Fitness, Practice, and Social Change

A central component of any change process – personal change or organizational change – is the concept of practice.

— Ng’ethe Maina and Staci Haines, The Transformative Power of Practice

I've been thinking a lot about practice recently. My current practice is pretty good: on weekdays, I get up, exercise almost every day, work at a job that is fulfilling and that I generally enjoy, eat good and reasonably healthy food, drink good beer, go to bed. I generally take enough down time on the weekends to recharge and keep in house in order, and I spend enough time with my spouse and kids to maintain good relationships with them. Over the years I've learned how to respond to most difficult situations with patience, humility and compassion instead of anger, frustration and insecurity. In Maina and Haines's terminology, I've been intentional enough about changing my practice that my default practice now aligns pretty well with my "present-day values, politics, [and what I] care most about" (I should also note that I have been lucky/privileged enough not to have experienced the kind of trauma that can lead people, for reasons of immediate survival, to develop practices that in the long run are not healthy/aligned with their values/etc.)

Still, there are things that I would like to do more of: writing (beyond what I do at my job), composing and playing music, and being more involved in local political work. To some degree, these are limited by the number of hours in the day, but I recognize that if I want to find the time to spend even a few hours more on these activities, I need to change my daily practice.

I've also been thinking about practice a lot because I recently, largely by accident, became part of a fascinating and compelling online community of people who attended one of the institutions of higher education that made up my somewhat checkered higher-ed career. Over the past six months, this community — originally devoted almost entirely to witty banter mocking the seriousness of official alumni publications — has become equal parts comedy improv troupe, free-ranging discussion forum, and on-demand support group for any number of issues, with a good dash of exhibitionism, flirtatiousness and hedonism ("drink threads" are de rigeur on weekends, and common during the week) thrown in.

One of the things that I find especially fascinating about this community is how people have started using it as a sort of accountability mechanism to change their practice. As in, literally, people will post about something that they intend to do (but might be worried they won't actually follow through on), in order to be "held accountable" by the group.

This is most noticable in a spinoff group devoted to fitness. And, even without having had a conscious desire to improve my own fitness practice, I have noticed that the ritual of posting my daily workout to the fitness group, reading other's workouts (at all levels — from starting to get off the couch to qualifying for national triathalons), and us all encouraging each other with comments and "likes," has increased the length of my runs, the intensity of my gym workouts, and my curiousity about other forms of exercise (I've even flirted with the idea of re-learning how to swim).

The world of fitness, of course, as both a social phenomenon and a capitalist industry, has done an exceptional job figuring out how to create this kind of culture of accountability and encouragement. The kind of camraderie formed at races, in zumba and spin and yoga classes, etc., is crucial to the industry's profitability and growth — and this has naturally spread to social media.

Now, I have fitness goals (it would be great to lose the noticable beer belly I've had for the last 5 years or so), but I've got other goals as well, as mentioned above. Many of these not-fitness goals, especially writing about politics and culture, are essentially social (I want to change society), even if the mechanism (writing) is a solitary activity. So I find it kind of ironic that I am currently, in essence, pursuing my personal goals in a social manner, while I think of the work to pursue my social goals as something that I just need to "find more time for" in my personal life. (To be fair, this is probably exacerbated by the fact that my spouse are both doing essentially social and political work at our jobs for 8-10 hours per day; it's just the "extracurricular" social goals, as it were, the ones I don't get paid for, that I'm talking about here).

I don't think this is totally uncommon. We know (from opinion polls, surveys, our own door-to-door work) that people want the world to be a better place. Yet even our most popular actions are dwarfed by the number of people who turn out for 5Ks every weekend. Our job, as a movement, is to help more people — if we want to succeed, millions of people — feel supported and accountable in being part of changing the world, in ways that are effective and also doable. To grow to scale, we can't just "organize" people as we currently understand it — getting them to participate in social-change organizations through repeated reminders and turn-out calls and so forth, and if we're lucky recruiting a few more volunteers to help us with the turn-out calls — we need to bring people to a place where "showing up" for justice (in whatever way) becomes part of their default practice.

I think part of the appeal of the fitness world is precisely the kind of casual camraderie of racing or taking a class together, or being part of an online fitness community. It is precisely that kind of community that capitalism has hollowed out, especially in recent decades as the massive disruption of globalization has forced people to move and the casualization of work has made it difficult to even maintain regular social practice within families, let alone the (generally) less intense social interactions of friendships, reading groups, bowling leagues, etc.

