-in-a-lifetime referendum vote or through a one-off symbolic protest, but through practical tools that can be used in your everyday life to give you more influence over decision-making and to realise your power as a citizen.” (page 23)

A copy of the book is available in Bromley’s central library. Or will be, when I return it tomorrow.

Workshop: “Activism, anthropologically speaking: Sociocultural analyses of efforts to re-shape social worlds”, 16 Feb 2017, University Constant, Germany

https://www.uni-konstanz.de/workshop/

Up to now, most anthropological studies of activism have used concepts and categories originally developed by specialists of other disciplines, such as the figures of ‘social movements’ or ‘non-governmental organization’. With this workshop, we seek to discuss the potential conceptual contributions of anthropology to the study of activism to highlight our discipline’s particular focus. We therefore aim to develop an anthropological framework to better understand emerging efforts to actively re-shape the world. In order to do so, the workshop looks at activist discourses and practices in the ‘centres of calculation’ of activism as well as with a view to the differences and intersections between this notion and a variety of others such as ‘volunteering’, ‘humanitarianism’ and ‘social movements’. We understand ‘activism’ as being culturally informed, therefore requiring attention to contextuality, situatedness and (g)local sense-making for an anthropological analysis.

Reclaiming the University of Aberdeen

RECLAIMING THE UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN

On movement activists and community organisers

http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/saul-alinsky-break-rules/ (Published 2014)

The principle of “no electoral politics” took hold in the Alinskyite tradition based on the idea that community organizations should be pragmatic, nonpartisan, and ideologically diverse — that they should put pressure on all politicians, not express loyalty to any. Historian Thomas Sugrue writes that Alinsky “never had much patience for elected officials: Change would not come from top-down leadership, but rather from pressure from below. In his view, politicians took the path of least resistance.” Alinsky himself was not anti-state — as sociologist P. David Finks writes, for him “the problem was not so much getting government off our backs as getting it off its rear end” — but the focus of his efforts was outside the electoral arena. The IAF’s lingering pride in its “independent, nonpartisan” status reflects its desire to recruit members from across the political spectrum in any given community, not merely to engage the usual suspects of progressive activism.

This “nonpartisan” avoidance of ideology also relates to perhaps the most interesting precept in the Alinskyite tradition: the one which distances community organizing from mass mobilizations. As Rutgers sociology professor and former ACORN organizer Arlene Stein wrote in 1986, “community organizers today tend generally to shun the term movement, preferring to see themselves engaged in building organization.”

Why would someone promoting social change see themselves as wary of movements? There are several reasons, and the way in which the terms “movement” and “organization” are understood connect to some defining aspects of the Alinskyite model.

Ed Chambers, Alinsky’s successor as IAF director, expresses an aversion to movements as a part of his long-term commitment to community members. As he writes in his book Roots for Radicals, “We play to win. That’s one of the distinctive features of the IAF: We don’t lead everyday, ordinary people into public failures, and we’re not building movements. Movements go in and out of existence. As good as they are, you can’t sustain them. Everyday people need incremental success over months and sometimes years.”

Alinsky, too, saw a danger in expecting quick upheavals. He argued, “Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change…. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that’s the way the game is played — if you want to play and not just yell, ‘Kill the umpire.’” Before entering a neighborhood, Alinsky planned for a sustained commitment. He would not hire an organizer unless he had raised enough money to pay for two or more years of the staffer’s salary.

Beyond setting expectations for timeframe, a dedication to “organizations not movements” is reflected in several other Alinskyite norms. These include the tradition’s connection to churches and other established institutions, its selection of bottom-up demands rather than high-profile national issues, and its attitude toward volunteers and freelance activists.

Alinsky believed in identifying local centers of power — particularly churches — and using them as bases for community groups. The modern IAF continues to follow this principle, serving as a model of “faith-based” organizing.

