>For me, it's an extension of the activistism piece <http://
>www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Action.html> that Liza, Christian, and I
>wrote. American political culture is deeply and often proudly dumb,
>and it bothers me.
i wish I had more time, but you know that much of my work in grad school was on what we called "reinvigorating civil society". we worked for over a decade in a central NY community that had been ravaged by plant closings, so much so that it was profoundly anti-union and the focus of intense research by the likes of Bluestone and Harrison.
Under such conditions, the foundations for public dialogue are ravaged, though we learned that, when the state tried to locate a radioactive waste dump, what the community still had going was the infrastructure it needs to mobilize resources -- material, physical, communications. E.g., when Yoshie humps on churches, I sympathize. Because, as with the Civil Rights struggle, churches were a foundation, a place where the skills and talents needed to mobilize were constantly being forged. Same thing with orgs like Kiawinis club, etc. When push came to shove, the people who knew how to build fundraisers for burn victims or hold auctions to raise money for a family burned out of a home, they were the ones who also knew how to mobilize resources to effectively fight the state.
There was a lot more to it, but short on time here. At any rate, we did this, working with the local community, to recreate, rebuilt, reinvigorate public forums where people discussed pratical problems (plant closings) while also discussing big ideas that someone people would consider wank material: what is the meaning of work?
But as I've said before, when you live in a community where the prospect of having utterly no work at all is very clear and present, questions like "what is the meaning of work?", are not wank material at all. When the thought of losing your livelihood isn't the only thing on that table, but a way of organizing your life and identifying yourself and relating to others is ripped out from underneath you, without any way of getting it back -- or seemingly no way to get it back? The question of "what is work?" matters and people take it seriously.
so do questions like, "How do we fight these plant closings?" and "How do we do so, not just in our community, but all over?" matter. Because one thing fighting the low-level radioactive waste dump did was reveal to people just what state authority thought of them: they were a bunch of dumb hick farmers who'd roll over at the slightest bit of encouragement.
This pissed people off. But fighting it also meant that what started out as a NIMBY movement became much more than that as people across the globe came together to share their ideas for fighting to protect their communities. This meant that they had to rethink the issue: what to do with radioactie waste? Not in my backyard, not in anyone's? And where they had to move after being angry with the state was to where the responsibility was: with corporations that produced that waste.
blah blah. outta time. Anyway, we used a combination of stuff, informed by Saul Alinksy, informed by Harry Boyte and Sarah Evans, informed by the civil rights struggle, and probably most important, in my view, information -- gasp -- by postmodern critiques of anthropology and sociology where we recognized the power we had as intellectualis/researchers and did what we could to address it.
oh. crap. just blah blah blah blee.
here's what I don't get. there are all kinds of examples of this kind of research out there. small and large, funded by big old gasbag institutions and not. people who know real things about community mobilization, long experience etc.
if it matters to us, then why not use what they have and figure out a way to do exactly this, only to leftier ends? hmmmm?
there's all this blah blah blah on this list, when starting right at us is a wealth of experience -- except it is from conventional sources and done by people who aren't totally lefty. pretty lefty, but still more mainstream. Why does that always seem to be a stumbling block. Bring up Saul Alinksy and people jump all over it as not radical enough, etc. At least that's what I've observed in the past.
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org (NSFW)