[ The role of strategy in making social movements and
organizations more effective, and who creates it, are the urgent
questions four authors explore in three new books. Their answers will
surprise you, as they surprised me.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

ANSWERING THE CALL: STRATEGY AND POWER-BUILDING FROM THE BOTTOM UP  
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James Mumm
January 8, 2024
Reviews 4 Radicals
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_ The role of strategy in making social movements and organizations
more effective, and who creates it, are the urgent questions four
authors explore in three new books. Their answers will surprise you,
as they surprised me. _

Photo by Trintage on Unsplash // Reviews 4 Radicals,

 

First, what is strategy, and why does anyone need it? Aren’t social
movements all about taking action to create change?

Deepak Bhargava [[link removed]] and Stephanie
Luce [[link removed]], who teach at
CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, tackle this question
head-on. “How do oppressed people, facing far stronger opponents,
sometimes win?” The key to an underdog’s success, they argue, is
strategy. While long-term planning comes naturally to the wealthy and
powerful, strategy is even more important for the dispossessed to
achieve their goals. Yet if the stories of the less powerful are
rarely told, their strategies are even harder to trace. 

“Underdogs have strategy as well,” say Bhargava and Luce, “but
the transmission of the diverse lineages of their wisdom has too often
been interrupted or lost due to state repression and violent attacks
(particularly against Black freedom movements), through moral panics
like the Red Scare purges, and through the genocide of Indigenous
people.” 

This is the historical wrong Bhargava and Luce seek to right with
their work. Because many of our most effective organizers were
murdered and forgotten, their strategies were never recorded or
erased. So rediscovering the lineages of good organizing and effective
strategy, then pushing ourselves to go beyond our training and
traditions, is essential to all modern-day practitioners of the craft.

Strategy, according to Bhargava and Luce, is a plan to achieve a goal
with limited resources, under conditions of uncertainty, while facing
opposition. Their book, _Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to
Change the World
[[link removed]] _(2023), explores
the successful strategies of movements starting with Abolition in the
19th century through to the modern day, with real-life examples
from Make the Road New York [[link removed]], St. Paul
Federation of Educators [[link removed]], 350.org
[[link removed]], Gay Men’s Health Crisis
[[link removed]], and many more. _Practical Radicals_ plumbs
the depths of each movement’s strategy, with sharp examples and
vivid stories. It introduces readers to seven strategies and six forms
of power framework analysis, with thirty-six essential tools, prompts,
and resources.

The two figures whose legacies weave through the three books discussed
in this review are Ella Baker
[[link removed]], who organized (among many
other projects) the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
[[link removed]] and Chicago
community organizer Saul Alinsky
[[link removed]], whose 1971 book _Rules
for Radicals
[[link removed].]_ offered
a blueprint to a new generation of organizers and change-makers.

All three works praise the enormous contribution Baker’s
“spadework” approach to community organizing made to the civil
rights and freedom movements, and the organizations they inspired.
Bhargava and Luce also note that the “disruptive, raucous movements
in the 1960s weren’t distractions from the “real” work of
building mass organization, as Alinsky argued: they were essential
fuel for the explosive growth of racial justice and community
organizations.” 

Bhargava and Luce argue good organizers can, and should, find value in
multiple organizing and strategy traditions: “Good underdog
strategists can sense when it’s time to shift from spadework in the
hard times to fanning the flames of disruption when conditions are
ripe, as Ella Baker did.” They continue:

Many community organizations descend directly or indirectly from Saul
Alinsky, who consciously developed the practice of community
organizing as a reaction to the sectarian narrowness of the American
Left, which had come to be long on radical rhetoric and short on
organizing. Many of today’s community organizers have in turn
reacted to Alinsky’s emphasis on self-interest and power by
emphasizing vision and ideology. A new synthesis combining broad
social vision with renewed rigor in the practice of the craft of
community organizing is needed.

In the Disruptive Movements chapter, Bhargava and Luce explain that
“It was the systematic humiliation of poor women by the welfare
system—even more than the paltry benefit levels—that inspired them
to organize.” They tell the story of Johnnie Tillmon, whose 1972
article in 
[[link removed]]_Ms.
Magazine
[[link removed]]_ shook
up the women’s movement with a challenge to center poor women of
color: 

Organizing has been portrayed as something done exclusively by paid,
formally trained organizers. But poor women of color began organizing
themselves years before the formation of the NWRO. Tillmon was a union
shop steward in a laundry in Compton, Los Angeles. She stopped working
there after she became ill and decided to stay home to care for her
six children. Tillmon was outraged by the treatment she received at
the hands of the welfare office, including inspections of her
refrigerator, questions about her decision to buy a television, and
midnight raids aimed at finding reasons to disqualify her from
assistance. She organized a meeting of hundreds of poor women to found
Aid to Needy Children Mothers’ Anonymous in Los Angeles in 1963.