Instead of picking a galvanizing, morally loaded, and possibly divisive national issue to organize around — as would a mass movement — Alinsky advocated action around narrow local demands. Mark Warren’s Dry Bones Rattling, a study of the IAF, explains: “As opposed to mobilizing around a set or predetermined issues, the IAF brings residents together first to discuss the needs of their community and to find a common ground for action.” Practicing what is sometimes called “stop sign organizing,” those working in this vein look for concrete, winnable projects — such as demanding that city officials place a stop sign at a dangerous intersection. The idea is that small victories build local capabilities, give participants a sense of their power, and spur more ambitious action.

They also meet some of the immediate needs of the community — far preferable, in Alinsky’s view, to social movements’ far-off calls for freedom and justice. Throughout his career, Alinsky spoke the language of self-interest. He looked to build democratic power among community members seeking to improve the conditions of their own lives. He was suspicious of volunteer activists who were motivated by abstract values or ideology, people drawn to high-profile moral crusades. That movements were full of such people did not sit well with the Alinskyites. As Chambers writes: “Activists and movement types are mobilizers and entertainers, not democratic organizers. Their script is their persona and their cause. They tend to be overinterested in themselves. Their understanding of politicalness is superficial or media-driven. They lack disinterestedness.”

Moreover, Chambers contends, movement activists’ expectations for change are far too short-term: “Their time frame is immediate. ‘What do we want?’ ‘Freedom.’ ‘When do we want it?’ ‘Now!’ ‘No justice, no peace,’” he explains dismissively. “Movement activists appeal to youth, frustrated idealists, and cynical ideologues, ignoring the 80 percent of moderates who comprise the world as it is…. Organizing is generational, not here today, gone tomorrow.”

Chambers’s view may seem harsh, but it is not atypical of those drawn to community organizing. As Stein explains, “[T]he revival of Alinsky-style organizations in the 1970s and 1980s often defined itself against the social movements of the previous decade — especially the civil rights, women’s, and student antiwar movements — which it tended to view as promoting collective identity formation over the achievement of strategic goals.”

Patient base-building, long-term strategy, incremental local wins. These ingredients would contribute to a lasting and influential organizing model. They would also, in the turbulent 1960s, put Alinsky at the center of an activist culture clash.

* * *

At the same time that Alinsky became a popular speaker on 1960s campuses, his vision of organizing put him at odds with many of the era’s leading activists — both its student militants and its more high-profile leaders, such as Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1965 and 1966, tensions between “organization” and “movement” surfaced when King and his Southern Christian Leadership Council came to Chicago, Alinsky’s home turf, to mount their first Northern civil rights drive.

During the campaign, Nicholas von Hoffman, a close Alinsky lieutenant, had a chance encounter with King in Memphis, Tenn., in the hospital where activist James Meredith had been taken after being shot while marching in support of black voter registration. Von Hoffman gave King his advice about Chicago: “I told him I thought it could succeed if he was prepared for trench warfare, which would demand tight, tough organization to take on the Daley operation,” von Hoffman writes. “I added it could not be done in less than two years.”

Von Hoffman was not convinced that King was listening. He knew that the SCLC — coming off of mobilizations in Birmingham and Selma — had grown accustomed to much shorter campaigns, sometimes lasting just months. Nor was he impressed by King’s decision to move his family into an apartment in one of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, which von Hoffman dismissed as a “dramatic gesture” of little utility. “Organizing is akin to stringing beads to make a necklace,” von Hoffman argued. “It demands patience, persistence, and some kind of design. King’s campaign in Chicago was short on beads and bereft of design.”

Alinsky and von Hoffman regarded the SCLC leader as a “one-trick pony” who relied too heavily on media-seeking marches, and they held his team in low regard. As von Hoffman contended, King and the outsiders he brought into Chicago “were, as far as I could tell, a hodgepodge of young white idealists, college kids, and summer soldiers, most of whom had no knowledge of the people they were supposed to recruit. In the South the youthful white idealists were useful civil rights cannon fodder; in Chicago they were dead weight.”

