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‘OCCUPATION: ORGANIZER’: HOW ANTI-POLITICS BECOMES ANTI-DEMOCRACY
 
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Emma Tai
January 28, 2025
Convergence
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_ To build formations capable of advancing both political and
economic democracy, we need to grapple with the enduring footprint of
anti-political thought in our organizations. _

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In the run-up to the November 2024 election, many predicted
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the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on the call to “save
democracy” would ultimately ring hollow for the many people for whom
American democracy has always seemed like more of an empty promise
than anything else. They were sadly correct, indicating that it’s
long past time for us to rethink how we practice and discuss democracy
within our organizations and movements. 

In 1988, Stuart Hall wrote: “Without the deepening of popular
participation in national-cultural life, ordinary people don’t have
any experience of actually running anything. We need to re-acquire the
notion that politics is about expanding popular capacities, the
capacities of ordinary people.” He was reflecting on the rise of
Thatcherism, but it remains an essential observation to this day. 

To be able to resist the fascist program, we will need to build
organization and advance a vision of democracy that speaks to the
conditions of people’s lives. This will require thoughtful
examination of our dominant models of organizing and a shift towards a
clearer practice of representation in our own organizations, ensuring
that large numbers of people can become dues-paying members, debate
and make important decisions, and elect their own leaders. Such
organizations can both build the muscles for practicing democracy and
the force to contest for governing power.

Alinsky’s “crème brûlée” model of political participation

There are a few recent and important works that help us consider how
we might build more democratic political organizations and social
movements in service of this project. The first is _Occupation:
Organizer: A Critical History of Community Organizing in
America _(Haymarket Books
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2023), in which French sociologist Clément Petitjean convincingly
uses historical research to show that Saul Alinsky, the oft-critiqued
forefather of modern, professionalized community organizing,
effectively packaged his intervention as a form of management
consulting–one aimed at optimizing the functioning of American
democracy, so that “more people can have a voice.”

One of Petitjean’s most useful observations is how Alinsky tailored
his innovation to the philanthropic imperatives of Cold War
anti-communism, pitching to funders what Petitjean calls the “crème
brûlée” model of political participation: a shiny, crispy crust of
direct action and confrontation, aimed ultimately at producing
concession and reform, all built upon the creamy foundation of
free-market liberal democracy.

This intervention would prove to have remarkable staying power.
Petitjean turns up notes from a 1994 funder meeting in which many
community organizers disagreed about certain features of their
organizing model, including the role of race and gender and whether it
was better to organize individuals or local institutions, but “they
all saw themselves as professional ‘democratizers’ whose role was
to give low- and moderate-income Americans a genuine opportunity to
influence the political system without being controlled by
organizers.”

This one quote neatly encapsulates some of the enduring contradictions
of the “crème brûlée” model of community organizing and
political participation. What does it mean to be a “professional
democratizer” and who gets to decide who becomes one? What does it
mean to be “controlled by organizers”? And in what specific ways
are “low- and moderate-income Americans” trying to influence the
political system–and what happens when they disagree with each
other? 

Democracy’s dualities

Astra Taylor’s scholarship on democracy helps us see that the
paradox of the “professional democratizer” is far from the only
contradiction inherent to democratic practices, at either the scale of
a grassroots organization or a federal government. In her book
[[link removed]] _Democracy
May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone_ (Verso, 2019),
she writes:

Democracy is rife with … occasionally discordant yet indivisible
dualities: it always has to balance freedom and equality, conflict and
consensus, inclusion and exclusion, coercion and choice, spontaneity
and structure, expertise and mass opinion, the local and the global,
and the present and the future. There can be no unambiguous resolution
on one or the other side of the binary.

Taylor’s naming of the dualities, and her encouragement to “live
in the tension” of them, is a useful guidepost to anyone who finds
themselves in the role of the professional democratizer. The problem
is not managerial expertise per se: anyone who has led a challenging
meeting knows the value of a seasoned facilitator who can efficiently
move a group of people towards a shared agreement on next steps and a
division of labor. But what Taylor’s works on democracy encourage us
to do is to explicitly name that _as_ expertise and from there, to
question whether that expertise _in and of itself _is sufficient as
the basis for representing a set of collective interests. 

