Edgy Debates and Contexts

As a most exuberant period of radical democratic experimentation in the 1960s and early 1970s waned, and as hopes for broad and deep democratic transformations of culture and political economic power diminished, many scholars and activists began to reflect upon the causes of this decline and possibilities for renewal. The critical analyses and political directions that subsequently emerged were manifold, contesting the character of power operating in progressive movements and the broader society along entwined matrixes of race, class, gender, ethnicity, ecology, religion, sexuality, organizational modes, strategic action, and so forth. Some of the most significant efforts to rethink possibilities for transforming antidemocratic political economic structures engaged the question of organizing: How to organize broad and intense democratic movements that might alter widespread cultural patterns of deferential quiescence and grossly unjust distributions of goods and productive capacities?

A landmark in this reflective process was Piven and Cloward's Poor People's Movements.¹

Questioning pervasive progressive assumptions embodied in organizing efforts like the labor and welfare rights movements, Piven and Cloward argued against seeking transformation by establishing formal mass-membership organizations insofar as they tend toward internal oligarchy, bureaucratic rigidity at odds with the mobility conducive to more successful struggles, and increasing cooptation stemming from the need to privilege cooperative relations with external elites (from whom symbolic and material recognition is needed for such organizations' survival). Such organizations tend to erode grassroots democracy and are generally short-lived. The concessions that formal organizations are able to win, Piven and Cloward argued, stem not from their political efficacy, but from the initial disruptive insurgency that provokes a de-legitimation crisis for political elites. The concessions elites will make quickly diminish as the insurgency declines or is co-opted. Lacking these concessions, poor people have no incentives to participate regularly, and they retreat from the organization.

Piven and Cloward argued that the limitations facing efforts to change entrenched powers of contemporary political economy in more democratic and just directions are “large and unyielding.” The key to a more effective progressive politics was “to understand these limitations, and to exploit whatever latitude remains to enlarge the potential influence of the lower class.”²

Thus, rather than trying to create formal mass-based organizations in the midst of political upheaval generated by people taking to the streets, it was wiser to intensify the political defiance that foments de-legitimation crises from which significant elite concessions most often stem—especially during times of instability. We should seek to “escalate the momentum and impact of disruptive protest at each stage in its emergence and evolution.”³ Though such efforts would themselves be relatively short-lived (because significantly dependent on systemic disruptions that tend to be temporary and largely beyond the control of social movements), if the opportunities were seized, movements of irregular action might approach the maximal limit of the concessions winnable from the state at a given point in time. This stark sense of limited possibility was far from their ideal, but “to criticize a movement [or theoretical position] for not advocating or reaching this goal or that one without even the most casual appraisal of its political resources is an exercise in self-righteousness”⁴—something they sensed in many of their critics.

Though significantly persuaded by Piven and Cloward's analysis of politics in the United States, Ira Katznelson importantly argued that they over-generalized the claim concerning the desirability of disruption over organization.⁵

In countries where strong social democratic movements provided stable vehicles for progressive reform, redistributive gains far greater than in the United States had been won through combinations of struggle and organization. Katznelson suggests the need to invent organizational vehicles, even as he also provides an analysis of how class and community issues have been historically separated in the U.S. and have been channeled into the politically co-opting “trenches” of trade unionism and urban machine politics in ways that pose major challenges to doing so. Those who would seek by means of community organizing to accomplish an end-run around the problem of either creating a powerful radical organization or settling for the more minimal returns of a politics of irregular disruption are, he thinks, barking up the wrong tree. “Community-based strategies for social change in the United States cannot succeed unless they pay attention to the country's split in the practical consciousness of American workers between the language and practice of a politics of work and those of a politics of community.”⁶ On Katznelson's reading, the questions of politics and class power in the workplace and broader political economy were crucial to engage simultaneously and in connection with questions facing neighborhoods, schools, housing, environment, and so forth. A narrow focus on the former conceals the manifold implications of class power. A narrow focus on “community” issues, alternatively, conceals central political economic sources of power, the transformation of which is a condition for addressing deeper community issues in the first place.

Katznelson's critique here is partly aimed at another locus of theory and practice that developed in response to the decline of grassroots democratizing efforts and the right-wing backlash in the early 1970s—namely the myriad community organizing efforts that were significantly inspired by and developed beyond the political work of Saul Alinsky.⁷

Reflecting upon the shortcomings of progressive politics in the wake of the 1960s, organizers in Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) became convinced that successful efforts to democratize culture and power hinged upon going back to the institutions of civil society that remained intact, and organizing within each locality an “organization of organizations” able to connect with and cultivate the more radically democratic and pluralist values rooted in the traditions of different communities, congregations, and families. The IAF sought to be radically counter-cultural—insofar as becoming grassroots democratic political animals is counter-cultural—but in a manner that eschewed ideological posturing and connected to the specificities of mainstream peoples' everyday lives, faiths, issues, angers, and hopes. It sought patiently to develop grassroots democratic relationships and power in order to reconstitute a broad and deep network across many of the pivotal differences that divide people and render them impotent. The concomitant aim was to hold dominant institutions accountable and responsive to a genuinely democratically constituted people. Yet for Katznelson, the IAF's diminished focus on work, class, and scales of contestation sufficient to alter the prerogatives of capital were major shortcomings.

Indebted to Katznelson, a group of scholars-activists critically engaged the “new populism” of IAF-type organizations and suggested that class analysis and systematic critique (including critiques of people's traditional ideological frames) should be a part of organizing, as well as a focus on ways to move beyond local organizing to address large corporate and state power.⁸

These “transformative populists” sought to develop a politics that worked in the tensions between the new populism's emphasis on “meeting people where they are” in their communities and traditions, and the introduction of more radical analyses and networks of organizing aimed at contesting larger modes of power. Only by integrating both horns of the dilemma, they argued, was there hope of inventing a politics that might escape the confines of mere resistance or assimilation, and engender deeper cultural and political economic transformations.

I think many of the questions and problems posed by these “transformative populists” remain very important for those who would enhance struggles for democratization and justice. Given the extent to which localities in the United States are shaped and limited by global capitalism and the politics of what Sheldon Wolin calls the “mega-state,” political initiatives that avoid wrestling with these questions will likely fail to democratize culture and power.⁹

Moreover, we might risk complicity with anti-democratic forces insofar as we channel political engagement toward blind allies and minutia, or political modes that lack larger transformative horizons. The question, then, concerns how democratic organizing might begin around small issues that are immediately connected to peoples lives and winnable (concerning missing street signs, specific abandoned houses, potholes, etc.) yet simultaneously link these issues to broader critiques and the task of building larger networks that might transform structures of power.