In this environment, most of us struggle to maintain two really intense relationships: one with our job (or jobs), and another with our partner and/or immediate family (or spending energy trying to find or establish one). These relationships, even when not fraught with oppressive power dynamics, are extremely high-stakes, and thus I think are actually particularly ill-suited places to think about changing our practice. In these intense and high-stakes 1:1 relationships which structure the vast majority of our waking hours, we dig more deeply into our default practices, and we're also less likely to hold the other person/institution accountable, even in the smallest of ways.

And, the problem with so much movement organizing is that we expect people's relationships to our organizations to mirror the same kind of intense relationships we have with our employers (especially if we, ourselves, are professional organizers or staff of social-justice organizations) and our families. Perhaps not consciously, but subconsciously — we always talk about wanting to provide "easy asks," low-intensity ways for people to participate (such as signing petitions), but at some level we're just scanning the petition signers for potential "leaders," people who could be brought to having the same intense commitment to the organization as we do. We rarely think seriously about how people could particpate in and be accountable to the organization in the way that they are part of and accountable to their spin class.

So, I have a couple of questions I think we should be thinking about (and I welcome thoughts in the comments):

First, how do we (not just people who currently identify as movement organizers, but anyone who wants to see a better world), provide ourselves and others with a structure that allows us to pursue our social-change goals with a similar flexibility, accountability and scalability as, say, the world of running (while recognizing that it's much harder to do something when it's (a) not generating profit and (b) actually threatening people with power).

Second, since I sort of work in the intersection of technology and social change, are there existing platforms, apps, etc. that include similar social-accountability mechanisms as the fitness-based ones yet are flexible enough to be used for social-change goals? Is there something already developed for social-change purposes that organizations could use and experiment with? If not, is there a need for one?

Big Water

In which my healthy respect for the destructive power of water is reinforced through a terrifying personal experience.

Yesterday, I went white-water rafting for the first, and probably last, time. It's not likely something I would have agreed to do, but my dear spouse bid on, and won, four tickets in a silent auction to support Voices for Vermont's Children. So, off to the Maine wilderness we went.

I grew up in Kansas, and while there were a couple of lakes around, I never really had occasion to go out on them in boats of any kind. Boats make me nervous, even large stable ones in calm water. I just like having my feet connected solidly to the earth (I dislike flying, never learned how to ride a bike, and prefer not to drive whenever I can avoid it, for the same reason).

But, of course, what really freaked me out, when I thought about it (which I tried not to do), was the idea of one of the kids going overboard, and not being able to help them. That "do I dive into dangerous waters when I don't know what I'm doing and can barely swim but I'm counting on the superhuman strength parents are supposed to get from adrenaline when their kid's in danger" moment played over in my mind more than a few times.

The safety lecture at the beginning of the trip was somewhat reassuring; we all had lifejackets (or "personal floatation devices" as they are apparently now called), fitted by the guides. They reassured us that the river was deep, that the guides were professional, that even if we had an "out of boat experience" we would be fine, that no one had drowned in forever, etc. And, of course, this is a major industry up here, which it couldn't be if the change of harm weren't extremely low. But still, there were the waivers, and yesterday was "big water" - over 8,000 cubic feet per second rushing down the river.

* * *

I developed a healthy respect for the destructive power of water three years ago, when Vermont experienced not one but three major flooding events. First, in the spring, the increasingly erratic climate (thanks, Big Oil!) followed a winter of heavy snowfall with a week of eighty-degree temperatures in March. I was working at the time in Winooski, a former mill town that shares the Winooski River with Burlington. Crossing the bridge every morning, I saw — and heard — the runoff-swollen river pouring over the top of the dam with so much force that you couldn't really see the dam, just the water crashing against the concrete walls on either side and then turning and cascading down like a sloping hill into what is normally the tranquil eddies of Salmon Hole fishing area, below the dam.

All that water raised Lake Champlain to record highs; low-lying homes and businesses were flooded. Parts of the waterfront park and all of the lakeside beaches were underwater until July, and the water eroded the soil under the lakefront bikepath in numerous places, causing it to collapse and requiring a couple of million dollars worth of repairs over the last few years.

In the middle of the summer, there was flooding in central Vermont, flooding which unearthed enough storage tanks from gas stations and so forth to make all the traditional swimming holes unusable.

And then, of course, came Irene at the end of the summer. Although it was downgraded from "Hurricane" to "Tropical Storm" by the time it hit Vermont (because the wind speeds had reduced, presumably), the torrential rain dumped into the narrow mountain valleys carried a shocking destructive power. The sudden swelling of rivers and creeks took out bridges, destroyed homes, and killed at least one person.

