The unsung people who weave America together need a new vehicle to elevate what they do into something that can meet our moment of democratic challenge.
Organizers not entrepreneurs. I’d build constituencies, have members and strengthen democratic citizenship. . E’s have employees, clients or customers and strengthen capitalist ownership. Deepti should know better.
One thing that I've been thinking about is the capacity of government itself to act as the creator of civic space and to create programs which encourage democratic practice. We do not really think in those terms these days but there is plenty of precedent:
* Religious congregations are subsidized (in the form of non-profit status) to create spiritual and physical space.
* Unions are chartered by national policy, whose express purpose is to enlarge the arenas where citizens may practice democratic skills. Of course the protections for labor organizing have atrophied over the years, but to my knowledge the basic language in the NLRA which says that the government encourages the formation of unions has never been struck down or undone. Arguably the Biden administration is breathing new life into those words.
* Libraries themselves are directly funded by local governments. More often than not they act as temporary spaces for a lot of these civic society groups. And the historical story here is interesting, since they started out as privately-funded spaces which gradually became basic fixtures of municipal government across the country.
While it's a little different, I think the movement towards representational budgeting has flavors of this kind of activity as well - it's really about governments in some ways paying their citizens to practice democratic skills. The argument in "100% Democracy" is also in this vein.
I think there's a lot of room for government to operate more actively in these spaces, and to create more venues where citizens can practice their democratic skills. What I have in mind includes creating literal space for existing civic society groups (something like first-come-first-serve room signups in the city hall annex) up to actively working to foster new organizations that expressly seek to bring people together from different walks of life and to give them some kind of substantive power which they can wield democratically. (Akin to the NLRA, but adapted to other kinds of organizing.) It seems to me that the first kind of work can operate really nicely on the municipal level, and the second kind of work is better suited to state-level actors, but I'm not picky! I know there are a lot of potential problems with these ideas, potential conflict-of-interest and so forth, but it does not seem insurmountable. I also know that you have to be careful what you wish for - I'm sure I'd be much happier with Gavin Newsom in charge of this kind of policy than Ron DeSantis.
Fundamentally it seems that the defense of democracy should be the responsibility of government itself. We are (rightfully) cautious about government interceding too strongly on behalf of one civic society group or another, but it seems to me that it should be possible to craft government policy that intercedes on behalf of civic society itself. There's far too much bad news on the state of civic society - polarization, a rise in anti-democratic feeling, depletion of "social capital", the deterioration of journalism, etc. Government can and should work to fight those problems.
Micah and Marshall - We need BOTH AND. We need more organizers to build movements that fight for our democratic and progressive ideals AND we need more people building and leading spaces for people to connect and act together across differences - without a political agenda.
Given the intensity and polarity of our current political climate, bringing people into our democratic culture cannot just be left to politics, organizers and campaigns but requires a set of broader experiences where people start acting together in a way that we all feel and experience our interdependence, and then let that govern our political engagement - whichever party that may be.
It seems like you are saying that in these spaces people must associate the work of acting together, in community and with power sharing as building our democracy. But I disagree - if people are getting an experiential sense of what its like to share power, participate in spaces where all people belong, and work towards collective goals why does it have to be named as in the service of democracy for it to serve that purpose?
As for the term, entrepreneur originates from the French verb, entreprendre, meaning “to do something” or “to undertake. Today it may connote capitalistic undertakings, but its the spirit of taking initiative and leadership to create something new that has made me feel like its the right word to give an identity to the people creating these sorts of community building pluralistic spaces; and one that *may* bring more people into creating these sort of spaces than the identity of an organizer.
Sep 10, 2022·edited Sep 10, 2022Liked by Micah L. Sifry
What has struck me when it comes to this idea of a politically active community, is congregations and large art events.
In any community, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of religious congregations that meet regularly and have some sense of committed community. If a political and activist community can gather 100 people on a weekly basis and get those people civically engaged---that is a game changer. That is the equal of one smallish but midsized congregation.
Or recently, I had the joy of seeing the new Frederick Douglas musical in DC where over it seems to sell out every night at $100 a ticket. It was a powerful play where I came away with the message that you'd better get off your ass and fight for justice and freedom. Again, if an organized community was able to get a group like that to gather and donate at that scale just once a week or month, that is game changer in local politics.
I also was on the ground for a tough primary fight in Michigan, where congressperson andy levin took on congressperson Haley Stevens. Bernie Sanders came out for a rally and about 600 people showed up--which isn't too bad for a political rally. On the night that Andy lost the primary though, there was about 4,000 metalheads who showed up for a concert in the same downtown Pontiac, MI neighborhood where the Bernie rally had been held 4 days earlier.