A number of recent historical developments in the United States are striking and pertinent as we consider the range of alternatives we have briefly sketched above. First, progressive efforts in the United States to cultivate a politics of disruption have met with relatively little success (whether defined in terms of intensity, relative durability, or pragmatic results). The anti-WTO protests in Seattle made an important splash, but the protests that followed against neo-liberal globalization have become increasingly routine, contained, and marginalized in the broader public sphere. The character of political, economic, cultural, and media power in the United States today pose ever-greater questions concerning the efficaciousness of a politics for which such disruptive protest would be the central tool. Second, for myriad reasons the numerous attempts to develop large, powerful, and enduring progressive organizations (e.g., the New Party, the Labor Party) have had little success forming deep and enduring connections with a broad swath of the public. Third—and in marked contrast—in the decades following the criticisms of “new populism” discussed above, it is IAF organizations and others deeply informed by them that have been remarkably successful at broadening and sustaining broad-based networks of democratic power, cultural change, and significant redistribution at the local level (around housing, living wages, infrastructure, schools, etc.). The track record of “transformative populists” is far less impressive. How and why have IAF-like organizations done as well as they have during a period of dramatic right-wing ascendancy? Are they primarily indicative of a “politics of containment” that fulfills the functional requirements of the dominant order, or is their work better than this in terms of what it has achieved thus far and in terms of its promise? In considering these questions it is important to note that the “transformative populists'” analyses of the new populists were rather thin and often inaccurate (as the discussion below illustrates). Many IAF-style groups have, for example, sought to enlarge the scales of political contestation, many entertain critiques of capitalism and class, and many acknowledge a relationship to myriad traditions that is at once deeply indebted to these traditions and draws them into dialogues that are democratically transformative. In this light, it is important that the politics of community organizing be explored with a fresh eye for its possibilities and limits.

Fortunately there is a growing literature by both activists and scholars that engages these political efforts on the part of tens of thousands associated with the IAF in scores of U.S. cities to shift power, political culture, and practical policy outcomes toward increasing grassroots political engagement, equality, and inclusion. Two of these, Going Public, by Michael Gecan, and Roots for Radicals: Organizing for Power, Action, and Justice, by Edward Chambers, are written by long-time IAF organizers. A third, Dry Bones Rattling: Community Building to Revitalize American Democracy, is by Mark R. Warren, a political sociologist who studied the IAF as a “participant observer.” A fourth, Everyday Politics: The Power of Public Work, is by Harry Boyte, who has long worked at the intersection between theory, history, and political engagement. Below I engage some of the most provocative contributions offered in these works in order to explore ways in which they might inform understandings of democratic political engagement in the context of the debates and challenges sketched above. I focus particularly on themes concerning the ethos and practices of organizing; civic, political, and economic visions of transformation; modes of addressing questions of race and gender; and the role of leadership and authority in radical democratic work. I am interested in the extent to which theses works are rooted in and suggest practices that might push beyond the “trenches of containment” mentioned above, and also in the question of how the politics of tensions they articulate might be further developed in order to enhance their capacities for doing so.

Developing an Ethos and Practice of Grassroots Organizing

Each of these books charts a course both indebted to and critical of central motifs that emerge in the early IAF fashioned by Alinsky. Though Alinsky was effective in the short run around issues of infrastructure, services, schools, jobs, housing, etc., his organizations frequently perished after several years, organizers often burned out, and sometimes organizations developed in directions that defied the democratic and inclusive spirit of their emergence. In response, following Alinsky's death in 1972, there was a period of intensified critical reflection upon and transformation of IAF practices.

Where Alinsky late in his life emphasized a narrowly pragmatic understanding of organizing, the new generation of leaders has cultivated a practice and philosophy of organizing that extended Alinsky's earlier attentiveness to specific community traditions in two key ways. First, IAF's own philosophy of democratic organizing has become increasingly entwined with teachings of the religious traditions with which it is engaged (Christianity and Judaism have played a predominant role, though many networks have increasingly sought out and been informed by Islam, Buddhism, and other traditions), drawing inspiration from teachings emphasizing political perseverance, liberation, solidarity with the least well off, welcoming the stranger, community building across differences, and so forth. Second, each local IAF organization aims to enhance the institutional strength of each of its member associations—diversifying leadership, broadening participation, reorganizing in ways more conducive to the association's flourishing, finding practical embodiments of vision, etc.

Yet even as IAF is inflected by the visions and practices of the traditions with which it engages, it inflects these traditions in light of a radical democratic ethos that accents inclusion, dialogue, receptivity, equality, difference, a taste for ambiguity, patient discernment, and an affirmation that political relationships centrally involve ongoing tension, some compromise, and humility in the face of disagreement (including a hesitancy to push for organizational action on issues where widespread agreement has yet to be forged). Rather than a political liberal “public reason” that is worked out in advance and would regulate public discourse on basic issues, the discrepant political voices in IAF draw upon a variety of traditions in a process of dialogue that is more pluralizing, open-ended, and gradually changes in light of particular engagements around specific issues. The wager seems to be that patient discernment in responsive relationships is both sufficient and in important ways better than the terms of a pre-established Rawlsian social contract—because more respectful of differences and more flexible in relation to human contingencies.

Chambers has played a major role in these reformations of the IAF in recent decades, reflectively gathering the practical knowledge gleaned from decades of organizing, establishing the IAF's national “ten-day training” institute which regularly trains dozens of new leaders in the arts of political organizing, and helping to develop a life for organizers that is fulfilling over the long-term, rather than a burn-out experience. Yet for all the incisive strategic practical wisdom he offers concerning the nuts and bolts of organizing, one of the more striking things about Chambers' book is the extent to which he painstakingly seeks to convey what he takes to be the existential attitude most conducive to vibrant, effective, sustainable engagement in the rough and tumble of grassroots democratic politics. For Chambers and many IAF organizers, this ethos is integral to the change in political culture that is required for and provoked by radical democracy—and central to the way he seeks to rework the term “radical.”

