If your activism isn't building power in numbers and forms that you (and others) can count, maybe it's time to stop believing in the magic of small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens alone.
Glad you wrote this, Micah! I've always disliked that quote for exactly the reasons you say - omitting the hard work of organizing and base-building. It's like celebrating seeds and not what it takes them to grow into a tree.
I invite you to the GNAD, Global Nonviolent Action Database, and the list of 199 ways that groups can take direct action to bring change.
I further invite everyone to read George Lakey's book, How We Win, on his research and life experiences on the subject of nonviolent direct action. As a professor, he built that database with his students at Swarthmore.
Very nice, Micah, thanks. You point out correctly there are a number of necessary but not by themselves sufficient ingredients to successful social movements. For a broader overview check out Wm. Gamson's The Strategy of Social Protest - a study of a random sample of U.S. movement organizations 1800-1945. And for a closer look at movement dynamics, see Max Heirich's The Spiral of Conflict: Berkeley, 1964. Both Gamson and Heirich were on my thesis committee at Michigan, and Gamson was one of the organizers/originators of the anti-war teach-ins. Most organizers I meet are completely ignorant of that literature, to our collective loss.
I grew up with Bill's kids (we went to the same summer camp) and much later in life got to work with him a bit on an special section of the Journal of Sociology focused on the Occupy movement: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/utsq20/54/2?nav=tocList
Great piece, sent it to two organizers I manage who are learning the "art" of 1:1's and relational meetings in the structure organizing tradition. They went to an organizing bootcamp with Marshall Ganz earlier this month, a real treat!
I'm responding because this was a VERY useful piece of analysis of the current state of organizing. I must admit, I was left hanging just a bit at the end. I wanted to share this comment to engage you and others in a question:
Specifically, I'm not sure it's a problem that Indivisible and 50501 aren't doing "structured organizing" or organizing in what Mark and Paul Engler call the structure tradition.
I think what a lot of groups are missing and what your friend is intuitively sensing is that those groups are lacking a credible grand strategy. I would argue that most if not all groups are lacking that, specifically on a national scale. It's understandable right now because this is the first time we've had to deal with these conditions (national democratic backsliding, competitive authoritarianism etc.) and people are still adapting to them. (For instance, I'd be surprised if ISAIAH and Faith in Action have a credible grand strategy right now for how to get out of this mess). That said, I agree with you that the ability to gather 5,000 people is an incredible structure test and that we would need to be able to do that to defeat Trump.
Despite organizing for 15 years and belonging to an organization that does some structure based organizing (albeit not as well as what you've documented here), I too feel like your friend. What does that say that a Political Director of a well-respected national organization is struggling with this?
I think we need a better grand strategy. I have been doing a lot of thinking on this but I'm just some guy. What we need is a way to engage in that process collectively and then disseminate it. That was sorta what Indivisible started with their guide, anyway.
What I'm suggesting is that structured power-building to be better able to confront oligarchy is the master strategy, but yes it would help if we had a more positive vision too.
Larry was one of his Carl’s thesis advisors and he remembers him talking all about this. I wonder whether the IAF influenced ISAIAH’s institutional-based organizing structure. But I don’t think the IAF, tho when I wrote about them were looking beyond churches, considered barber shops to be institutions! (Also, I don’t know what they’re up to nowadays.)
Another thoughtful piece...I'd be interested to know how many movements were able to achieve success (however you measure that) without the catalyst of a charismatic leader...It seems to be all too often that, somewhat perversely, groups can't achieve success without a populist leading the way, at least at first. This feels great when you're on the same side (Dean, Obama) and terrifying when you're not.
Thank you Micah. This is very well thought out and articulated so your Substack blog helps chip away, along with other similar postings, in promoting the needed change in defending our democracy. This is greatly needed when all seems so austerely bleak in our future.
In re academics, Larry told me the following story AFTER that conference when he was having a beer with my crew whom he was meeting for the first time... - excuse the cut and paste...
