published in 2016 by Oxford University Press
notes written in 2017 in preparation for a grad school comprehensive paper on social movements
McAlevey makes the argument that labor has been on the decline because it has chosen mobilizing over organizing, thereby separating labor from community and social movement organizations. She takes us through a union history, from her favorite progenitor, the CIO, through the treason of Alinsky and to today’s ‘New Labor,’ and also outlines a theory of power and specific organizing steps that can return us to the CIO’s organizing model. Her key distinction between organizing and mobilizing gives theoretical arguments about NGOs, class formation, and the difference between new and old social movements some concrete, practical teeth. It’s a great example of strategic, praxis-based writing.
History
The historic success of the Congress of Industrial Organizations came from its commitment to organizing across barriers between the skilled and unskilled, between different races and genders, and doing this by creating working class social networks that could organize entire communities. However, John Lewis and the Red Scare purged these organizers, leading to the ascendance of the Alinsky model, which de-linked CIO methods from their Marxist analysis, re-instituted the skilled-unskilled divide through a factory-community divide, and promoted professionalization by falsely asserting organizers are not leaders, while leaving all the strategic planning to the former. There was a lack of political substance, as Alinsky red baited priests into supporting him (lest their parishioners become communist) and his organizations supported expanded policing and red lining. His mobilization model is later developed during the grape boycott, which finds strategic ways to pressure companies, only engages workers as ‘authentic messengers,’ and shies away from strikes.
Today, New Labor (including the SEIU and Unite Here) continue this tradition, finding carrots and sticks to secure neutral organizing environments. This keeps with an individualist neoliberal trend, which has gone from casting factory workers to public sector/government workers as overpaid and asserts tax cuts are a more effective (individualist) solution to people’s problems than collective bargaining. Mobilization’s emphasis on data analysis and messaging can’t hope to overcome this powerful, hegemonic message. Instead, only collective struggle will teach people to overcome individualism. She critiques the organization representing the best of the mobilizing model, Make the Road New York, for lacking an active, external organizing focus that seeks to build majorities, despite the fact they have mobilized for successful campaigns and instituted internal measures and education to break the organizer-leader divide.
Theory of change
This all has to do with McAlevey’s larger analysis of power and change. She differentiates between
1) advocacy, which only analyzes elite power, only focuses on messaging, and therefore doesn’t leverage working class numbers against elite resources;
2) mobilizing, which still doesn’t analyze popular power, doesn’t involve members in strategic planning, fights for wage increases, and relies on targeted direct actions that the highly-committed ‘usual suspects’ can be relied on to attend; and
3) organizing, which seeks to build on working class numbers and social networks by engaging those who don’t self-identify as activists to become involved, collectively strategize, and recruit their networks to support collective action.
This majority approach to organizing accepts that natural, respected leaders won’t come flocking to the struggle (they don’t want to risk their earned leadership on a losing campaign), so they must be recruited, and the strength of the networks they recruit in turn must be evaluated by ‘structure tests.’ This approach differs from mobilizing primarily in emphasizing building collective power above simply improving the wage relation, lets the collectively-developed power analysis set strategy, and maintains a broad, transparent governing structure (eg, open bargaining). Most importantly, it’s not afraid to use the strongest tool the working class has: the majority strike.
One of the strongest strategic aspects of McAlevey’s book is her discussion of the specific practices that comprise organizing. The process is to always pair analysis of elite power with analysis of people’s power and to build collectivity by collectively carrying out this analysis. The goal is for everyone to develop a theory of change that leads to collective strategizing, for collective action. Leadership is critical, so the process begins with
-Identifying key leaders who are respected by their peers, working with them to develop their recruitment skills. Can they convince a majority within a couple shifts to take a risky action?
-Recruiting a majority. A key tool is ‘framing the hard question,’ especially since you begin with leaders who are already favored in small ways by the boss- ‘are you content with these small gains or are you opposed to putting up with the larger problem for the rest of your life?’
-Evaluating the power of this group through escalating structure tests.