Radical refers to “root,” for Chambers, yet not in the sense of an origin that, once revealed, would provide the foundational lens rendering both our historical situation and what is to be done easily intelligible. Rather, radical refers to the truth of spirit, which resides in the permanent tension between “the world as it is” and “the world as it should be.” The search for meaning and better forms of political community is “fueled by a tension that won't go away”;¹⁰

one that is—when artfully acknowledged and given generous form—a source of creative political action for radical democracy and justice.¹¹ Hence, we must “step up to the tension” and avoid succumbing to the cynicism and coercion that result when we collapse it either toward the “world as it is,” or the marginal moralizing that ensues when we collapse it to the “world as it should be.”¹² This tensional root emerges in proximity to anger and yearning, and it gives birth to “the radical question of this book … why should things be this way, rather than another? … why not a different world?”¹³

Chambers argues that radical democracy is a project of learning to live artfully when political community is recognized first and foremost as a question, rather than a rhetorical device veiling a politics of the ready-made answer. The pragmatic, strategic, and ethical questions that swarm in the interstice between the present world and other better possibilities call radically democratic selves receptively “to gather with others as fellow citizens to converse, plan, act, and reflect for the well-being of people as a whole.”¹⁴

Chambers calls this capacity our “politicalness”, following Wolin, whom Chambers describes as “America's finest political teacher.”¹⁵ Citizenship, rather than a prerogative of nation-states, is constituted by our politicalness, which Chambers (again following Wolin) takes to be a birthright of each and every person. The citizenship of radical democracy belongs to all those who respond to the call of politicalness. Organizing is largely the practice of repeatedly soliciting politicalness where it has yet to appear; and listening carefully to and working with those who actively respond. This is politically crucial because IAF organizing bridges and transfigures not only divides of race, religion, class, and gender, but also nationality, as it engages in political work with thousands of newly arrived immigrants lacking officially sanctioned United States citizenship.

The tension and questioning that the IAF calls people to “embrace everyday [as] the destiny of our spirit” draws people into creatively pluralistic modes of politicalness because, “the tension between the two worlds is a tension between interpretations. The world as it is and the world as it should be are not raw facts or simple objective realities. We don't have objective uninterpreted access to either world. People from different histories see the two worlds differently …. What you and I can create for our respective groups … and the larger community depends on bringing our respective interpretations together in a better reading or our common situation and obligations than we could do alone, one that enables us to act together with power.”¹⁶

IAF politicalness thus follows the Tocquevillian theme of broadening concerns and horizons through political participation. Yet they radicalize this theme significantly by rooting the potential sources of democratic life in far more heterogeneous and open-ended locations than did Tocqueville, subtly but critically shifting the orientation of democracy from his accent on relatively stable common foundations in the being or mores of a people, to the unpredictable “dialectic between being and becoming”—the interaction between a rich if often forgotten legacy of grassroots democratic practices, heterogeneous traditions and the emergent possibilities that arise as people more receptively engage one another.¹⁷ At their best, IAF practices strive to gather sources of receptivity in each tradition and work these against the stingier elements that also reside everywhere people co-exist.¹⁸

At the heart of the philosophy of IAF organizing is the necessity of tapping into the “self-interests” of diverse constituencies. Yet Chambers interprets this through Arendt's reflections on “inter esse,” which locates our interests in the tensional space “in between, with our relationships.”¹⁹

Hence at the same time that a focus on self-interest propels the cultivation of self-recognition, respect, and determination, it also propels us into receptive political relationships with others. Along with virtually all other IAF organizers, Chambers writes that “the most radical thing we do out of that tension starts with what I call the relational meeting,”²⁰ one-on-one conversations that are vital enactments of the political ethos of IAF. Where IAF organizing is proceeding at its best, relational meetings are ceaselessly occurring in which individuals are propelled into dialogues in which they provoke and listen to each other's stories, angers, passionate dreams, specific issues and hopes, and so forth.

Chamber's describes these meetings as “an art form. It's one organized spirit going after another person's spirit for connection, confrontation … searching for talent, energy, insight, and relationships. It is where public newness begins … the telling of stories that open a window in to the passions that animate people to act.”²¹

Relational meetings are a vital source of information through which issues, strategies, solidarity, and practices of local organizations emerge. Indeed, the IAF performs thousands of these meetings in each city prior to picking issues, instituting formal structures, going public, etc. A far cry from groups on the left and right who accent modes of “preaching to their ideological clubs, using their own language, their own fabricated theology, and their own single agendas,”²² the relational meeting practically embodies the idea “that listening to the stories and insights, the memories and struggles, of another is more important than hustling their name … the relational meeting is a risky, reciprocal event … a two-way street … [where one must] be prepared to be vulnerable.”²³ Each of these encounters seeks to communicate and exemplify that “its agenda has some fluidity, that its tone or strategy might be altered, that newcomers are expected to bring something to the group's agenda.”²⁴ In response to those who think that organizers must come into communities with an ethically and politically “correct” vision, the IAF counters not with a blind faith in the everyday traditions they find already in play, but a profound sense that the traditions of most communities have multiple sources (including traditions of radical democracy) that can be drawn upon to animate people to engage in more dialogical and receptive practices through which a democratically deeper and more plural “we” can be engendered.

The aim of IAF organizing—through house meetings, leaders meetings, community-wide assemblies, action teams around specific issues, grassroots actions at public hearings, etc.—is to generate an enduring radical democratic counter-culture that could dramatically transform power and policy in directions that are more inclusive, egalitarian, and just. Negotiating between ideals and a pragmatic sensibility, Chambers strives toward a world in which civil society would not be a “third sector,” but the “first sector” which would “hold [governments] as well as the moguls of the market accountable”—a world that recognized that “the state and market came later and exist to support [civil society].”²⁵

In practical terms, states must “put boundaries on the market”, but can only do so in the context of pressures from an attentive, organized, and fluidly active democracy working throughout civil society.

Chambers has been engaged in the politics Weber famously described as “the slow boring of hard boards” long enough to know the tremendous challenges facing IAF's effort to cultivate radical democracy. Crucial to his interpretation of IAF politics is a trickster sensibility that he sometimes calls “political jujitsu”, which aims to “use the power of the opposition against itself” to change things.²⁶

Yet “the opposition” is not simple persons in power who are resistant to democratization, but also the systems of anti-democratic power themselves. Hence, more profoundly, like many tricksters, IAF often pretends to play one game while its real focus is on another. In the face of what Chambers takes to be capitalist markets gone wild—in which capitalism itself acts as an anti-democratic trickster, bestowing upon commodities apparent (and thus real) autonomous steering power-value and a seductive character that cultivates consumerist selves, all the while veiling the human power relations at its core—the IAF crafts an antidote-trickster that mimics M-C-M′ (Money, Commodity, Money′) toward radical democratic ends. Chambers crafts the formula as follows: TEP (Talent, Energy, Power)-CA (Collective Action)-TEP′.

