An Excellent Piece on Occupying and Organizing

I'm not blogging this week or next, because I'm on a two week writing sprint to finish revising my second mystery.  But before I left, I had started collecting some thoughts on the relationship between organizing and movement building, how they can inform each other, and how they differ.  And just now I ran across this article by Rinku Sen from ColorLines that basically says a lot of what I wanted to say.  So I'm off the hook!

Here's a teaser, followed by the link to the full article.

Occupying, Organizing and the Movements That Demand Both

by Rinku Sen

I have spent hours, weeks, months in discussions about how to recognize a movement—and whether anything we’ve done on all the issues you’ve mentioned counts. Suddenly, there are thousands of people taking some action, inspired by each other and seemingly not organized by anybody, and the conversation shifts to how we can harness the energy that has been released in that moment. Embedded in these discussions is an implicit assumption that one can build a movement in much the same way that one builds organizations: methodically, over the long term, with lots of structure so that people can join and find a path to leadership. I think this assumption is fundamentally wrong.I have spent hours, weeks, months in discussions about how to recognize a movement—and whether anything we’ve done on all the issues you’ve mentioned counts. Suddenly, there are thousands of people taking some action, inspired by each other and seemingly not organized by anybody, and the conversation shifts to how we can harness the energy that has been released in that moment. Embedded in these discussions is an implicit assumption that one can build a movement in much the same way that one builds organizations: methodically, over the long term, with lots of structure so that people can join and find a path to leadership. I think this assumption is fundamentally wrong.

... Read the rest