I’ve spent the last 20 years attending activist meetings, from my Bloomington days through my time in Iowa City. What almost all these meetings have in common is that they’re badly and ineffectively run.
Why?
Granted, most of them happened in college towns. So I could chalk it up to some kind of college town effect. But I’m not too convinced by that. In every other respect, the meetings vary quite a bit. Some involved putting together a new group. Others involved far more established groups. Some were meetings of socialist or anarchist groups, while others focused on identity- or issue-based activism. And attendees varied quite a bit in terms of age, gender, race, socioeconomic status, and other categories.
And still, most activist meetings stink. They start late, run over on time, and are facilitated badly. Many people come away frustrated. Maybe the issues they care about didn’t find its way to the agenda. Maybe there wasn’t an agenda at all. Meetings often feel more like friend hangouts than spaces where people do things. And many of these friend hangouts feel inaccessible to anyone not already part of the group.
Again, why? I don’t think it’s due to the intent of organizers. Quite the opposite. Most organizers want to create spaces accessible to new and diverse people. Most want meetings that are democratic and productive. And they use the methods they know in order to get there.
Indeed. I’ll suggest the methods are a big part of the problem here. The methods aren’t so great.
The New Left and Activism
Young people dominate many activist groups. And when older people do get involved, there tends to be generational conflict. But there’s an underlying irony here. Many of the problems with meetings led by people in their 20s come inherited from older people who started many of these problems in the 1960s or 1970s.
How so?
Lots of meetings go something like this: the group announces the meeting only a day or two ahead of time (if at all), there’s no agenda or an agenda shared with only a few leaders, the meeting features open-ended ‘democratic‘ discussion that no one is really guiding or facilitating, and the overall meeting structure and environment focuses on activist subculture while turning off almost anyone not already part of the scene or very similar to the people who are part of the scene.
Sound familiar? The New Left of the late 60s and 70s is where it began in the U.S. And then they passed these problems down to most subsequent activist groups. I suspect younger people operate mostly unaware of this history. But aware or not, they’re part of the history.
People objected to it way back then. But no one solved it.
The Impact: Bad Meetings and More
These problems don’t always prevent activist groups from getting things done. Indeed, focusing around a subculture sometimes helps bring (a few) people together. And it creates (a small) welcoming space for (a few) people. And so, sometimes it’s merely a minor annoyance and perhaps even a facilitator of certain kinds of actions.
But it’s quite an obstacle in other ways. It keeps groups small and unfocused beyond what a certain subculture wants to see happen. It generates meetings inaccessible to the vast majority of people not a part of the subculture. And inaccessible meetings like the one above turn off the very working-class base the left needs to build. So, it’s a particularly large problem for groups like DSA looking to build a working class left.
Indeed, running these kinds of meetings limits what we can accomplish. It encourages us to turn inward toward our small communities, failing to build actual majorities that can accomplish larger things. When we do turn our attention to concerns of the broader community, we find very quickly that we’re out of touch with most people.