For example, those democratic organizers and leaders will discern multiple issues of great importance to a community and generate a plethora of action with the ostensible aim of winning significant gains around housing, living wages, education, equitable infrastructure, safe neighborhoods, environmental justice, etc. The redistributive track record of the IAF is substantial in this regard (especially during a period of dramatic national retreat from redistributive politics), including resources for the construction of thousands of houses enabling home ownership for low income people, many urban living wage ordinances, a raise in the California minimum wage, and hundreds of millions of dollars of city and state funds directed toward poor and working class schools, neighborhoods, and communities. Yet these issues and ultimately even the game of interest group liberalism as such are secondary objectives—the secondary game—for the best IAF organizations. A key factor in discerning which issues to pursue—as well as how to pursue them, when to compromise, etc.—is the extent to which they might contribute to broadening and deepening durable radical democratic engagement, relational power, knowledge, and practices (the primary goal).

Issues grow in proportion to the political capacities of the organization, for the IAF is very careful not to drag people into many losing battles that are demoralizing and politically debilitating. Action, reaction, and reflection are like oxygen for grassroots politics; they draw new people into political engagement and deepen the vitality of those already involved. In a world where deprivation is pressing, politically deferent consumerism is rampant, and the rules of the game often favor myopic greed, Chambers knows that the pursuit of radical democracy must often be oblique and might don a trickster character. Political games that may seem at times to be primarily about issues that appear (like commodities) to acquire a life, power, and value entirely their own are always more about soliciting collective actions and reactions that proliferate horizontal relationships, culture, and power (just as the movement of commodities and money is actually primarily rooted in and aims to proliferate relationships of vertical power).

Thus an issue that seems too small, or a compromise that seems to give up too much, when viewed primarily through the redistributive lens of goods desperately needed (but probably unattainable in a present power context), may be crucial to winning what Chambers takes to be the more important game: enhancing a radical democratic counter-culture and power that is itself partially constitutive of flourishing. The ultimate aim is to change the game, or at least make the radical democratic game more powerful than the interest group distributive game. What I am calling trickster politics—at its best, and it is easy for it to get tricked—moves back and forth between these two games, carefully trying to play the latter while avoiding getting caught in its frame, a theme to which we will return in discussing Boyte and Warren. As Chambers puts it, “the line in the fight about how the world should be is now drawn between market values and generational ones.”²⁷

Questions of Critical and Transformative Vision

As Gecan's Going Public repeats many themes discussed by Chambers (with whom he has collaborated for decades) I focus upon his subtle differences. Where Chambers consistently links organizing themes to deeper questions of practical philosophy, Gecan's work unfolds by presenting provocative exemplifications of modes of democratic organizing and engagement. His text is divided into four parts, each of which articulates a “habit” that is central to the participatory democratic “cultural work” that the IAF seeks to provoke: “the habit of relating”, “the habit of action”, “the habit of organization”, and “the habit of reflection.”

Gecan has an wonderful eye for creating—and voice for narrating—public drama, and his stories (e.g., reversing architectures of power by arriving early to a meeting, occupying the central elevated “plush leather” chairs and tables of the uncooperative commissioners, while insisting that the latter sit beneath them in little “rickety wooden chairs” for “peons”) are often followed by spirited injunctions like: “Don't whine … Take charge. Be irreverent. Test how plastic the world really is. And learn how to enjoy a win.”²⁸

In the midst of story after story of organized people creating significant power, transformation, and political-economic outcomes that benefit their lives, his claims that there are “entire continents of political reality still undiscovered and unexplored,” or that those involved in grassroots democracy can “become refounding brothers and sisters of their country,” acquire needed texture and believability.²⁹

Nevertheless, Gecan's ruminations concerning what these farther reaching possibilities might look like remain mostly limited to democratizing shifts—albeit profound—affecting the terrain of civil society. Moreover, in a subtle but important way, he generally portrays the relations between civil society (or “relational culture”), on the one hand, and “market culture” and government “bureaucratic cultures,” on the other, in a manner that is far less agonistic than Chambers. This difference comes through repeatedly, in the way he accents the distinctness of civil society less in contestational relation to the other culture-powers, and more in terms that emphasize its distinct capacities to “figure out how to do what the market or state have either shown no interest in doing or have failed to do well … especially … the growth and development of people and their voluntary institutions.”³⁰

Striking a moderate tone, his discussion of market culture poignantly describes why he “admires the market's energy ….and appreciates its power,” yet generally does quite little to elaborate why he is “concerned about its impact.”³¹ At his most radical, he writes of “holding markets accountable” and “keeping them in their place”—if they won't do so themselves—but the spirit of his remarks on markets tenaciously avoids addressing more deeply critical and transformative issues.

Harry Boyte's Everyday Politics labors consistently in democratizing directions that are only occasionally suggested by Chambers and Gecan. Boyte has been engaged in scholarship and political relationships with the IAF for many years. Much of his early work theorizes democracy in a manner deeply indebted to this organizing and the rich related legacy of “commonwealth” political visions and struggles throughout U.S. history. Everyday Politics continues to be deeply appreciative of the innovations of groups like the IAF, but its primary ambition is to render a narrative and theoretical account of the innovative democratic experiments in which he has been involved for the past fifteen years that move beyond some of the limits in political organizing that confines itself to the terrain of civil society.

With Gecan and Chambers, Boyte argues for a mode of democracy that moves beyond a “protest politics” that remains too marginal, too episodic, too preachy and moralizing, and too enamored with disruption to the exclusion of constructive engagement. He is similarly unimpressed by establishment non-governmental organization politics characterized by bureaucratic expert cultures and minimal grassroots engagement. While IAF-style radical democracy is a major advance, if it fails to develop strategies that democratize work and make it “public,” it will likely be insufficient in a period when the “world threatens to become entirely privatized and the market to spin out of control, metastasizing into a cancerous growth that turns private wealth-making into an almost religious ritual”. Boyte worries that though the IAF model avoids the depoliticized framework that accompanies many discourses of civil society, it nevertheless remains stuck in the civil society frame when it “separates ‘production’, which it locates in the ‘economic sector’, from public life”; this is a frame in which “the actual process of creating the “what”—our public wealth—disappears.”³²