I am now a life long organizer, where my career started in the 1990s in ACORN and New Party era Chicago, and have since gone on to work on giant union healthcare campaigns, retire coal plants, beat republicans and bad democrats as a campaign manager, organized to save factories from closing like the Carrier factory here in Indianapolis, and now help lead Our Revolution, the organization that Bernie Sanders started in 2016.
I do think creating meaningful, well-financed, grassroots political communities that gather for fun, learning, art, and social and political action should be the goal of long term organizing Way easier said than done, but like I said at the top, if you can build a community of 100 activists and organizers in a place, you can probably at the very least transform what is possible in local politics.
I've been making a routine of asking friends what types of hobby-based groups they think could be particularly fruitful to go from apolitical to politically left (strengthening the community bonds rather than alienating them). A few ideas that've come up so far: CSA members, community garden volunteers, outdoor cycling clubs, body positive/liberation focused sewist groups, hiking/backpacking groups for BIPOC and/or LGBTQ people.
Micah, are you planning on keeping a running list of potential groups? Happy to be of logistical support if/where a resource like this could be useful.
Thanks for the shoutout! I love and agree with the notion that community spaces are a way to grow democracy. We need more opportunities to connect with our fellow humans and realize we all have similar desires and needs.
Building power WITH each other, collective capacity, not challenging power OVER them. Can turn out that way if credit union brings down loan sharks on you. Capacity for collective self-government is also undermined with the entrepreneurial model, it's opposite.
There's years of knowing how to organize within these constraints the support the election of candidates and passing of measures that are consistent with the values of the organization. It makes it even stranger to characterize all organizing as being partisan? Important to be clear about what is and isn't organizing. Check our SSIR: Social Enterprise is not Social Change
Organizing in service of democracy is inherently values based and pluralistic! How are they "essentially" partisan? Much is done within 501(C)3 and 4 organizations, definition non-partisan. Also one party is more aligned with democratic values, including pluralism, than is the other. What does entrepreneurial "pluralism" mean?
Micah, I’ve been enjoying your pieces about community organizers and building a movement for democracy. A number of my older family members in their 70s have used local politics recently as a way to meet friends and find meaning. My impression is that the politics seems like an afterthought; mostly, they’re looking for an excuse to hang and drink wine. I recall this line from a NYT profile on Bay Area NIMBYs: “Over the past two decades, Susan Kirsch said she has spent almost as much time on her deck drinking wine and talking housing with fellow activists as she does with longtime friends.”
I think it’s great that hobby groups can serve as an entryway into political organizing. At the same time, I worry when our friendships and hobbies are oriented around instrumental political goals instead of serving as sources of inherent joy. I appreciated David Corey’s thought experiment about this in his essay on politics and friendship in Comment:
“Imagine, by analogy, a virtuoso pianist at the peak of her career who looks out at the culture around her and realizes that appreciation for classical music is rapidly fading. She senses a crisis: if things continue, there will soon be no audiences, no careers in music, and no future great performances. She considers the situation so dire that she decides to step away from her instrument, if only for a time, in order to defend classical music nationwide. She gives speeches about composers in grade schools across the country, lobbies Congress for increased support for the arts, and solicits wealthy donors to sponsor classical-music instruction. Her work is noble, but it consumes her; and the crisis is so severe that her task is never done. Thus, she never fully returns to the life of music she enjoyed before. Now, when she has time to play, which is rare, she’s a shadow of her former self. Practice sessions find her distracted. Her music suffers as a result of her effort to save music.”
More than anything, just wanted to say I’ve been enjoying your writing here and look forward to reading more.
I just came back to this post to see how comments are handled in Substack now that Musk owns Twitter and it's such a delight to see Marshall Ganz talking here. I couldn't agree more about what we need: organizers, not entrepreneurs.
More to the point we need organizers organizing with other organizers and the appropriate offline+online tools to support them. The Entrepreneur in the way that most people think of and relate is so embedded with libertarian and neoliberal values, it has creeped into civil society as "social impact" bring with it very definable political and economic technocratic values. Much better cultural values and norms exist around community organizing, and in the 21st Century that means the leaderful numbers of digitally savvy creators, makers, engineers who are also great coaches and organizers.
There's also a very misdirected intention in privileging apolitical positions over political, which implies that any position can be without politics, without power relations. It is much wiser to be very honest about power claims, beliefs, relations and politics we have, and then have the debates and the organizing to see where the larger consensus will net out. The longer we hide behind ideas around being neutral, or apolitical, the worse our democratic crisis will become.
