Occupation: Organizer by Clément Petitjean offers a comprehensive historical examination of the variety of contexts in which a century of community organizing has operated and evolved and how interest groups, political organizations, philanthropic organizations, and movements have shaped the practice and the process of its professionalization — with Chicago inevitably at the epicenter of his analysis.
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“My goal in this book is to challenge these misconceptions and take community organizing as a serious object of critical analysis. In order to do so, we need to look at community organizers not so much as individuals, with their stories and backgrounds, but as the members of a particular social group, with its own values, norms, and material and symbolic interests, which exists as a relatively autonomous entity.”

These misconceptions that Clément Petitjean refers to in Occupation: Organizer: A Critical History of Community Organizing in America are of those on both the Right and Left that dismiss community organizing from having measurable worth, as well as its association as solely being a byproduct of the nonprofit industrial complex or philanthropic organizations. Petitjean also implores us to look beyond the celebritization of organizers—namely the Saul Alinskys and Barack Obamas of the world—and understand the actual function and evolution of community organizing with all of its contradictions, messiness, and tedious work considered all at once. The book is predominantly framed around the question and the process of the professionalization of the practice.

This framing, mostly by necessity and perhaps to the collective sigh of many socialist organizers, starts with the life of Saul Alinsky. Petitjean emphasizes that unpacking Alinsky’s legacy is done so in the book not so much to biographize and certainly not to elevate it, but rather to examine the “professionalization dynamics” that Alinsky contributed to the field of community organizing in an inarguably lasting way. This examination unravels into virtually every imaginable dimension of the Left ecosystem from the 1930s up through the last part of Alinsky’s life in the New Left movement in the 1960s and 1970s (he passed away in 1972). But it also takes note of how the Right has co-opted Alinsky’s work, by taking note of his tactics and giving them a conservative twist—a testament to a key component in Alinsky’s approach: stimulating civic participation using a universally applicable model which is also ideologically agnostic. Alinsky, in a 1959 letter to a social reform-minded priest named John O’Grady, essentially stated as such as part of his initial guiding practices:

“[create] a responsible area of authority which possesses the loyalty of the people by virtue of its active representation and implementation of the people’s hopes and desires.”

We also briefly learn how the academic and literary arguments for and the institutionalization of community organizing initially took place in the 1910s and 1920s to the chagrin of social workers — a practice that was professionalized decades earlier and was still in the process of defining itself as well. In fact, the professionalization of social work produced a culture in the field that rejected social and political reform as its components.

Prior to his engagement in community organizing, Alinsky studied in the first Sociology department in the U.S. at the University of Chicago under Ernest Burgess and Robert E. Park, both of whom had a lasting impact on his life work and instilled in Alinsky an “obsession with conflict and power.” They saw conflict as necessary to shaping the fabric of society in order for its power dynamics to be properly understood. The city of Chicago was where their vision was applied and theory of change was practiced. One of Alinsky’s first endeavors after college was the Chicago Area Project (CAP) which ran off of public and private funds (some from the Rockefeller Foundation). CAP was seen as “a direct application of the Progressive-Era belief that social surveys could be used as a tool for social reform.” CAP would send organizers into Chicago neighborhoods that they perceived as disorganized or prone to civic disorganization and would predominantly target youth, being that their goal was to spark a self-help project to provide social and educational services to the neighborhood. CAP was premised on the rejection of casework, seen as an “individualizing, psychoanalysis-inspired practice” (another highlight of the tension between social work and community organization) and government-driven social intervention. Alinksy’s vision, that being the pursuit of natural leaders by professional community outsiders, marked the initial development in practice of the theories of community organizing he developed under Burgess and Park.

One of Alinsky’s cornerstone projects came to be the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council (BYNC) which he founded with the help of Bishop Bernard Sheil in 1939 to organize existing organizations in the neighborhood around shared goals in spite of its ethnic divisions (that being western European immigrants of different ethnicities—interracial organizing that included Black residents was not on the table). One of BYNC’s first victories was putting pressure on Armour, the meatpacking company, to recognize their employees’ union and offer wage increases. BYNC was heralded as a model for civic democracy in the press throughout the early 1940s, and saw recognition from President Truman. Its success provided validation for Alinsky to continue his entrepreneurial project of community organization rather than settling for a relatively more stable career in social work or academia.

