english
nederlands
Indymedia NL
Independent Media Centre of the Netherlands
Indymedia NL is an independent free communication organisation. Indymedia offers an alternative approach to the news by using an open publishing method for text, images, video and audio.
> contact > search > archive > help > join > publish news > open newswire > disclaimer > chat
Search

 
All Words
Any Word
Contains Media:
Only images
Only video
Only audio

Dossiers
Agenda
CHAT!
LINKS

European NewsReal

MDI's complaint against Indymedia.nl
Courtcase Deutsche Bahn vs. Indymedia.nl
Topics
anti-fascisme / racisme
europa
feminisme
gentechnologie
globalisering
kunst, cultuur en muziek
media
militarisme
natuur, dier en mens
oranje
vrijheid, repressie & mensenrechten
wereldcrisis
wonen/kraken
zonder rubriek
Events
G8
Oaxaca
Schinveld
Schoonmakers-Campagne
Help
Tips for newbies
A short intro into Indymedia NL
The policy of Indymedia NL
How to join?
Donate
Support Indymedia NL with donations!
Lawsuits cost a lot of money, we appreciate every (euro)cent you can spare!

You can also direct your donation to Dutch bank account 94.32.153 on behalf of Stichting Vrienden van Indymedia, Amsterdam (IBAN: NL41 PSTB 0009 4321 53)
Indymedia Network

www.indymedia.org

Projects
print
radio
satellite tv
video

Africa
ambazonia
canarias
estrecho / madiaq
kenya
nigeria
south africa

Canada
hamilton
london, ontario
maritimes
montreal
ontario
ottawa
quebec
thunder bay
vancouver
victoria
windsor
winnipeg

East Asia
burma
jakarta
japan
manila
qc

Europe
alacant
andorra
antwerpen
armenia
athens
austria
barcelona
belarus
belgium
belgrade
bristol
bulgaria
croatia
cyprus
estrecho / madiaq
euskal herria
galiza
germany
grenoble
hungary
ireland
istanbul
italy
la plana
liege
lille
madrid
malta
marseille
nantes
netherlands
nice
norway
oost-vlaanderen
paris/île-de-france
poland
portugal
romania
russia
scotland
sverige
switzerland
thessaloniki
toulouse
ukraine
united kingdom
valencia
west vlaanderen

Latin America
argentina
bolivia
brasil
chiapas
chile
chile sur
colombia
ecuador
mexico
peru
puerto rico
qollasuyu
rosario
santiago
tijuana
uruguay
valparaiso

Oceania
adelaide
aotearoa
brisbane
burma
darwin
jakarta
manila
melbourne
oceania
perth
qc
sydney

South Asia
india
mumbai

United States
arizona
arkansas
atlanta
austin
baltimore
big muddy
binghamton
boston
buffalo
charlottesville
chicago
cleveland
colorado
columbus
danbury, ct
dc
hampton roads, va
hawaii
houston
hudson mohawk
idaho
ithaca
kansas city
la
madison
maine
miami
michigan
milwaukee
minneapolis/st. paul
new hampshire
new jersey
new mexico
new orleans
north carolina
north texas
nyc
oklahoma
omaha
philadelphia
pittsburgh
portland
richmond
rochester
rogue valley
saint louis
san diego
san francisco
san francisco bay area
santa barbara
santa cruz, ca
seattle
tallahassee-red hills
tampa bay
tennessee
united states
urbana-champaign
utah
vermont
western mass
worcester

West Asia
armenia
beirut
israel
palestine

Topics
biotech

Process
discussion
fbi/legal updates
indymedia faq
mailing lists
process & imc docs
tech
volunteer
Credits
This site is produced by volunteers using free software where possible.

The system we use is available from:mir.indymedia.de
an alternative is available from: active.org.au/doc

Thanks to indymedia.de and mir-coders for creating and sharing mir!

Contact:
info @ indymedia.nl
Organizing vs. Activism: How to Build a Movement
Mark Rudd - 18.11.2010 18:14

It seemed to me that they believed that movements happen as a sort of dramatic or spectator sport: after a small group of people express themselves, large numbers of by-standers see the truth in what they’re saying and join in.

Since the summer of 2003 I’ve crisscrossed the country speaking at colleges and theaters and bookstores, first with The Weather Underground documentary and, starting in March of this year, with my book Underground: My Life with SDS and the Weathermen (William Morrow, 2009). In discussions with young people, they often tell me, “Nothing anyone does can ever make a difference.”

