What is to be Done?
Let’s go back to the mid-20th-century to think about what kinds of options people employed to make best use of the resources they had at hand. We saw that “organized philanthropy” caused problems even as it also produced opportunities. The dual obstacles to liberation occasioned by the vexed relationship between funders and “minority” organizations–dependency and accommodation–did not destroy the antiapartheid movement. I suggest that part of what helped secure a better outcome was that Reid1 and other critics pointed out what kinds of problems had materialized over the course of several decades, and people put their minds and hands to solving the problems without abandoning themselves. Thus the problems were not absolute impediments, especially insofar as the recognition of them produced the possibility for some organizations–and their funders–to see each other differently and more usefully. More to the point, along the broadly interlocked social justice front that swept across the country in the mid-century, the committed people took the money and ran. I don’t mean they lied or they stole, but rather that they figured out how to foster their general activism from all kinds of resources, and they were too afraid of the consequences of stopping to cease what they’d started. They combined flexibility with opportunity in the best sense, working the ever-changing combination toward radical goals. And they did not fool themselves or others into pretending that winning a loss–sticking a plant on a mound of putrid earth in a poisoned and flooded field–was the moral or material equivalent to winning a win. Here are snapshots of four cases that illustrate what I mean. These are not complete histories; those stories have been well written by many and should be read by activists who want to learn from the past in order to remake the future. If people living under the most severe constraints, such as prisoners, can form study groups to learn about the world, then free-world activists have no excuse for ignorance, nor should they rely on funder-designed workshops and training sessions to do what revolutionaries in all times have done on their own.
1949 – Pacifist/Anarcho-feminist Organizing in the San Francisco Bay Area
Pacifica Radio formed when a small group of white activists tried to figure out how to use radio for radical ends. They were inspired by radio’s potential rather than daunted by its limitations. Their challenge was to make broadcast possible without advertising, because, in their view, commercial sponsorship would always compromise independent expression. To evade capitalist control they became a subscription, or listener-sponsored, organization that also, over time, combined foundation support with the dollars sent in each year from ordinary households. Without a single advertisement from that day until now, they have largely funded themselves from the bottom up.2 Pacifica became a foundation that developed a small national network, and as it grew from the first station, its complexity made the straightforward goals of the founders a challenge to secure. In the late 1990s, the national board tried to sell off the network’s main asset–the 50,000-watt KPFA station–using the then-prevalent logic of non-profit management to veil their effort to limit independent expressive art and journalism. The fact that such a board came to direct the foundation was an outcome of the pressures to professionalize that all non-profits have encountered during the period under review. The gargantuan efforts needed to fight back against the board and re-democratize Pacifica’s governance forced the organization to confront its internal racial and gendered hierarchies.3 Thus, a formidable means to amplify radical voices during the mid-century freedom movement developed from the grassroots, and success made it vulnerable to the structural constraints that squeeze even relatively mighty organizations that work today in the shadow of the shadow state.
1955 – Urban Antiracist Activism in the Jim Crow South
In the folktale version, the Montgomery Bus Boycott started when Rosa Parks was too tired to move to the back of the bus. But, of course, we know the boycott was not a spontaneous event. Parks acted as part of a larger organization, and also as one of a series of refuseniks who sat in the front of the segregated public from 1943 forward. How did a group of people concentrated in but not exclusively located in Montgomery, Alabama, manage to assault and scale apartheid’s wall? The people who organized themselves had short-, medium-, and long-term goals to raise awareness, to involve the masses, and to desegregate the buses as a means to undo other aspects of apartheid. Three key political formations were involved: the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, the Women’s Political Council, and the Montgomery Improvement Association. Each filled a different role, and all three were funded from the bottom up. The Women’s Political Council–which comprised grassroots thinkers, including activist-scholars–crafted the plans and maintained a low profile during their execution. The Montgomery Improvement Association organized carpools that ensured boycott participants would be able to get to and from work and not lose their jobs or neglect their households. The Dexter Avenue Church served as a staging ground, and the place from which the principal rhetoric of equality as fairness emerged, in the form of thrilling speeches by the young Martin Luther King, Jr. The collaboration by these groups evaded the obstacle of accommodation and worked relatively independently of the major African American organizations that were fighting for the same goal. And while the Dexter Avenue Church had no intention of disappearing, the other two organizations were flexible in their design and in their intended longevity, with the outcome rather than the organization the purpose for their existence.4
1956 – Agricultura/Labor/Antiracist Activism
