Occupation : Organizer

A Critical History of Community Organizing in America

340 pages

English language

Published April 21, 2023 by Haymarket Books.

ISBN:
978-1-64259-955-8
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2 editions

How organizing became a profession

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This is a great critical review/history of community organizing, with a particular view about how organizing became "professional." A useful critical take on Alinsky, but also a discussion of how organizing's "spadework" (a term coined by Ella Baker to describe the difficult work of cultivating personal relationships and preparing the ground for longer-term organizing) might be the better place to focus energies rather than on what Petitjean calls the "crème brûlée" of militant liberalism with its "crisp layer of conflict tactics and antiestablishment rhetoric on top o fa mellow cream of commitment to class harmony, compromise, and liberal pluralism. Significantly, the professional dimension of [organizing] work was baked into the créme from the beginning." (21)

This book also introduced me (I'm sure this is mostly because I'm just uninformed) that the distinction between organizing and mobilizing written about in Jane McAlevey's No Shortcuts actually originates in the SNCC critique of …