He went on to form the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940 and continued to build upon the concept of professional community organizing, and had still managed to avoid any association of his work with anti-communism throughout the first couple years of its founding. But as time went on, Alinsky’s original intentions unraveled differently. Returning to the aforementioned letter from priest John O’Grady to one of the most powerful Vatican officers in 1959, Cardinal Secretary of State Domenico Tardini, O’Grady highlighted Alinsky’s work as not having direct roots in the faith tradition but still serving as a model to fight apathy and demoralization that communism was not equipped to address. Alinksy went on to validate this with O’Grady after the correspondence took place. Petitjean goes on to elaborate as to how Alinsky used professionalization as its own version of anti-communism, and how Alinsky’s self-styled hard-headedness and pragmatism paved a path for him to show how his “radical” approach made him stand apart from other professional organizations, to the extent that he would attempt to set himself apart from “establishment” or “sell-out” liberals. Ironically, IAF organizers out in the field were sent out to parts of the country they had no familiarity with and would report back to their supervisors or Alinksy himself of the low wages, long hours, and work overload as a result of staffing shortages. Sexism also produced deep resentments and lack of opportunity in Alinksy’s IAF. Alinksy’s biographer, Sanford Horwitt, noted that “Alinsky’s attitude toward women (which changed somewhat by the end of his life) was typical of the male world of Chicago politics and especially of the CIO subculture.”

In spite of the trouble behind the scenes at the IAF, the media continued to praise Alinsky’s work as a polished and technicalized approach throughout the 1950s and more so into the 1960s. This revealed itself to be a crucial time in which Alinsky’s so-called radicalism began to be put to the test. The Economist published “Plato on the Barricades” in 1967 to argue that Alinsky’s strategy proved more effective in organizing the Black population than Stokey Carmichael’s or Martin Luther King’s—perhaps not a surprising expression from The Economist in the 1960s, but an audacious and racist assertion nonetheless. Petitjean illustrates:

“A month before the Economist piece on Alinsky, Martin Luther King delivered his famous Riverside Church speech, where he took a strong public stance against the war in Vietnam and connected the civil rights movement with a broader fight against US imperialism. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other dominant newspapers all lambasted King’s speech. Instead, Alinsky’s ‘radicalism,’ which contained no anti-imperialist element, no support for the anticolonial revolutions underway in the third world, and defined politics in technical terms (‘we’re just technicians trying to organize the people’), was a much more suitable candidate for the media’s patriotic defense of the social order and the status quo.”

What’s further telling of the depoliticized nature of Alinsky’s ground game was the last decade of his life, in which he resorted to consulting large corporations. Although he suggested to his peers that the attention he received from the corporate scene wouldn’t compromise or adversely affect his underlying cause, he played directly into the emerging trend at the time of corporate social responsibility. It became all the more clearer that omitting an ideological approach was a key fixture to Alinksy’s work so that it “could be pitched to basically any group that sought to implement ‘change,’” and in Alinsky’s own words, “as long as the clients adhered to core Judeo-Christian moral values.” We see in returning to how the IAF was run in addition to how he communicated his theory of change towards the end of his life that his intentions were very individualistic from the onset, and his successor’s insistence on the mere existence of the “Alinsky method” cemented the idea of the professionalization of the field was valid and effective as an organizational model to be carried forth.

The second half of the book examines the development of community organizing in the latter part of the 20th century by first examining the reaction of organizations and individual organizers to the Alinsky method and the tensions during the civil rights movement that were seen in overlapping organizing networks of the time. Petitjean looks at the emergence of local community networks during the 1960s which favored “the development of oppressed people’s collective leadership to achieve emancipatory structural change,” and was often deliberately anti-institutional, and described by Petitjean as “spadework.” Petitjean looks at four specific examples that invoked the spadeworker tradition: “SNCC’s activity in the Deep South; the attempt by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to build an ‘interracial movement of the poor’; the creation of politicizing positions and vehicles by war on poverty legislation; and the Black power movement’s emphasis on organizing at the local level.” 

