Base-building is inherently messy

So get over it and start organizing

Pink Sheets Study by Rebecca Harp

One time I was talking with a worker who was involved in building an organizing committee at her workplace, a giant tech company. She was expressing some jealousy about another union whose photos she’d seen on social media. That union was focused on organizing another enormous company, but in the service industry, and had recently pulled off a national day of action where workers at many sites walked out for the day. She described the other union’s efforts as coordinated, powerful, and inspiring. Then she compared them to the efforts in her own workplace, which felt, to her, like trying to push a boulder up a hill – slow, difficult, and sometimes hopeless.

Despite this worker’s perceptions, the two organizations were at roughly similar stages of development. Both unions were trying to organize companies with hundreds of thousands of workers, and at that time, had built support among a few thousand. Both were, and are, at the base of the mountain, facing the task of climbing miles of rocky terrain, with lots of risk of stumbling and falling.

There is always a gap between how organizations feel from the inside and how they look on the outside. A year or two ago I reached out to a fellow staff organizer and friend to let him know that a rally he had helped organize looked great on social media. But I added: “I bet it was chaotic up until it started.” He laughed and said yes: their space permit had nearly been revoked about 10 minutes beforehand and a couple of speakers had flaked at the last minute. But the photos did look great, and the vast majority of people who attended the rally wouldn’t have known about any of this messiness.

It is well-known that social media sets up all kinds of unrealistic expectations - for what our bodies should look like, for how easy a recipe will be to make, for what a morning routine looks like, the list goes on. What is less understood is that this is true not just for individuals, but organizations as well. There is always at least some chaos behind any seemingly well-coordinated rally and any smiling group photo.

But because not very many people are aware of this inevitable messiness, when they enter unions or other social movement organizations, they tend to have expectations of these organizations that don’t reflect the reality of how they actually function. They think that being in the organization will primarily involve doing the activities they saw on social media: being on picket lines, holding rallies, etc., when the day-to-day is a lot less flashy. My days as a professional organizer mostly involve having one-on-one conversations, going to meetings, and looking at spreadsheets. It’s less typical for there to be signs and bullhorns involved.

It’s not just that this work is more mundane than social media would make it seem; again, it’s also a lot messier. And this is not an accident: I think that base-building organizations, especially when you’re doing it right, have an inherently high potential for conflict among their members.

Base-building organizations aim to bring people together across divisions like race, class, nationality, and political affiliation. These are deep divisions, and so bridging them creates a high potential for conflict and misunderstanding. Sometimes people bring harmful baggage with them into this work of bridging - like racism and xenophobia - that more experienced organizers need to work with them to undo. Other times they will bring another unhelpful tendency - what Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò calls “deference politics” - which, roughly, is the idea that the most-oppressed person in the room needs to be deferred to on every matter. While often well-intentioned - an effort to correct for the historical and ongoing injustice of wrongly dismissing marginalized people’s viewpoints - total, uncritical deference is problematic as well: it puts marginalized people on a pedestal. A marginalized person may (gasp!) have bad ideas that need to be challenged, and if the norms of an organization involve uncritical deference, conflicts will arise elsewhere – for example, in the fallout of implementing that person’s bad ideas. Most of us aren’t used to being in diverse spaces precisely because our society is deeply segregated. So it makes sense that there will be a huge learning curve to not only co-existing with others of different races, nationalities, and classes, but to actively collaborating across these lines. This is true not only for people who are racist and xenophobic but also for those who are trying not to be.

Another source of conflict and mess that stems from doing base-building correctly is that, particularly in organizations where the base is composed of people from poor and racialized backgrounds, people come in with real trauma. A not insignificant number of the organizers involved in the tenant union I work with have experienced homelessness, for example. And trauma follows you around, making you hyper-vigilant where you don’t need to be. Someone with a history of trauma might come into an organization and have a short fuse in interactions with others, or they might conflate healthy discomfort with being made to feel unsafe.¹ This is especially challenging because organizing involves pushing ourselves and others out of our comfort zones.

So if a base-building organization is completely conflict-free, and it is only doing the sexier work of public rallies and dramatic actions and not the more mundane “spadework” of building organization, it may actually be a signal that the organization is not successfully base-building. The lack of any conflict could also be a signal that the target base happens to be extremely homogeneous, or is more privileged and has been less exposed to the traumas that come along with being poor and racialized. In these cases, the project of base-building will be less useful for social transformation; this is because it does not seek to overcome the barriers that systematically divide the working class.

There are other sources of mess too. Because true base-building organizations involve a lot of mundane work and come with high conflict potential - and because people who enter them are often not expecting this - too few people hold too great a share of the work. It is not uncommon for new members to enter an organization with a lot of enthusiasm only to back away as soon as they get a glimpse of the mess behind the curtain. This generates additional mess: with too-few people doing too much of the work, the ball gets dropped, tasks get forgotten, and plans may be poorly conceived or executed.

How do we overcome this problem - of many people’s expectations of base-building organizations being perpetually misaligned with reality? When it comes to this gap in more familiar cases, the internet has offered a solution: be more “authentic” in posting. When you take a selfie, don’t crop out the pile of laundry on the floor; don’t use the filter that smooths out your blemishes; etc. The thought is that posting our mess not only makes us more relatable but helps establish more realistic expectations for those who see our content.

However well this guidance works on the individual level – count me skeptical! – unions and other social movement organizations cannot simply post the mess. If the social media update for the rally my friend helped organize had been something like: “OOPS! A couple of our speakers flaked but we tried our best!!!!” that would reveal organizational weaknesses to management at the workers’ company, who could then use that information to exploit the union’s vulnerabilities. There are higher stakes to looking coordinated and organized, or for figuratively cropping out the messy pile of laundry on the floor, for organizations that are going up against some of society’s most powerful figures and institutions.

So if organizations can’t simply post the mess, what can be done? One important step is to start recognizing the difference between necessary and unnecessary conflict, and working to minimize the latter. One way that I have seen unnecessary conflict arise is when an organizational culture over-emphasizes political-ideological labels; for example, when people spend endless amounts of time arguing about whether they are anarcho-syndicalist or Leninist or social democratic.² People mean so many different things by these labels, and often we waste time talking past one another when we use them. Organizations can minimize conflict here by committing to excise many terms used to describe political ideology and just speak plainly about the ideologies’ core commitments. Another source of unnecessary conflict is widespread reluctance to move beyond text-based means of communication and just call people or talk to them in person. It’s always easier to be misinterpreted and accidentally cause offense in a text-based chat than it is in person, where you can gather additional information about where someone is coming from through tone and body language. It’s no coincidence that the messiest organizations I have seen or been part of are ones where members primarily communicate via Discord, Slack, or Signal (or even worse: where people get into debates about political ideology on these platforms). Committing to primarily communicate via live conversations can go a long way toward eliminating unnecessary conflict.

While we take steps to identify and reduce unnecessary conflict, we must also prepare ourselves and others for the general fact that some degree of mess and chaos is inevitable, and that conflict can actually be an indicator that we are doing something right. This can help organizers go into the critical work of base-building with their eyes wide open, which will hopefully help them stick with it in the long haul.

1. For a thought-provoking and much more in-depth analysis of the relationship between conflict, discomfort, and safety, see Sarah Schulman’s Conflict is Not Abuse.

2. A favorite quote in our household, from WEB DuBois: “Call this Socialism, Communism, Reformed Capitalism, or Holy Rolling. Call it anything, but get it done.”