Sociologist Jeremy Levine’s 2016 study of community development
organizations in Boston
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which Petitjean cites in his work, refers to this as the
“privatization of representation”—a sort of worst-case scenario
of what happens when managerial expertise, including professional
managerial class access to philanthropic resources, becomes the
primary basis for representation:

[Community organizations] are ‘nonelected neighborhood
representatives’ who have ‘actually superseded elected officials
as the legitimate representatives of poor neighborhoods.’ … What
is central in the ‘privatization’ of representation is that the
claims made by community-based organizations are not validated through
electoral channels but certified by agents of the philanthropic field.

Of course this is not to say that _all elected officials _are better
at representing a set of people’s political and economic interests
than_ all privately-funded community organizations_. Levine’s
observations do, however, point to the importance of explicitly naming
the grounds on which a member of an organization or movement–whether
that’s an executive director or a protestor in the street–claims
to represent more than just their own individual self when giving
comment to the press, negotiating with a state agency, or applying for
grant funding. 

‘Politics doesn’t go away’

Questions about the legitimate basis for representation loom large
over another important book on the struggle against right-wing
authoritarianism, Vincent Bevins’ _If We Burn: The Mass Protest
Decade and the Missing Revolution _(PublicAffairs
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2023)_. _In it, Bevins studies the years 2010-2020, in which mass
protests around the world, from Brazil to the Arab Spring to Hong
Kong, often led to the ascendance of right-wing political
organizations.

Bevins identifies two tendencies within these mass movements that made
it possible for the right wing to seize control. The first was the
leaderless horizontalism of the protest movements themselves: in their
determination to prefigure an egalitarian society where everyone has a
voice, they were ultimately unable to legibly represent their
political demands and contest for power in the moments of upheaval
that followed. (Importantly, Bevins distinguishes between movements
that were intentionally horizontalist and those that were de facto
horizontal because the political leadership of prior generations was
killed, imprisoned, or exiled by anti-Communist regimes). 

The second tendency was these movements’ embrace of
“anti-politics,” or their orientation away from political parties
and political power (“anti-politics” is a term first coined by
anthropologist James Ferguson to describe the international
development regime guided by the World Bank, in which the
depoliticization of poverty was of material but unnamed economic
interest to its funders). This tendency showed up both in social
movements’ orientation away from politics, and in widespread
valorization of electoral candidates whose main credential was being
an “outsider.”

The combined effect of anti-politics and horizontalist tendencies
produced devastating results in Brazil, where right-wing forces (many
of them tied to free-market ideological formations in the United
States) hijacked the meaning of the mass street protests of the
Movimiento Passe Livre (the MPL, or free fare movement). Cleverly
calling themselves Movimiento Brasil Livre (MBL), they claimed that
the protests were _actually_ about the alleged corruption of the
left-wing Workers’ Party president, Dilma Rousseff, and thus set in
motion the chain of events that led to Rousseff’s impeachment and
the rise of Jair Bolsonaro. In a 2023 interview with _The Dig_,
Bevins notes how the a-party stance of the MPL slipped into
anti-politics, which, under Bolsonaro, turned quickly into
anti-democracy (emphasis mine):

MPL are what they call in Portuguese a partidário [a-party] … They
are not aligned with any party. They’re never going to join a party,
they’re not doing party politics. They are not against the fact that
politics is happening, but what to them was staying outside of party
politics … was understood by the people as a full rejection of
politics in general. … And this a-party stance in Brazil slips into
anti-politics, which slips into, in the case of Bolsonaro, a wholesale
rejection of democracy, an embrace of authoritarianism. Because
anti-politics is always still politics. _POLITICS DOESN’T GO AWAY._

Politics doesn’t go away: this is essentially what political scholar
Wendy Brown tells Taylor in her 2019 documentary, _What is
Democracy? _The alternative to “rule by the people” is not rule
by an amorphously-bounded, civically-minded civil society; it’s rule
by the financial institutions and profit-driven algorithms that
already determine so much of how we live, who turns a profit at the
expense of whom, and what kinds of ideas we are exposed to. There are
always interests at work–and those of us who care about rule by
people, instead of ever-greater rule by market, are served better by
naming them than not naming them. 