They practiced a bottom-up approach that rejected the boundaries established by the professionalization of organizing, with no distinct individual or organization that constituted the center of it to amass social capital in the way that Alinsky did. In spite of concerted attempts to disassociate with the professionalization of community organizing and even in cases where local residents themselves were recruited for their respective organizing efforts, the attachment of a specific agenda to their work clouded their mission, especially given that residents weren’t necessarily conscious of any given organizer’s political agenda, of which there certainly was one.

A notable event in which the Alinksy and New Left worlds collided was in the summer of 1964 when IAF board member Ralph Helstein attempted to train SDS members in the proto-Alinsky method. The meeting was not successful: Alinksy saw SDS organizers as naive, and SDS saw Alinsky’s approach as too liberal and absent a political vision. Although SDS organizers were clearly onto something in identifying Alinsky’s shortfalls, they ironically ended up reproducing efforts of Alinsky’s anyway, such as the use of social surveys to perform political work. Petitjean points out the similarities in the Alinsky and spadeworker tradition: ethnographic community immersion, leadership identification and attempting to let the people speak for themselves, and the development of specific goals removed from abstraction. And as it perfectly fits into ongoing debates of the educational backgrounds of leftists today, spadeworker development was almost always fueled by student movements or the college-educated. The Black Panther Party’s development likely would not have come to be without its college-educated core.

The organizing culture from the 1970s to the end of the century gradually became more of an effort to capture populist sensibilities in the context of practicing hyperlocal politics—and attitudes that shaped these practices were often seeded in a deep mistrust of government in general, also serving as an interesting backdrop to the early years of the development of neoliberalism. “Grassroots” political action was coined and developed throughout the 1970s and 1980s, driven not only by consultants of some of the most well-funded electoral campaigns of the time but also the advocacy organizations that now constitute our modern non-profit industrial complex. This caused the concept of community organizing to expand beyond unforeseen levels of reach and influence. To add to it, philanthropic donations went on to triple from the 1970s to the late 2010s.

Throughout now-Mayor Brandon Johnson’s campaign it has been easy to catch Chicago organizers and advocates for Johnson, rightfully so, comparing his campaign and tactics with that of Harold Washington: emphasis on the intention to place input from neighborhood groups into motion and listen to (and eventually employ) professional organizers. As this developed during Washington’s term, community organizing also managed to find its way into conservative and reactionary tendencies as exemplified by the founding of Save Our Neighborhoods, Save Our City (SON-SOC). Petitjean notes the context in which SON-SOC developed:

“Both organizations were started by IAF-trained organizers in the 1970s in neighborhoods where white ethnics responded to the arrival of African American and Hispanic families with reactionary language and methods. In these neighborhoods, the dog-whistle rhetoric used by people like Republican mayoral candidate Bernard Epton and alderman Ed Vrdolyak, the leader of the anti-Washington faction during the infamous ‘Council Wars,’ resonated widely. During SON-SOC’s first convention in 1984, the 750 delegates issued a ‘Declaration of Neighborhood Independence,’ soon nicknamed the ‘white ethnic agenda,’ centered on neighborhood preservation and opposition to racial integration.”

This served as one of many examples alongside the quickly changing landscape of nonprofits, volunteer organizations, philanthropic organizations, labor unions, and political campaigns that produced a vast array of competing interests with the ascension of neoliberalism as its backdrop. It contributes to the murkiness of the concept of community organizing itself: is it inherently liberal, conservative, reactionary, radical, local, or political? Any of these descriptors could be assigned to community organizing throughout its development. It’s on this basis that Petitjean dismisses any notion that community organizers are either homogeneous or exist in a social vacuum. He concludes that community organizers do inhabit a “subaltern position” in the political ecosystem, although it may also be fair to critique how subaltern their position actually is considering the current political moment in Chicago and the influence that community organizers had on Mayor Johnson’s successful campaign.

