Is organizing democratic?

[colist at comm-org.wisc.edu]

[ed:  Nathan is replying to Candee, Margo and Richard.]

From: Nathan Henderson James <nathanhj at gmail.com>

A couple of things I thought of in reading these comments:

1) Candee notes a tension between being asked to join an already-in-progress
(and seemingly large-scale) campaign, and working closely with a few others
on issues that are importance to that group. It is an interesting conundrum.
How do you mobilze enough people to show that you have the power to enforce
your demands, at the same time that you maintain enough flexiblity to allow
for new recruits (who often lack the perspective and history the campaign's
leaders have from being there since the elevator was on the ground floor) to
participate effectively and creatively?

I don't have any real answers to this tension, but I do know that ACORN
attempts to address it through its multi-issue structure and willingness to
work on issues from the neighborhood to the national levels. Thus if a
person joins because of a large-scale campaign that already has well-defined
goals and demands, there is always another campaign that is much more
malleable and susceptible to the input of the new member.

Also most successful organizing operations, geographic community, union, or
interest-based community, have mechanisms for ensuring that their members
are engaged in creative actions in support of their campaigns. Campaigns
that aren't designed to allow this aren't concered with developing leaders,
building capacity, or building infrastructure. They are just interested in
winning a specific issue on a specific timeline. And that's not organizing.
That's campaigning. Which lots of organizing groups do in the course of
pursuing their broader aims.

2) Margo's quote from the evangelist is well-taken, but I'd like to add a
dimension to it in light of the current discussion, which is that most
groups that engage in "organizing" are also membership-based organizations
and it is their members to whom they are ultimately accountable. These
groups may or may not involve non-members in decision-making, leadership
development and campaigns, but they must, almost by definition, privilege
the voice of their members over the voice of non-members. In my experience
ACORN falls very much in this mode of operation. As do most unions.

3) Richard's points about the influence of money in blunting organized
opposition to development schemes are well worth remembering. Moreso by
groups like ACORN which claim to speak for specific constituencies. No one
wants to see groups with such promise devolve to the level of NY's late,
totally unlamented Liberal Party, which went from push progressive values in
the electoral arena to being the personal patronage and influence maching of
Ray Harding, willing to sell the ballot line to the highest bidder. To me,
this gets back to the issue of accountability on the part of the community
organizations/uions doing the negotiating of the CBA's. And, of course,
their power to enforce what's written down on paper.

Interesting dicussion!

Nathan

--
Nathan Henderson-James
Performance Poet
Director, Strategic Writing and Research Department
ACORN Political Operations and Project Vote
510-213-1970 cell
nathanhj at gmail.com
nathanhj.livejournal.com
"I want to inject your blunt caustic observations between my toes so that
some day my truth will kick someone's ass!"


