Transformative Organizing

• In Event: Democracy and Organization in the American Context

Abstract

Comrades, Jodi Dean has observed, are those who count on one another (2019). A comrade is someone who risks her own freedom and well-being for the sake of those with whom she is in solidarity. But what social conditions make this willingness to sacrifice possible? Political philosophers and theorists have generally claimed that this willingness to sacrifice in solidarity with others is based in unity: persons recognize a set of interests that they already share, and commit to struggle for one another in pursuit of these shared interests. Yet many political projects, especially those combating identity-based forms of oppression, seek to build solidarity among persons whose interests are in conflict with one another. The question I take up in this paper is: what does it mean to build solidarity in communities and workplaces fractured by oppression, where the idea of a common cause or interests cannot be taken for granted?

In this paper, I turn to the political thought of Asa Philip Randolph and Ella Baker to show how organizing can function as a tool for transforming, rather than simply activating, persons’ interests. Throughout his career as a socialist activist, labor organizer, and civil rights leader, Randolph sought to build working-class interracial solidarity on terms that supported the self-determination of Black workers (Anderson 1973, Bynum 2010, Ervin 1979, Marble 1983, McCann 2021). I argue that underlying Randolph’s transition from a ‘One Big Union’ model of labor organizing to a focus on workplace-based Black unions (in particular, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters) from 1918 to 1937 was a model of interracial solidarity forged through systematic changes to economic, social, and political structures that made such solidarity in the interests of both Black and white workers. Ella Baker, in her work with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and especially Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, developed a theory of organizing that political theorist Mie Inouye describes as “starting with people where they are” (2022). I argue that the power of ‘starting with people where they are’ is that it envisions organizing as a matter of taking people’s perspectives and values and reshaping them through active participation in movements and organizations (Grant 1998, Parker 2020, Payne 1989, Polletta 2002, Ransby 2003, Sabl 2002). Together, Randolph and Baker articulate a model of organizing that can generate the conditions for solidarity where they are absent.

Author

• Philip Yaure, Virginia Tech