When you stumble on an excerpt that says what you want to say better than you could ever say it, you switch very eagerly from blogging to quoting. This is a long excerpt from Francesca Polletta’s 2002, “Freedom is an endless meeting,” and incredible historical book about participatory community organizing. You can tell from the title that she’s interested in the fact that all solutions come with a pet tension for struggling with. Recounting story after story of early civil rights organizers balancing idealism and pragmatism, you understand how she gets so easily to realism, and you wonder why everyone in the democracy scene hasn’t. This bit tackles the eternal question of what leadership means when your goal is cultivating leaders and the biggest threat is your own effectiveness.
The literature on organizing is rife with injunctions against leading: organizers should rather help residents articulate their own agendas and build their leadership. Yet, in the process, organizers are often expected to help identify goals, push people to question their preferences, and rally them to act. How can they do that without thereby undermining the leadership capacities of those whom they are organizing? Myles Horton’s answer was to ask questions. “I use questions more than I do anything else. They don’t think of a question as intervening because they don’t realize that the reason you asked that question is because you know something…. Instead of you getting on a pinnacle you put them on a pinnacle.” Horton described a Highlander director in a workshop who “asks one question, and that one question turned that workshop around and completely moved it in a different direction.” Was the Highlander workshop leader leading? Should one ask questions that open the whole enterprise up for scrutiny? That purposely move a discussion in a new direction? In SNCC, asking questions later became a way for organizers to hold onto their radicalism without feeling that they were imposing it on the people whom they organized. The tactic ended up alienating people more than involving them. What comes across in the stories that Horton tells, in SNCC workers’ tales of the best organizers, and in the broader literature on organizing is good organizers’ creativity: their ability to respond to local conditions, to capitalize on sudden opportunities, to turn to advantage a seeming setback, to know when to exploit teachable moments and when to concentrate on winning an immediate objective. Sometimes you insist on fully participatory decisionmaking; sometimes you do not. Albany SNCC project head Charles Sherrod urged fellow organizers not to “let the project go to the dogs because you feel you must be democratic to the letter.” Horton recounted on numerous occasions an experience that he had had in a union organizing effort. At the time, the highway patrol was escorting scabs through the picket line, and the strike committee was at its wit’s end about how to counter this threat to strikers’ solidarity. After considering and rejecting numerous proposals, exhausted committee members demanded advice from Horton. When he refused, one of them pulled a gun. “I was tempted then to become an instant expert, right on the spot!” Horton confessed. “But I knew that if I did that, all would be lost and then all the rest of them would start asking me what to do. So I said: ‘No. Go ahead and shoot if you want to, but I’m not going to tell you.’ And the others calmed him down.”Giving in would have defeated the purpose of persuading the strikers that they had the knowledge to make the decision themselves. But Horton sometimes told another story. When he was once asked to speak to a group of Tennessee farmers about organizing a cooperative, he knew, he said, that since “their expectation was that I would speak as an expert… if I didn’t speak, and said, ‘let’s have a discussion about this,’ they’d say, that guy doesn’t know anything.” So Horton “made a speech, the best speech I could. Then after it was over, while we were still there, I said, let’s discuss this speech. Let’s discuss what I have said. Well now, that was just one step removed, but close enough to their expectation that I was able to carry them along…. You do have to make concessions like that.” What better time to make a concession than when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun? Horton presumably knew that he could get away with refusing to be an expert in the first situation and not in the second. Perhaps the difference was that he was unknown to the farmers and was known to the strikers. But one could argue that a relationship with a history could tolerate aberrant exercises of leadership while first impressions die harder. In other words, extracting rules from the stories that Horton tells is difficult. When to lead and when to defer, when to ask leading questions and when to remain silent, when to focus on the limited objective and when to encourage people to see the circumscribed character of that objective—the answers depend on the situation and are not always readily evident.
p. 76
I love how that first bit about questions turns the patronism of the Socratic method right on its big self-important head. I also like the focus on process, what Polletta calls “the developmental project of democracy.” I think the single biggest force acting against democracy is the experience of everyday people in their first organizing role trying and failing to get others involved, and coming reluctantly to the conclusion that it just doesn’t work, that people want to be told what to do. Your bad experience cultivating democrary wasn’t a lens into the fundamental architecture of human nature. You’re a person in a social reality trying to fine tune a smaller reality within it. You’re in a project, and a project has to get where it’s going by starting where it’s at.
