Organising is in vogue these days in the UK. Those who used to talk about ‘activism’ and ‘campaigning’ have gradually switched up their language, but to what degree is that language shift reflective of different understandings of power and how social change happens?
Years back, I remember participating in various debates in social justice spaces that argued endlessly between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ approaches to creating change. Did you try to influence the powers-that-be to improve, by presenting the best evidence and winning the argument? Or did you build popular power to force the hands of those holding the cards to act justly and fairly? I generally landed firmly in the latter camp at this stage, but also missed the common thread that brought these apparent polarities together: that power was something held exclusively by ‘Others’ – politicians, cops, corporations, etc.
Community development work I’d been a part of had been sorely lacking in any significant power analysis of wider systems of oppression, but had given me some grounding in the ideas that people could figure out some significant issues for themselves. Campaigning I’d done had offered ideas to explain the power imbalances that felt so intuitive based on countless run-ins with the cops – or even many teachers in school – while it also felt a world away from most working class communities I knew. The policy wonks (or ‘insiders’) lacked either the power analysis or the basic understanding that people knew their own lives better than those who studied them.
Enter (in my consciousness, at least): Community organising! A broadly Northern/Western tradition that has implicitly or explicitly built on generations of people’s movements around the world (particularly Latin America and other parts of the Global South), which could never afford the luxury of locating power exclusively with distant ‘Others.’ Instead, these movements have held power to be something we create when we come together, which can in itself meet our collective needs.
While rarely self-described as ‘organisers’, these movements and communities have come together to:
- Build homes, when they have not been able to secure them through the state or the market;
- Manage their own workplaces when the bosses have up and left;
- Grow food when people have been hungry.
I’m not going to try to offer a history of ‘organising’ as a term or a practice (obviously there are countless strands that have long-related to trade union and political campaign organising), but instead want to look at what it means to really follow some of the threads that have run through it, and to understand why I feel we’ve barely scratched the surface of its potential in the UK (and elsewhere). It’s about questioning a lot of the recent uses of the term – particularly in larger, more formal organisations – and thinking about what might be needed to deepen the practices we attach to it as an idea.
Much of my critique boils down to this question: If we believe – as is a bedrock of most community organising – that people can create the power to meet their/our own collective needs, what does that mean for how we organise ourselves?
Organising doesn’t simply talk about ‘people power’ as the brute force of a mass protest that makes it impossible for a political party to maintain an oppressive policy (though it may show up this way). More specifically, it doesn’t ground change in an expectation that ‘The Masses’ will become the cannon fodder at the frontlines of an elite-led strategy for change that needs its demands to be sufficiently ‘backed-up’ in order to succeed. Organising is an approach which at least offers the potential for ‘prefigurative’ change – we can organise ourselves in ways that align with the future we desire, rather than just achieving our immediate goals. Organising sees all of us as more than numbers and each of our ongoing investment and involvement in change work to be fundamental to any measure of ‘success.’
This is not to say that some orientation to shifting the destructive actions of traditional power holders is at odds with organising – just that following that tactical direction should always be a choice, rather than an assumption. Organisers may come together with the physical materials required to build the homes we need together, and we may push to prevent the state-led destruction of the ones we already have. But in organising, it’s a choice, and one that is made by as many of us as possible each time.
How committed are we to this approach? It’s usually easier to sit in a room with two or three others and devise a strategy, draw up a series of actions and set the comms machine in motion to mobilise, than it is to do all of these things together, with a much broader ‘us.’ This is obviously a bit of a caricature of the tension, as rarely is the collective process fully collective, any more than the elite process entirely individual. But the broad contrast is one that should affect all of our choices if we are working to build sustainable power and change in communities.
A big part of why community organising was so groundbreaking for me, was because it was able to combine:
- an understanding of how power operates (namely, that when it is not being created by us, it is not a benevolent force, and will necessarily cause harm), and
- a belief that we can be the answers to our own collective needs (by taking direct action to answer those needs, rather than relying on the state, the cops, or our landlords to be nicer).
No doubt this is harder in places where there is less history of these kinds of ‘prefigurative’ direct actions, but my own organising experiences – even in the UK – have told me they are still possible here. Most notably, I was able to be a part of a 7-month housing occupation of an estate in North London in 2015, which both provided homes for many of the families involved, throughout that time, and also pressured the local council to improve its offers to many of those families when the state finally succeeded in cracking down on the occupation. We certainly aimed to pressure the council at various stages, but the organising stemmed from actions that would immediately address the needs of the community – keeping and putting roofs over one another’s heads.
It was wildly challenging and did ultimately fail to prevent the demolition of that housing estate, but it showed all of us something that we were constantly told was impossible: that we could create the conditions we need to live, together, even if only for a short time. This is always a hard thing to believe, when a range of political perspectives tell us otherwise, but to me, it’s what feels most transformative about community organising. If we don’t believe that we can create dignified lives for ourselves, we’re left hoping that institutions that have repeatedly failed to offer those conditions, will do so, given the right kind of pressure. I’ve chosen to put my faith in us, instead.