shreya's goofy little site.
thoughts on organizing
as an active labor and community organizer, i spend a lot of time thinking about/learning about organizing. below i've captured some of the resources that have been most revealing for me and some of the insights i've learned through my own experiences. think of this kind of as an annotated bibliography for organizers -- what i think organizers should read/hear, what i wish i'd known when i started organizing. a lot of these insights are particular to the spaces i've organized in in the past, including the labor movement (especially in graduate worker unions) and the movement for Palestinian liberation.
practices
inspirational case studies
- Practicing Science as Class Struggle (Science for the People, May 2024)
- HCI Tactics for Politics from Below (Whitney et al 2024)
- When Polaroid Workers Fought Apartheid (Dissent Magazine, August 2020)
- Spadework (n+1 Magazine, Spring 2019)
- I couldn't believe how similar my experience becoming a union organizer was to this story. Below are some quotes that especially touched me:
- "I was desperate for those conversations, and organizing, I found, was the way to have them. Like a consciousness-raising group, organizing conversations allowed you to air grievances long suppressed in the name of politeness or professionalism, to create a space for politics where it wasn’t supposed to be. The point was to locate the fundamental experience of powerlessness lurking beneath the generalized misery. Yet for all that we griped about how much we worked, in organizing conversations the question of whether we were really workers came up constantly.
- "The really controversial thing, though, wasn’t joining the union but organizing it. We asked people to help build the union, and to help lead it. We asked them to sign a card, then to ask a friend to sign one, too; to commit to meeting regularly with an organizer; to join the organizing committee and bring the people they knew to meetings and to rallies. We asked a lot — too much, some thought. Many people were happy to sign a membership card and a petition from time to time but didn’t want to go to more meetings or talk to colleagues about the union: they were already busy, so busy. They supported the union, they said, but they wanted it to leave them alone...We were all too busy, but the too-busyness wasn’t really about time, or at least not only. Being too busy meant people didn’t see why the union was worth making time for. Your job as an organizer was to find out what it was that people wanted to be different in their lives, and then to persuade people that it mattered whether they decided to do something about it. This is not the same thing as persuading people that the thing itself matters: they usually know it does. The task is to persuade people that they matter: they know they usually don’t.
- "Organizing requires you to learn the language of politics so well that it becomes your own. Like any other language, it takes a lot of practice, during which time you often feel awkward and unsure. For this stage there are exercises like “stake, take, do,” which lays out a sequence of questions for you: What is at stake for you? What will it take to win? What will you do about it? You have to start with what matters to you and the person you’re organizing before jumping into how hard it’s going to be and why they should do it anyway. These exercises are useful, but they can be stiff and artificial, because you’re not really speaking politics yet: you’re still translating. It’s why new organizers often sound slightly robotic, repeating something they’ve clearly learned from someone else. But eventually you learn to leave this scaffolding behind and speak as yourself."
- This really spoke to me; when I first started organizing, I was reciting from a script and just becoming used to making explicitly political claims in everyday conversation. But now, as I've become a more experienced organizer, I find that the hundreds of organizing conversations I've had have changed the way I speak.
- "Realizing that it was not enough for people to like me was revelatory. I had to learn to be more comfortable with antagonism and disagreement, with putting a choice in front of people and letting them make it instead of smiling away tension and doing the work myself. I had to expect more from other people. With other organizers, I role-played the conversations I feared most before having them; afterward, I replayed them over and over in my head. I struggled to be different: the version of myself I wanted to be, someone who could move people and bend at least some tiny corner of the universe." (I struggle with this).
- "To organize, and to be organized, you have to keep in mind Hall’s lesson: there is no true or false consciousness, no true self that organizing discovers or undoes. You too, Hall reminds us, were made by this world you hope to change. The more distant the world you want to live in is from the world that exists, the more deeply you yourself will feel this disjuncture. “I’m not cut out for this,” people often say when they struggle with organizing. No one is: one isn’t born an organizer, but becomes one."
- "Sometimes I felt I was organizing for the future of the entire world, in a deductive train that went: capitalism was going to devastate the planet; to fight it we needed strong unions, which meant new organizing, particularly in low-carbon fields like teaching, which meant building the academic labor movement — which meant that I needed to unionize the Yale political science department. It was absurd. Could I have been more quixotic, more grandiose, more self-important? Our style of organizing was intense, often all-consuming, and I knew that, too. I didn’t always like it. Often I longed for a nice life, an easy life, the life of the mind that academics were supposed to have. Couldn’t I just go to demonstrations here and there on the weekends before stopping off for groceries, the way I had before? "
- "Our relationships forged the practical commitments to one another that held the union together. They made us accountable to each other. They were difficult and multifaceted, often frustrating, intensely vulnerable, and potentially transformative but no less prone than any other relationship to carelessness, hurt, and betrayal, and always a lot of work. We were constantly building them and testing their limits, pushing each other harder the closer we got. They had to bear a lot of weight. In more abject moments, I wondered whether they were anything more than instrumental. More often, though, I wondered what was so menacing about usefulness that it threatened to contaminate all else."
- "I thought the union was intensely democratic — we were, after all, seeking some amount of self-rule in our workplace and asking more people to take part in it. But democracy was more than aggregating our individual preferences or adhering to procedures; it was more like the attempt to find the general will. We were declaring ourselves a people, and that meant coming to see ourselves as part of a collective, not just a sample of rational actors. We want nondomination, another political theorist in the department said; things are pretty good now, but we’re vulnerable to arbitrary power. This went over surprisingly well with the empiricists. Finally — the academic discussion I’d been waiting for! In any case, it was true that I wanted to persuade people of my position. I thought the union was good, and important, and I wanted them to vote for it. But I didn’t just want their votes; I wanted them to want the union. There was no union without them."
- "On the eve of the election, I realized I had never wanted anything so much in my life, and had never wanted so badly something over which I ultimately had so little control. I had organized all I could, but at the end of the day, people would make their own choices. It was a strange feeling, after a life spent chasing individual achievement, to want something that I could only have if other people wanted it too. And if on the one hand organizing was an exercise in learning that you could do so much more than you thought — that you could talk to people, find out they wanted the same things you did, and fight together — it was also a lesson in limits. You simply could not make someone do something they had decided not to do."
- "Why did I stay? Ultimately, for the same reason I had done everything else. I liked who I was when I put myself out there with other people again and again. I was braver and kinder, more generous and more confident. I wanted to live in a world where my voice mattered, where I could see the people around me as comrades instead of competitors. The union was imperfect in ways that I knew as well as anyone, but it was the closest I had come to that kind of world, and I simply could not convince myself that at that moment, for those few months, there was anything I could do that mattered more than trying to bring it into being."
- Building the Union with Hannah Srajer (from the Connecticut Tenants Union) (The Dig, January 2025)
political education links etc