originally posted on Substack on October 3rd, 2023
I
I’m in no position to give labor organizing advice. I’ve been active in my workplace union since I started this job ten years ago. I’ve been a steward since 2016. There are people with longer and better track records than me; you should go listen to them. But I can say with pride that, if I were hit by a bus tomorrow, I’ve left my union in a stronger place than I found it: more engaged and informed members, more committed and active organizers, and a roadmap to develop more of both. That’s the sort of patient, relentless work that puts a union in a position to seize bigger gains when the opportunity presents itself.
Okay, I will say this with confidence: I am more qualified to talk about labor strategy than former investment banker and Obama official Steven Rattner or WSJ ghoul-in-residence Greg Ip. But that’s not saying much. You’re more qualified! Two dogs tangled on each other’s leashes are more qualified! Anyone who considers the working class with anything greater than nauseated contempt is more qualified.
What insight I have, I’ve gained from:
- A few years of painful experience;
- Living through an ahistorical surge in union popularity;
- Talking with organizers from other unions;
- Trainings and books from Labor Notes;
- Reading Jane McAlevey.
I return to McAlevey’s book, No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, from time to time. Even if you’re not building or strengthening a labor union in your own workplace, it’s an immensely valuable book. She introduced me to Marshall Ganz’s way of conceiving of strategy—”turning what you have into what you need to get what you want”—which I’ve used in all aspects of my life, not just organizing. But, most important, it grounds me on where my focus should lie.
Because, as the title itself tells us, there are no shortcuts:
The core argument of this book is that for movements to build maximum power—the power required in the hardest campaigns—there is no substitute for a real, bottom-up organizing model. […] The mobilizing model places primary agency on staff and is only capable of winning under certain restrictive conditions: those that do not require high levels of power. An organizing model places the primary agency for success on an ever-expanding base of ordinary people, and it can win in much more difficult circumstances, those requiring high levels of power. In each model, staff plays a very significant but radically different role. The key difference is where and with whom the agency for change lies.
The working class has two advantages which the ownership class can not take away: their absolute dependence on our output, and our numbers. Without our work, the shelves of their stores, the machines in their factories, and the imagery of their intellectual property is just so much dead weight. And we—the ones do the work—outnumber those who collect the rents, royalties, and profits one hundredfold. But neither our critical position nor our advantage in numbers are useful without organization. What form that organization takes, and who leads it, has been contested ground since the First International.
II
Move over Dark Brandon, this group wants to make Joe Cool a new meme (Politico):
The organization, ProgressNow, is launching a $70 million project to help the president and down-ballot Democrats win the war for voters’ digital attention. The idea is to create, in their own words, an “echo chamber” on the left. At its heart, it is an effort to compete with one they say already operates on all cylinders on the right.
[…]
The center of ProgressNow’s plan is an app that the group has developed called Megaphone. Users who download the app can scroll through a series of liberal memes, videos and graphics created by the organization, add their own captions, and then quickly share them on social media platforms [emphasis mine].
“ProgressNow has become an important partner to the groups supporting the Biden-Harris agenda,” said Anita Dunn, a senior White House adviser and top 2020 Biden strategist who added she was providing her comment in a personal capacity. Ramping up “ensures they will be in an even stronger position to deliver compelling digital communications to people in their communities through a grassroots network that effectively complements efforts in 2024 and beyond.”
[…]
ProgressNow is hiring more than 65 new digital organizers across 10 battleground states to manage a band of volunteers who will be tasked with sharing the organization’s online content far and wide through Megaphone. By the fall of 2024, the group is looking to expand its grassroots army to 13,000 volunteers nationwide.
[…]
The Strategic Victory Fund, an initiative of the leading donor group Democracy Alliance, is planning to raise the majority of the $70 million for the effort.
At the risk of cavilling, every person with a smartphone already has an “app” where they can access “memes, videos, and graphics […] add their own captions, and then quickly share them on social media platforms”. It’s called Facebook. It’s called Twitter X. It’s called Instagram. It’s called TikTok or Reddit or WhatsApp or Discord or Bluesky or Tumblr or Cohost. It’s the Safari or Chrome browser that came installed on your phone. It’s email, if your relatives are old enough.
