Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Political Science

First Advisor

Mantena, Karuna

Abstract

AbstractAntinomies of Organizing This dissertation theorizes a problem that attends all attempts to form or deepen democracy, namely, the problem of democratic transitions. People are shaped as political subjects by their participation in the institutions that govern their lives; their analyses of society, their self-understandings, and their political capacities are determined in large part by their participation in the state, the family, the workplace, and the market. When these institutions are oppressive, they may undermine participants’ capacities to engage in political action, to recognize and identify the sources of their oppression, and to self-govern. They may also undermine their sense of their own political efficacy. But the agency of the oppressed is crucial to attempts to democratize oppressive institutions. Therefore, democratization requires a process of personal transformation that gives oppressed people the capacity to resist and reshape the institutions that oppress them. How can oppressed people develop these capacities, given the ways in which the conditions of their lives constrain their development as democratic agents? For organizers—leaders who unite ordinary people in political organizations in pursuit of shared goals—this is a perennial problem whose resolution requires work and experimentation. Turning to the praxis of political organizers in the American organizing tradition, which stretches from the industrial labor movement of the late 19th century through contemporary movements for racial and economic justice, I ask, What forms of leadership and organization are necessary to the process of developing democratic agency? And how can these forms of leadership and organization avoid further reinscribing existing relations of domination and subordination? In turning to the American organizing tradition for answers to these questions, I treat organizers as political theorists. With Stuart Hall, I understand theory as an analysis of the historical world that provides a basis for transforming it. On this understanding of theory, organizers theorize not only when they articulate their understandings of democracy or freedom, but also when they craft campaigns and organize protests. Theory, thus understood, guides practice, but it is also invariably shaped and reshaped by the contingencies that emerge in the course of political action. Thus, with Joshua Simon, I take a “problem-centered” approach to political theory, which begins from the problems particular individual or organizations were trying to solve, the obstacles they faced, and the decisions they made in response in order to reconstruct their political theories. The chapters of my dissertation reconstruct the answers that five organizers, representing overlapping traditions of party, labor, community, and social movement organizing, offered to the problem of democratic transitions. Chapter One considers the role of theory in making democratic agents through the praxis of V.I. Lenin and William Z. Foster, a Leninist leader of the American industrial labor movement and the Communist Party of the U.S.A. Against realist and radical democratic political theorists who argue that democratic organizing is non-ideological, I argue that theory, understood as ideology, is necessary to resolving the problem of democratic transitions. Chapter Two turns from the height of the industrial labor movement to a crucial nexus of labor and civil rights organizing in the United States: the Highlander Folk School, a residential school for labor and civil rights organizers. I reconstruct Highlander co-founder Myles Horton’s theory of democratic education as a response to the problem of democratic transitions that reveals certain forms of hierarchy to be indispensable to emancipatory political projects, while suggesting practices that can prevent these hierarchies from becoming forms of domination. Chapters Three and Four turn to two theories of organization that deal specifically with the psychological and social legacies of racial oppression, both of which are influenced by uplift ideology, an elitist response to the problem of democratic transitions. Chapter Three reconstructs W.E.B. Du Bois’s theory of race organization. I show that Du Bois thought racism could only be addressed by preserving and strengthening race through organizations led by and for members of a particular race. Du Bois’s theory of organization simultaneously embraced aspects of uplift ideology and recognized race organization as a crucial means of developing black Americans’ distinctive cultural contributions, which could be the basis for a critique and transformation of American society. Chapter Four concludes with the praxis of civil rights organizer Ella Baker. While Baker, like Du Bois, was influenced by uplift, she came to thoroughly reject it, even as she retained from her missionary background the insight that people change through sustained participation in organizations. Her praxis offers a model of organization that recognizes the organizer’s leadership while unraveling their authority over time.

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