Power to the People

A community organizer elected to the U.S. presidency. A vice-presidential wannabe who dismisses his work. Nightly screeds and conspiracy charts by Glenn Beck. Lead stories on CNN. There is no doubt that, in the last three years, community organizing has become “hot,” or at least as hot as grassroots organizing for social change can become.

Into this mix come two new books—John Atlas’s Seeds of Change and James DeFilippis, Robert Fisher, and Eric Shragge’s Contesting Community. Both provide a reflective analysis of the role of community organizing in progressive politics and social change. And both are grounded in the pragmatic, populist politics practiced by the late Senator Paul Wellstone—a politics that develops and grows leaders within communities to challenge existing power relationships by combining grassroots organizing with electoral politics, all around a clear public policy agenda. Wellstone used to say: “Electoral politics without community organizing is a politics without a base; community organizing without electoral politics is a marginalized politics. And community organizing and electoral politics without a clear, progressive public policy agenda is a politics without a head, without a direction.” (Wellstone Action now trains out of this model and calls it the “Wellstone Triangle,” www.wellstone.org.)

Seeds of Change examines the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) as an example of the type of progressive organizing Wellstone promoted, and Contesting Community provides an intellectual framework and a provocative critique of community organizing in a neoliberal age. Both show why a Wellstonian politics is at once so rare and more important than ever.

Contesting Community starts out slow, making relatively modest and obvious claims: community has been romanticized by both the Left and the Right, communities cannot be isolated from larger forces that reside outside them, and communities are not homogeneous. But the argument quickly becomes an engaging and provocative critique of the evolution of neoliberalism and its impact on communities and community organizing.

There is little doubt that the last thirty years have witnessed massive divestiture in government provision of social welfare, and the normalization of a neoliberal economics that celebrates private capital, free markets, individual entrepreneurial freedom, incentive schemes, competition, efficiency, and deregulation. Contesting Community argues that, in the face of this neoliberal economic assault, the public sector has retreated from providing basic services and turned to public-private partnerships and the non-profit sector to provide for human needs. The authors argue that privatization has effectively expanded the size of civil society at the same time that it has marginalized community organizations and subordinated the social benefits they provide to the logic of the marketplace. Community Development Corporations (CDCs) and Community Economic Development organizations (CEDs) have arisen to fill the void and help stressed communities. Governments contract with these community organizations to provide services and, in turn, expect them to professionalize and operate like for-profit businesses. According to the authors, the most corrosive aspect of this contracting out is the diminished importance of the public sector. Government “no longer has a direct responsibility to local citizens” and “the community can no longer turn with any success to the state that is no longer responsible” (p. 79). The result is a less visible, less effective government that seems, for many citizens, incapable of providing the basic services necessary for personal and collective life. The authors do not reject the market pro forma, for if the market could provide social and economic justice in communities they would not object (p. 77). But the goals of the market are far different from the public good; CDCs emerged precisely because the market failed to provide basic social services, and free market logic turns community life and public services into commodities rather than collective, basic social rights (p. 90).

The authors do not aim to lay blame on community organizers or...