Abstract
Introduction
Occupation: Organizer written by Clément Petitjean carefully presents a critical view of community organizing in the United States. As the author points out, the conception of community organizing itself is surrounded by misconceptions and misguided assumptions, justifying the book’s aim to go beyond individual analyses and to instead understand organizers as social actors who are “members of a particular social group, with its own values, norms, and material and symbolic interests” (p. 2).
The history of community organizing in the U.S., Petitjean asserts, is also the history of its professionalization, involving not only pay, but occupational competence and skills. Petitjean explains these professionalization dynamics gave birth to a contradictory hybrid, an infrastructure “straddling the worlds of social movements, institutionalized politics, nonprofits, and philanthropy and having conflicted ties with these worlds” (p. 5). Community organizing is marked by an inbuilt tension between the management consultant and the radical spadeworker. In this sense, the author seeks to understand the tensions and power dynamics that shaped the history of community organizing and its movement towards professionalization.
Professionalization and community organizing
In 2008, when Obama was elected not only as the first Black President of the United States but also as the first community organizer to hold that office, professional community organizing faced a moment of supreme legitimation. The former President spoke about the topic to millions of people who had never heard of it before. For Petitjean, that was both a service and a disservice to community organizing, since many still did not actually understand what “organizing” really meant or how it differed from advocacy, philanthropy, and other related practices. In fact, “community organizing remained largely invisible, in the margins of the political field” (p. 12).
Community organizing became a hazy term, used synonymously with “activist,” and most of the time taken for granted not only by regular people but even by philanthropic foundations that, as the author demonstrates, played a crucial role in the institutionalization and professionalization of its practice. It is not by chance that a considerable number of critiques related to the professionalization of organizers emerged over time, since a “body of specialists” with particular material interests may distance themselves from radical demands and the influence of nonprofit organizations may end up commodifying social justice. Such a standpoint argues that professionalization creates a group of specialists who sell their services to social justice movements in exchange for financial compensation, ultimately undermining the radical edges of organizations, following the equation: professionalization = depoliticization.
However, Petitjean’s book demonstrates some problems with this simple equation, since community organizers are far from being a homogeneous group. Even within a capitalist society that tends to commodify everything in its sight, other elements are also at play: “people’s class, race, gender backgrounds, their prior educational and professional experiences, their religious upbringing or politics, which do not result from the choices they made, shape and constrain how people perform their work and how they define it” (p. 32).
This is what Petitjean aims to demonstrate through his book: explain the social determinations behind the ones who developed community organizing in the U.S., their contradictions and differences throughout time. In order to do so, chapters 2 through 4 specifically focus on the trajectory of one of the most important names of community organizing professionalization in the United States: Saul Alinksy.
Alinsky’s Crème Brûlée: A “professional radical” or a political entrepreneur?
Petitjean delves into Alinsky’s biography in order to understand his motivations, class background, and his diverse (but sometimes conflicting) educational influences. For instance, although very much influenced by the Chicago School in his formation as a sociologist, the young Alinsky refused to pursue a career in the area, since his main interest was to understand how to actually work and develop community organizing in practice. Nevertheless, although Alinsky definitively helped different marginalized communities throughout his life and consolidated his national community organizing network named the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), his commitment to each of these communities never went much further towards a radical project of social change.
Furthermore, Petitjean demonstrates that Alinsky never had any interest in going beyond U.S. institutions and liberal democracy. Alinsky’s aim as a community organizer was to develop civic participation in order to strengthen liberal democracy. This does not mean that Alinsky and his associates embraced the Cold War anti-communist rhetoric, but they still saw their “active citizen participation” and vision of democracy as “the most effective way to positively combat communism” (p. 62).
