Organizing as Preparation

• In Event: Democracy and Organization in the American Context

Abstract

Radical democratic theorists have long associated democracy with fugitivity. Following Sheldon Wolin’s depiction of protest in “Fugitive Democracy”, they describe democracy emerging and dying in fleeting moments of spontaneous uprising. By contrast, they tend to associate organization with anti-democratic tendencies toward rigidity and oligarchy. This article draws on the theory and practice of mass action in the twentieth-century U.S. labor and civil rights movements to argue that fugitivity is an inadequate concept to represent how protest comes into existence and how it helps realize the ideal of democracy. Drawing on A. Philip Randolph’s writings on the March on Washington Movement and Ella Baker’s response to the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, I argue that both Randolph and Baker saw mass action—the collective withdrawal of cooperation with existing institutions by large enough numbers of people to incapacitate those institutions through, for example, boycotts, acts of civil disobedience, general strikes, or marches—as the essential lever for transforming undemocratic institutions. They understood opportunities for mass action to be socially structured and, to a large extent, beyond organizers’ control. However, they also thought that organizers could prepare to make the most of such moments by creating flexible, distributed organizations that were national in scope. The theory of mass action they articulate challenges the binary of organization and spontaneity that permeates radical democratic theory, offering a more nuanced and accurate account of the interplay between these two elements of protest. It also offers organizers and political theorists a distinctive account of what organizing is and does. Rather than engineering mass uprisings or their outcomes, organizing is best understood as preparation for moments that are conducive to mass action. Organizers prepare for such moments by cultivating relationships, developing skills, and developing and transmitting ideological frameworks that can become lenses for interpreting oppression and giving direction to resistance.

Author

• Mie Inouye, Bard College