From a developmental perspective, no compromise from your ideal is really a compromise. A compromise is a step away from the ideal, and your steps are still toward the ideal away from the status quo. They don’t approach the ideal directly, as the crow flies. They follow the landscape and its contours, avoiding the mud as much as possible. Following the hills is only a compromise in the sense that obeying gravity is.
To keep the navigational metaphors going, what does it mean to navigate by the stars? When we follow a star, it’s not with the goal of getting there. You follow a star to reach a place on Earth that’s closer to it. And that’s a meaningful, deeply idealistic journey even if, in a cosmic sense, every place on Earth you could possibly go is ultimately the same number of years away from the light. Even if, as your North Star takes you climbing along the sphere to its pole, less and less of your motion is up toward the star and more and more is sideways to the pole. That’s just physical law. Obeying gravity is not a compromise.
An especially exciting thing about Polletta is her critique of prefiguration. Prefiguration is a popular framework for activism and radical change because it offers a way to pursue an ideal in this non-ideal world. It proposes that one create little microcosms of the ideal within the real, and that your perfect bubble grows and grows until it’s as big as the world. In the prefigurative view, the root of the power of participatory approaches to community is that they prefigure the global approach by enacting it. Seems hard to fault. But Polletta holds the developmental project in contrast to the prefigurative project, arguing that prefiguration works in relation to itself, with no more influence from the outside world than is necessary, while the developmental project is about the outside world. The project of pursuing the ideal becomes the project of finding the most idealistic way of relating to the rest of the world as it is, and that being that way in this world changes the world. The great thing about Polletta is it’s all examples and history first, so these ideas are grounded in actual things that happened, giving you nuance for free. From the page before the quote above:
One can also contrast this developmental rationale for participatory democratic decisionmaking with the prefigurative commitment that commentators have attributed to SNCC and the new left. Where a prefigurative commitment envisions change through personal self-transformation and moral suasion rather than through institutional political change, a developmental commitment is not in conflict with an explicitly political one. To the contrary, its very purpose is to produce activists and organizations capable of taking on powerful officials and agencies. From early on, Horton said, he had been “more concerned with structural changes than I have with changing the hearts of people.” A prefigurative commitment tends toward absolutism since the object is both to “oppose” a current regime and to be truly “opposite”; a developmental commitment tends more toward an acceptance of the conventional. The two projects have very different views of organization. A prefigurative project is suspicious of organization, concerned that it molds people in its own image, valorizing efficiency and conformity over the purposes for which the organization was created, raising means to the level of ends. Enacting the ends in the means, committing to the “here-and-now revolution,” favoring community over organization—all these counter the oligarchical tendencies of organizations. By contrast, the broader organizing strategy of which a developmental project is a part sees organizations as one of the key arenas for developing political efficacy, leadership, and accountability and, not least, for securing power. An organization is doomed to failure unless people have a stake in its preservation, however. Participation in decisionmaking provides the sense of ownership and the pleasures of learning that sustain people’s participation.
The relationship underpinning a developmental democratic project is a pedagogical one. People learn to articulate concerns and evaluate options by doing so. At the same time, they learn from each other, and they may also learn from a facilitator or teacher, someone who encourages, guides, questions, and challenges them.
p.74
The tough thing for me about a good book is it takes years to read because I keep going into reveries. It’s been 2 years probably and I’m only 75 pages in. Here’s another great quote from earlier in the book, redeeming meetings:
Local people have really begun to find a way that they can use a meeting as a tool for running their own lives. For having someone to say about it.
That’s a line from Bob Moses, an organizer for the civil rights movement in the US South. It offers such a striking counter narrative to the modern “meetings are bad; fewer meetings” atmosphere that work culture creates. I think what’s happened is that there has been a change in the meaning of the word “meeting”. The way it is used in those quotes is as a bottom-up gathering of community members to discuss a matter of shared concern. That is so much different from what the word means today. If I were weaving conspiracy theories, I’d say that part of the project of undermining democracy has been capturing and corrupting the word. I think there’s a case to be made that meeting, not voting, is the fundamental unit of democracy.