In this sense, the author explores the contradictions in Alinsky’s conception of community organizing: although he once emphasized that being an organizer means being radical, he never went beyond U.S. institutions and negotiation practices, instead defending a Tocquevillian model in which liberal democracy is amplified, yet never questioned. This is one of the reasons why, for Petitjean, Alinsky’s politics can be defined as a Crème Brûlée, that is, “a thin crust of broiled power politics on top of a smooth and creamy custard of negotiation and compromise” (p. 65).
Going further in his analysis, Petitjean highlights that Alinsky’s book Rules for Radicals goes hand in hand with the consolidation of the IAF as a “consulting agency specializing in democratic apathy management” (p. 71), in which Alinsky attempted to establish universal principles of organization and power applicable to any situation, using the language of professionalism and expertise. For Petitjean, this set up the conditions for organizers to be seen as “management consultants in disguise” who supposedly existed “outside” of political and ideological struggles, since the IAF’s main goal when arriving in a neighborhood was not political, but determined by “standards of professional excellence.” For the author, these elements resulted in the failure of IAF organizers to gain effective legitimacy and social recognition.
Also, Petitjean argues that Alinsky built a career not as a professional radical, but rather as a political entrepreneur in the 1960s, seeking to bring “a touch of professionalism” to collective action. However, such professionalism, which aimed for abstract principles of collective organizing, ultimately resulted in contradictions documented between Alinsky and minorities such as women and the Black community, with the latter becoming clearer during the uprisings of Black liberation movements that contested such abstractions by linking U.S. institutions with colonialism, imperialism, and racism (something that Alinsky was not interested in). Thus, an alternative definition of community organizing emerged in the sixties that challenged Alinsky’s and IAF’s technical approach on collective action.
Spadework: The radical-pedagogy perspective
In Chapter 5 of Occupation: Organizer, Petitjean introduces the racial community organizing tradition from the 1960s, a tradition that not only rejected Alinsky’s “militant liberalism” and its professional claims, but also favored the development of oppressed people’s collective leadership to effectively achieve emancipatory structural change. The author describes this tradition as “Spadework,” in which collective leadership aimed to connect people’s immediate life issues with political struggles related to inequality, power, and oppression. Spadeworkers were not concerned with claiming any professional control or recognition over their work, nor did they leave the community after a “job was done,” as was the case with the IAF.
Examples of spadework movements were the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP), launched by Students for a Democratic Society in 1964. Although both movements had their contradictions related to organizational issues and barriers of class, they crystallized spadework as an alternative form of collective organization. Moreover, it is worth noting a crucial element stemming from the political and historical context of the 1960s: the “internal dissentions within the civil rights movement and radicalization of collective action, combined with state repression and white supremacist violence” (p. 158), through which the Black Power concept arose and shaped community organizing in the United States in the following years.
For Petitjean, one of the best examples was the Black Panther Party, founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, and their powerful community services that were deeply connected to their broader political struggle against racism and colonialism. These examples include the Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children Program, launched in Oakland in late January 1969, and the Rainbow Coalition from Chicago in 1968, led by Fred Hampton, which brought together groups from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
However, although spadeworkers innovated by creating a radical pedagogy in workers’ education movements (in opposition to the IAF’s management consulting work), Petitjean argues that in the early 1970s the shift to different political terrains “recalibrated the political implications and practical opportunities of spadework. Against the backdrop of heightened political repression, movement exhaustion, strategic and tactical divergences, spadework was further marginalized vis-à-vis other forms of collective action within the ecology of protest politics” (p. 169).
Professionalization from within
The beginning of the 1980s saw the emergence of a self-conscious group of professional community organizers who came together around a shared project of professionalization from within. This possibility occurred mainly because of four pillars: “an organizational framework; individuals who were ready to work as organizers but who wanted to find a balance between work and their personal lives; a body of knowledge and skills; and the development of institutions binding the group together” (p. 173).
Still, there were evident dividing lines between the IAF and spadeworkers. Such division is clear when it comes to ideology: while spadeworkers were associated with Black liberation, the antiwar movement, and demonstrations that were openly national in their framing, IAF organizers followed their mentor Alinsky in a shared distrust of effective radical change and with a great deal of opportunism: organizers should focus on “the world as it is” and not be concerned with big theories of society.