In the year 2023, nobody who wants to share more pro-Biden memes online is at a loss for where to find them. Nobody is wandering the desert, garments rent, children wailing in their arms, desperate for content.
I do not know anyone engaged in the work of textbanking, doorknocking, or flyering for a political candidate who has ever wished aloud for a new app. In my (limited!) experience, you more frequently hear the opposite: complaints about too many apps. “Are we using Dropbox or Google Drive? How do we invite someone into our Slack? We need to update our flyers; who has the Canva login? Why are we using WhatsApp instead of Signal?” And so on.
$7 million apiece in 10 battleground states could fund campaign offices and a small legion of volunteers. Tell the beleaguered Arizona Democratic Party chair that a super PAC is airdropping $7 million in 2024 and they’d name their next child after you. But giving staffers and volunteers what they want isn’t sexy and cutting edge. It doesn’t excite the big donors who write checks for Democracy Alliance.
All of this is taking at face value that Megaphone is actually an app, not just a website built in Chromium and published on the Play Store.
And the donors, not the staffers, are the target audience. They’re the ones who need to be convinced that this is what will turn things around for the Democrats. They vaguely recall that the Obama campaign’s success in getting out the youth vote had something to do with “online”. And even if they do want to put a sincere effort into influencing critical elections, they don’t have the time or expertise to do so. It’s easier to be told that one donation will assuage their concerns.
These efforts also survive because they’re resume padding for professional nonprofit consultants. Anyone who worked on building or deploying Megaphone has a bullet point they can talk about for the next ten years, whether it moves the needle or not. Further, “Progressive Advocacy Group Develops App for Cool Biden Memes” gets headlines on Politico; “Progressive Advocacy Group Hires More Staff in Battleground States” wouldn’t even merit an email digest.
Donors drive both parties in the United States. Donors are the target audience. The parties need voters to get elected; it’s not like the voting is a fiction. But they rely on donors, and the professionals the donors pay for, to tell them how to reach the voters. This is why the interests of the parties and the interest of their donors seem so closely aligned.
III
Following layoffs, Boston University announces ‘inquiry’ into Ibram Kendi’s Antiracist Center (Boston Globe)
The assessment comes the week after Kendi, a celebrity author, scholar of race, and antiracism advocate laid off more than half the center’s staff.
[…]
Since its announced launch in June 2020, just days after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the center has raised tens of millions of dollars from tech entrepreneurs, Boston-area corporations, and thousands of small donors.
[…]
[A Boston University spokesperson] also provided a list of the center’s achievements, including: funding for numerous research projects, collaboration in a project launched by journalists at the Atlantic magazine (where Kendi is a contributing writer) to track racial disparities in COVID data, and organizing two “policy convenings” on antibigotry and data collection related to race and ethnicity.
In 2020, following the nationwide demonstrations and protests over the murder of George Floyd (among others), my employer started a reading and discussion group on diversity, equity, and inclusion. The first book we were assigned was Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. Since we were still working remotely, we all received a hardcover copy—free!—with plenty of time to read it. We were told this would be the first in a series of readings and discussions that my employer would hold. If there was a second, I never heard about it.
In How to Be an Antiracist, Dr. Kendi makes a compelling case that race, and racism, are the result of policies meant to serve the powerful, rather than bad ideas passed from individual to individual. He makes this case through good reporting on data, an examination of the historical record, and memoir. The memoir is the shakiest portion. He tries to marry each chapter in his study—on culture, on sexuality, on language—with a vignette from his own life. Not all of them match or resonate.
I believe Dr. Kendi is sincere in his commitment to change the material structures that prop up racism in this country. I do not believe he is a grifter. I couldn’t say this of everyone to came to prominence in the antiracist movement between 2013 and 2020. I believe he thinks he is doing the right thing.
I do not believe the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research is merely a form of 21st century diversity indulgence. I do not believe it is a box for billionaires and major corporations to deposit coins and show a commitment to ending racism: a sizable check, a well-crafted press release, a values statement on an unindexed page of their website. I do not believe that.