This group must carry out a strategic analysis about what is needed to win their demands: what are the total costs for the employer (including internal, structural modifications it will have to make)? Greater cost requires greater power to win, and the majority strike is the greatest display of power. To make this successful, workers must engage in Whole Worker analysis to see everywhere they can mobilize power from. This is especially important in the service sector, which is highly strategic since the community is the point of production and the work can’t be off-shored. So either the workers will mobilize the community in their support (convincing them that better working conditions make for better services) or the community will be mobilized against them.
Genealogy
Instead of periods of new and old movements, you can differentiate between those with an organizing approach and those with a mobilizing approach. If you’re looking to tell a history of strategic approaches, these are the major ones to focus on (although you have to avoid just telling a history of social movements that pits bad/reformist/mobilizing groups against good/revolutionary/organizing ones). Casting the divide this way sheds light on a few other historical trends: how Marxism’s emphasis on class struggle helps us prioritize organizing (even though McAlevey doesn’t use this language), while analysis of very specific forms of oppression lead to very focused mobilizing efforts to meet these demands (led by the few, highly-motivated, usual suspects), without needing to build broad power. The difference is an intersectional analysis articulated in organizing practice, and it’s important to note that Marxist organizations can just as easily fall into this as non-Marxist ones. (For example, look at the ‘parties’ that are really just study groups.)
To flesh out this argument, you can also show how the advent of NGOs, neoliberalism, and the professionalization of social movement work through taking on privatized state functions all lead to the ascendance of the mobilization model. This genealogy is essentially what McAlevey lays out in her history of the labor movement. It also connects us with contemporary movements (alter-globalization, Wisconsin, Occupy) in that these relied on the support of the converted instead of recruiting and building collective analysis with the masses who don’t identify as activists. An important distinction is the subjectivity of ‘mass’ versus ‘activist.’ She makes a similar argument to White in saying these mobilizations have been defeated because they can easily be ignored, but her conclusion is much more strategic than White’s (who instead advocates for new tactics instead of a new strategic approach to praxis).
The limitation of all this great analysis is that McAlevey only really considers unions. She says she wants to bridge the false divide between unions and social movements, but her analysis of Make the Road is cursory and she doesn’t consider community groups that successfully organize for self-generated demands (instead of being enlisted to support union struggles). This is where movement histories of Zapatismo, Cooperative Jackson, or housing struggles can be useful.
Class consciousness
Although she doesn’t use Marxist language, hers is an argument for how class consciousness and class struggle are co-constituting. We collectively build strategy by recruiting, testing the strength/’agency’ of the collective, and letting that inform further recruitment. Furthermore, this is about social relations, in that workers are motivated by more than just wages, since their workplace concerns are shaped by larger structural issues in society (especially for service sector jobs where the community is the point of production), meaning analysis and agitation has to go beyond the wage relation (which connects to Dalla Costa’s argument). Therefore, class consciousness is related to gendered and racialized consciousness, in that the agitation and recruitment that grow the group and allow for broader collective strategizing and action can begin with many different seeds. The point is to find a starting place the person is passionate about/feels deeply and to expand outward from there.
Strategy
This is the strongest aspect of the book. Class consciousness is mobilized by going beyond the wage relation, by recruiting majorities that use the strongest tool they have as a class to win deep, structural change. This is favored by the growth in service sector jobs (showing us the divide isn’t between industrialization and de-industrialization, but between bread-and-butter mobilizing and whole worker organizing). On the other hand it’s harmed by individualism. The conditions that produce the strategic orientation of mobilizing are the conditions that reduce class consciousness and class struggle organizing.
Concepts
Labor, popular education, direct action, new social actors, organic intellectuals, new social movements, class struggle, participatory democracy, neoliberalism, praxis
People
C Wright Mills (power elite, mapping), Ganz (organizing strategy), Piven (need for massive disruption from ordinary people), Skocpol (professionalization of unions and movement organizations), Alinsky (against, for turning CIO organizing into mobilizing), Polletta (participatory democracy)
Stuart Schussler 