Irene really brought home the realities of climate change for me, and I think for most people in Vermont. In addition to the sheer destructive power, it also made me realize how fragile our technology-reliant society is. With bridges and roads washed out, whole towns were cut off from food and other necessities, which had to be airlifted in. An industrial food system depends on trucks, which depend on paved roads and bridges. Which continue to exist only at the pleasure of the rivers.

* * *

Editor's note: this is the part of the blog post where, if it were a New Yorker article written by a professional writer with a budget, there would be a fascinating and well-researched detour over into economic and social history. Since it's just me tapping away on my computer in the morning before everyone else gets up, in a lodge with no internet access, it will instead be a brief bit of hearsay and speculation.

While we were milling around getting our gear and waiting for the safety speech, I overheard a young woman asking one of the guides how many people died while rafting. He gave the standard answer: "A lot fewer than have died logging."

The Kennebec river (like many others in New England, upstate New York, and I suspect anywhere with rivers and forests) had long been used for transporting logs. Loggers would lash the fallen trees together into rafts and ride them down the river — when safety gear consisted of leather boots and wool clothing.

In the 1950s, a modern hydroelectric dam was built on the Kennebec. One of its features was a sluice for running logs down.

The guide on our raft told us that in 1976, the night that logging on the river was finally shut down, one enterprising guy rounded up a bunch of soon-to-be-unemployed loggers in a bar, paid them each a thousand dollars to go down the rapids in a raft, and thus was born the modern rafting industry. The rafting company founded by that guy now runs a resort with a hot tub, a brew pub, and all the amenities (we stopped there for dinner the night before our trip).

We're a bit further up Route 201, where I'm writing this on the front porch of a much more primitive lodge, watching truck after truck go by, trailers piled high with logs.

* * *

We lowered the raft into the water just below the dam. The rafting industry depends on controlled releases of water from the dam, which happens at 10 o'clock every morning. The dam operators tell the rafters the amount of water they are going to release, so they can plan for conditions on the river. Yesterday was 8,000 cubic feet per second — "Big Water."

When you go white-water rafting, you're not strapped into the raft at all — in fact, you're not really "in" the raft, you're sitting on the very edge, with paddles. The secret, apparently, is to have enough momentum going into the big waves to, well, stay upright, and you create that momentum by padding furiously along with your raft-mates, under the direction of your guide.

I've been flying a lot recently, and have had some success in dealing with my nervousness during takeoff, landing, and turbulence by trying to mentally lean in to the motion of the plane, not expecting it to be some luxurious space for relaxation that just happens to get you to another city (as, say, airline commercial portray it), but more of a wild ride, a dangerous but thrilling trip with some arrogant mythical beasts who believe they have conquered the air.

I found, surprisingly, that I was able to do that we started going through the Class 1 rapids. I realized I had been preparing myself in the wrong way, thinking about this as a trip in a vehicle, and obsessing about whether the vehicle was safe, what would happen if I or one of my family fell out of the vehicle. I was worried about whether the vehicle would protect us from the river. Instead, as we careened through waves, I realized that we were just out on the river, ourselves, with a few tools — the raft, the life jackets, the paddles, the helmets — that would hopefully keep the river from damaging us. Remarkably, I passed through my fears and started enjoying myself.

Which was damn good, because when we hit the Class 4 wave — "Maytag" — the wave, as they say, tagged us. It is a 16-foot wave, about the length of our raft, and there was a sudden moment when I realized we were flipping over.

And then I was in the water. They say that in times of crisis, time seems to go slowly. I am incredibly thankful that, at least in memory, those few seconds seemed to only last a few seconds.

I was completely submerged in water, no idea even which way was up, felt the bottom of the river with my feet (which is pretty deep there, so I must have been thrown straight down, and with a lot of force, when the raft flipped). The first phase: pure animal, physical terror.

Within a second or two, the lifejacket pulled me up and suddenly I was half-breathing, half-drinking, being buffeted around by the waves. They tell you, if you go into the water, you'll most likely come up near the raft — but this is less true when your raft is overturned by Maytag, apparently; I was a good ten feet from the raft. I started flailing towards it (you can't really call it swimming).  Some of the safety instructions, most of which were heavy on "self-rescue" techniques, started floating back into my brain.  While flailing towards the raft, I tried holding the paddle, which I still had a grip on, out towards it, in the vain hope that someone would grab it and pull me towards the raft.

They also tell you to keep your eyes open, anticipate the waves so that you can breathe when your head is above water and not when you're hitting a wave.  This is all very fine in theory, but I was now highly conscious of how utterly incapable I was of doing this. The second phase: the conscious realization of what you need to do to save yourself, and how you may not be able to do it.