But, if it were, would it look any different?
The best work that BU’s own spokesperson could cite, when challenged on what the Center has done so far, was “funding” and “policy convenings”; i.e., passing along the money that they received and holding meetings.
If one believes, as Dr. Kendi writes in How to Be …, that “locat[ing] the roots of problems in power and policies” is the fundamental work of anti-racism, then the most obvious target is those institutions that have the power and that can write, or lobby for, the policies. These would include companies like Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Twitter, the company Jack Dorsey founded. But Dr. Kendi’s Center depends on them for philanthropy. There’s no way the Center could do the work it does without the donations that Vertex, Jack Dorsey, and others provided. No one else is funding that sort of work.
As with a progressive meme app, the target audience for the Center’s work is its donors. The donors are the ones Dr. Kendi and the other staff need to impress: not the BU student body, not the residents of Boston, and certainly not the Black community in America.
Any center—any institution—that relies on massive capital contributions is not going to challenge capital. Capital guards its power jealously. It defends the right to accumulate as much as possible. It justifies that power in part through philanthropy. This is how the Rockefeller Foundation is still writing million dollar checks to causes like the Center, even though a Rockefeller hasn’t been relevant since before I was born.
The complaint surfaced in the Globe article (and echoed elsewhere, such as by the former head of the center), is that Dr. Kendi had trouble delegating decisions, and that this slowed the center’s work. Management isn’t an innate talent. It’s not surprising that Dr. Kendi may have had friction with his staff. But at least some of this friction may have come from having to generate concrete solutions to a problem caused by capitalism while being dependent on capital.
“Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy,” wrote Dr. Kendi in How to Be an Antiracist. “It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant.” Identifying the Center for Antiracist Research so strongly with Dr. Kendi gave Boston University a way to make headlines in a time when all of America was glued to the news. It also gave them a scapegoat for when an impossible task started to fall apart.
IV
Many years ago, HR brought a bunch of staff members into a meeting to freely discuss the results of a survey they’d done on job satisfaction. My colleagues in another department—far enough away that I never saw them on a given day, but still connected to my work—spoke at length about their challenges. They were burned out; there was no clear path to job advancement; their supervisors were inconsistent and inconsiderate. HR nodded and said they’d see what they could do.
Outside the conference room, I nodded to usher the colleagues over to a private corner. “I heard what you were saying,” I told them. “I’m a union rep. Could we meet more regularly to talk about conditions in your department?”
Many of my most productive conversations as a union rep have come as fast follow-ups to all-staff emails or HR updates. I swim in the wake of policy like a remora.
Our union sends out periodic emails and holds regular meetings to update our members on workplace conditions. They have an active social media presence and all the buttons and posters you could want. But there is no substitute for the personal touch of organizing: the one-on-one conversation, the discussion with a small group, the little asks, the recruiting of fellow organizers, power mapping, strategizing, and so forth.
The work is not glamorous. I’ve led relatively few pickets in my time. I’ve drafted no petitions and I’ve never started a walkout. But I’ve turned bystanders into activists and activists into organizers. I have helped turn our labor union from an idea into a presence around the office: a tangible force that management has to acknowledge. I’ve done that not through my incredible genius or personal charisma, but through the slow, relentless work of putting power into other people’s hands. The power does not flow from me.
There’s a trillion dollar non-profit sector in this country, a vast edifice promising to do good. It’s staffed by thousands upon thousands of people. Many of them—probably most of them—come to their work with the sincere intent to do good. But we must always return to one question: does the work put power in the hands of people, or concentrate power in the hands of the office? Are institutions being attacked or placated? Afflicted people know what they want: peace, land, bread. Does this work get them closer to that or no?
Capital subsumes and appropriates all critiques made against it: all cynicism, all anger, all despair. It’s the edgy billboard encouraging you to join the gig economy; it’s a commercial with Kendall Jenner giving a Pepsi to a cop; it’s the science-fiction rebellion. But it still requires our hand on the tiller. Alienated, we have nothing; organized, we could have everything.
Ideas are cheap; labor is dear.