Working in the tradition of Ella Baker, the community organizer seeking an innovative breakthrough in education will use the principle of “cast down your bucket where you are.” The organizer becomes part of the community, learning from it, becoming aware of its strengths, resources, concerns, and ways of doing business. The organizer does not have a complete answer in advance – the researcher’s detailed comprehensive plans for remedying a perceived problem. The organizer wants to construct a solution with the community. He or she understands that the community’s everyday concerns can be transformed into broader questions of general import. The form of these questions and actions that follow from them are not always known in advance. I did not know that my concern for [his daughter] Maisha’s math education would lead to the Algebra Project’s raising questions about ability grouping, effective teaching for the children of color, experiential learning, and community participation in educational decision-making. I pulled these issues up flycast at my bucket. Finally, unlike the researcher, the organizer helps community members air their opinions, question one another, and then build consensus, a process that usually takes a great amount of time to complete.

This is a long journey and not a linear progression. It is a journey with zigs and zags, a process of push and pull, if you are successful in some classrooms, that gives you an opening to approach the community. In order to get into all the classrooms, however – to all the students – we need the community’s political commitment and clout. You have to work both sides of the street at the same time. You have to learn how to move effectively in all arenas. I have thought of the Algebra Project as a young child who is trying to stand up and teetering and falling down a little, then getting back up, falling down a little, and getting back up again.… It doesn’t really matter how many times young children fall down, they keep getting up, attempting to walk. Probably part of the reason that happens is that they have a lot of people around them who are walking. (pp. 112-3)

I’m not sure how this ties back to my framework. Clearly it’s got something to do with how you think about power and shaping the economy from a Movement Perspective, but beyond that I can’t put the connection in the words. But it feels like there’s something important in what he’s saying that goes beyond community organizing, that ties back in a deep and powerful way to how we should think about the economy. So for now, I’ll just let it simmer on the back burner.

SGEP sees its work centered in working with the communities most affected by the economic crisis—women, African Americans, immigrants, youth and poor whites. We are working on not just getting a piece of the pie but developing cooperative business and making our own pies.

The folks who attended the Southern Grassroots Economy Project were from cooperatives or cooperative networks all across the South. And as you would expect from a founding conference held in the Appalachians at the Highlander Research and Education Center, they’re trying to do so in a way that is also focused on movement building.

Given the South’s rich history of cooperatives and fighting for social justice, it’ll be interesting to see what they’re able to pull off. Stay tuned for more info in the spring, when they’re getting together again in Epes, Alabama, at the Rural Training Center of The Federation of Southern Cooperatives.

I have spent hours, weeks, months in discussions about how to recognize a movement—and whether anything we’ve done on all the issues you’ve mentioned counts. Suddenly, there are thousands of people taking some action, inspired by each other and seemingly not organized by anybody, and the conversation shifts to how we can harness the energy that has been released in that moment. Embedded in these discussions is an implicit assumption that one can build a movement in much the same way that one builds organizations: methodically, over the long term, with lots of structure so that people can join and find a path to leadership. I think this assumption is fundamentally wrong.

Organizations and movements are certainly related. Organizing builds infrastructure for a movement, and sometimes trains a movement’s leaders. The simplified movement stories we read today—how Rosa Parks sat down one day ‘cause she was too tired to move to the back of the bus, for example—are pretty much fantasy. Rosa Parks was a devoted member of the NAACP for 20 years before that day. She had put in her time recruiting members, registering people to vote, supporting legal efforts and plotting change. Before Mrs. Parks refused to move, others had, too, just as there were desegregation sit-ins at Southern lunch counters before the Greensboro Five sat down at Woolworth’s. Some of those sit-ins even had some success, but they didn’t spark spontaneous mass action, and only a real history buff or someone who was involved will bother to dig up their memory. Sometimes it’s useful to think of this period as the “pre-movement” stage. This is all the stuff that Gandhi did in South Africa years before the Salt Marches in India; all the work to protect gay people before Stonewall; everything we’re doing right now on our way to a new immigration system.

There does turn out to be a time that a cause, identified with a particular tactic, activates people to an extent previously unseen. So many factors feed into that moment. Some elements are tangible and we can try to influence them, like media pick up of the action, or a simple tactical design that eases replication. But some of these elements are intangible. We can’t predict them and we can’t control for them. They are comprised of some magical combination of an angry-enough constituency, a large-enough break in the system of repression so that what is underground can rise up, and the presence of creative leadership. When these factors are present, we might have a movement moment. Thus, organizers have to be prepared for such a moment to hit at any time. I wish I knew how to call it years in advance, but I’ve never really met anyone who could. The best we can do is open our eyes when it’s right on top of us.