While base-building and disruptive movements are only two of the seven
strategies in _Practical Radicals _— the others being narrative
shift, electoral change, inside-outside campaigns, momentum, and
collective care — the generative power-building of community and
worker organizing writ large is essential to each. They use a
framework that includes six forms of power: ideological, political,
economic, military, solidarity, and disruption. Each strategy can draw
upon multiple forms of power. 

Chapters in Practical Radicals end with a chart of the key components
of the model, identifying the form(s) of power used, theory of change,
narrative shifts, examples, protagonists and structure, goals and
methods, tactical repertoire, what does winning mean, time horizon and
when the model is most effective, how it works with other
models/movement ecosystem, strengths, weaknesses, and the tools that
best advance the strategy. Within this novel structure is freedom, as
Bhargava and Luce deftly weave theory with practice through the
stories of modern day organizers and insights from our various
traditions. 

The under-told stories of nine movement women that weave together many
of these strategies and forms of power are the heartbeat of Lynn
Lewis’s _Women Who Change the World: Stories from the Fight for
Social Justice
[[link removed]]_ 
[[link removed]](2023).
All nine of Lewis’s oral histories—Vanessa Nosie
[[link removed]], Roz Pelles
[[link removed]], Yomara
Velez [[link removed]], Betty
Yu, [[link removed]] Loretta Ross
[[link removed]], Terese Howard
[[link removed]], Malkia Devich-Cyril
[[link removed]], Priscilla
Gonzalez
[[link removed]],
and Hilary Moore [[link removed]]—include
fascinating origin stories. Most of the women credit their parents and
communities as their inspiration and first teachers in strategy and
organizing (in a minority of stories women were
reacting _against_ their given families and communities). 

The resonances between the seven strategies and six forms of power
in _Practical Radicals_ and the oral histories in _Women Who Change
the World_ are not surprising. Women have always played versatile and
essential roles as organizers and leaders of movements and
organizations, sometimes forced into such roles due to discrimination
on the basis of race, class, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and
other times because their talents allow such fluidity. Vanessa Nosie,
for instance, is Chiricahua Apache
[[link removed]], enrolled in the San Carlos
Apache tribe. As an organizer in Apache-Stronghold
[[link removed]], Vanessa’s work resonates with the
strategy of Collective Care as she manages schedules, cooks, and takes
care of elders. She also co-leads the organization’s participation
in the Poor People’s Campaign
[[link removed]]—Solidarity Power in Bhargava
and Luce’s framework. 

Vanessa started having “intimate talks with my dad and my
grandmother about who we are, the genocide that happened to our
people, and the ongoing fight for our survival.” Vanessa describes
receiving teachings that her ancestors gave her great-grandmother,
grandmother, and father who passed it along to her as she has passed
them to her own children. She took her first action at 12 when she
refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance in school. 

Roz Pelles’ oral history repeats this pattern. She credits her
father, who “taught me at a very early age that if you see something
wrong, it’s your responsibility to do something about it. This is a
daunting thing to hear if you are a four- or five-year-old. But if you
live into that, it really can be a guide.” Roz was called to action
at 13 when her church in Winston-Salem, N.C., became the headquarters
for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
[[link removed]]. She
describes how: “We were trained, and we were on the picket line, and
it was a scary thing if you’ve never done it. But there was a spirit
that just made it all right. There was the singing, there was the
camaraderie, and there was the confidence that we could win.” 

The core lesson I draw from these and other stories in _Women Who
Change the World_ is a universal of organizing: the equal and
opposite reaction to oppression is resistance. We may receive
encouragement from our families, or we may break with them to do this,
but inevitably, people organize against oppression. And they do so
through diverse given and adopted traditions.

Clément Petitjean’s
[[link removed]] _Occupation:
Organizer: A Critical History of Community Organizing in America
[[link removed]]_ (2023)_ _stands
in stark contrast to both works, in the way it focuses on the
importance of “professional” organizers, which I find both
reductionist and flat. Yet there are valuable nuggets once you get
past Petitjean’s reeking cynicism; don’t worry, we’ll dig them
out. 

_Occupation: Organizer_ is primarily concerned with the development
of a professional class of community organizers in the United States
starting in the 1970s. He argues community organizing is now a
“semiautonomous entity transcending individual organizations”
which is structurally subservient to philanthropy, on the one hand,
and in his opinion dominates rank-and-file members and masses on the
other. This rankles Petitjean to the point of distraction. 

Petitjean posits that the “body of knowledge and know-how that was
believed to legitimize the superiority of organizing came from two
different sources: the IAF’s expertise in fostering militant
voluntary association and the experiential know-how about politicizing
spadework that was passed on from the sixties.” What really seems to
get under Petitjean’s skin is Alinsky’s public rhetoric as an
anti-fascist and radical. This leads to a very French analogy, and the
most unique epithet I’ve heard hurled at Alinsky: crème brûlée (a
hard crust of faux radicalism concealing a soft inner cream of
liberalism). 

I think professional organizers are more like the versatile shortcrust
pastry. Shortcrust pastries can be savory or sweet. You can make flan.
Or tarts. Pies or quiches even. Professional (and unpaid) organizers
who draw on multiple strategies and forms of power give shape to the
pastries (i.e. organizations and campaigns) that the chefs (organizers
and member-leaders) require. Let the battle of French pastry analogies
begin!