...he told about meeting C.L.R. James—another radical thinker at home with folks who lived below (what a genteel voice once termed) “the men who make up your mind.” Larry encountered James in the early 70s at a university conference on the theme “The Year 2000.” The meeting hall was filled with academic stars who sat up front in a sort of inner circle. Larry was placed in the back and his sense of distance increased as he listened to the certified “geniuses.” He wasn’t all alone, though, as he found out when James scribbled a note to him suggesting the only thing the assembled mandarins knew about 2000 was that each hoped to be president of Harvard by then. James kept quiet for the first day or two of the conference. When he finally opened up in public, he began by recalling modern instances when striking steelworkers destroyed machines in British factories and farm workers in Trinidad fired cane fields that provided their livelihood. He pondered aloud if such heavy expressions of alienation might be worth a thought or two as conference panelists tried to project what life might be like in the next millennium. There was a pause—the silence resonated promisingly until…the discourse picked up where it had left off before James posed his question. Larry caught James’s eye and they walked right out of the room to the nearest bar...
FWIW, bar makes sense but I may have misremembered that...- might have been a bite to eat... PS I LOVED the Minnie Miracle vid in your last post...THANK YOU!!!!!
Thanks. A really interesting collection of observations. I loved the weather analogies of how people just happened to be brought together as if most by magic.
I’m also interested at the next level of granularity - the group processes of these organising events so that people get along, collaborate and make decisions together across difference and keep coming back. So many groups fail and don’t grow because of internal conflict.
Glad you wrote this, Micah! I've always disliked that quote for exactly the reasons you say - omitting the hard work of organizing and base-building. It's like celebrating seeds and not what it takes them to grow into a tree.
- from Betsy Leondar-Wright
I invite you to the GNAD, Global Nonviolent Action Database, and the list of 199 ways that groups can take direct action to bring change.
I further invite everyone to read George Lakey's book, How We Win, on his research and life experiences on the subject of nonviolent direct action. As a professor, he built that database with his students at Swarthmore.
Very nice, Micah, thanks. You point out correctly there are a number of necessary but not by themselves sufficient ingredients to successful social movements. For a broader overview check out Wm. Gamson's The Strategy of Social Protest - a study of a random sample of U.S. movement organizations 1800-1945. And for a closer look at movement dynamics, see Max Heirich's The Spiral of Conflict: Berkeley, 1964. Both Gamson and Heirich were on my thesis committee at Michigan, and Gamson was one of the organizers/originators of the anti-war teach-ins. Most organizers I meet are completely ignorant of that literature, to our collective loss.
Bill Gamson was my mentor and dissertation chair too! I learned so much from him, and miss him frequently now that he's passed away.
I grew up with Bill's kids (we went to the same summer camp) and much later in life got to work with him a bit on an special section of the Journal of Sociology focused on the Occupy movement: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/utsq20/54/2?nav=tocList
Reminds me of a workshop given by Peter Levine at Tufts where they work over the Mead quote (including asking for evidence she said/wrote it).
They did a great summary t-shirt:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/2zBHRStEWzvP15NU7
and here's a post from Peter with some explanation:
https://www.peterlevine.ws/mt/archives/2009/06/beyond-civic-pi.html
Great piece, sent it to two organizers I manage who are learning the "art" of 1:1's and relational meetings in the structure organizing tradition. They went to an organizing bootcamp with Marshall Ganz earlier this month, a real treat!
I'm responding because this was a VERY useful piece of analysis of the current state of organizing. I must admit, I was left hanging just a bit at the end. I wanted to share this comment to engage you and others in a question:
Specifically, I'm not sure it's a problem that Indivisible and 50501 aren't doing "structured organizing" or organizing in what Mark and Paul Engler call the structure tradition.
I think what a lot of groups are missing and what your friend is intuitively sensing is that those groups are lacking a credible grand strategy. I would argue that most if not all groups are lacking that, specifically on a national scale. It's understandable right now because this is the first time we've had to deal with these conditions (national democratic backsliding, competitive authoritarianism etc.) and people are still adapting to them. (For instance, I'd be surprised if ISAIAH and Faith in Action have a credible grand strategy right now for how to get out of this mess). That said, I agree with you that the ability to gather 5,000 people is an incredible structure test and that we would need to be able to do that to defeat Trump.