Then I heard my wife (who, along with our son, had been hauled up onto the flipped-over raft at this point) yelling our daughter's name.  The third, and worst, phase: realizing that your child may be in danger, and that there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

* * *

Our daughter was (I learned later) briefly trapped under the raft, but by the time I got to the raft had gotten herself out and been hauled up. Eventually (well, within a few seconds), I also got to the raft, grabbed on, tried to pull myself up onto it with no success, but got hauled up by the guide.

The river is relatively calm after Maytag, so we were able to regroup pretty easily; they loaded us onto one of the company's other rafts while the guide flipped our raft back over, then we got back onto it. The guide pulled some candy and knit hats out of the dry bag, and we floated uneventfully down the remaining eight miles or so to our disembarkation point.

Water.  Don't fuck with it.

Grits with shrimp, lacinato kale and poached eggs

This was incredibly delicious, if a bit on the rich side. Looking forward to having the leftovers for breakfast sometime in the next few days.

1. First, prep your kale — destem and all that good stuff, and slice into strips. Also, dice up a small amount of some kind of hard, savory cured meat (I used a VT Smoke & Cure Meat Stick, because that was what I had on hand, but any kind of pepperoni, tasso, etc. would be good. Or you could use shallots instead). Oh yeah, and peel your shrimps.
2. Bring 4 cups of chicken stock + 1/4 cup of cream and 1/2 tsp salt to a boil
3. Add in 1 cup of grits, stirring until it starts to thicken. Once the grits are thick, turn the heat way down and continue to stir occasionally while cooking everything else.
4. Heat a bit of oil in a reasonably wide and deep sauté pan with a lid, and sauté your meat and/or shallots for a few minutes.
5. Add the kale and cook, stirring, for a minute or two, uncovered, until the kale is nice and glossy-looking. Season with salt and pepper as you're doing so.
6. Add a good splash of white wine, stock and/or water, cover the pan, and cook for about five minutes.
7. Check to make sure there's still enough liquid in the pan to steam/poach your eggs and shrimp. If it's pretty dry, add a bit more liquid. Crack your eggs over the greens on one side of the pan, then place the shrimp on the other side.
8. Cover and cook for 2 minutes, until the egg whites are just cooked but still soft and the shrimp are just pink.
9. Remove the shrimp from the pan with tongs. Spoon grits into bowls, use a slotted spoon to place the greens and eggs on top of the grits, top with shrimp and then sprinkle with a little additional salt and smoked paprika.

Chicken confit

This is pretty easy to make: just take some chicken thighs, legs or drumsticks, fit them snugly into a baking pan, scatter a bunch of sliced garlic and thyme over, then pour in enough extra-virgin olive oil to just cover the chicken. Bake at 300 degrees for about two hours (oil should be just bubbling). Strain the flavored oil off, and store in the refrigerator. To serve, crisp the chicken pieces up in a tablespoon or two of the oil.

Practicing our scales

I think we need a deeper conversation about how organizers can think of our work as cultural work, and how (left) cultural workers can think of their work as organizing

The day after Obama was first elected, in 2008, I had a deep sinking feeling, and was incredibly depressed all day. Don't get me wrong — the night before I was caught up in all of the excitement of, among other things, a Democrat winning Virginia and North Carolina, and a sense that a small but significant victory had been won over white supremacy. But while Obama had always been pretty clear that he was a candidate of the center-right — he was just going to be smarter about pursuing imperialism abroad and austerity at home than Bush was — I could just see the widespread politicization and popular mobilization that characterized the last few years of the Bush administration dissolving into vagues "hopes" for "change." Having been a Reagan-era kid who was caught up in the excitement of Clinton's election in 1992 (as, I might add, the first president from the modern working class), I had seen this movie before.

This time around, I am cautiously optimistic that things will be better. The labor movement seems to understand the need to fight the austerity measures being proposed by both parties in the upcoming "fiscal cliff" negotiations, the remnants of Occupy (still organized enough to do a better job than FEMA in Hurricane Sandy relief) are not exactly lining up for cabinet positions, and the sector of the left that I identify with most strongly — the independent community- and worker-based organizations that make up such alliances as the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Grassroots Global Justice and Jobs with Justice — seem to be very clear on the need to both maintain independence from the Democratic party while building broad alliances.

However, none of this really matters if we can't, as it's often put, "organize to scale." Having been in and around conversations on this question as a staff person at NDWA, a leader and strategist at the Vermont Workers Center, and a pretty much lifelong member of the United Electrical Workers union, I thought now would be an opportune time to put down some of my thoughts on, um, paper.

