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PRACTICAL RADICALS by Deepak Bhargava

PRACTICAL RADICALS

Seven Strategies To Change the World

by Deepak Bhargava & Stephanie Luce

Pub Date: Nov. 7th, 2023
ISBN: 9781620978214
Publisher: The New Press

Two community organizers suggest strategies for advancing progressive agendas.

It’s long been observed that the American left fights battles, while the right fights wars. Wars are won by strategy, and “strategy can be taught, and strategists can get better with practice,” write Bhargava and Luce, who teach at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. One way to get better is to drop assumptions about the moral superiority of one’s cause, abandoning purity of method along the way. It’s hard to forge a united front when there’s a tendency to splinter over the tiniest points of doctrine; when that happens, the “overdogs” win. The civil rights movement is remembered for marches and sit-ins, seemingly impromptu actions, but these were carefully coordinated even as the strategists behind them lobbied legislators, recruited allies, and propagandized to score moral victories. Disruption has its place, the authors write, but so does electoral change, as well as the “momentum model,” which blends action with organization building as organizers “seek out polarizing fights that attract a passionate minority of intense supporters and build a majority of passive support for the cause among the mass public.” Such movements are easily built, relatively speaking, thanks to social media, as was seen with Occupy Wall Street, but more useful still are movements based on mutual care, as with the network that formed around the AIDS epidemic. As the authors argue convincingly, a successful labor movement should step beyond questions of pay and hours and instead examine matters such as structural racism, educating while agitating. The authors close with many pages of workbook-like exercises—e.g., how to build a tenants’ rights network, strategies for reducing homelessness, and how to create a “coalition…between labor, community, faith, and student organizations to fight for a living wage.”

Progressive activists will want to dog-ear, underline, and pore over this well-conceived handbook.