I agree wholeheartedly with Yoshie - networks and databases are essential. They pose rather different problems, however. The Internet particularly changes the possibilities for networking, and to a lesser extent for databases.
Networks are in part personal and in that sense cannot be "lost" back to the top-down managers. Furthermore, both tactical skills and some political wisdom are inevitably learned in even the most top-down campaigns. And some people learn that they have the capacity to be leaders.
For all its many flaws, the ABB campaign was able to get people involved, in part because it had concrete aims and was plausibly winnable (basic lessons for organizing going back to Alinsky). For better or worse we have at least two such campaigns facing us, to "bring the troops home now" (coming soon to a streetcorner near you) and to "save social security"), neither as cut and dry as an election but both more concrete than, say, opposing globalization; and possibly a third to keep Scalia from being made Chief Justice (and a fourth to oppose the draft, and a fifth...)
As I suggested on a different list, a "map" of the new territory would be helpful - who are all the groups who mobilized people, who volunteered, how much overlap is there, who funded them, etc. And, who got the databases!
--Paul
Julio wrote:<snip>My neighbors, friends, family and myself -- all people who live off our work -- began supporting Dean. Then we supported Kerry, consciously, deliberately, with time and other resources. We traveled, we spent time in Ohio and Pennsylvania, doing clerical and other menial work, phone banking, knocking on doors, turning the vote out, etc. We collaborated with a bunch of superb people (mostly women), union officers, plain workers, young and old volunteers. These networks are latent and can be reactivated when need be.If the criterion is the number of votes attained, how can they call Kerry's support a failure?
What did rank-and-file Kerry supporters on the left achieve by campaigning for John Kerry, registering voters and getting them to vote? Did they fail or succeed? What are the criteria of success and failure in this instance? The criteria are (A) whether rank-and-file Kerry supporters on the left have kept their own databases of names and contact information (especially those of "a bunch of superb people [mostly women], union officers, plain workers, young and old volunteers") that they have collected "while doing clerical and other menial work, phone banking, knocking on doors, turning the vote out, etc.," rather than turning over all products of their labor to the John Kerry campaign or the Democratic Party or union or liberal non-profit bureaucrats; and (B) whether they have already planned for post-election activities to keep the networks that they built alive.
In politics, the most important products are databases and networks. Build them and maintain control of them for your own purposes, and you have a foundation for independent organizing on which you can build. If you have built them and given them away to the Democratic Party or union or liberal non-profit bureaucrats, however, you have let them alienate the products of your own labor from you. In that case, you worked (probably for free or cheap), and they profited. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