Petitjean also concludes with looking at professionalization dynamics through a “prism” to see what type of work is done and how. In examining professionalization, he neither concludes that unpaid volunteer work should be put on a pedestal or romanticized, nor does he conclude that a wide network of paid professionals is sufficient to sustain itself. He argues that lulls in movements provide the most difficult scenarios to advocate for deprofessionalization, “since defending the group’s dwindling resources can appear as a more reachable and desirable goal”—with philanthropists contributing to the dialectic of constraining organizing work while at the same time keeping it financially afloat.

Petitjean frames three approaches to effective and sustainable community organizing to consider:

• Continue offering community organizers paid roles, but in a way that is removed from any sense of academic or professional superiority
• Interrogate organizational dynamics themselves: their structure, how volunteers and paid staff relate to one another and identify sources of conflict and address them, and how roles are specialized
• Making organizer roles deliberately temporary, allowing many people to practice them over time to produce a longer term act of knowledge-sharing that is closer to Ella Baker’s idea of “group-centered leadership”

There are a myriad of factors to consider for not only developing a self-sustaining strategy of community organizing for the modern Left, but to also avoid running in circles. What does it really mean to produce an environment in an organization where its paid organizers aren’t naive young adults fresh out of college and falling into a self-righteous modus operandi? How easily can conflict and task division be predicted and addressed in a substantial way that doesn’t have a problematic director or broader leadership team serving as a bottleneck? Are horizontal organizing tactics always doomed to failure, or is it possible for an organically self-reproducing culture in an organization possible in establishing long-term goals? Alinsky provided us procedures absent a democratically-minded politics and painted the organizer as a hero, while the New Left and many segments of the modern Left exhibit deep convictions of democracy at their core, while having an historic propensity to dissolve or burn out. How do we survive?

Occupation: Organizer is a must-read for activists, activists-becoming-organizers, and of course organizers themselves whether their area of focus be politics, labor, or running a neighborhood block club. The way forward is not remarkably clear after reading, but the historical lessons the book provides are critical to shaping our understanding of the organizing world as it is, and what we’re at an advantage to avoid.

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Occupation: Organizer was released on Haymarket Books on April 18, 2023. The author and Executive Director of In These Times magazine, Alex Han, recently held a conversation about the book at Haymarket House in Chicago which can be viewed here.

The post Review: “Occupation: Organizer” by Clément Petitjean appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

Yesterday, three organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund were arrested by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation on charges of “money laundering” and “charity fraud” in an apparent effort to develop a RICO-like case against the Stop Cop City protest movement. These charges against civil rights organizers represent yet another scare tactic and unwarranted escalation by the same elite forces conspiring to build Cop City. We call for the immediate release of the arrested organizers with all charges dropped.

The Atlanta Solidarity Fund has for years provided bail and legal support for peaceful protestors — it is not a criminal organization. We stand in solidarity with the defendants against the corrupt politicians, police foundation, billionaires, and corporations pushing to undemocratically destroy public forests and build Cop City. It’s notable that the same Georgia prosecutors who routinely ignore blatant corruption at City Hall and the State Capitol are instead taking aim at working-class Atlantans fighting to preserve public land through peaceful protest. These arrests are acts of political repression by a right-wing, minoritarian regime which rules society to serve a handful of wealthy elites.

Since 2021, thousands of Atlanta residents have peacefully campaigned to oppose Cop City by legal and democratic means. All violent conflict over Cop City has been instigated by Mayor Andre Dickens, Brian Kemp’s State police, and the major corporations behind the Atlanta Police Foundation. Mayor Dickens and the Atlanta City Council have repeatedly and brazenly ignored the concerns of local residents and voters in authorizing the destruction of public Atlanta forest land and the violent eviction raid on peaceful protestors — all culminating in GBI’s violent murder of an environmental protester.

No amount of police repression can silence the voices of working-class Atlantans who are united in our resolve to stop Cop City. The crisis over this development has been ongoing for two years, and the popular resistance against Cop City will continue until Atlanta residents are able to decide on this issue in a free and fair election. We call on the Atlanta City Council to vote NO and reject the allocation of construction funds for Cop City. Instead, the council should order a democratic referendum to let the people of Atlanta decide whether the construction should proceed in the upcoming general election already scheduled for November 7, 2023.