Organizers not entrepreneurs. I’d build constituencies, have members and strengthen democratic citizenship. . E’s have employees, clients or customers and strengthen capitalist ownership. Deepti should know better.
One thing that I've been thinking about is the capacity of government itself to act as the creator of civic space and to create programs which encourage democratic practice. We do not really think in those terms these days but there is plenty of precedent:
* Religious congregations are subsidized (in the form of non-profit status) to create spiritual and physical space.
* Unions are chartered by national policy, whose express purpose is to enlarge the arenas where citizens may practice democratic skills. Of course the protections for labor organizing have atrophied over the years, but to my knowledge the basic language in the NLRA which says that the government encourages the formation of unions has never been struck down or undone. Arguably the Biden administration is breathing new life into those words.
* Libraries themselves are directly funded by local governments. More often than not they act as temporary spaces for a lot of these civic society groups. And the historical story here is interesting, since they started out as privately-funded spaces which gradually became basic fixtures of municipal government across the country.
While it's a little different, I think the movement towards representational budgeting has flavors of this kind of activity as well - it's really about governments in some ways paying their citizens to practice democratic skills. The argument in "100% Democracy" is also in this vein.
I think there's a lot of room for government to operate more actively in these spaces, and to create more venues where citizens can practice their democratic skills. What I have in mind includes creating literal space for existing civic society groups (something like first-come-first-serve room signups in the city hall annex) up to actively working to foster new organizations that expressly seek to bring people together from different walks of life and to give them some kind of substantive power which they can wield democratically. (Akin to the NLRA, but adapted to other kinds of organizing.) It seems to me that the first kind of work can operate really nicely on the municipal level, and the second kind of work is better suited to state-level actors, but I'm not picky! I know there are a lot of potential problems with these ideas, potential conflict-of-interest and so forth, but it does not seem insurmountable. I also know that you have to be careful what you wish for - I'm sure I'd be much happier with Gavin Newsom in charge of this kind of policy than Ron DeSantis.
Fundamentally it seems that the defense of democracy should be the responsibility of government itself. We are (rightfully) cautious about government interceding too strongly on behalf of one civic society group or another, but it seems to me that it should be possible to craft government policy that intercedes on behalf of civic society itself. There's far too much bad news on the state of civic society - polarization, a rise in anti-democratic feeling, depletion of "social capital", the deterioration of journalism, etc. Government can and should work to fight those problems.
Micah and Marshall - We need BOTH AND. We need more organizers to build movements that fight for our democratic and progressive ideals AND we need more people building and leading spaces for people to connect and act together across differences - without a political agenda.
Given the intensity and polarity of our current political climate, bringing people into our democratic culture cannot just be left to politics, organizers and campaigns but requires a set of broader experiences where people start acting together in a way that we all feel and experience our interdependence, and then let that govern our political engagement - whichever party that may be.
It seems like you are saying that in these spaces people must associate the work of acting together, in community and with power sharing as building our democracy. But I disagree - if people are getting an experiential sense of what its like to share power, participate in spaces where all people belong, and work towards collective goals why does it have to be named as in the service of democracy for it to serve that purpose?
As for the term, entrepreneur originates from the French verb, entreprendre, meaning “to do something” or “to undertake. Today it may connote capitalistic undertakings, but its the spirit of taking initiative and leadership to create something new that has made me feel like its the right word to give an identity to the people creating these sorts of community building pluralistic spaces; and one that *may* bring more people into creating these sort of spaces than the identity of an organizer.
What has struck me when it comes to this idea of a politically active community, is congregations and large art events.
In any community, there are dozens, if not hundreds, of religious congregations that meet regularly and have some sense of committed community. If a political and activist community can gather 100 people on a weekly basis and get those people civically engaged---that is a game changer. That is the equal of one smallish but midsized congregation.
Or recently, I had the joy of seeing the new Frederick Douglas musical in DC where over it seems to sell out every night at $100 a ticket. It was a powerful play where I came away with the message that you'd better get off your ass and fight for justice and freedom. Again, if an organized community was able to get a group like that to gather and donate at that scale just once a week or month, that is game changer in local politics.
I also was on the ground for a tough primary fight in Michigan, where congressperson andy levin took on congressperson Haley Stevens. Bernie Sanders came out for a rally and about 600 people showed up--which isn't too bad for a political rally. On the night that Andy lost the primary though, there was about 4,000 metalheads who showed up for a concert in the same downtown Pontiac, MI neighborhood where the Bernie rally had been held 4 days earlier.