This is the moment when conflict can arise between a new movement and the established organizations that created the pre-movement infrastructure, because this is when the differences between enabling movements and building organizations becomes clear. Movements are decentralized; organizations are centralized. Movements are spontaneous; organizations have strategies and plans, not to mention members and funders. These first two characteristics make movements go fast, while organizations can be slooow. Movements and organizations both want change, but organizations have the added goal of building for the long term, of perpetuating themselves. That goal can make organizations reluctant to embrace movements, even on the issues they’ve worked on forever, and can in turn can feed contempt for established organizations among movements.

We need both kinds of activity. There are things that the NAACP can do because it’s 100 years old, and there are things it can’t do for that very same reason. There are things Occupy Wall Street can do because it is nimble and unknown, but there are things it can’t do for that same reason. A good relationship between social justice organizations and movements requires reorientation from both.

Organizations can speed up by shifting some of their priorities. They can drop the notion that we must get all those occupiers or marchers or queer public smoochers to join their groups. They can be willing to share their planning and tactical skills even for an effort that they do not control and for which they will not likely get credit. In a movement moment, the imperatives of organization building can be set aside, and we might even recognize that not every organization has to live forever to make a great contribution. Organizers are used to hunkering down for marathons, but movement moments require sprinting. As a collective body, we must prepare to run full out.

For their part, movements can slow down enough to make sure they don’t exclude important perspectives in the rush to action. They can do their homework so that they know who John Lewis is when he wants to speak to them. They can adopt enough structure to protect people within the movement who could be abused by people with more power. They can refrain from blaming the current situation on the organizers who “failed” to make change earlier. More than anything else, social justice organizations and movements have to support each other, because the opposition will do its best to divide them by punishing the new movement, by pressuring the established groups to withhold support, even by making some concessions to one or the other.

Lately I’ve been remembering a quote by Omowale Satterwhite, a former board member of the Applied Research Center, which publishes Colorlines.com. During one meeting, long before an Obama presidency, Omowale said that our organization had to be ready for anything. People might not care so much about race now, he said, but that could change at any moment. He had observed from the fight against South African apartheid that “you never know how close you are to freedom.” We can’t set the timer for a movement moment, but we can act correctly when the clock strikes now.

If you want to learn more about her perspective on organizing, check out her book, Stir It Up: Lessons in Community Organizing and Advocacy.

Another good sign for Occupy Wall Street’s future: a new group called “Occupy the Hood.”

Founded by Malik Rhasaan, 39 of Queens, N.Y., and Ife Johari Uhuru, 35, based in Detroit, @OccupyTheHood has close to 3,500 followers on Twitter, the growing support of notable figures and a cadre of volunteers devoted to getting the word out about the cause of the protests to African Americans and Latinos.

Rhasaan told Loop 21, Occupy The Hood has six core volunteers, but he’s already seen “Occupy The Hood” carried by people he’s never met

Like many others, he was initially just curious about the protests.

“It was a news story and I’ve always been interested in what’s going on in our country,” Rhassan said via phone from the protests, where a police officer had asked him to move along. “I was just going down and really, just being nosy to see how honest it was. I realized there was a solid movement but that there weren’t enough black and Latinos.”

@OccupytheHood is Rhassan’s first Twitter account, and since he created it he has linked with thousands of followers, including Cornel West. He said he wants to use the account “as a springboard to address other things, whether it be crime or health issues in our communities. But we in the inner-city doesn’t know how this pertains to us. We don’t tie our issues to Wall Street.”

It’s depressing and infuriating that in 2011, our side still doesn’t take diversity & racism seriously enough that a group like Occupy the Hood was needed. But the fact that this early in Occupy Wall Street’s history two guys who are not, as far as I can tell, hard-core professional organizers could make something like this happen so quickly is an encouraging indicator of where this movement/happening might go.

After a few days, I switched to Doug Henwood’s position:

I’m not here to disparage Occupy Wall Street; I admire the tenacity and nerve of the occupiers, and hope it grows. But I’m both curious and frustrated by the inability of the organizers, whoever they are exactly, or the participants, an endlessly shifting population, to say clearly and succinctly why they’re there. Yes, I know that certain liberals are using that to malign the protesters. I’m not. I desperately hope that something comes of this. But there’s a serious problem with this speechlessness.…

Occupiers: I love you, I’m glad you’re there, the people I talked to were inspiring—but you really have to move beyond this. Neoliberalism couldn’t ask for a less threatening kind of dissent.

