Democracy and Organization in the American Context

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

What is the role of organizing in a democratic society? Does the practice of organizing instantiate democracy in the present, or is it best understood as a means of transforming existing institutions? How can theorists study the practice of organizers to understand the meaning of democracy?
United by a common focus on learning from the activity of organizers in the American past and present, this panel offers answers to these questions. Building solidarity, developing political capacity, revealing the need to transform existing states of affairs, and preparing for opportunities to break with the status quo are all functions and purposes of organization, carried out in different ways and contexts.
Two of our papers consider organizing in the American present. In his paper, “Making the Road by Walking: Immigrant Justice Organizing and the Replenishing of American Democracy,” Garibaldo Valdez looks to the immigrant justice movement (IJM) and finds, enacted in its organizing practices, a powerful critique of liberal democracy in the U.S. Using a case study approach, Garibaldo Valdez shows that the history and practices of immigrant justice organizations (IJOs) reveal the illiberal, antidemocratic structures “illegalized” immigrants encounter, including exploitative employers, opaque bureaucracies, and inhumane immigration prisons. The structures encountered by IJOs within the U.S. disclose the violence and exclusion of the American project and make clear the relationship between racial subordination in the U.S. and American imperialism in Latin America. In responding to these structures with new movement repertoires, imaginaries, and analyses, IJOs create the conditions for a more just and accountable democracy. In her paper, “Building an Abolitionist Approach to Housing Justice: Lessons Learned from Chinatown,” Wong explores the emergent connections between housing precarity, carcerality, and abolition in Chinatowns across North America. While Garibaldo Valdez points to the ways organizing reveals an undemocratic status quo, Wong draws from interviews conducted with tenants, sex workers, mutual aid collectives, organizers, and youth activists in several Chinatowns to show the innovative ways that Asian Americans engage in cross-sectional organizing to instantiate democracy within the movement for housing justice. Wong’s paper focuses on the historic formation of a national coalition called the Chinatown Coast to Coast Network and traces the ways Asian immigrants, women, youth, and elders are imagining and realizing an alternative world within their neighborhoods, one without dispossession in the making of everyday life.
Three papers look to the past for lessons, drawing on the civil rights, labor, and anti-war movements. Inouye and Yaure look to A. Philip Randolph and Ella Baker for insight into the relationship between organization and democracy. In his paper, “Transformative Organizing,” Yaure reconstructs Randolph and Baker’s views of organizing as means to generate the conditions of solidarity and practice of participation capable of transforming values. For Yaure, organizing makes solidarity possible, and this solidarity transcends identity cleavages and creates bonds where common cause or shared interest cannot be found, and this transcendence facilitates shared sacrifice along the path of change. In her paper, “Organizing as Preparation,” Inouye interprets Randolph and Baker as thinkers whose theory of mass action runs counter to dominant radical democratic theory which theorizes democracy as fugitive, existing in short-lived moments of protest. In contrast to radical democrats, Randolph and Baker understand protest as an interplay between spontaneity and organization, navigated by organizers who have prepared for it. Through an analysis of Randolph’s reflections on March on Washington Movement and Baker’s reflections on the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott, Inouye argues they offer resources to think through the role of organization in preparing for moments of mass action. This view, she argues, is relevant to organizers and democratic theorists today, as they aim to take advantage of the opportunities for change presented by compounding social crises. In her paper, “Process, Continuity, and the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP),” Nair turns to the student movement of the mid-1960s to explore how a relational understanding of democracy and its value shape organizing. She argues the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) conceived of participatory democracy as a relational ideal, and their community organizing practice, fostered through the Economic Research and Action Project, put it into practice. The ideal, while it fostered novel participatory forms, required rejecting non-participatory ones, even when organizers might have found them useful. Her historical analysis generates insights for the embrace of democracy as a relational value today, as it shows how conceptualizing democracy relationally engenders an orientation to organization that rival conceptions do not.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Making the Road by Walking - Ramon Garibaldo Valdez, University of Chicago

• An Abolitionist Approach to Housing Justice: Lessons Learned from Chinatown - Diane Wong, Rutgers University, Newark

• Transformative Organizing - Philip Yaure, Virginia Tech

• Organizing as Preparation - Mie Inouye, Bard College

• Process, Continuity, and the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) - Gaby Nair, Princeton University

Chair

• Karuna Mantena Columbia University

Discussant

• Deva Woodly Brown University