colist at comm-org.wisc.edu wrote:
> --------
> This is a COMM-ORG 'colist' message.
> All replies to this message come to COMM-ORG only.
> --------
>
> [ed:  Candee, Margo, and Richard continue the discussion.]
>
> Quoting Randy:
>
> > Ed: Like Candee, I have seen the strengths of other models  in 
> empowering
> > members individually, but have also seen the weakness of those 
> models in
> > attacking power (you can view my paper with Susan Stall in the 1996
> > COMM-ORG papers collection).  There is a tension between individual
> > empowerment, and campaign success.  The organizers I know value both,
> > but recognize that winning with an inexperienced community requires, at
> > least for a time, the organizer to lead more than they might like.]
>
> I haven't read the paper yet but plan to soon. Another difference that 
> seems
> to lies between individual/group action and an organized campaign is the
> amount and quality of creative solutions or attempts that can be 
> generated.
> I'm thinking here of the work on positive deviance - in which people
> (individuals and small groups) try things out. In the few instances when
> I've been asked to support an organized campaign my biggest concern is 
> the
> rigid-ness and narrowness of the focused action. This makes it hard for
> people to move around inside an idea or to take creative actions or even
> discover and make visible underlying issues and assumptions if the
> solution/action already set. And without that sort of learning can real
> change occur?
>
> candee basford
>
> *****************************
>
> From: "Margo Menconi" <malyme at hotmail.com>
>
> I worked for ACORN for a bit and I was frustrated that they wouldn't 
> really
> listen to anyone unless they became a member.  In that respect I think 
> there
> is a modicum of un-democracy in their modus operandi.  However, I will 
> say
> that a quote from D.L. Moody (19th century evangelist) upon being 
> criticized
> for his method of evangelization is appropriate here:  "I like the way I
> evangelize better than the way you don't."
>
> Margo
>
> -------------------------
> Margo Menconi
> Silver Spring, MD
> E-mail: malyme at hotmail.com
>
> [ed:  ACORN has recently changed its membership practices to include 
> levels of memberships.  You still need to be a paying member to vote, 
> but not to participate in the discussion.]
>
> *************************************
>
> From: Richard Layman <rlaymandc at yahoo.com>
>
> I am not that familiar with ACORN, but I do have some experience with 
> observing co-optation processes.  I went back and read the original 
> DMIblog story, and it covers the same ground, not so much about ACORN, 
> but about Forest City Ratner's active program in soliciting-buying 
> support of community organizations, that I wrote about in a blog entry 
> on October 18th, 2005, based on an article in the New York Times.  
> ("Money, Money Changes Everything" -- 
> http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2005/10/money-money-changes-everything.html) 
>
>
>  Dealing with developers is difficult for any community organization.  
> The same goes for community development corporations, which the 
> moderator of this list wrote about in an excellent paper in 1996 (in 
> the archives on the website associated with this list).
>
>  While not commenting about ACORN, I do know that the system of 
> negotiating community benefits is completely unstructured in DC, and 
> most neighborhoods wholly outmatched when it comes time to negotiate.  
> I think that the "system" is a massive violation of the equal 
> protection clause of the 14th Amendment, but lawyers I've run that 
> argument by have said that such Constitutional law arguments are 
> extremely difficult to win.  In short, I say that most neighborhoods 
> get negotiated out of their underwear without even knowing it, and the 
> Zoning Commission and the Office of Planning provide little if any 
> guidance in how to go about equalizing the power dynamics.
>
>  I find that the best education on these broader issues is Harvey 
> Molotch's seminal paper "The City as a Growth Machine" (linked on my 
> blog) and the book by Logan and Molotch that grew out of that paper, 
> _Urban Fortunes: A Political Economy of Place_.
>
>  Rather than go back and forth about ACORN this or that, everybody on 
> this list would benefit far far more by reading that book.  Here's 
> what I wrote about it in an amazon book review:
>
>  Molotch's basic argument is that previously, local government and 
> community studies focused on intra-elite competition and the like. His 
> major point was that regardless of differences of opinion within the 
> local political power structure, all in fact were united behind a 
> "growth agenda" directed to an intensification of land uses and an 
> increase in rents (the economics term, in the sense of the rentier 
> class). The book extends these arguments much further. For example, 
> one of the points made is about the "use value" versus the "exchange 
> value" of place. The latter is about making money off place, the 
> former about the intrinsic value of home, etc. The other major point 
> (also in the article) is the growth machine's "value-free development" 
> ideology, that growth is always good, adds jobs, etc. This book is as 
> important to urban studies as Jane Jacobs _Death and Life of Great 
