Occupation: Organizer: A Critical History of Community Organizing in America
Clément Petitjean
340 pages, Haymarket Books, 2023
It is now a commonly held belief that funding organizing work is the most effective way to bring about real, effective social change. But what is the history behind that belief? How have full-time organizers come to be regarded as discreet but crucial incubators of people power? And what role have philanthropic foundations played in that very American story?
In Occupation: Organizer: A Critical History of Community Organizing in America, I tell the story of how one particular form of organizing, community organizing, has professionalized throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, how community organizer positions have become inevitable political intermediaries, and how those developments affect the terrains onto which collective action and democratic efforts take shape.
While many think that community organizing was invented by Saul Alinsky and his Industrial Areas Foundation in the late 1930s, I show that the professionalized form of community organizing which has become dominant in organizing spaces as well as in political imaginaries, really came into existence in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Community organizing was born as a hybrid, ambiguous entity out of the convergence of Alinsky’s legacy with the practices and ideas of freedom fighters like Ella Baker, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members, student radicals, and Black Power militants, blending together traditions of community-based social work and movement work, civic engagement and liberation struggles, and management consulting and radical pedagogy.
In the book’s final chapter, from which the section below is excerpted, I argue that community organizing roles, practices, and institutions were incorporated into the division of political labor as contradictory intermediaries, half citizen participation rationalizers, half self-effacing politicizers. Philanthropic foundations played a central role in the process—one that went far beyond funding.—Clément Petitjean
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What does it matter that community organizing, or even all forms of organizing in general, is shaped and driven by logics of professionalization? Why should anyone care that organizers claim that they are skilled experts in the mechanics of organization building if the work that they perform is effective and wins victories that improve people’s lives in very concrete terms? And if professional logics hold such a grip over the work, shouldn’t the spontaneity of radical upheavals falling outside of staff-heavy organizations be seen as a better hope for emancipatory politics?
To start addressing these difficult questions, I want to touch on two substantial qualifications to the professionalization thesis. First, community organizers are far from being a homogeneous, clearly defined professional group. The distinction between amateurs and professionals is fundamental to understand how the group has carved out its own territory, but as several studies on the history of sports have shown, the boundary between professional and amateur sports can sometimes be difficult to draw distinctly.1 Whether you are the only staffer in a small neighborhood organization or whether you are one among dozens of staffers in a large citywide coalition that is affiliated with a national organizing network, your working conditions, wages, benefits, and physical workspace can vary greatly. Because working conditions remain particularly straining, especially for organizers occupying subordinate positions within their organization’s hierarchy, and because the pay is still relatively low, turnover is quite high and burnout quite frequent. The advent of professional community organizing means that it has become possible to pursue a career as an organizer, but as one female organizer told me in Chicago, “there aren’t that many lifers. So when people get frustrated they just leave the field. I’m an ancient organizer. I became ancient at twenty-eight.”2
Second, professional community organizing does not exist in a social vacuum as a stand-alone entity; it belongs to a broader political ecosystem, but in a subaltern position. Contrary to how political consultants took over campaign and electoral work, for instance, community organizers have not managed to take full control over their work.3 When they team up with labor unions, community organizations are very often relegated to performing organizational and political “dirty work,” like phone banking or door knocking. More generally, organizer positions in all sorts of political organizations—labor unions, nonprofits, social movement groups, and advocacy groups—might have become more difficult to get for noncollege graduates, but they still occupy a subordinate position vis-à-vis more dominant positions within social justice organizations like policy staffers, full-time advocates, and top leadership positions, and even more so vis-à-vis other larger institutional players in the political ecosystem. The professional organizer’s very existence is also regularly called into question by people who do not agree that the organization of political work should be monopolized by one particular group and should be professionalized, which means that their professionalism does not enjoy society-wide acceptance and legitimacy.
So if professionalization dynamics are actually heterogeneous, and if (community) organizers play a subordinate role in the division of political labor, why bother looking at organizing in terms of professional work? Besides, doesn’t the focus on professionalization shift the attention away from the real bad guys, so to speak, the really dominant ones, who definitely stand on the other side of the barricade? Fundamentally, issues of professionalization matter because the professional group, however much it lacks social recognition, however much it is plagued by structural underfunding and high turnover, has become one of the social constraints that people have to deal with when they get involved in political work writ large, alongside philanthropy, nonprofit status, celebrity contests, and social-media-driven entrepreneurialism. Professional organizer positions have become an unavoidable feature of US politics in general and movement politics in particular. They exist as an objective opportunity for anyone who wants to combine the imperatives of work in a capitalist society and a practical commitment to social justice. Conversely, those who are particularly predisposed toward organizer positions because of their background and politics but who choose not to become full-time paid organizers very often have other employment options or material resources that allow them to have the choice in the first place.
Highlighting professionalization dynamics, therefore, serves as a prism through which to look at how political work is actually performed. Submitting professionalization dynamics to critical scrutiny should not lead to a romantic valorization of unpaid, volunteer political work as being more authentic and more “real” than salaried work. First, the volunteer dimension obviously does not protect from burnout, internal rivalries, infighting, power relations, physical and symbolic violence, and domination. Second, volunteer commitments presuppose that people have spare time that they can allocate to nonwork activities, which of course cannot be dissociated from class status. As Max Weber noted a hundred years ago, granting a financial compensation to elected officials was the only way to make sure that people who did not come from wealth could remain in office. In the case of community organizing, it is worth keeping in mind that changes in the group’s class composition and racial and gender makeup happened after the professional group emerged. In other words, the consolidation of the professional group made this bottom-up democratization possible.