Yet power is deeply rooted in the construction of work; and the cultural shaping of selves in work is deeply formative as well. Hence, Boyte argues that deep culture-power shifts will require transforming how people engage in and understand their everyday work. Ignoring this task, “removes the large institutions of our world from democratic action, organizing, and transformation,” and “ignores the power and authority that citizens can gain through [democratized public] work,” which has so often been drawn upon by those who have engaged in transformative politics throughout history.³³

Moreover, much research indicates that bureaucratic, passive, narrow, privatized work practices are a key part of what ails many people. If grassroots organizations are to effectively engage people in the suburbs, they will have to find ways of listening to and engaging these discontents and the aspirations that venture beyond them. Finally, a focus on transforming work holds promise to “democratize the organized knowledge systems”—higher education, communications, culture industries—that are central to contemporary culture-power.³⁴

As co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, Boyte has creatively collaborated with others in a variety of laboratories for democracy across a wide range of settings that include efforts to democratize public scholarship at the University of Minnesota and elsewhere; Public Achievement (a youth civic education initiative that engages students in “politics understood as an activity that negotiates diverse interests for the sake of creating things of broad public benefit”;³⁵

the Jane Addams School (which engages new immigrants and citizens in practices of community-based education in order “to free and cultivate the talents, cultures, and interests of people from diverse backgrounds to the commonwealth”;³⁶ the Lazarus Project (which has transformed a large Lutheran nursing home in ways that have introduced principles from broad-based organizing and have drawn the staff, residents, and families into a “public community” of dialogue and work that has led to numerous significant changes); and several others.

These projects—and much of the practical wisdom that Boyte formulates in his stories and analyses of them—are significant, informative, and inspiring even as they are relatively modest and still very vulnerable. They contribute to theorizing democratization by exemplifying important kinds of changes in institutions, culture, selves, and power that can indeed ensue as work is made more democratic internally and its purposes are reinterpreted and oriented toward democratic public relationships and public goods. Boyte and his co-creators locate and seize present sites of political possibility, engage them responsively rather than self-righteously, and set to “sweaty and muscular” work of the commonwealth tradition they remember and reenact in opposition to “the cultural and political force of the market [that] is like a tidal wave rolling across the world.”³⁷

Thus he bolsters the important critical claim that Habermasians often rely on a problematic “static theory of power, ignoring the interplay between large systems and everyday life, collapsing the lumpy, interactive quality of power dynamics even in situations of sharp inequality into granite-like relationships.”³⁸

Yet even as Boyte's work suggests important directions for democratization, I wonder if some of his debts to IAF organizing theory are not linked to certain limitations in his analysis as well. One of the virtues of the approaches to radical democracy under review is that they take significant strides toward building a more receptive politics that has had significant success at drawing a wide range of people to grassroots democratic practices. While there is much to recommend these changes, they come at a significant cost when they lead to an organizing culture that shies away from articulating more searching systemic criticism and radical reforms, in the name of staying close to “where people are.” This problem marks the kernel of truth in the “transformative populist” critique sketched above. This dampening appears to be most dramatic in Gecan, but is also present in Chambers and Boyte as well.³⁹

This wariness takes the form of markedly truncated analyses of market-state systemic pressures as they pertain to the durability, enhancement, and portability of the democratic spaces Boyte so admirably pursues. Some of his public work narratives end with qualifications that mark the threatening presence of such pressures, but these are never followed by careful extended analyses of these forces and the challenges they pose, nor subtle explorations of the kinds of macro political and economic changes that might be necessary to thwart them, nor (most importantly) suggestions about ways in which various modes of the “everyday politics” with which Boyte is associated might develop and extend themselves to begin to build the requisite political capacities, democratic coalitions, and larger experimental visions for moving in the direction of larger transformations that might in turn be more conducive to a commonwealth politics of micro-experimentation across institutions of civil society, state, and markets.

For example, Boyte concludes his discussion of Public Achievement by noting that there are “large challenges to sustaining and expanding” such efforts, including commercialization and technocracy in the schools, and the deleterious pressures related to high stakes academic testing (No Child Left Behind)—which, an evaluating team argues, threatens the very survival of this effort (126).⁴⁰

In passing, Boyte notes that the nursing home that was the site of the Lazarus Project was a nonprofit. How does the growing for-profit nursing care industry impact the prospects for sustaining and expanding similar projects? Toward the end of his penetrating discussion of advancing the democratic power of higher education, he notes that this power “is largely locked up”—due both to intensifying “marketplace thinking that defines students as customers and judges research only by its commercial utility,” as well as a deepening mythical meritocracy that entwines “growing economic inequalities [with] educational disparities”—and that higher education “is highly unlikely to change itself, from the inside alone.”⁴¹ Yet how might we begin to challenge and change the larger constellation of powers which have engendered these characteristics in order to provide a context more conducive to the democratic experimentation that Boyte and many others are exploring? And if this link is salient, shouldn't proponents of democratization strive to stimulate careful and sharp criticism of the larger deleterious forces, visions for transforming these forces, and place in the foreground of political dialogue questions concerning ways to engender political constituencies, capacities, relationships, powers, strategies, and critical-constructive visions that address these connections—even if this gives such work a more “progressive” stance?

These criticisms are not to diminish the force of Boyte's theoretical and practical innovations, but rather to suggest ways in which they might be developed to enhance the odds of further democratization. Moreover, my point is decidedly not that radical democracy needs a rigid transformative platform to orient all its efforts, nor that transformed markets ought to have no place in the mix. It is rather that since virtually every effort to advance democratization immediately faces severe resistance (and occasional support as well) from market pressures working in myriad ways, proponents of radical democracy need to proliferate careful far-reaching criticism and radical alternative horizons and paths of transition in connection with the concrete immediate work we do to increase living wages, create better job training programs, advance public work, etc.⁴²

We need to proliferate critiques and constructive alternatives (across a variety of scales and time-frames) that are offered not above, but in the fray: affirming contestation; soliciting the work of independent criticism and imaginative reconstruction from those newly drawn to practices of grassroots democracy; relentlessly striving to link far-ranging transformations to more immediate political challenges and engagements. Ultimately, to follow through on Boyte's own critique of those who reify systemic power, we must articulate theoretical analyses, practical political work, and local and larger scale experimentation, that demonstrates ways in which the freer spaces it is possible to open in the midst of bureaucracies and markets can survive and proliferate in ways that transform currently hegemonic practices until the “powers that be”—that render them so vulnerable—are no longer dominant.