This is also where the limits of Alinsky’s “management
consulting” approach become clearer. Petitjean’s historical
research convincingly suggests that Alinsky wasn’t exactly
anti-ideological, as he’s often described: he was a booster of
American capitalism who refused to ever take a contract working for
white supremacist organizations in the US South. But
he _was_ anti-political. His core belief in the power of
organization-building to enhance the functioning of American liberal
democracy was distinctly anti-political in its assumption that
progress–towards free markets, free people, and a rising tide of
economic prosperity–was not a site of contestation, with some
benefiting at the expense of others, but rather an inevitability that
could be hastened along with the right set of managerial expertise at
the helm. 

That inevitable neoliberal destination of free markets and free
people, so essential to Alinsky’s “crème brûlée” model of
political participation, no longer seems quite so stable and creamy.
We are living in a moment of rupture. On the one hand, we see the free
market partisans’ alignment with authoritarianism, from Movimiento
Brasil Livre and Jair Bolsonaro to the Heritage Foundation bolstering
Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud.

On the other hand, we have the small-d democrats, whose struggle for
political democracy seems increasingly hollow without a real program
for economic democracy to accompany it. Taylor writes: 

“If the last fifty years has demonstrated anything, it is that
formal political equality, exemplified by the right to vote, is not
enough to ensure democracy, as the wealthy have many avenues to exert
disproportionate power … Extending democracy from the political to
the economic sphere is the great challenge of our age, and also the
only way to protect political equality from the concentrated financial
power that is proving to be its undoing.”

‘Towards a clearer practice of political representation and
contestation’

If we are going to build the formations capable of mounting a real
challenge to the resurgent right and advancing not just political
democracy but also economic democracy, we need to grapple with the
enduring footprint of anti-political thought in the organizing field,
and with both the limits and benefits of the “professional
democratizer” approach. I’d offer a few suggestions for us to
think about.

First, we need to understand how anti-political stances–whether
reformist like Alinsky or maximalist like the MPL–create
advantageous conditions for those who have fewer compunctions about
contesting for power. Contesting for political power in a serious way
is a difficult project, rife with contradictions and colored by our
own, often harmful experiences with those who have held it in the
past–and, I would argue, still preferable to the anti-political
alternative. As Bevins notes,

“there is no such thing as a political vacuum … If you want to
knock the main players off the stage, you should be paying attention
to who is going to take their place. If it is not going to be you,
then you had better like the people who are waiting in the wings.”

There are structural reasons, mostly having to do with philanthropic
restrictions on political giving, for why organizations shy away from
explicitly political conversations about elections. But we must ensure
that we do not let these structures warp our understanding of what
interventions are actually required.

Secondly, we should work within our own organizations to encourage
more honest assessment of our ability to represent a set of collective
interests. “We thought representation was elitism, but actually it
is the essence of democracy,” reflects Egyptian human rights
activist Hossam Bahgat in his conversation with Bevins. In fact, the
lack of representation can replicate elite systems and relationships;
too many of us have seen how the field rewards highly proficient
fundraisers and communicators who can tell a good story about impact
without asking how many people they actually represent and whether
those members can and do hold an organizational line.

Too many of us have seen how the field rewards highly proficient
fundraisers and communicators who can tell a good story about impact
without asking how many people they actually represent and whether
those members can and do hold an organizational line.

How many dues-paying members does an organization have? What
decision-making power do they have? Do they elect their own leaders?
Do they vote on a platform or political endorsements? Do they move
with discipline once that vote is cast (i.e. even if they disagree
with the decision, will they still support it because it was decided
upon within the organization)? When I was the Executive Director of
United Working Families, I made sure that our by-laws (which included
rules for both internal elections and political endorsements) were
available on our website, ensuring that members–regardless of the
extent of their direct relationship with staff–could read them and
work to understand and shape the political decisions of the
organization. This may seem like a small intervention, but I was
consistently surprised at how many members did not know what by-laws
were and would end up asking how they could find them for other
organizations with which they were affiliated.