Statement from the Atlanta DSA Steering Committee

Nearly two years out, was the DSA successful in implementing the will decided by the 2021 National Convention?

Quad Cities DSA’s hearts go out to the tenants of the 324 Main Street apartment building and hope no harm was done to anyone who did not leave the building. The apartment building at 324 Main Street, owned by the Davenport Hotel LLC, with tenants reporting many problems, some as recently as last week. One contractor described being able to see visible cracks with exposed rebar, and WQAD reported that the apartment building had masonry issues.The city of Davenport also inspected the facility, which passed on the 24th of May of this year. Situations like those at 324 Main Street, unfortunately, are not uncommon. Many apartment buildings have faced similar problems as property owners have neglected housing options for community members, including the Crestwood Apartments that had to be abandoned in 2021. What other properties have Davenport Hotel LLC neglected in our area? Have other tenants reported concerns that have been dismissed? Have contractors’ findings been ignored by Davenport Hotel LLC? Tenants need the ability to express their concerns without having to rely on landlords and property managers. One way tenants can have some say in their living conditions is through tenants’ unions. Tenants' unions are made up of and led by tenants to fight for their collective interests and housing rights. The relationship between landlords and tenants is inherently unequal, exploitative, and unjust. Every human being needs housing for survival, and landlords and banks hold this resource, giving them economic and political power. Other tenants unions around the country have proven that when tenants organize together they are able to resist illegal evictions, protect tenants from rent hikes, advocate for repairs and updates, and create a space for tenants to address their issues. Housing is a basic human right, not a commodity. Quad Cities DSA is open to hearing from tenants in the Quad Cities area on their living conditions and related cases of their housing situation.  You can reach out to us at quadcitiesdsa@gmail.com.

No one is coming to save us, but us.

We need visionary politics, collective strategy, and compassionate communities now more than ever. In a moment of political uncertainty, the Socialism Conference—September 1-4, in Chicago—will be a vital gathering space for today’s left. Join thousands of organizers, activists, abolitionists, and socialists to learn from each other and from history, assess ongoing struggles, build community, and experience the energy of in-person gatherings.

A four day conference featuring dozens of panels, lectures, and workshops organized by groups from all over the country, the Socialism Conference will facilitate exchanges between existing activists and organizations, while also welcoming new layers of politically curious people as part of rebuilding our radical traditions and movements.

Featured speakers at Socialism 2023 will include: Naomi Klein, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Robin D.G. Kelley, aja monet, Bettina Love, Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò, Sophie Lewis, Harsha Walia, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Astra Taylor, Malcolm Harris, Kelly Hayes, Daniel Denvir, Emily Drabinski, Ilya Budraitskis, Dave Zirin, and many more.

The Socialism Conference is brought to you by Haymarket Books and dozens of endorsing left-wing organizations and publications, including DSA. Visit socialismconference.org to learn more and register today.

Register for Socialism 2023 by July 7 for the early bird discounted rate! Registering TODAY is the single best way you can help support, sustain, and expand the Socialism Conference. The sooner that conference organizers can gauge conference attendance, the bigger and better the conference will be!

Socialism 2023 Covid-19 Policies:

Attendees are expected to wear a mask (N95, K95, or surgical mask) over their mouth and nose while indoors at the conference. Masks will be provided for those who do not have one.

A number of sessions from the conference will also be live-streamed virtually so that those unable to attend in person can still join us.

“The Jersey City City Council Wednesday night took the first step to establishing a “Right to Counsel” for the city’s tenants who comprise about 70 percent of the population and who, advocates say, face increasing prospects of evictions by landlords’ hiking rents to unprecedented numbers.”