Once more searching criticism and alternatives become constitutive aspects of democratic engagement, a more nuanced approach to the politics of protest will probably have to be invented as well. IAF grassroots politics developed significantly in oppositional response to radical democratic efforts that overplayed the politics of protest to the detriment of the many valuable insights and practices gleaned in community organizing in recent decades. Yet my sense is that, though Chambers insightfully discusses the need to move to and fro between political polarization and de-polarization, the IAF's oppositional stance in relation to protest too-often overplays the politics of cooperation and obscures some of what is valuable in disturbance. When they do, they become especially vulnerable to the vitiating traps of innocuous assimilation that Piven and Cloward identified. This stance shows up in the rather dismissive rhetorical posture that finds articulation in parts of Gecan's text, and also in what appears to be an overall trend in IAF politics away from the more dramatic modes of contestation of decades past and toward practices that currently greatly favor more cooperative modes. With deeper critiques and more expansive senses of possibility, political intensity might be generated that could in fact enhance the likelihood of a politics of intermittent political disturbance that might in turn (if conducted as part of a larger bag of cooperative and relationship building practices), enhance political power (along the lines of some of Piven and Cloward's arguments), solicit and energize engagement, and enhance the trickster sensibility that can evade the interest group frames that accompany the games grassroots democrats are often forced to play. I emphasize “might” twice because this possibility is promising but very much part of a more nuanced political art still “in progress”—still to be invented.

Looking at the engagement from another angle: The IAF's significant—if struggling—changes in local democratic cultures; their relative effectiveness at shifting resources and power downward at a time when the politics of redistribution is mostly shifting resources and power upward; their non-bureaucratic mode of broad-based organizing; their increasing (if slow) development of statewide and regional political capacities—all of these developments merit a searching engagement with this politics on the part of those oriented toward more traditional modes of “progressive” politics. At the very least, the future of democratic engagement requires a more open and reflective conversation than has yet happened between proponents of IAF politics and those closer to a politics of disturbance.

Responding to Race

Mark R. Warren's Dry Bones Rattling provides an insightful theoretically informed analysis of IAF organizing in Texas. It is exemplary for the way it probes complexities and dilemmas of grassroots democracy and suggests new directions. Those interested in questions of race, power, social capital, bridging divides, congregations in political action, and grassroots leadership will find Warren's book an engaging read. In the present context, I focus briefly on his discussions of race and leadership. Each is significant in its own right and offers insights that bear indirectly upon the issues at hand.

As Warren compellingly argues, there are few recent grassroots efforts that have been as successful at bringing blacks, Latinos and Latinas, and whites into enduring political relationships—forging respect, trust, dialogue, and collective action around common goods. What seems to facilitate bridging racial divides—as well as drawing creative strength from differences—in IAF organizing across the U.S. appears to be the solidarity nurtured by focusing on working towards common goods. This enables relationships to form that move people beyond the walls of raced communities to listen to and begin to explore the world they share from the vantage points of others—their stories, neighborhoods, religious institutions—situated across the fraught lines that pervade U.S. history. Until the past decade, when the IAF did talk about race, it generally bracketed broad-ranging discussions of the most troubled differences, and focused instead on specific and addressable issues where race is salient: racial gaps in schools, infrastructure allocations, housing, discriminatory bank lending, etc. This allows the divide to be “segmented” in ways that—combined with common work—make the issue less threatening to many and less intractable as well.⁴³

Yet focusing on commonality and segmentation in order to work obliquely on deeper, broader, and affectively saturated problems of difference has problematic limits as well as advantages. For example, Warren recounts how in 1991, the IAF affiliate in Fort Worth initially failed to respond when a white skinhead murdered a black man and was sentenced only to probation, thus angering many African Americans (and also many Whites and Hispanics). Warren argues that among the numerous reasons for this failure of racial understanding in the IAF was fact that the Texas IAF network up to that point “seldom discussed issues of race or racism directly. Nor did the organization provide a forum through which Hispanic and Anglo leaders could develop an appreciation for the historical experiences of the African American community.” Thus when the injustices “forced the issue of racism so directly, [the organization] was not prepared to act.”⁴⁴

Warren argues that, “by avoiding open discussion of racism both internally and externally, relationship building is likely to remain fairly superficial.”⁴⁵ In the following decade, responding to Blacks pushing for discussions of race, the Texas network brought in numerous black scholars (many radical, some provoking heated discussions) to bimonthly seminars on race that most organizers and leaders found useful.

Warren argues that it is too soon to draw firm conclusions, yet suggests that the key to negotiating race seems to be in sustaining (by constantly readjusting) the tension between emphasizing commonality and difference (one might make a similar argument concerning protest and more cooperative engagement). Many leaders in Texas also emphasize the importance of action, for the way it draws different people (with different emphases on commonality and difference) into relations that are productive and enduring as well as critical. Critically reflective action can facilitate a politically more creative (because reciprocally informative) relation between short-term time horizons pertaining to urgent issues, and vaster time horizons concerning themes such as race which stretch from the deep past and threaten the future. Collective action on immediate issues can enact more hopeful relationships across differences and produce changes that open beyond the intractable yet impotent fury that can be generated when centuries-old racism acquires an aura of immutability. Simultaneously, the vaster temporal frame provides a lens that is often essential for identifying and framing issues, informing stronger deeper relationships, and formulating more powerfully responsive political and economic aims.

It is not difficult to discern important resonances between Warren's discussion of the connections between action on specific issues and broader more searching critical reflection (as well as the connections between short- and long-term horizons, commonality and difference, and cooperation and agonism), on the one hand, and my discussion concerning the need to open broader and deeper interrogations of politics and economics in relation to struggles around specific issues, on the other. In each case, the issue is how to entwine different elements that are central to the structure of human historical experience and political possibility, in ways that help nurture durable and powerful democratic relationships that generate—and evolve in light of—careful practical judgments. The aim suggested by Warren is to work beyond “either-or” structures of theory and practice toward creative tensional articulations of “both-and” through which radical democratic communities might engender futures that respond better to questions concerning how the world might better become different.

One wishes for a similarly attentive discussion of the ways in which gender relations are simultaneously transformed by and problematically at work in IAF democratic practices—but there is unfortunately very little in any of these books.⁴⁶

This may appear to be an unimportant oversight, given that women frequently take powerful leadership roles in IAF organizations in ways that radically transfigure gender power structures and performances. Yet the lack of attention to gender in these texts—and the parallel lack of serious discussion of gender within IAF organizing—renders less visible and appreciated the powerful transformative potential of such organizing, and simultaneously tends to push to the margins of public inquiry ways in which vestiges of gendered power might continue to be operative in these organizations—whether this takes the form of a relative paucity of collective reflection on gender power compared with race, class, ethnicity, and religion, or manifests itself in difficulties having open discussions concerning elements of a certain “machismo” that sometimes haunt organizing cultures.

