he brings in, Smucker provides a fresh and insightful look at an old and vexing problem.
I particularly appreciate the book’s deep examination of left “movement culture” and the light it shines on our tendency toward insularity and self-enclosure. Smucker observes that oppositional groups, as they struggle to create their own safe spaces, narratives, rituals, and distinctive communities, often have a penchant for developing in self-referential directions—sometimes coming to choose the comfort of their clubhouses over the scrum and the inevitable compromises of politics. Along these lines, he holds the emergent culture of Occupy responsible for its demise.
But Smucker’s agenda isn’t finger-pointing or blame. He urges us to take a hard look at patterns of internal dysfunction in order to better seize the abundant organizing and mobilizing opportunities before us today. Occupy’s premature unraveling is a tragedy for Smucker precisely because of the radical potential its early success seemed to promise. Occupy wildly, thrillingly succeeded at “reframing a potent and popular class conscious narrative” and the mainstream media was shockingly open to carrying the message and covering the novel movement. But in its resistance to uniting with existing groups, social blocs, and institutions that were key to expansion, Occupy ultimately sabotaged itself. To partially explain the origins of these self-destructive inclinations, Smucker puts forward the notion of the political identity paradox: in order to succeed, social movements need to foster the deep group identity that leads a dedicated core to make extraordinary commitments of their energy and time, but this same strong internal cohesion can lead to isolation that will prevent organizations from acting effectively to achieve their political goals. I think he’s spot on.
One of Smucker’s most incisive observations about Occupy is that over time the rituals that grew up around the movement’s process of decision-making came not to facilitate the development of strategy, but to stand in for strategy itself. While viewing the hyper-democratic General Assemblies at Zuccotti Park as brilliant theatre and an important part of the public message that “juxtaposed a visibly participatory people’s movement against a rotted political system,” Smucker nonetheless came to the conclusion that it was nearly impossible to get anything done through this forum. “Because they were so cumbersome and easily derailed, many of the most active Occupy organizers…eventually stopped attending with much frequency. We were too busy attending to tasks to be able to sit through hours upon hours of exasperating do-nothing meetings. Thus much of the real decision-making was pushed … into underground centers of informal power.” Anyone who has worked inside organizations, coalitions, or movements with hyper-democratic processes but no formal structures is sure to recognize the hard truth of Smucker’s words.
In the existential and intellectual wrestling match between movement and organization that has been going on inside the American left for generations, this book reaches for synthesis. If our ambition is to be a hegemonic actor, Smucker argues that we should embrace the Gramscian concept of articulation where there is a fusion of the institutional contest —“the strategic capacity to maneuver through the minutia of political terrain to shape structures, laws, policies, distributions of wealth and relationships of power,” which is the realm of organizing—with the symbolic contest—“the capacity to shape narrative, symbols, meaning, and common sense,” which is the realm of movement. Our desire for such synthesis is the reason why the civil rights movement is every community organizer’s favorite—because it was a movement that incorporated institutions while it also catalyzed challenger groups and included tactics and messages (e.g., lunch counter sit-ins, Freedom Rides, etc.) that compellingly prefigured the movement’s vision of a more racially just society.
The subtitle for this book is “A Roadmap for Radicals.” Smucker understands that to contest power, grassroots organizations and social movements must have more than a vision of a better world; they need some sense of how to get there. In his words, “knowledge of what is wrong with a social system and knowledge of how to change the system are two completely different categories of knowledge,” and this book focuses first and foremost on the latter, thus serving as a twenty-first century organizer’s toolbox for the day-to-day work of building and wielding collective power: how to build organizations, how to provide entry points and ladders of engagement, how to develop strategies calibrated to move more individuals and organizations from passive support into the active allies column, and how to put forth a set of ideas, narratives, and memes that are situated within American cultural tropes rather than outside of them.
I so appreciate Smucker’s willingness to tell us what happened on the inside of Occupy, amongst other movements, from his perspective—to air his frustrations and mine the scholarly literature for insights into the predicaments, peccadillos, and contradictions of the US left. He says that when he first got involved in social movements, he felt like something of a “political orphan,” not finding many mentors or resources to guide him toward thinking more strategically about social change. I hope that this book will find its way into the hands of many of the dedicated young people who may find themselves in a similar situation today. So much depends upon the new social movements that are emerging today to confront the multiple crises we presently face. In the right hands, this book might just contribute to these important movements’ success.
Janice Fine is Associate Professor of Labor Studies and Employment Relations at the School of Management and Labor Relations, Rutgers University, Director of Research and Strategy at the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization (CIWO), and author of the book Worker Centers: Organizing Communities at the Edge of the Dream published by Cornell University Press and the Economic Policy Institute.
Political Orphans
“My fellow radicals who were supposed to pass on the torch of experience and insights to a new generation just were not there.”
—Saul Alinsky2
Late to the game
“Do you ever think we came to the game too late?”
Carmen Trotta has a heaviness about him. Burdened. He is also charming and always sincere, but he doesn’t pose questions like this one for the sake of making conversation. He thought that there was a very good chance that we had literally been born too late to do anything to stop humanity from destroying itself completely.
Maybe the social movements of the 1960s, or those of the 1930s, could have corrected the course. Carmen wasn’t about to argue that these movements had accomplished nothing important. But they had fallen short in important respects—and he wondered if the damage could be remedied at this point. A dozen years my senior, he had barely missed the wave of social movements—from civil rights to feminism, from student protests to anti-colonial revolutions—that had shaken the world, but that had by now, only about a quarter century later, become an almost unbelievable distant memory. Carmen came of age in the 1980s, an era that seemed to be inoculated against the memories and ideas of “the 60s.”
Carmen, Jeremy Scahill, and I were discussing politics in a bar in New York City’s Lower East Side, just two blocks from the Saint Joseph Catholic Worker house, where they both worked and lived. It was the spring of 1997. Bill Clinton had just been inaugurated for a second term and the Dow had just broken 7,000 points for the first time. At that point, Carmen had lived at the Worker for more than ten years—he still lives there today—splitting his time between serving meals to poor and homeless people, working on the Catholic Worker monthly newspaper (which still costs a penny a copy), and engaging in protest against social injustices—from opposing New York slumlords to US wars of empire. A practicing Catholic, Carmen found a political home in what remained of the Catholic left, taking action alongside people like Liz McAllister, Phil Berrigan, and Dan Berrigan (the ex-nun, ex-priest, and priest, respectively, who famously burned draft board files and broke into US military bases to hammer on weapons, “turning swords into plowshares”).
Carmen’s day-to-day routine of service and sacrifice points to an interesting