I am now a life long organizer, where my career started in the 1990s in ACORN and New Party era Chicago, and have since gone on to work on giant union healthcare campaigns, retire coal plants, beat republicans and bad democrats as a campaign manager, organized to save factories from closing like the Carrier factory here in Indianapolis, and now help lead Our Revolution, the organization that Bernie Sanders started in 2016.
I do think creating meaningful, well-financed, grassroots political communities that gather for fun, learning, art, and social and political action should be the goal of long term organizing Way easier said than done, but like I said at the top, if you can build a community of 100 activists and organizers in a place, you can probably at the very least transform what is possible in local politics.
I've been making a routine of asking friends what types of hobby-based groups they think could be particularly fruitful to go from apolitical to politically left (strengthening the community bonds rather than alienating them). A few ideas that've come up so far: CSA members, community garden volunteers, outdoor cycling clubs, body positive/liberation focused sewist groups, hiking/backpacking groups for BIPOC and/or LGBTQ people.
Micah, are you planning on keeping a running list of potential groups? Happy to be of logistical support if/where a resource like this could be useful.
Thanks for the shoutout! I love and agree with the notion that community spaces are a way to grow democracy. We need more opportunities to connect with our fellow humans and realize we all have similar desires and needs.
Building power WITH each other, collective capacity, not challenging power OVER them. Can turn out that way if credit union brings down loan sharks on you. Capacity for collective self-government is also undermined with the entrepreneurial model, it's opposite.
There's years of knowing how to organize within these constraints the support the election of candidates and passing of measures that are consistent with the values of the organization. It makes it even stranger to characterize all organizing as being partisan? Important to be clear about what is and isn't organizing. Check our SSIR: Social Enterprise is not Social Change
Organizing in service of democracy is inherently values based and pluralistic! How are they "essentially" partisan? Much is done within 501(C)3 and 4 organizations, definition non-partisan. Also one party is more aligned with democratic values, including pluralism, than is the other. What does entrepreneurial "pluralism" mean?
Micah, I’ve been enjoying your pieces about community organizers and building a movement for democracy. A number of my older family members in their 70s have used local politics recently as a way to meet friends and find meaning. My impression is that the politics seems like an afterthought; mostly, they’re looking for an excuse to hang and drink wine. I recall this line from a NYT profile on Bay Area NIMBYs: “Over the past two decades, Susan Kirsch said she has spent almost as much time on her deck drinking wine and talking housing with fellow activists as she does with longtime friends.”
I think it’s great that hobby groups can serve as an entryway into political organizing. At the same time, I worry when our friendships and hobbies are oriented around instrumental political goals instead of serving as sources of inherent joy. I appreciated David Corey’s thought experiment about this in his essay on politics and friendship in Comment:
“Imagine, by analogy, a virtuoso pianist at the peak of her career who looks out at the culture around her and realizes that appreciation for classical music is rapidly fading. She senses a crisis: if things continue, there will soon be no audiences, no careers in music, and no future great performances. She considers the situation so dire that she decides to step away from her instrument, if only for a time, in order to defend classical music nationwide. She gives speeches about composers in grade schools across the country, lobbies Congress for increased support for the arts, and solicits wealthy donors to sponsor classical-music instruction. Her work is noble, but it consumes her; and the crisis is so severe that her task is never done. Thus, she never fully returns to the life of music she enjoyed before. Now, when she has time to play, which is rare, she’s a shadow of her former self. Practice sessions find her distracted. Her music suffers as a result of her effort to save music.”
More than anything, just wanted to say I’ve been enjoying your writing here and look forward to reading more.
I just came back to this post to see how comments are handled in Substack now that Musk owns Twitter and it's such a delight to see Marshall Ganz talking here. I couldn't agree more about what we need: organizers, not entrepreneurs.
More to the point we need organizers organizing with other organizers and the appropriate offline+online tools to support them. The Entrepreneur in the way that most people think of and relate is so embedded with libertarian and neoliberal values, it has creeped into civil society as "social impact" bring with it very definable political and economic technocratic values. Much better cultural values and norms exist around community organizing, and in the 21st Century that means the leaderful numbers of digitally savvy creators, makers, engineers who are also great coaches and organizers.
There's also a very misdirected intention in privileging apolitical positions over political, which implies that any position can be without politics, without power relations. It is much wiser to be very honest about power claims, beliefs, relations and politics we have, and then have the debates and the organizing to see where the larger consensus will net out. The longer we hide behind ideas around being neutral, or apolitical, the worse our democratic crisis will become.
I’d not I’s!