Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Category: Class (Page 8 of 24)

Organizing for Power Training

Over the course of May and June of this year, I attended a set of training sessions called Organizing for Power. The Rosa Luxemburg Foundation does the trainings, with Jane McAlevey serving as the lead trainer.

Overall, it’s a good training in certain practical matters of organizing. I’d recommend it. For the most part, they base the training on McAlevey’s popular books about union organizing. I’ve written about those books several times in the past, including a post on key lessons and a post on some problems and issues with McAlevey’s notion of an ‘organic leader.’

Does the course impart any key new lessons a person can’t gain by reading McAlevey’s books? Not really. But they structure the training around reinforcing lessons and practicing them. And not to mention helping people work through their ‘bias’ in favor of activists. Many of the fellow students organize within their own unions and social orgs. These things alone make the training worthwhile.

For readers looking to put theory into practice, I’d say do the training! I think the training could serve as a starting point to figuring out how to apply lessons to your own workplace or org. But I’d recommend balancing alongside astute critiques of the model.

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Housing Commission and Housing Ideas

Some of you who know me might know I spent the last three years serving on the Iowa City Housing and Community Development Commission (HCDC). And I’ve been the chair of HCDC since July 2021. As I finish up my 3-year term, I wanted to write a bit about all that and about housing in Iowa City (and elsewhere!).

The short version: HCDC does great work on community problems, but it’s not built for solutions to deep or structural problems.

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The Politics of Lean Production

I subscribe to a few leftist magazines. One of them – Catalyst – has published a few contributions to a debate over the status of Lean production. Not long ago, I read the most recent article in that debate: one by the title ‘The Politics of Lean Production‘ by Matt Vidal.

The debate itself concerns both the theory and economics of Lean. Is Lean a bad thing by its very nature? Or, on the other hand, do we have ways we can redirect it for the benefit of the left? Vidal reads his opponents as arguing for the former, while he argues for the latter. And while Vidal doesn’t really want to go there, no less than Lenin himself once tried to re-capture something a bit like Lean.

Let’s take a look at this debate.

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Organic Leader: Potential Problems?

Just about everyone involved in leftist organizing in the last 5 years knows about Jane McAlevey. No Shortcuts became the go-to book for it. There’s a broader debate out there on how well McAlevey’s methods do in the real world. But I want to hone in on one idea from her book – the notion of the ‘organic leader.’

McAlevey advocates for an organizing model whereby the organizer – union organizer for McAlevey, but we could apply the model well beyond unions – starts by identifying organic leaders among workers. From there, the organic leader takes the lead in building support for the org.

There’s a lot I like about McAlevey’s approach. But I also think there’s a lot riding on the very organic leaders she appeals to. If we find problems with the very idea of an organic leader, it could put the org in trouble right from the start. So, let’s talk about that.

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