The words still sound strange: it’s a phrase I never once heard forty years ago, a sentiment obviously false on its surface. Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I and the rest of the country knew about the civil rights movement in the South, and what was most evident was that individuals, joining with others, actually were making a difference. The labor movement of the thirties to the sixties had improved the lives of millions; the anti-war movement had brought down a sitting president—LBJ, March, 1968—and was actively engaged in stopping the Vietnam war. In the forty years since, the women’s, gay rights, disability rights, animal rights, and environmental movements have all registered enormous social and political gains. To old new lefties, such as myself, this is all self-evident.

So why the defeatism? In the absence of knowledge of how these historical movements were built, young people assume that they arose spontaneously, or, perhaps, charismatic leaders suddenly called them into existence. On the third Monday of every January we celebrate Martin Luther King having had a dream; knowledge of the movement itself is lost.

The current anti-war movement’s weakness, however, is very much alive in young people’s experience. They cite the fact that millions turned out in the streets in the early spring of 2003 to oppose the pending U.S. attack on Iraq, but that these demonstrations had no effect. ”We demonstrated and they didn’t listen to us.” Even the activists among them became demoralized as numbers at demonstrations dropped off very quickly, street demonstrations becoming cliches, and, despite a massive shift in public opinion in 2006, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan droned on to today. The very success of the spontaneous early mobilization seems to have contributed to the anti-war movement’s long-term weakness.
Something’s missing.

I first got an insight into articulating what it is when I picked up Letters from Young Activists: Today’s Rebels Speak Out, edited by Dan Berger, Chesa Boudin, and Kenyon Farrow (Nation Books, 2005). Andy Cornell, in a letter to the movement that first radicalized him, “Dear Punk Rock Activism,” criticizes the conflation of the terms “activism” and “organizing.” He writes, “activists are individuals who dedicate their time and energy to various efforts they hope will contribute to social, political, or economic change. Organizers are activists who, in addition to their own participation, work to move other people to take action and help them develop skills, political analysis and confidence within the context of organizations. Organizing is a process—creating long-term campaigns that mobilize a certain constituency to press for specific demands from a particular target, using a defined strategy and escalating tactics.” In other words, it’s not enough for punks to continually express their contempt for mainstream values through their alternate identity; they’ve got to move toward “organizing masses of people.”

Aha! Activism = self-expression; organizing = movement-building.

Until recently I’d rarely heard young people call themselves “organizers.” The common term for years has been “activists.” Organizing was reduced to the behind-the scenes nuts-and-bolts work needed to pull off a specific event, such as a concert or demonstration. But forty years ago, we only used the word “activist” to mock our enemies’ view of us, as when a university administrator or newspaper editorial writer would call us “mindless activists.” We were organizers, our work was building a mass movement, and that took constant discussion of goals, strategy, and tactics (and later, contributing to our downfall, ideology).

Thinking back over my own experience, I realized that I had inherited this organizer’s identity from the red diaper babies I fell in with at the Columbia chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. Raised by parents in the labor and civil rights and communist or socialist movements, they had naturally learned the organizing method as other kids learned how to throw footballs or bake pineapple upside-down cakes. ”Build the base!” was the constant strategy of Columbia SDS for years.

Yet young activists I met were surprised to learn that major events such as the Columbia rebellion of April, 1968, did not happen spontaneously, that they took years of prior education, relationship building, reconsideration on the part of individuals of their role in the institution. I.e., organizing. It seemed to me that they believed that movements happen as a sort of dramatic or spectator sport: after a small group of people express themselves, large numbers of by-standers see the truth in what they’re saying and join in. The mass anti-war mobilization of the Spring, 2003, which failed to stop the war, was the only model they knew.

