Process, Continuity, and the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP)

• In Event: Democracy and Organization in the American Context

Abstract

In contemporary activist and academic debate around how to organize transformative movements, it is nearly impossible to avoid references to the American social movements of the 1960s, including the student New Left and its most representative organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). When discussed in these debates, SDS is either heralded or dismissed for its embrace of democratic prefigurative politics, expressed in its participatory structures, allergy to centralization, and overall anti-organizational bent. In this paper, I neither herald nor dismiss SDS, opting instead to reconstruct its understanding of democracy and its attempt to put this understanding into practice in poor communities through the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP).

Through this reconstruction, I show that SDS–and by extension, its contemporary defenders–expect participatory organization to be effective in bringing about the democratic transformation of American society. In their view, hierarchical or technocratic organization inhibits the development of the capacities, dispositions, and values needed to sustain democratic institutions while the experience of participatory organization allows for such development. The development of these democracy-sustaining capacities, dispositions, and values is so central to this understanding of social transformation that SDS and its defenders suggest that non-participatory forms of organization and action should be rejected, even if and when they could be instrumentally useful. This rejection, I argue, comes not from SDS’s political naivety nor its desire for moralized authenticity, as many commentators have argued, but instead, this rejection is rooted in its relational understanding of democracy and its value. I conclude that democracy understood as a relational value necessitates a particular orientation to the effectiveness of organization in the present that rival understandings of democracy do not engender. A relational understanding of democracy and its value requires centering the process of social change and the relations formed in and through that process. As a result of this process-centricity, a relational understanding of democracy reshapes effectiveness into a measure of the ability to make present organization and action continuous with the aimed-for democratic future.

Author

• Gaby Nair, Princeton University