Ralph Nader - mobilizing vs. organizing
This is from January 3, 2021 on heyheyrenee.
I've been to a lot of protests and marches. I posted till I was blue in the face. Looking back, there was no meaningful change. Why not? Because we didn't do the hard work of organizing to elect local and federal representatives to work for us.
If we're gonna start winning elections, the left has to move from mobilizing to organizing. Listen to this clip of Ralph talking with Professor Adolph Reed Jr. from this week's Ralph Nader show to hear why.
Adolph Reed Jr. is a professor of political science at University of Pennsylvania. He is a volunteer on Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign and a co-organizer of Higher Ed for Bernie.
“Jane McAlevey, longtime organizer and now a sociologist also, makes a crucial distinction between what she calls ‘mobilizing’ and ‘organizing.’ Mobilizing comes down to marshaling the constituency that you have to do stuff. And the focus of organizing is on creating the constituency that you need through deep connections with people."
“I don’t understand how as an organizing principle we’re supposed to build the solidarities, the popular base that we need to change the society, to overcome the corrupt institutions, to undermine corporate and capitalist class dominance, if we are to start out from affirmation of all the many ways we might differ. It seems to me it makes more sense to get to where we’re trying to get to, if we start out trying to stress what we have in common.”