I began looking for a literature that would show how successful historical movements were built. Not the outcomes or triumphs, such as the great civil rights March on Washington, 1963, but the many streams that eventually created the floods. I wanted to know who said what to whom and how did they respond? One book was recommended to me repeatedly by friends, I’ve Got the Light of Freedom: the organizing tradition and the Mississippi freedom struggle by Charles M. Payne, (University of California Press, 1995). Payne, an African-American sociologist now at the University of Chicago, asked the question how young student organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, had successfully organized voter registration and related campaigns in one town, Greenwood, Mississippi, in the years 1961-1964. The Mississippi Delta region was one of the most benighted areas of the South, with conditions for black cotton sharecroppers and plantation workers not much above the level of slavery. Despite the fact that illiteracy and economic dependency were the norm among black people in the Delta, and that they were the target of years of violent terror tactics, including murder, SNCC miraculously organized these same people to take the steps toward their own freedom, through attaining voting rights and education. How did they do it?

What Payne uncovers through his investigation into SNCC in Greenwood is an organizing method that has no name, but is solidly rooted in the traditions of church women of the rural South. Black churches usually had charismatic male ministers, who, as a consequence of their positions, led in an authoritarian manner. The work of the congregations themselves, however, the social events and education and mutual aid, were organized at the base-level by women, who were democratic and relational in style. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council, SCLC, used the ministerial model in their mobilizing for events, while the young people of SNCC—informed by the teaching and examples of freedom movement veterans Ella Baker and Septima Clark–concentrated on building relationships with local people and helping them develop into leaders within democratic structures. SNCC’s central organizing principle,”participatory democracy,” was a direct inheritance from Ella Baker.

Payne writes, “SNCC preached a gospel of individual efficacy. What you do matters. In order to move politically, people had to believe that. In Greenwood the movement was able to exploit communal and familial traditions that encouraged people to believe in their own light.”

The features of the organizing method, sometimes called “developmental” or “transformational,” involve long-term strategy, patient base-building, personal engagement between people, full democratic participation, education and the development of people’s leadership capabilities, and coalition-building. The developmental method is often juxtaposed to Alinsky-style organizing, which is usually characterized as top-down and manipulative.

For a first-hand view of Alinsky organizing—though it’s never named as such—by a trained and seasoned practitioner, see Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father (Three Rivers Press, 1995 and 2004). In the middle section of the book, “Chicago,” Obama describes his three years organizing on the streets and housing projects of South Chicago. He beautifully invokes his motives—improving young people’s lives—but at the same time draws a murky picture of organizing. Questions abound: Who trained him? What was his training? Who paid him? What is the guiding ideology? What is his relationship to the people he calls “my leaders?” Are they above him or are they manipulated by him? Who are calling whose shots? What are the long-term consequences? It’s a great piece to start a discussion with young organizers.

While reading I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, I realized that much of what we had practiced in SDS was derived from SNCC and this developmental organizing tradition, up to and including the vision of “participatory democracy,” which was incorporated in the 1962 SDS founding document, “The Port Huron Statement.” Columbia SDS’s work was patient, strategic, base-building, using both confrontation and education. I myself had been nurtured and developed into a leadership position through years of close friendship with older organizers.

However, my clique’s downfall came post-1968, when, under the spell of the illusion of revolution, we abandoned organizing, first for militant confrontation (Weatherman and the Days of Rage, Oct. 1969) and then armed urban guerilla warfare (the Weather Underground, 1970-1976). We had, in effect, moved backwards from organizing to self-expression, believing, ridiculously, that that would build the movement. At the moment when more organizing was needed, in order to build a permanent anti-imperialist mass movement, we abandoned organizing.

This is the story I tell in my book, Underground. It’s about good organizing (Columbia), leading to worse (Weatherman), leading to horrible (the Weather Underground). I hope it’s useful to contemporary organizers as they contemplate how to build the coming mass movement(s).

Website: http://www.markrudd.com/?organizing-and-activism-now/how-to-build-a-movement.html
 

Read more about: vrijheid, repressie & mensenrechten

supplements
some supplements were moved to the "ruis" page
eerder, vertaald 
globalinfo - 19.11.2010 11:56

Vertaling van eerder stuk:  http://www.globalinfo.nl/Achtergrond/wat-er-nodig-is-om-een-beweging-op-te-bouwen.html
supplements
> indymedia.nl > search > archive > help > join > publish news > open newswire > disclaimer > chat
DISCLAIMER: Indymedia NL uses the 'open posting' principle to promote freedom of speech. The news (text, images, audio and video) posted in the open newswire of Indymedia NL remains the property of the author who posted it. The views in these postings do not necesseraly reflect the views of the editorial team of Indymedia NL. Furthermore, it is not always possible to guarantee the accuracy of the postings.