A third example is from the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a largely Filipino American and Japanese American grouping associated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. The group began to organize in 1956 with the goal of reviving the type of radical agricultural organizing that had shut down harvests in California’s Central Valley in 1933 and nearly succeeded a second time in 1938. They fought a hard battle; both state and federal law forbade farmworkers from organizing, and the bracero (or guest worker) program had undermined even illegal field organizing from 1942 onward. One of the techniques used by AWOC to get “buy in” from workers was to require a large chunk of their meager wages to fund the organization’s activities. In this view, when one owns something one cannot sell–such as membership in an organization–one is more likely to participate in it. While AWOC did not succeed, its funding structure was adopted by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta when they started the United Farm Workers (UFW). Their work began as the bracero program ended, and while they still confronted legal sanctions against their work, they had the advantage of workers who, though migrant, were increasingly based in the region permanently.5 Their campaigns powerfully combined the language of civil rights with that of labor rights,6 and when the UFW reached beyond the fields for support they fashioned a variety of ways that people throughout the US and beyond could demonstrate solidarity, be it through writing checks, lobbying for wage and safety laws, forming coalitions in support of farmworkers, or refusing to eat grapes and other fruits of exploited labor.7
1962 – Coffee-table Politics
Many are looking for an organizational structure and a resource capability that will somehow be impervious to cooptation. But it is impossible to create a model that the other side cannot figure out. For example, imagine neighborhoods in which women come to have a political understanding of themselves and the world. They go to their neighbors and say, “Hey read this, it changed my life. I’ll babysit your kids while you do.” In this appealing model, the written works circulate while women care for each other’s children and form a cooperative system, which does not have paid staff. Because of what they have learned, they go on to run for school board and lobby legislators, and ultimately exercise huge impacts on local, state and national elections. Sounds like a great model, right? Yes, it does. It’s also the origin of the New Right in California.8 This is the movement that attempted to put Barry Goldwater in the White House, that put Ronald Reagan in the governor’s mansion, Richard Nixon in the White House, and Ronald Reagan in the White House. This is the movement that has done the grassroots work that created the need for the shadow state to rise.
If contemporary grassroots activists are looking for a pure form of doing things, they should stop. There is no organizational structure that the Right cannot use for its own purposes. And further, the example of the New Right points out a weakness in contemporary social theory that suggests the realm of “civil society”–which is neither “market” nor “state”–is the place where liberatory politics necessarily unfold. Michael Mann shows how quite the opposite happened in the Nazi takeover of Germany, arguing that a dense civil society formed crucial infrastructure for the party.9 I argued earlier that “forms create norms,” and it might appear that this last section is contradictory. Yes and no. Form does not mean blueprint, but rather the lived relations and imaginative possibilities emanating from those relationships. In a sense, form is a resolutely geographical concept, because it is about making pathways and places rather than searching endlessly for the perfect method and mode.
Grassroots non-profits should uniformly encourage funders to move away from project-driven portfolios; if the results enjoyed by the activist Right are any indication, $1 billion for ideas would go a long way toward regenerating the devastated landscape of social justice. Funders who want to return their inherited wealth to the communities who produced it should reflect on whether they are building glorious edifices that in the end perpetuate inequality. Reid pointed out the mismatch between the gleaming physical plant segregated colleges and universities built with foundation support and the weak curricula designed to produce a professional managerial class whose lifework would be to keep their people in check.10
Finally, grassroots organizations that labor in the shadow of the shadow state should consider this: that the purpose of the work is to gain liberation, not to guarantee the organization’s longevity. In the short run, it seems the work and the organizations are an identity: the staff and pamphlets and projects and ideas gain some traction on this slippery ground because they have a bit of weight. That’s true. But it is also the case that when it comes to building social movements, organizations are only as good as the united fronts they bring into being. Lately funders have been very excited by the possibility of groups aligning with unlikely allies. But to create a powerful front, a front with the capacity to change the landscape, it seems that connecting with likely allies would be a better use of time and trouble. Remembering that likely allies have all become constricted by mission statements and hostile laws to think in silos rather than expansively, grassroots organizations can be the voices of history and the future to assemble the disparate and sometimes desperate non-profits who labor in the shadow of the shadow state.
- Reid, “Philanthropy and Minorities.” [↩]
- Lewis Hill, “The Theory of Listener-Sponsored Radio,” The Quarterly of Film, Radio and Television 7, no. 2. (winter 1952): 163-169. [↩]
- Iain A. Boal, draft statement of purpose, Coalition for a Democratic Pacifica, Berkeley, CA, December 29, 1999. [↩]
- Robin D. G. Kelley, Race Rebels (New York: The Free Press, 1996) and Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003). [↩]
- Gilmore, Golden Gulag; Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996). [↩]
- Marshall Ganz, “Resources and Resourcefulness: Strategic Capacity in the Unionization of California Agriculture, 1959-1966,” American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 4 (2000): 1003-1062. [↩]
- Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice; Ganz, “Resources and Resourcefulness.” [↩]
- Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). [↩]
- Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). [↩]
- Cathy Cohen, Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999). [↩]