> American Cities_. Whereas Jacobs focuses on design, density, and mixed 
> uses; Logan and Molotch focus on the
> sociology, politics, and economics of local government. In the argot 
> of today, they focus on the "back story." Sections on the role of 
> sports, gambling, etc., in the growth machine efforts are no less 
> worthwhile. Any one who is active on local land use issues will find 
> this book to be a revelation.
>
>  I am not close enough to the situation or ACORN to say who is right 
> or not.  What interests me more are the dynamics of the situation and 
> how these systems work, pretty much the same way, all the time.
>
>  This example is no different.
>
>  Richard Layman
>  urban revitalization advocate
>  Washington, DC
>  http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com
>>
>>
>> [ed:  thanks to Candee and Jerry for engaging the discussion.]
>>
>> From: Candee Basford <candee at bright.net>
>>
>> When I've been 'organized " to speak at hearings or write letters to my
>> government I've felt conflicted. ON the one hand, I may have been 
>> empowered
>> for a brief time, in part because I did something new and bold like 
>> finding
>> my way to the state capital or speaking in front of really important 
>> people.
>>
>> But later I felt like a pawn because I was literally told what to 
>> support
>> and how to support it, in this instance increased funding for special
>> education services. The organizers message, "we know what needs to be 
>> done
>> to make things better, just do it and then you can go away (until we 
>> need
>> you again)."
>>
>> those experiences of being organized feel a lot different than the times
>> when I've Participated in learning groups, when I've learned with others
>> over time, discovered my own powerful questions, took action and came 
>> back
>> together again and again to learn more about what just happened.
>>
>> IN those times, I found power from within and power with others. I
>> discovered how to move forward in spite of the muck. I discovered 
>> where to
>> invest my energy as I became more clear about what mattered. At the same
>> time, we quickly lost any certainty that there was one clear strategy to
>> social change.  We learned that improvisation was not only important but
>> necessary if we really expected anything new to happen.
>>
>> A note to myself here - that first experience, the one of being 
>> organized to
>> increase special education funding resulted in just what the organizers
>> wanted - increased funding.  Indeed, because of that increase in funding
>> more professionals were hired but, as far as I can tell, nothing much
>> changed for people with disabilities.
>>
>> Seems to me that the two experiences invite different perspectives of
>> people & problems - invitation and approach.
>>
>>
>> candee
>> Candee Basford
>> 3320 Buck Run Road
>> Seaman, Ohio 45679
>> (937)695-0169
>> (937) 695-9145 (fax)
>>
>> *******************************
>>
>> From: jerryhoffman <jerryhoffman at earthlink.net>
>>
>> What's the motive here?  Is it to talk about whether organizing is part
>> of the democratic process?  That answer seems too obvious.  Is this a
>> critique of an organization's involvement in organizing?  That is, if an
>> ACORN fell out of a tree, and people weren't there to notice that it
>> fell, would there be any organizing?  Of course there would.  People
>> organize because they're being screwed in someway, by someone, and they
>> want to turn-around that set of circumstances.  By doing so, they turn
>> the position of power to be more favorable to them.  That's empowerment.
>>
>> If an organization has its own agenda that is not indigenous to the
>> people, then this turns from organizing to coercion.  People are being
>> coerced, not organized, for the organization to win something.  This is
>> just another form of power.  People who must live daily with the
>> consequences of organizing must make all the decisions along the way. 
>> Whether the issue is housing, loan sharks, health care, corporate raid
>> of education funding, whatever, the people who benefit from the results
>> of organizing are the leaders, the researchers, the messengers, the
>> public correspondents, the informants, the agitators, the negotiators,
>> the winners.
>>
>> If an organization is confused about this, then they're selling out the
>> self-interests of that community, and should consider either reframing
>> its role or dissolve.  That's a dangerous game to play with peoples 
>> lives.
>>
>> Jerry Hoffman
>> Lincoln, Nebraska
>>
>> They don't need ACORN  , and would that organizing lead to direct
>> actions and wins for community folk?
>>
>>
>> From: Benjamin Shepard <benshepard at mindspring.com>
>>
>>
>> http://www.dmiblog.net/archives/2005/12/calling_the_question_of_acorn.html 
>>
>>
>> what is acorn doing? is it
>> democratic? is it empowering people?
>>
>> ************************
>>
>> [ed: I don't know the source of the blog about ACORN, or its 
>> accuracy, but I do know the critique, and it has been leveled at 
>> organizers since the day Alinsky gave his first press interview.  
>> Should organizers simply organize or do they get to lead as well?  
>> When is a deal a sellout?  Who gets to decide, and at what level, in 
>> community organizing?  There are no easy answers, but it is a worthy 
>> discussion.] 
>
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