How the government is helping young people to learn about community organising

For a long time it puzzled me that my kids and most of their peers grew up a-political. Now I realise I was not being very bright about it. For a start, I needed to turn the reflection around: it was probably as much that politics was 'a-young-people'.

And, as I suddenly realised while reading a marvellous, passionate article by Suzanne Moore in today's Guardian, for a long time they didn't have a cause of their own. For myself and my brothers and some friends, as we bemoaned our youngsters' apparent disinterest, it feels in retrospect like we expected them to take up other causes, which is not necessarily an easy route to early political awareness.

Moore writes of excitement and energy in the current student protests. No surprise that, as she says,

'these kids are able to quickly organise new kinds of creative chaos'.

And as we'd expect, the learning they are going through is invaluable:

'These people have discovered the politics of self-organisation quickly. Some of what was going on was the painfully slow but necessary business of process. How does such a diverse group make rules for itself?'

What interests me even more is the sophistication of their disquiet: it does not seem to be raw anger or outrage - the kind of last-ditch, backs-to-the-wall desperation that characterised the miners' strike for instance.

What seems to be happening is a calculated rejection of the kind of political attitude - imitated across the country by the embarrassing complacency of the Haves - that has no qualms in dumping ordinary people perceived to be incapable of organising their own resistance. In some ways the students' resistance is perverse, in that there is nothing anarchic about it:

'their main contention is wanting access to state institutions.'

We are being governed by two political leaders who exude contempt for anyone not swimming in the mainstream, and seem ignorant of the risks of their lofty disdain. If Moore is right and young people make the clearest demonstration that this politics is morally unacceptable, I for one will find it very inspiring.

And it would be pleasing if in a few years' time we can look back at today's learning about the organisation of resistance as providing the platform for a revitalisation of community politics. That would resonate sweetly with the rhetoric of big society.

 

Comments

[PN Peterson]

As I follow Big Society from the western side of the pond, Cameron's loose interchanging of Alinsky and Burke in reference to community building continues to amaze me.

The Alinskyite "Have"/"Have Not" rhetoric appears in this post too. Of course, Alinsky also employed a third "class": the "Have a little/Want more". This paradigm is ridiculous for several reasons:
1. It establishes a zero sum scenario tending in a certain direction. To be a "have not" implies that only a "have" has what you need/want. There is no creative agency or responsibility placed on the "have not" to want something else or different. They are, by nature of the paradigm, wholly dependent on the "haves". For where else can I go as a "have not" than to a "have"?

2. It further structures a relationship in such a way, that the goal is to become a "have", but in so becoming, one has arisen to be the central part of the socio-economic problem. For what else could a "have not" want than to become a "have"?

Obviously, Alinsky utilized this rhetoric to great effect, but he was never quite clear as to what he thought about actual socio-economic mobility. Of course he was the all-seeing presence, who could lead "have nots" and "have a little/want more" into some promised land...of becoming a "have"?