However, faced with a substantial increase in the pool of people who were now willing to become full-time organizers, both groups defended a professionalization strategy for community organizing, which would ultimately enable people from different social backgrounds to professionalize themselves as organizers. Thus, in opposition to the dominant white male group that characterized Alinsky’s era, from the 1980s onwards there was an evident diversification of community organizers’ demographics and social composition, which was a real demand of the spadeworker tradition that called for organizers who shared similar social identities with the people they organized.
From that point on, it became far more possible to “make a career” out of community organizing, “a sign that the profession had established a real grounding in the professional order” (p. 190). However, Petitjean emphasizes that the “organizer profession” faced major contradictions related to self-effacement behind leaders and the pursuit of recognition within the professional order.
A community organizer in the White House
The final chapter explores the challenges and contradictions of professional organizing that extended through new political territories and clashed with other established professional groups. As the author pointed out, the story of legitimization and institutionalization of community organizing starts with its professional element coming into existence in the 1970s and the 1980s, and it ends with Barack Obama (a former community organizer) being elected to the White House in 2008. Here, community organizing gained legitimacy through its incorporation into other neighboring social fields (philanthropy, social movements, advocacy, organized labor, and electoral politics), in a way that resulted in community organizing being nested into a subaltern position.
For instance, philanthropic money invested in community organizing was a “mixed blessing” that also made organizations more dependent on foundation grants for organizational survival, and beyond that. Perhaps the most interesting example would be the combination of labor sectors with organizing practices, something that had been developed in the past among workers, but later abandoned during Cold War repression. According to Petitjean, the new fusion between labor sectors and professional organizing resulted in the advent of labor-community coalitions to “reach workers who had hitherto been excluded from union representation” (pp. 236–237), including precarious workers from the service economy, part-time workers, and immigrant workers. The idea was that union politics could begin in the neighborhoods where workers lived.
For the author, such partnership resulted in a “more integrated, comprehensive approach to workers’ actual living conditions and experiences” (p. 238), which was nevertheless not free from contradictions due to an unbalanced division of labor, in which community organizers were responsible for doing the most unacknowledged groundwork (knocking on people’s doors, making phone calls) while white labor leaders negotiated with employers.
In this sense, the author argues that the professionalization of community organizing happened through relationships of interdependence with philanthropy, social movements, advocacy, and organized labor, but also with the political field that ultimately elected Obama as President of the United States, in which community organizing was officially recognized but at a higher price. The “professional world” had finally absorbed community organizing, but through its effective subordination.
Conclusion
Clément Petitjean effectively demonstrates that current “professional organizing” does not exist in a social vacuum as a stand-alone entity, but rather belongs to a broader political ecosystem, yet facing an evident subaltern position. This conclusion, however, does not lead the author to a romantic valorization of unpaid, volunteer political work as being more “authentic” than salaried professional organizing. As his book demonstrates, the professionalization of community organizing allowed people from different class and racial backgrounds to effectively have time (often a privilege of the middle or elite classes) to actually mobilize for their communities: “the diversification of organizers’ demographics was in part the product of a professionalization strategy” (p. 263).
Petitjean argues that future initiatives must keep pushing for a democratization of organizing, while at the same time challenging professional closure and the autonomization of community organizing. It is clear that, for the author, the best way to press forward is by learning from the spadework approach and its radical pedagogy perspective. While this book may prompt different opinions among community organizers and scholars (especially regarding the author’s severe critique of Saul Alinsky), it is undoubtedly an important work for making sense of the complex history of community organizing in the United States, as well as the contradictions surrounding the occupation of the “organizer.” Organizers must still struggle to avoid becoming stuck in abstract and rational professionalism that, to the detriment of any real radical change in society, ends up chained to a marginal position within the myriad of institutionalized professional groups in capitalism.