But in the last few days, as the protesters have repeatedly shown solidarity for striking union workers and as Occupy Wall Street has spread to other cities, Mr. Curmudgeon has completely left the building. In an interview with Ezra Klein, organizing guru Stephen Lerner nicely captures where I’ve ended up:

EK: One criticism of the protests has been that they don’t really have any demands, that there’s not a clear and achievable vision of what success looks like, nor of how to achieve it. Do you worry these efforts will just burn themselves out?

SL: I think that’s an interesting question. I don’t know the answer because we’re in uncharted waters as a country. But it’s important to realize it’s not the only thing happening. There are lots of people with concrete demands about principal reduction and closing corporate loopholes. We haven’t had a shortage of demands and solutions. We’ve had a shortage of mass movements that are courageous and heroic and driven by a sense of right and wrong. So if we can get more and more people into the streets and activism, that will give more force and energy to the demands.

I have no idea if Occupy Wall Street is going to be the beginning of “the Movement.” But even if it isn’t, this many people getting up on their feet and saying, “I’m mad as hell, I’m not to take it anymore – and I’m not going to go away” is a very good thing.

A few months agoI heard a young Egyptian activist explain how Tahir Square occurred. Tahir Square, he said, wasn’t the start of something. It was the culmination of years of many different organizing efforts, some of which succeeded, some of which failed miserably. So maybe Occupy Wall St won’t end up being Tahir Square. But maybe it’s the next step on the road.

Or to paraphrase an old joke: how do you get to Tahir Square? Organize, organize, organize.

Amanda Marcotte is frustrated with a lot of folks on our side:

So, I posted earlier today about what jackass crazy fuckwits run the Republican party and that’s why we’re in this current crisis, I suppose the inevitable thing happened in comments: I got scolded about my priorities. Apparently, I’m supposed to be focusing like a laser on how Obama is actually a double agent for the GOP…

Yes, I’m saying it right here: whether Obama is a secret Republican or whether he’s a well-meaning Democrat who is simply being blackmailed is irrelevant. The problem, either way, is Republicans.

If only. I think there’s a much, much bigger problem here — us.

Exhibit A: the debate on liberal/lefty blogs over “neoliberals” like Matt Yglesias, nicely summarized here and here. To grossly oversimplify, it’s about whether policy folks need to make long-term grassroots base building an integral part of their thinking about policy. Matt Y had complained:

Kevin Drum offers this effort:

I don’t know the answer either. But as I said a few months ago, “If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we’ve ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade.” It still is.

[Matt says:] So I really, strongly, profoundly agree with this. The moment someone comes up with a workable idea on this front, please sign me up. But if there’s no idea to debate, then there’s no idea to debate. Debating the desirability of devising some hypothetical future good idea seems kind of pointless to me.

Erik Loomis sums up the response:

being right about policy is often irrelevant unless you have a mass movement of people behind you ready to engage in collective action to see those policies enacted. And I don’t think left neo-liberals often understand that. This is why I get so outraged when, for example, left neo-liberals support education “reform” that weakens teacher unions. We probably all agree that there are bad teachers out there and it would be great to get rid of them. But by weakening the one educational institution that can best mobilize people to protect our schools from conservative attacks, these reforms often further right-wing politics even if they theoretically achieve a left neo-liberal policy point.

To which I say, Oh. My. God.

A few months after Wisconsin, we’re having a debate over this? The whole point of what Republicans are trying to do is to use policy to wipe out our power. How can anyone on our side who’s been paying attention at all – let along blogging endlessly – not get this?

So no, the problem isn’t the Republicans. The Republicans are playing a tough but smart bet: double down on the crazy in order to capture a lot of the anger that’s out there and see how far they can go before it blows up. As the Debt Ceiling drama is demonstrating, it may be a lot sooner than they were thinking. But considering the alternatives, it was a pretty smart gamble.

The problem is that our side isn’t playing equally smart. That’s why Obama can basically ignore what we want.

So if we want to stop losing, it’s time to stop whining about the Republicans or Obama and get in the game. One small step in that direction: stop having debates about whether (political) gravity exists.

On the myth that we are broke:
We’re not broke, we were robbed.
Saying “we are broke” is a great way to paralyze people.

Every American entrepreneurs blessed to have the best investor — America pays for roads, courts, firefighters, teachers. So: “if you do well in America, you should do well by America.”

“I am not talking about the good businesses” — small businesses, green businesses, “the corporations that are still patriotic. We honor them, we admire them.” He’s talking about the businesses whose attitude is “gimme, gimme, gimme — don’t give nothin’ back.”

The three pillars of the middle class: good government, good employers, and good citizens.

Why unions are the key to middle-class: our grandparents knew that “giving working folks the voice was the key to an economy that can maximize profit without minimizing people.”