Less blatant bias and cynicism and more academic rigor would have made
Petitjean’s book a must-read instead of a chore. The distinct lack
of geographic, racial, and gender diversity in this Chicago-centric
book’s interviews and sources is striking, and in his quest to take
down the professionalization of community organizing, he pays less
attention to the craft itself. 

In the end, Petitjean concludes that a revolution is not in the
offing, and the best option is to de-specialize and de-professionalize
the field of organizing, turning professional organizer roles into
temporary positions and organizations into “group-centered
leadership,” modeled on Ella Baker’s spadework. These are
provocative ideas, but they still must answer the core questions the
field is currently wrestling with: how can we build more power and
what strategies will lead to transformational change?

Petitjean’s core concerns — about the relationship between
organizing and philanthropy and the relationship between professional
organizers and members — are legitimate. Their solutions may come
from experiments in independent resource generation like those
championed by the Progressive Multiplier Fund
[[link removed]] and innovations in
base-building organizing by the groups calling for an Organizing
Revival
[[link removed]],
Social & Economic Justice Leaders’ Strengthening Organizing Project,
and the Leadership Center for Democracy and Social Justice
[[link removed]]. 

I don’t foresee a change to the core dynamic in community
organizing: building power that centers the virtuous cycle of
developing volunteer leaders who can organize others, developing lead
organizers who can train new organizers, and ensuring robust local,
state, regional, and national training programs. Nor am I bothered by
the professionalization of community organizing when we perform the
craft with authenticity and integrity as Deepak Pateriya
[[link removed]] discusses
in _A Sacred Trust: Being a Paid Staff Member of a Base Organization
[[link removed]]_ (Convergence,
2023). 

This brings us back to Bhargava and Luce’s call for a movement-wide
upgrade in strategy development. The last section of their book urges
us to learn from history and avoid the pitfalls of the past, with
pieces on building trust and unity, investing in creativity, learning
from our opponents, and mastering the rhythms of social change. 

I particularly loved their final chapter, “Why We Argue.” This
digs into the changes that we need to make to our collective practice:
deeper power analysis, sharper conjunctural analysis, exploiting and
creating fissures in the overdog coalition, creating new strategy
hubs, generative conflict and principled struggle, and investing in
the strategic capacity of organizers, leaders, members, and
volunteers. 

Understanding the conjuncture, our analysis of the present moment and
our predictions and vision for the future, are the keys for organizers
and change makers to use multiple strategies and forms of power in
order to develop strategy and win transformational change. We are
neither beholden to the past, nor prisoners of it. This includes our
own histories and traditions as _Women Who Change the World _makes
so clear.

We can all be practical radicals, but we are going to have to embrace
complexity if we want to build multi-racial majority coalitions that
can win governing power (the north star of an increasingly large
segment of the Left and the organizing sector). Being an organizer and
volunteer member-leader — and developing into strategists —
requires drawing from multiple traditions. It is a constant struggle
for the organizers and change-makers of the day to distinguish between
orthodoxies and universals, the calcifications of traditions that are
no longer useful and the truths about organizing that don’t
change. 

Bhargava and Luce point to a hopeful sign here: “Sulma Arias
[[link removed]], the executive
director of People’s Action [[link removed]], has
rightly called for an “organizing revival
[[link removed]]” to renew the
tradition. A new synthesis, modeled by groups featured in this book,
that brings together bold vision, rigorous strategy, and recommitment
to the fundamentals of the craft, is emergent.”

All three new books contribute to advancing organizers’
understanding of their craft, where it comes from and where it can go.
Our last word goes to Lewis, whose deep listening in _Women Who
Change the World_ is an invitation for us to open our ears, not our
mouths, if we want to forge the building blocks of the changes we
seek: 

Community organizing at its most powerful compels us to listen, learn,
and support the collective analysis and action of the many, not the
few. Because of them, the rest of us have more choices. Because of
them, the rest of us have more rights. Because of them, the rest of us
live with less danger, and because of them, we are more free.

First published in _Social Policy: Organizing for Social and Economic
Justice [[link removed]]_ (53)4.

BOOKS REVIEWED:

Bhargava, D., Luce, S. _Practical Radicals: Seven Strategies to
Change the World_ [[link removed]].
New Press, 2023. 

Lewis, Lynn. _Women Who Change the World: Stories from the Fight for
Social Justice
[[link removed]]. _City
Lights, 2023. 

Petitjean, Clément. _Occupation: Organizer: A Critical History of
Community Organizing in America_
[[link removed]].
Haymarket Books, 2023

_​[JAMES MUMM​​​​​​ is the Director of Strategic
Initiatives at 22nd Century Initiative. James brings more than thirty
years of experience to this role, with deep community organizing
experience in Chicago and the Bronx, as managing director of
People’s Action, and most recently as National Campaigns Director
for Greenpeace USA.]_

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