How can the pitfalls of professional control and power be avoided? What are the alternative practices and options to look to? I’m not really interested in (or capable of) providing a road map or a ten-step plan, but I’d like to point to possible roads to think on and move forward. To begin with, I don’t think that a mass revolutionary uprising that would upend and redefine all social relations, while desirable, is a credible option in the current configuration of advanced capitalist societies. Despite the crumbling legitimacy of prominent political and social institutions and development of powerful practices, movements, and narratives calling into question neoliberal capitalism in recent years, the ruling class and their allies are still protected by thick trenches of all sorts, to borrow Antonio Gramsci’s metaphor, which make the prospect of a fast war of maneuver against the state and capital highly unlikely.
A more realistic road, therefore, is to wage a war of position at the community organizing level; the first main possibility is to tinker with the organizer side of the organizing relation. In an analysis of the state and prospects of the US left after the 2020 presidential election, historian and activist Mike Davis noted that one of the key questions for the left was the building counterinstitutions that could sustain the radical activism that proliferated after the murder of George Floyd and produce “a new mass politics” that could “[bridge] social democratic reform and extreme economic conditions.” According to Davis, the combination of Bernie Sanders’s defeat in the 2020 primaries, distrust toward the possibility that the Democratic Party can ever move to the left, and the gridlocked nature of party politics in Congress means that the electoral road is not the best fit to channel these activist energies. Rather, “the goal must be the creation of more ‘organizations of organizers’ offering niches that allow poor young people, not just ex–graduate students, to lead lives of struggle.”4
One of the main takeaways from the history of community organizing’s professionalization is that the diversification of organizers’ demographics was in part the product of a professionalization strategy. One way forward would therefore be to keep designing organizer positions as paid positions, but to find ways to dissociate the paid dimension from the sense of professional pride and cognitive superiority that fuel competition and contempt, fostering instead collaboration and cooperation. Because they break down traditional boundaries and barriers, mass movements and protests are particularly conducive to a challenge of existing practices and norms, as the complex interactions between Black Lives Matter groups and community organizing groups show.5 But in contexts of movement lulls, it is much more difficult to push for deprofessionalization as a winning strategy since defending the group’s dwindling resources can appear as a more reachable and desirable goal. Given how much the subordination to philanthropy constrains organizing work, developing independent sources of funding in order not to replicate the dependence on foundation money will probably be key—even if the recent controversy over the $6 million mansion in California that several prominent BLM leaders bought in 2020 has shown that issues of accountability and transparency in how the money is spent by movement actors are just as important as how much money was available in the first place.
Because so much of the organizer’s power of control comes from the monopoly they have (or try to have) over keeping an organization running and growing and developing its strategy, a second site for reflection might be located in actual organizational dynamics, whether you look at their internal structures, their governance, how people commit both to the organization and to one another, chains of accountability among all organizational members, and role specialization. As legal scholar Dean Spade very pointedly puts it, one of the concrete ways in which mutual aid groups can “prevent and address overwork and burnout” is to “make internal problems a top priority” rather than pushing them under the rug or turning them into staff-only issues.6 Speaking from my own experience and conversations with organizers in the US and France, and in light of research I’ve done for this book, turning organizer positions into temporary roles that several people, including nonstaffers, could take on over time, rather than entrenching them into fixed identities and job titles, for instance, might lead to a more long-term circulation of information, skills, and sense of authorization at endorsing the organizer’s role. Not only would it lower the costs of entry into the role and make it more accessible to a wider variety of backgrounds and social characteristics, but it would also develop more solidly what Ella Baker called “group-centered leadership.”7
The third possibility, which does exist outside of the organizer’s contradictory professional hold, is to modify the other side of the equation, the community leader’s side. Because as it stands, the organizing relation is largely predicated on the wide gap in terms of cultural capital between organizer and leader, a rising tide on the community leaders’ side would probably level off the relation in more profound ways than intentional changes in recruitment patterns. Of course, concrete relationships between individual organizers and individual community leaders cannot be reduced to the one dimension of domination. Not only can these relationships produce genuine emotional bonds, mutual trust, and friendship that mitigate the power imbalance, but leaders can also influence organizers’ work through their concerns and previous life experiences. They can, and they do: since the 1980s on, scores of Latin American leftists migrating to the US have brought their politics with them in their community commitments and confronted organizers’ biases and attempts to control the entire organization process.
At a more macrosocial level, however, there still are tremendous obstacles to the development of working-class self-organization. Structural factors like educational attainment and class background still play a formative role in shaping electoral and nonelectoral political participation writ large. A fundamental overhaul (and decommodification) of the education system, the implementation of tuition-free and debt-free public colleges and universities, massive investments in building a strong and durable safety net, and a sharp increase in unionization rates (because labor unions are a crucial site for building working-class self-confidence and political skills) would probably have a more long-term impact on changes in internal organizational cultures and on the likelihood of working-class self-activity and mass politics than the multiplication of the “niches” that Davis calls for.
In the wake of the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic, and against the backdrop of an accelerating climate crisis and soaring inflation, such prospects are not on the table in the foreseeable future, however. So in the meantime, all initiatives that keep pushing for a democratization of organizers’ ranks while simultaneously challenging professional closure and autonomization seem like a sound course of action and reflection.