the big point is: having worked with some local organizing groups filled with young folks recently, what i've noticed is that a lot of this stuff that people are finding troubling because unfamiliar with it (one simple demand, no demand, starting with solidarity, etc.) is actually "in the air".
I'm curious what Carrol thinks about this.... What I'm saying is, these ideas, these tactics, these practices have infiltrated youth culture enough such that anyone who organizes anything, even if they are not politically aligned with or formally affiliated with anarchists, use these methods for organizing and/or think in these frameworks because that is what they learned from someone else who organized something they were involved with, etc. etc.
It's just "in the air", part of what young people do/have been taught/have picked up by osmosis. I'm guessing it's DA methods that have been filtered into all organizing, even if it isn't political anymore. Reading Binh over on Lou's blog, I noticed that her group actually used the same corporate strategy used to define an organization's "mission statement". Cracked me up.
The "one demand, multiplicity of voices" thing seems to come from public art installations. Or rather, it is at least popularly expressed in cities all over the country. The idea is to take a public space and use it to talk to one another about what, in your ideal world, you'd like to see done with a building, a run down tenement, a moribund park, an old supermarket covered with for sale signs. In some places, the "art" is used as a way of talking to local governments, to get them to do something or hear something that they wouldn't have heard through conventional channels.
One example was when we did this with a chain market that opened in 2007 and abruptly shut down a few months ago. Young ppl felt the old guard running the city wouldn't listen, so they started putting up ideas on a chalk board installed at the building. when an idea took hold, so many people were excited by it, a bunch of people got together, drummed up the resources, and made a presentation to the city about what to do with the building.
Later, public art was created on some buildings using this tactic as the art itself, only in this case, people simply fill out a blank, "_____ makes me happy."
That idea came from somewhere initially, i don't know where, but someone was asking about where the idea for "one demand, expressed in a multiplicty of ways" came from. I don't know the origin, but I wonder if its popularization was expressed in the way I have seen happen.
Here's a chalkboard, what is your One demand of the city to do with this building? That was the question posed. What made it stick in people's minds, and from what I've heard, why it's become a popular form of engagement in local politics and art, is that it's successful. The tactic has proved successful, so it gets communicated from city to city.
-- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)