Von Hoffman noted the contrast with his tradition. “It was the antithesis of an Alinsky operation where outside volunteers were generally shooed away not only because they got in the way but also because they didn’t have any skin in the game,” he noted. “Laudable as it is to volunteer to help other people wrestle with their problems, effective organizations are built with people who have direct and personal interest in their success.”

This type of analysis reflected Alinsky’s broader critique of civil rights organizing. In a 1965 interview he argued, “The Achilles’ Heel of the civil rights movement is the fact that it has not developed into a stable, disciplined, mass-based power organization.” He believed the movement’s victories owed much to uncontrollable world-historical forces, to “the incredibly stupid blunders of the status quo in the South and elsewhere,” and to the contributions of church institutions.

He added, with King as his unnamed subject: “Periodic mass euphoria around a charismatic leader is not an organization. It’s just the initial stage of agitation.”

For Alinsky, stressing the importance of strong organization was also a matter of bridging a generation gap. Those yelling “kill the umpire,” in his view, were the members of the New Left. Alinsky felt that people his age were partially responsible for the youths’ ignorance. In writing Rules for Radicals, he sought to communicate with 1960s activists whom he saw as suffering from a lack of mentoring — the result of a missing generation of organizers. “Few of us survived the Joe McCarthy holocaust of the 1950s,” Alinsky wrote, “and of those there were even fewer whose understanding and insights had developed beyond the dialectical materialism of orthodox Marxism. My fellow radicals who were supposed to pass on the torch of experience and insights to a new generation just were not there.”

As a consequence, young leftists were too easily seduced by quick fixes, Alinsky believed. In an afterward to a 1969 reissue of his first book, Reveille for Radicals, he wrote, “The approach of so much of the present generation is so fractured with ‘confrontations’ and crises as ends in themselves that their activities are not actions but a discharge of energy which, like a fireworks spectacle, briefly lights up the skies and then vanishes into the void.”

The creation of an alternative methodology — what Stein describes as “a highly structured organizing model specifying step-by-step guidelines for creating neighborhood organizations” — was an understandable response, and one that has shown great strengths. But, in recent decades, we may have seen its limitations as well.

The question is whether too close an adherence to a hardened model has created missed opportunities — chances to integrate structure-based organization and momentum-driven movements, and to harness the power of both.

Criticism as solidarity

This comes from the guidelines for reviewers for Interface journal:

.1. Helpful criticism (criticism as solidarity)

Our job as reviewers and editors is generally in trying to help people who are making an effort in a direction that we share to some degree, to develop their ideas more clearly, with more insight and in ways that are more helpful to the movements we work with as researchers, theorists, writers etc. The most helpful comments are neither those which gloss over real problems in an article nor those which condemn without showing how things could be done better; they are those which identify difficulties, explain (gently) why they are difficulties, and suggest alternative approaches.

I wish more reviewers, editors, writers and people commenting on papers presented in seminars would keep this advice in mind. The fact that so many of them don’t reinforces my suspicion that in fact we don’t “share” “a direction”, even though there is often an implicit or explicit assumption that we do.

On activist money-related decision-making

[The] list of things that are important to you…tends to get bigger in middle age, when it might include many of the appurtenances of a middle-class lifestyle, including a comfortable house in a safe neighborhood, a college fund for your kids, a retirement fund for you and the ability to take care of your parents should they need help. All this, by the way, has nothing to do with selling out, and everything to do with common sense, meeting your obligations to yourselves and others and not being a burden on your loved ones. It also has to do with building the kind of happy, stable life that fosters a sustainable and productive activist career.

 

Of course you can make choices, lots of choices. You can buy a small house or a co-op, instead of a big house with a big mortgage and big heating bills. You can drive an old car, or not use a car at all. You can have one kid, or no kids, instead of two kids. And you can ask that kid to attend a state college for a couple of years before transferring into the Ivy League. These kinds of compromises are recommended by the authors of two excellent books on money management, The Millionaire Next Door and Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Every activist should read them. (Hillary Rettig, 2006, The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way page 41)

see also http://lifelongactivist.com/part-i-managing-your-mission/the-worst-choice-not-having-a-wellpaid-career/