The work by explicitly feminist writers and activists concerning community organizing, such as the collection of essays in Naples, contains extended and insightful discussions of ways in which such activism has contributed to reconceptualizing categories like “mothering,” “family,” “work,” “politics,” and so forth.⁴⁷

Similarly, such scholarship attends to the dynamic ways in which critical awareness and transformative practice tends to develop among women located on the underside of race, class, and gender power. It seems rather obvious that such reflective work is integral not only to transforming political thinking, but also to organizing more democratically and efficaciously to confront power and powerlessness in everyday life.⁴⁸

Leadership, Authority, and Responsive Grassroots Engagement

Associated with all efforts to engender political futures are questions of leadership and authority. Given the plurality, contestability, unequal capabilities and interest, and finitude of the human condition, what modes of authority might better inform radical democratic judgment and action? For such action will inevitably fail to achieve consensus, involve some in more frequent participation and more powerful positions than others (at least for periods of time), harbor little-recognized encroachments and exclusions, and so forth. Warren notes that many discussions of radical democracy conjure away such questions with illusions of “ultra-democracy” that would be so totally egalitarian, participatory, open, consensual, and decentralized that authority, power, and leadership would utterly disappear. Yet in practice, groups that deny the presence of authority and leadership typically become controlled by cliques that are all the less democratically accountable for being unacknowledged. Moreover, efforts to work in ultra-democratic fashion tend to be ineffective (and thus unattractive to most people) insofar as they fail to cultivate the leadership of those who develop the “skills, knowledge, and abilities” of what the IAF calls the “arts of politics”; such as how to “weigh alternatives, negotiate differences, analyze power dynamics, … strategize,” build relationships, solicit new participants and leaders, etc.⁴⁹

Generally, these abilities are attained only through long-term practice and reflection. By eschewing all efforts to organize in modes that cultivate, respect, and draw upon the leadership of those who have acquired abilities for radical democracy, groups tend to squander one of their most precious resources, and in so doing greatly inhibit their ability to develop collective power and vision for vibrant and enduring democratic practice.

For the IAF, in contrast, as Warren illustrates, radical democracy centrally involves developing grassroots leadership and authority, both within their networks and in the relationship between these organizations and their broader communities. The idea is not to create a hierarchy in which some rule over others, but to organize internally so that those with more developed political capacities are empowered to lead democratically in ways that aim fundamentally at soliciting and developing new participation and leadership for an ever broadening and deepening radical democratic community. Thus, Warren argues, the craft of radical democratic practice hinges upon “the dynamic between authority and participation which provides the driving force behind IAF organizing.”⁵⁰

Not only is participation explicitly organized in ways that are inflected by leadership and authority, leadership and authority are being reconfigured such that their raison d'être lies in the enhancement of participatory democratic engagement. Just as commonality and difference, immediacy and longer-term vision, and agon and cooperation, must be entwined with and pass through one another in order to cultivate deeper democratic relationships and vision, as IAF would have it, radical democratic engagement develops best in tensional relation with notions of leadership and authority that are themselves re-oriented toward radical democratic aspirations.

This theme is crucial to democratic theory. One of the paradoxes of radical democracy thus far (and foreseeably?) is that in each of its insurgent formations it actively involves only a small fraction of the society in and with which it struggles. Radical democracy is perhaps always far more aspiration than facticity. (For example, even Chambers' visionary vision of a world in which IAF and other grassroots efforts were to grow magnificently, so that perhaps 3 to 5 percent of those in the U.S. were seriously engaged and beginning to create fundamental changes, still leaves 95 percent much less engaged.) Such considerations led Hannah Arendt to conceptualize engaged political spaces as at best “islands in a sea or as oases in a desert” of political inaction.⁵¹

Thus, even under radically democratic circumstances where political spaces were genuinely open to the engagement of all, she imagined, many would not be drawn to political life, and politics would remain the activity of a “self-selecting elite.”

Arendt thought that the problem of reconciling equality and authority, which she called “one of the most serious problems of all modern politics,” could be addressed in a limited fashion (both within politics, in terms of those with more authority than others, and between the self-selecting elite and the “self-excluded” who chose to refrain from politics) by a pyramidal council system that would provide numerous real possibilities for political participation for those “from all walks of life who have a real taste for public freedom [and care for the common world beyond their private interests] and cannot be ‘happy’ without it.”⁵²

Hierarchical authority would be formed not from below or from above, but rather through a process in which politically engaged equals at each level selected those among them who would be delegated to the next level up.

Whatever the weaknesses of Arendt's analysis and suggestions, she illuminates more honestly than many the probable undemocratic remainder in even the most radically democratic efforts, spaces, and institutions. Rather than seeking salvation from the conflict between democracy and authority in a significantly mythical (because highly manipulative) vision of general suffrage which would conceal the tensional entwinement of equality and authority beneath the veil of authority-constituted-from-the-bottom (the unengaged voter), Arendt suggests a regulative ideal of political authority based on a system of public spaces that are genuinely open at the bottom, and constitute and populate pyramids of authority on the basis of an equality-based-on-engagement. Those engaged in such politics have a responsibility to care for the interests of those who are not, but their legitimacy ultimately hinges upon the openness and equality of public spaces and activities that are confessedly elite (and she is rather comfortable with this fact) rather than mythically egalitarian in relation to the whole of society. Indeed, in addition to a responsibility toward those unengaged in public life, Arendt theorizes a need to protect public spaces from those ensconced in private passions and interests. Thus, democratic politics requires an authority that exceeds equality in relation to the unengaged, even if it populates a pyramidal structure through egalitarian processes.

Analogously, the IAF, on Warren's reading, grants that there is an element of authority that is simultaneously necessary (at least in the present context) for the flourishing of radical democracy and yet in tension with egalitarian ideals. Yet on Warren's account, the distinction between those politically incapacitated by a sea of anti-political powers (such as global capitalism, corporatized media, the mega state, consumer culture, etc.) and those cultivating capacities requisite for political life is more graduated, porous, and movable than Arendt thinks it is. Therefore politicalness is a continuum that is simultaneously more endangered and more hopeful—than Arendt theorizes in On Revolution. In this light, many in IAF take politicalness to be paradoxically in need of both more authoritative protection and more receptive activity.

