Critical Notes on Active Resistance 1996

Community Organizing Core

Remarks drawn from my small group's evaluation.

• Several people felt that the activities of the small groups were not productive or well explained. They would like to have seen more structured or thematic small group topics, such as the project drafting on the last day.
  
  
• It was also felt that the speakers should have had both more time and more structure in their presentations. One of the presenters (Tom Knoche) mentioned that he was not sure what he was supposed to talk about.
  
  
• The exercises on "language-building," which I apparently missed, were seen as helpful.
  
  
• People would have liked to have seen more concrete and less abstract themes presented, an example being tactics for politicizing a campaign or neighborhood.
  
  
• Also, people seem not to have understood what the "mainstream model" is.

My own reflections.

I pretty much concur with the points on presentation raised by others in my small group.

Overall the Core had hoped to achieve a "dynamic tension" between anarchism and organizing, but I would have to say it did not.

The sessions seemed to pose anarchism as a theoretical protagonist which was somehow to inform community organizing. One of the small group exercises asked us to use a major element of anarchism to rewrite two pages of statements about community organizing. The second page came from an article by Tom Knoche. At first I thought both pages were his, and only later did I learn that the first page was from the Midwest Academy (a "mainstream" group). Except for its paragraph on internal organization, which is not a defining point, there was nothing in the Midwest Academy page that an anarchist should find deficient or objectionable. I was truly at a loss to see the point of the exercise, and my small group, probably most small groups, wound up bogged down in almost etymological scrutiny. We couldn't figure out what the problem was supposed to be.

In fact, theoretical overlap between anarchism and community organizing is substantial already. The things people often find objectionable in community organizing are its opportunism, concessionism, and lack of success at transmuting its theoretical principles into reality. (Do anarchists have special insight into this? No.) Thus the Midwest Academy can say, "Empowerment is a process by which people learn the value of united action through real-life experience, and build the self-confidence of the individual", and at the same time promote an Alinskyist doctrine that the purpose of action is to "make officials do their jobs". This does not necessitate rehabilitating their definition of empowerment.

I am more or less satisfied with community organizing as a tactical form, as far as that goes, and I fail to see the need to "develop an anarchist model." On the contrary, it would be much more fruitful to use the immense practical experience of organizing to critique traditional anarchist blunders which I will not enumerate except to say that self-ghettoization and purism would probably top any list. One point raised during the sessions is that communities need not be geographically based. Although formally true, this line of thinking has the potential to lead straight back to the ghetto. Many people seemed to think of community organizing as something to do within the "anarchist community." It's a community, isn't it? We're organizing, aren't we?

This may result from not understanding the community organizing model. Its geographic component is a feature we should never discard, because one important basis for political power is control of the land itself. The geographic component will also force us to take questions of local political development, alliance, and strategy seriously.

Ultimately I think the relationship between anarchism and organizing is a relationship of strategy and means. We should use the means as a component of the strategy, not micromanage the strategy into the means. For reasons I have yet to learn, this ideological micromanagement has been a consistent feature of the anarchist grouping I have come to know.

For Improvement

• Overall, one very valuable improvement would be just to present the community organizing model more thoroughly.
  
  
• A history of the major trends in community organizing, with some commentary on the social conditions of their emergence, would be very useful. Parallel to this should be a history of anarchist attempts at organizing, however slight they may have been.
  
  
• There should be discussion of concrete and tactical organizing issues, for example coping with the hazards of opportunism and purism.
  
  
• If we adopt the convention that development pertains to the aspirations of groups, we can talk about connections between organizing work and development work. This is an entry point to democratic planning of social decisions, as opposed to merely forcing or rejecting alternatives authored by elite power.
  
  
• A major problem with much "mainstream" organizing or activism is simply its refusal of politics and classic political concepts such as liberty. Instead of an "anarchist influence" let's keep it simple and try to introduce the discourse to which anarchism owes its intellectual roots.
  
  

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