Read “Right-To-Counsel Moves Forward, Smoke Shops to be Licensed” in Jersey City Times

“Jersey City is facing an eviction crisis. Rents are rising faster than incomes. Tenants deserve to know their rights and defend them. Developers have poured money into Jersey City. But not enough new units are affordable. More and more residents are being displaced. It’s time for developers to give back to the city…”

Read “Jersey City Council passes amended right to counsel ordinances on first reading” in Hudson County View

Right to Counsel JC Co-Chair Jake E. returned to DJ Trouble’s “This Is the Modern World” on WFMU!

Jake E, organizer for the Right to Counsel Campaign makes a second appearance on Jersey City’s very own WFMU to discuss the Right to Counsel campaign’s push ahead of the final vote on June 14th and tenants’ rights in Jersey City.

You can listen to the full interview here. Jake’s interview starts at 1:24:11 in the episode!

Tonight we are going to talk about winning. Earlier this month the Build Public Renewables Act passed through the New York State budget - a monumental victory for the Public Power NY Coalition that has been organizing for four years to pass the bill.

No outlet has covered the fight for Public Power in New York more than Revolutions Per Minute. Since day one in 2019, we’ve had lead organizers of the campaign on the show to speak about why we need Public Power and how we were going to win it.

Tonight on this special Best of BAI fund drive show - we’ll revisit some of those interviews and hear from the organizers who won socialist climate legislation here in New York. We’ll also hear past interviews with Assemblymembers Zohran Mamdani and Sarahana Shrestha 

If you’ve been listening along with us since day one, go to WBAI.org right now and make a donation to keep us on the air. 

You can follow the Public Power NY Coalition on twitter @PublicPowerNY

To learn more about how the Public Power NY Coalition won the Build Public Renewables Act watch BPRA: A Win in the Fight for a Green New Deal 

Today, the Democratic Socialists of America is issuing a freedom advisory for the people of Florida in opposition to the fascist actions of its politicians. We recognize the travel advisory issued by Florida Senator Rick Scott as part of a continued pattern of red-baiting and attacks against Black organizations like the NAACP in our country’s history. Scott’s “socialist travel advisory” is a mocking response to the NAACP rightfully warning people about the openly hostile laws created and upheld by Florida Senator Rick Scott and Governor Ron DeSantis that target African Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ individuals. 

While we disagree that the Biden administration is attempting to erase capitalism, the Democratic Socialists of America openly acknowledge our goal of replacing capitalism with a more just and democratic social and economic system. The billionaire class cuts essential social services such as education and social security, demands workers work harder for less pay, pollutes our air and water and drives climate change, promotes racist police violence, and uses a culture of hyper-individualism that puts us against each other and alienates us from the kinds of collective, democratic organizations necessary to challenge those in power and win the rights we all deserve. Reactionaries like Senator Scott have always opposed democratic socialists like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, who fought for the civil rights and dignity of Black people, poor people, and workers of all races. 

Under the authority of elected officials like Senator Scott and Governor DeSantis, Florida has:

• Half of their residents living close to or below the poverty line
• Made it harder for immigrants to provide for their families by criminalizing nearly 5 million people
• Worked to silence teachers and unions advocating for better pay and better working conditions
• Banned people from accessing abortion and related care 
• The most disenfranchised citizens in the United States, with 1.5 million disenfranchised voters
• Banned minors from gender affirming care, drag shows, and discussions of LGBTQ+ issues and resources in schools
• One of the highest rates of mass shootings 
• Delayed evacuation during hurricane devastation that resulted in deaths and damages

DSA members in Florida and across the country vow to fight against fascism while we still can. We are unapologetically socialist because we share a vision of a society where we have democracy in every aspect of our lives: in our workplaces, in our economy, at the ballot box, and in our communities. Working people in Florida deserve better than Scott and DeSantis’ dangerous threats.

We know that capitalism is inherently opposed to freedom. A society where the vast majority of our lives is spent working for someone else’s profit is not free. A society where a person can only have food, housing, or healthcare if it is profitable for someone else to provide it to them is not free. A society where humans are powerless to fight an ongoing mass extinction and where our movement across land is criminalized is not free. 

They fear us because of the future we promise. Join us in the fight for our lives and against the fascism that promises to destroy everything we hold dear. Another world is possible.

The post Freedom Advisory Against Florida Fascism appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).