And lastly, we should be clear that the promise of political democracy
only resonates when it is coupled with real commitments to economic
democracy as well. While economic democracy is often thought of in
more narrow terms, such as the workplace democracy or minimum wage
campaigns spearheaded by labor unions, Taylor’s writing invites us
to think more expansively about the connection between political and
economic democracy. “Over the last half century, [the] oligarchs and
their acolytes have entrenched their rule and wealth by attacking
democratic gains: taxes have been eviscerated, unions and job security
crushed, welfare gutted, education defunded, prisons packed to
overflowing, voting rights curbed, and regulations repealed,” writes
Taylor. “What should terrify us is not the frustration of the people
but the sources of their frustration, which have gone unaddressed for
so long.” The 2024 presidential election, in which Donald Trump
prevailed against the Democrats’ call to “save democracy” and
became the first Republican to win the popular vote in twenty years,
makes this passage from 2019 seem painfully prescient. Taylor wisely
suggests that we reimagine self-rule to include a wide set of
“social and collective entitlements” that are needed to support
the practice of democracy, including a housing guarantee, good jobs
and ample leisure time, and a robust and generous public sector. This
framing is a useful reminder that the call for economic democracy can
(and has!) come from community organizations and labor unions alike. 

One of the most straightforward distillations of these three
recommendations comes from Mike Parker, a longtime labor leader who
passed away in 2022. One of his final essays was titled simply
“Democracy is About People Having Power
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in it, as in his 1999 book _Democracy is Power_, he argues that the
ability to build powerful labor organizations comes from the degree to
which union members themselves have power in their organization: 

Democracy is about people having power. That obviously requires the
participation and involvement of people. But participation, for its
own sake and that results in nothing, is not about exercising power.
The focus on procedures and discussion of process often gets in the
way of the real activities of the democratic exercise of power. These
include:

* Choosing and demanding leadership.
* Challenging the leadership, holding it accountable, and replacing
it when necessary.
* Developing new leadership; increasing opportunities for members to
take leadership of parts of the project. 
* Meaningful participation in establishing the broad political
framework within which that leadership functions. 
* Involvement in carrying out the common program and learning from
it.

In a sense, Parker is describing a different kind of prefigurative
organization; not what Bevins describes as the horizontalist, “the
riot is supposed to become the society” kind of way, but
prefigurative to what American democracy could be: one in which large
numbers of people understand, and have the time and ability, to do the
work of governing themselves.

Professional community organizers have much to offer as we consider
the work that it will take to confront and overcome America’s slide
towards authoritarianism: experience leading protests and meetings,
recruiting and training large numbers of people, and developing and
executing a strategy aimed at using the structures of the world as it
is to move us closer to the world as we want it to be, to name just a
few. But what Petitjean’s book offers–taken together with the
historical research and practical experience that informs Taylor and
Bevins’ works–is the importance of being alert to, and shifting
away from, the anti-political tendencies of both horizontalism and
management consulting, and towards a clearer practice of political
representation and contestation.

“The promise of democracy is not the one made and betrayed by the
powerful,” Taylor writes. “It is a promise that can be kept only
by regular people through vigilance, invention, and struggle.” If we
are serious about confronting the rise of fascism in America and
abroad, we must fight for economic democracy, build organizations in
which large numbers of regular people have power and therefore can be
legibly represented by their organization, and turn the page on
anti-politics once and for all.

_Occupation: Organizer_: _A Critical History of Community Organizing
in America_, by Clément Petitjean (Haymarket Books, 2023)

_Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss it When It’s Gone_, by
Astra Taylor (Verso, 2019)

_If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, _by
Vincent Bevins (PublicAffairs
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2023)

_Emma Tai is a Chicago-based organizer and strategist. She is
currently the Lead Campaign Organizer at Organizing Resilience
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climate disaster organizing. She previously served as the Executive
Director of United Working Families, a multi-racial, working-class
independent political organization that has elected over 20 members to
city, state, county, and federal office._

_Convergence is a magazine for radical insights. We work with
organizers and activists on the frontlines of today’s most pressing
struggles to produce articles, videos and podcasts that sharpen our
collective practice by lifting up stories from the grassroots and
making space for reflection and study. Our community of readers,
viewers, and content producers are united in our purpose: winning
multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic economy._

* organizing
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* Saul Alinsky
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* anti-politics
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* democracy
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* Fascism
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