Effective democratic organizing in contemporary times is a difficult, endangered, and nearly lost art. Hence, in order to increase the odds of sustaining vital radical democratic organizations, most in the IAF believe it is desirable to imbue their networks with “a hierarchy of grass-roots leadership” skilled at negotiating the difficult tasks of cultivating democratic practices in starkly undemocratic times.⁵³

Typically, the modes of organizing—relational meetings, house meetings, action teams on various issues, modes of engaging establishment figures, conducting power analyses, the basic structure of assemblies, etc.—are disproportionately informed by organizers and local leaders who have developed within the radical democratic culture of the IAF. Positions of leadership are generally filled through broad informal networks of consultation in which those who are currently respected leaders have disproportionate authority and weight in the deliberations. (It is important to note that IAF authority concerns primarily the modes of democratic organizing: issues and concrete political strategies tend to be determined in a much more grassroots fashion. Yet authority in the former domain leaks into the latter.) This is particularly true in the early stages of an organization's development, and becomes significantly less so as a large pool of people with political experience develops over time. Warren does an excellent job identifying and analyzing the specific processes, modes of accountability, and dangers of IAF modes of authority in relation to democratic participation. Such authority is partly aimed at protecting organizations from the incompetence of those with significantly less democratic experience. Thus, the IAF justifies a democratic culture that acknowledges an element of informal authority and inequality—albeit very dynamic, mutable, decreasing significantly over time, limited to core questions concerning modes of organizing, and aimed at enhancing equality in practice—even among those engaged.

Yet Warren's account also reveals a radicalized notion of receptive responsibility that informs IAF authority. Because most in the IAF are unsatisfied with a mere openness in political process, authority itself is centrally oriented around transgressing the boundary between people who are apolitical and those who are not. That is, it is fundamentally oriented and legitimated in light of ideals of soliciting, provoking, and receiving those who are disengaged, and participating in developing their political capacities. Thus, from this perspective, the primary purpose of authority—and the locus of politics—is relentlessly to work the limit between those engaged and those who are not, so that it becomes radically less authoritative (neither manipulative nor “self-selected”), and more a site of solicitation of new voices, visions, and energies that will creatively alter the course of IAF's own development over time. Those persons and modes that do this best have more authority, for politics thus interpreted is not simply an activity of engaged equals accountable to each other, but also an activity receptively accountable to the others, ceaselessly attempting to practically interrogate and widen the limits of who is involved, what issues are brought forth, styles of engagement, etc.

Warren's account provocatively shows how the dynamic tensions between democratic equality and authority, as well as protection and responsiveness, are negotiated in ways that are both promising and fraught with dangers. He shows in detail that cannot be reproduced here how there are numerous democratic checks on the power of leaders, on the one hand, yet not insignificant possibilities for abuse and obstruction, on the other. Both practically and theoretically this issue is clearly a work in progress that will likely modulate in light of new political experience. Such authority is dangerous, insofar as it can always become a pretext for increasingly deaf, immutable, and deleterious modes of power (perhaps it always does, to some extent). More will need to be done to enhance the receptivity of IAF politics to questions and challenges concerning some of its core ideas, particularly in response to some other types of insurgent democracy, modes of political protest, coalitioning with non-IAF groups, the linkages between specific “issues” and broader “problems,” etc. This more dialogical culture will be enhanced to the extent that the IAF deepens its commitment to and capacities for strengthening member organizations in ways that affirm the autonomy (potentially sometimes in tension with the broader organization) of different member organizations' visions and actions. It will be further enhanced insofar as the IAF moves in directions more affirmative of coalitional work—in which it is not the center or the umbrella—with other nonmember groups. Moreover, the IAF would do well to create periodic forums where its most authoritative modes and principles of democratic organizing can be discussed, drawn into question, and potentially reformed. With these important caveats, however, I take the spirit of these emergent theories of radical democratic authority to be hopeful insofar as they may be a condition for transgressing power-drenched contexts of depoliticization in ways that solicit and empower the voices and actions of strangers to political engagement. What Warren's work suggests quite compellingly is that the future of radical democracy likely hinges on the ability to face and dynamically (re)negotiate the tensions between authority and wildly unpredictable grassroots engagement.

Concluding Reflections

But is there a future for radical democracy? And if so, what might it be?

From the perspective of a trickster politics of tensions, the future of democracy must always remain significantly in question. Democratic ethics and politics hinges on not knowing the future of democracy too well. I take this to be a sensibility that many of the best grassroots organizers repeatedly try to cultivate. Our being in common depends on it.

But there is an even more haunting intonation in the questions above: Is there any future at all for radical democracy? Sheldon Wolin, the radical democratic theorist who (along with Arendt) most inspires many IAF organizers, ends the second edition of Politics and Vision with great doubts.⁵⁴

In the context of a growing imperial mega-state that fuses gargantuan governmental and private corporate modes of power, Wolin argues that democracy today can at best be only “fugitive”—episodic, on the run, generally overwhelmed by greater forces. Perhaps this is all it ever has been or can be?

When I put this question to a leading IAF organizer Ernesto Cortez in August, 2004, he seemed to brush this conclusion aside, noting a couple of recent assemblies of over 10,000 people, and invoking the immanent possibility of much more in the near future.⁵⁵

Interpreting freely, I think he implied something like this: Radical democracy is less an “optimism of the will” (though it is this too) than a refusal to accept depoliticized and subjugative modes of power as the basic frame of things. It is not just a refusal of the long-term finality of this frame, but a refusal that seeks to lodge itself in the near-term as well, searching to muster unexpected powers to alter the present course of events. It is a refusal to take the corporate mega-state on its own terms—terms which would extinguish precisely the question of democracy's future. In other words, it is the determination to keep alive the question of democracy's possibility at each moment—and to do so strategically and politically, because lacking political initiatives and exemplifications the question quickly becomes empty and impotent.

Yet the call to initiative and exemplification is a call not to a narrowly confined pragmatic politics, but rather to a politics that crafts itself through a constellation of vital tensions that facilitate an intensification of widening political engagement connecting work on pressing issues to farther horizons of democratic transformation. In a world where the rules of the game are densely established in institutions, practices, and souls, a trickster politics is needed that is responsive, supple, and capable of fashioning new and powerful practices even as it masters the arts of much more cramped games. This sensibility is at heart of what I take to be most admirable in the practice and theory of IAF-inspired organizing. Its implications are just beginning to emerge, and they may yet contribute to gathering powers necessary to change the world more radically than some critics suspect.