The attitude of the superrich: “privatize again, socialize the pain. Socialism for the super wealthy, Darwinism for working folks.”

The biggest lie: “we are helpless. We can’t do anything.”

“Our slogan was never, ‘Yes He Can.’ It was ‘Yes We Can.’”

Fighting for the American dream, not for the American fantasy. The American fantasy: “everybody will be rich and buying things will make you happy.” The American dream “hard work should pay” — good American wages, benefits, dignified retirement.

The story of America: “the story of an imperfect people struggling to bring that unequal funding reality closer to that beautiful founding dream “that all men are created equal.

We are fighting for our opponents too. We don’t want them not to have a fire department near their house, we don’t want them to drink poisoned water.

The Tea Party talks about liberty.
We like the whole Pledge of Allegiance. “The Pledge of Allegiance does not stop with the word Liberty.” We believe in “Liberty and Justice for All.”

I may be wildly optimistic, but I think Rebuilding the Dream – which has backing from Moveon.org, SEIU, the AFL-CIO, US Action, plus a whole lotta other folks — is the best shot our side has for building an alternative to the Tea Party. So if you’re tired of us getting our butts kicked, after you’ve seen the video sign up on their website for one of the house meetings they’re planning on having in every state on Saturday, July 21.

To understand what these protests are targeting, here’s the story of one of the protesters:

Virginia Holwell, a 59-year-old shareholder from Peoria Heights, Illinois, even brought her own mortgage paperwork to the meeting to request help. Speaking to the gathering of shareholders, Holwell said she went to Chase to ask for a loan modification after losing her job a year ago. Howell said the company has lost her paperwork five times but has urged her not to go seek legal aid, housing counseling or advice from other parties. In March, after stringing her along for over 10 months, Chase advised her to “liquidate the property.”

This while Chase made $17 billion in profits.

In reaction to this entertaining but nonviolent protest, police responding by assaulting demonstrators, some of whom were elderly with mace, and also threatened some protesters with dogs. Stephen Lerner – aka Mr. It’s Time for Homeowner Strikes — said it was a sign that the protests were starting to get under somebody’s skin:

“The period where they were ignoring us is over, I think,” Lerner said of today’s police activity.

To learn more about what’s going on, check out Showdown in America as well as the website for National People’s Action, which is Showdown’s lead organizer.

But does this mean conservatives overreached? Not necessarily.

In the immediate aftermath of 2008’s financial meltdown, mainstream rags had headlines like The End of Capitalism? and Forget Adam Smith. They didn’t really mean it. But it was a sign of just how rattled the status quo was after the economy just barely stopped from falling off a cliff. Even the High Priest of Free Markets, Alan Greenspan, had partially recanted on national TV.

And now? With millions still out of work or working less than they want, corporations still hoarding cash because they don’t believe they’ll have enough customers, most states making terrible cuts with more to come, and jobs still polling as one of the top public issues, our national debate is over… how to cut the deficit. If you’d told me that in November 2008 I’d have thought you were nuts.

The reason: one part our side never really mobilized, and two parts the right’s brilliant all-out offensive. Rather than playing defense, the Right doubled down — and it paid off.

So yeah, odds are 2012 won’t be a good year for Republicans. Enough Republican politicians have very unpopular on-the-record votes, and the only candidates who stand a chance of winning the Republican Presidential nomination are either nuts or are fervently playing nuts. But will conservatives losses in 2010 really matter in the long run?

If our side keeps playing our hand the same way we have, conservatives may lose ground on a few small issues in 2013-15, but not by much. And by 2016, our activist base will have spent 8 years becoming progressively more disillusioned with Obama, there won’t have been much progress on the jobs front, Dems will have had some power for 8 years and won’t have gotten a lot done, and the Tea Partists will have had 4 years to burn themselves out to the point where the Pawlentey’s, Romney’s, etc. would have a shot at gaining the Presidential nod running on a non-crazy platform. If I were a conservative, I’d say that was a damn fine payoff from doubling down – especially compared to what might’ve happened if they hadn’t.

That history might get written very differently if our side gets its act together. If we turn overreachs like that of Scott Walker into a chance to not only overturn horrible policy but to also begin fighting for a broader vision of justice, folks in 2016 might look back on 2011 as a critical turning point. But only if we do what conservatives did and go on the offensive.

This isn’t the first time the Republicans have been said to have overreached. Back in the 90s, Gingrich made the same mistake. But the result was not a progressive renaissance. It was a few more years of Clintonian deficit obsession followed by 8 devastating years of Bush and zero progress for most working families. Another “overreach” like that and there may not be much of a New Deal legacy left to defend.