"Kicking the can down the road," "cooptation," and other considerations: Reconciling international socialism and community organizing

This piece was written in late 2011.

In the current Occupy Moment, I have asked myself this questions repeatedly:

How to reconcile the revolutionary with the practical? The systemic with the experiential? The ideological with the tangible?

Now first I must state that, for the purposes of this musing, I am in some ways conflating Occupy's outburst of 99% anger-about-everything with socialism's goal of a complete overthrow of capitalism. I realize, of course, that there are myriad problems in doing so. For one, we know that not all Occupiers are socialists. And furthermore there are some socialists who believe that Occupiers are disaffected middle-class kids. Nevertheless, the two share such an indignation with business as usual that both are cautious to support reformism, concrete and limited demands, and extensive dialogue or interaction with establishment candidates and electoral politics. That is what I want to talk about here.

Community organizing has a different focus. Rather than beginning from the premise that the revolution must be total, Saul Alinsky and those who have come after him operate under the assumption that power is wielded by people and money working consistently and persistently to achieve a shared goal. Community organizers seek to agitate and develop leaders who realize -- read, actualize -- their own liberation through incremental, measurable change. By building power among people acting on their own interests, community organizers allow the people to lead the process. Rather than deductively working toward an articulated endpoint -- rather than organizing teleologically, as socialists do -- community organizers listen to people and offer frameworks for addressing issues of all shapes and sizes.

Where I imagine tension arises between these opposing viewpoints:

The orthodox socialist would argue that community organizers' reformist agendas and issue-based campaigns do not address the root of the problem called capitalism.By calling for X new jobs, Y corporate taxes, and Z community benefits -- so the argument goes -- Alinsky-style organizing allows the ruling elite to remain in power. It focuses on incremental changes that do not fundamentally remake our society. It kicks the can down the road, cleaning up after the systematic inequalities that persist under capitalism.

The community organizer would contend that socialists speak about the World-as-it-Should-Be while organizers live in the World-as-it-Is.

Community organizers spend their waking hours talking with working people, perfecting the truly radical face-to-face relational meeting, and facilitating a process of liberation led by those most deeply affected. Rather than import an ideological project, they respond to the needs around them and achieve measurable "wins." Furthermore, their work is not issues. Their work is power. Members and constituent institutions select issues, but the goal -- always -- is building the power to act again and again.

In my personal experience agitating youth to act upon injustice in their communities, the language of Marx has not been effective. Speaking about jobs, homes, and educational opportunities has.

The project then for the truly radical organizer -- and by radical I mean, literally, getting to the roots -- is to bridge the practical with the ideological. To take lessons from history and the systemic analyses of socialists throughout the world, and to speak with people and value above all their perspectives and experiences. I believe that community organizing plays a vital role in the quest for socialism, if by that condition we mean a world in which all people are truly, systemically, fundamentally afforded equal opportunities and freedoms. People will only realize their capacity to change the world around them and to upset the dominant order through lived experiences, through a taste of change. We can't hold out on building power because a methodology is not doctrinally pure.

And those experiences must involve processes of organization, consciousness-building, and achievement. Otherwise we're battling against an ingraspable foe for a pie in the sky.