Despite organizing for 15 years and belonging to an organization that does some structure based organizing (albeit not as well as what you've documented here), I too feel like your friend. What does that say that a Political Director of a well-respected national organization is struggling with this?
I think we need a better grand strategy. I have been doing a lot of thinking on this but I'm just some guy. What we need is a way to engage in that process collectively and then disseminate it. That was sorta what Indivisible started with their guide, anyway.
What I'm suggesting is that structured power-building to be better able to confront oligarchy is the master strategy, but yes it would help if we had a more positive vision too.
Larry was one of his Carl’s thesis advisors and he remembers him talking all about this. I wonder whether the IAF influenced ISAIAH’s institutional-based organizing structure. But I don’t think the IAF, tho when I wrote about them were looking beyond churches, considered barber shops to be institutions! (Also, I don’t know what they’re up to nowadays.)
Another thoughtful piece...I'd be interested to know how many movements were able to achieve success (however you measure that) without the catalyst of a charismatic leader...It seems to be all too often that, somewhat perversely, groups can't achieve success without a populist leading the way, at least at first. This feels great when you're on the same side (Dean, Obama) and terrifying when you're not.
If success is measured by hard policy wins, then you could argue the folks in MN have won a lot without a charismatic figurehead.
Grateful to you, as always, Micah, for integrating your varied threads of reporting as well as reflecting. You speak for so many of us.
So Micah, is this a call to Indivisible et al to organize these MN style organizers? Or a call for us as individuals to each start our local groups?
All of the above? Though you're in PA and I think Pennsylvania United is already on this path: https://www.wechoose.us/p/the-church-of-organizing-forging
Thank you Micah. This is very well thought out and articulated so your Substack blog helps chip away, along with other similar postings, in promoting the needed change in defending our democracy. This is greatly needed when all seems so austerely bleak in our future.
Very thought-provoking article - and wonderful shout-out to my home state - I still have plenty of family in MN, but I hadn't heard about any of this!
Thanks for invoking Goodwyn: ICYMI - https://www.firstofthemonth.org/the-democratic-revolution/.
I helped organize that conference! And I remember that Goodwyn was pretty tough on us--the room was far too dominated by academics for his taste.
In re academics, Larry told me the following story AFTER that conference when he was having a beer with my crew whom he was meeting for the first time... - excuse the cut and paste...
...he told about meeting C.L.R. James—another radical thinker at home with folks who lived below (what a genteel voice once termed) “the men who make up your mind.” Larry encountered James in the early 70s at a university conference on the theme “The Year 2000.” The meeting hall was filled with academic stars who sat up front in a sort of inner circle. Larry was placed in the back and his sense of distance increased as he listened to the certified “geniuses.” He wasn’t all alone, though, as he found out when James scribbled a note to him suggesting the only thing the assembled mandarins knew about 2000 was that each hoped to be president of Harvard by then. James kept quiet for the first day or two of the conference. When he finally opened up in public, he began by recalling modern instances when striking steelworkers destroyed machines in British factories and farm workers in Trinidad fired cane fields that provided their livelihood. He pondered aloud if such heavy expressions of alienation might be worth a thought or two as conference panelists tried to project what life might be like in the next millennium. There was a pause—the silence resonated promisingly until…the discourse picked up where it had left off before James posed his question. Larry caught James’s eye and they walked right out of the room to the nearest bar...
FWIW, bar makes sense but I may have misremembered that...- might have been a bite to eat... PS I LOVED the Minnie Miracle vid in your last post...THANK YOU!!!!!
Thanks. A really interesting collection of observations. I loved the weather analogies of how people just happened to be brought together as if most by magic.
I’m also interested at the next level of granularity - the group processes of these organising events so that people get along, collaborate and make decisions together across difference and keep coming back. So many groups fail and don’t grow because of internal conflict.
thank you, very helpful
It's a great read, I wrote some things on a similar wave length recently, and reflected again based on this post. Thank you.
(https://rosie.land/posts/community-is-not-magical/)
where else is this being discussed??