I'll do what I can to write about this book, won't have the time or patience to sit on my fractured tailbone! In Freedom is an Endless Meeting Polletta illustrates what you are saying, discussing the benefits and drawbacks of mobilization through prefigurative, process-based politics that emphasizes participatory democracy and the cultivation of a mobilized citizenry from which leaders emerge in the process of ongoing struggle.
One thing I wanted to relate was the role of workers education movements in the early 20th century. Most of these efforts (Brookwood, ILGWU Unity centers, Bryn Mawr's Summer School for Women) were founded on the idea that workers needed a liberal arts education, a sense of empowerment through learning how to participate in political decision-making, and a kind of Deweyean philosophy of learning through doing - chores, fieldwork, etc.)
These schools were initially supported by unions but they did so with some trepidation. Later, unions moved to shut them down or defang them because they radicalized the workers too much, rendering them too radical to put up with the business unionism that dominated the labor movement.
The common thread Polletta finds is with people like Myles Horton (who later founded the Highlander Folk school integral to the civil rights struggle in the South) and Ella Baker who had attended Brookwood.
"Baker and Horton would continue to practice and disseminate the radical pedagogy of early workers' education efforts. Participatory decision-making should both train ordinary people in the skills needed for political leadership and develop their broadest aspirations for the movement, they believed. They would treat participatory decisionmaking as a critical tool in organizing, and the young civil rights workers whom they trained would do the same. But Baker and and Hortaon's influence on participatory democracy 1960s style was quiet. Few 19602 activists would identify them as sources for their understandings of how movement organizations should operate and even fewer would cite the tradition of workers' education on what they built." (p 36-7)