How can we build left organizations that are _productive_. Not mutual masturbation societies... Kelley
I'd be very interested to read any posts about left leaning assistance orgs that have entirely avoided or adeptly navigated this problem as such models should be shared, duplicated and improved upon. .d.
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Well, I can say after working in and around the disabled movement for thirty years, it ain't easy. The key is getting paid to do it.
In addition, there are serious, systemic, structural and conceptual reasons why theoretically `productive' approaches and organizing projects to attack poverty and other problems have failed.
I would strongly suggest anybody interested in this thread read this book:
Alice O'Conner, Poverty Knowledge: Social Science, Social Policy, and the Poor in the Twentieth Century U.S. History, Princeton Uni Press, 2002
It outlines the entire history of US establishment's reform movements. It is a stunning indictment. I am only on page 159, about half way through it just at the beginning of Johnson's War on Poverty.
Here is a sample:
...Economic growth would not be enough to break the ``vicious circle'' entrapping a significant minority of the poor. And yet, the CEA report did not call for the ``Marshall Plan'' Gunnar Myrdal had envisioned, nor for the explicitly redistributional economic and political reforms suggested by Galbraith and Harrington as a response to the new poverty. Instead, policy would take the human capital approach, in an attempt to overcome the handicaps of the poor themselves. Research, following suit, would focus narrowly on the characteristics of the population of poverty---to the near exclusion of larger problems of social and economic inequality which had given rise the idea of ``poverty amidst affluence'' in the first place.
The 1964 Economic Report represented the first concerted effort to bring the analytic tools of the ``new economics'' to the problem poverty, but the economists had not had the last word. For in the process of negotiating what amounted to a hybrid, internally conflicting but politically acceptable concept of poverty, they had opened the door to another, quite different kind of poverty expertise---attached to the sociological idea of community action---only later to find out just how incompatible the new economics and the old sociology could be... (158p)
The `new economics' refers to Milton Freedman and the Chicago school free market reductionist ideology backed up with heavy statistical analysis. In this lexicon, the poor are deficient in `human capital' and need to be `invested in' in order to gain something of an `equal' ground with the rest of the more `competitive' labor force. The idea is to change the Poor, not change the System. This should sound sickeningly familiar.
The incompatibility mentioned in the quote was to combine economic stimulus with community action as the method with which to administer the `investment in' the `human capital' part of the program. What they didn't know was that community action and community development projects would be taken over by civil rights activists and turned into an attack on the very systemic and structural problems like economic inequality, the government officials had tried to avoid with the economic stimulus part of the program.
But I will read about that tomorrow.
CG