* * *

1. Relevance

One line of thinking about "organizing to scale" looks at the organizations which have scale — trade unions, churches, Planned Parenthood, the National Rifle Association, etc. — and focuses on their relevance to people's day to day lives. Unions represent workers in their dealings with their bosses, churches provide a sense of community, address spiritual needs and increasingly act as the only social safety net around (as public programs are defunded), Planned Parenthood provides reproductive health services, the NRA gives people access to gun safety classes, shooting ranges, etc. The American Association of Retired Persons is, essentially, an insurance program. These organizations collectively have millions of members, and can still wield significant power in the electoral arena.

I think that in some sense, this analysis is spot-on. For a dozen years, I worked in a small shop with fairly high turnover. The likelihood that any of my co-workers would have ever gotten involved in any "movement" activities through their own social networks, or through being leafletted or door-knocked, is, I think, pretty small. The union gives us three things. First, it gives people an experience of collective action through the grievance and bargaining process. Second, it essentially forces people to take on leadership roles ("someone's gotta step up and be the steward, people"). Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, it gives us a shared cultural context and identity which allows a college-educated dorky political guy in his 30s to engage younger hipsters and older working-class folks in political discussion and action.

But I think that, in a deeper sense, this analysis is deeply un-historical. Quite simply, trade unions, churches, Planned Parenthood and the NRA did not get to be the size that they are by behaving the way they currently behave. If that were the case, they'd still be growing, right? — something that is most emphatically not happening to the labor movement. We can rightly fault the particular weaknesses of the American labor movement, but the reality is that labor movements are in crisis throughout most of the world. *(but more on the recent growth of mega-churches below)

This is not to say that the existing mass organizations (trade unions especially) should not continue to try to organize, or that our smaller, more ideological and grassroots organizations shouldn't try to figure out ways to be more relevant to our members' (and potential members') day-to-day lives. We should just think carefully about how we're doing that — and we should be especially wary of strategies that rely on, essentially, modern mass-marketing techniques.

* * *

2. Participation

The labor movement couldn't have grown by offering workers collective bargaining and grievance handling — before collective bargaining was widely established (in the railroads in the late 19th/early 20th century, in mass industry in the 40s, in the public sector in the 70s, etc.), unions simply didn't have the power to "offer" representation to workers. While there are some unions that can organize this way in some industries today through card-check agreements, or political deals, anyone who has been through a knock-down drag-out organizing campaign — especially any successful one — knows that the one thing that is absolutely essential to organizing is a strong, representative organizing committee of committed leaders from inside the shop, who know and can move their co-workers.

I'm most familiar with the labor history of the CIO, which established collective bargaining in America's mass production industries in the 1930s and 1940s — and this pattern certainly holds. We frequently complain about how hard it is to organize workers under our "broken labor law" — and certainly the psychological sophistication of the multi-million-dollar union-busting industry is much greater now than it was then — but the reality is that workers in the 30s on the whole faced much more difficult conditions and "stuck with the union" for much longer, with much less in the way of "services," than we expect workers to do today. When my union, the UE, was founded in 1936, only one of the seventeen independent locals that gathered in Buffalo to form a new union in their industry had a contract. The United Auto Workers — founded a year earlier — didn't win a collective bargaining agreement with Ford until 1941, and only after suffering, among other things, direct violence at the hands of company goons.

What kept folks going? There's a variety of theories (and different unions had different organizational cultures), but crucial to the initial organizing of UE locals — much of which was initially underground, kept secret from the boss — was a structure of stewards organizing small groups of workers in each department. To this day, UE policy is that there should be a minimum of one steward for every ten workers, and some shops have even more.

These stewards were not people who "enforced the contract" — there was no contract initially — or navigated a bureaucratic grievance procedure. They were, fundamentally, rank and file workers who stepped up and took responsibility for leading a small group of their co-workers, in manageable tasks such as collecting dues and, frequently, organizing direct, collective confrontations with the foreman in the department. Numerous oral histories testify to the importance of these confrontations — of, in modern left-speak, people participating in their own collective liberation — in maintaining loyalty to the union.

These stewards networks in the UE and in the early UAW (and in many other industrial unions) not only kept the union alive when it had little to "offer" its members, they also created a culture of vibrant democracy within the unions and opportunities for women and workers of color to step up to leadership at a time when local officers were almost always white men. It was precisely the establishment of collective bargaining (and, it must be said, the eagerness of many union leaders to be incorporated into the power structures of the capitalist state) that, in most unions, turned the steward from a leader into a bureaucrat, and, in many unions like the UAW, eliminated their shop-floor power altogether.

* * *

3. (counter-)Culture

My wife grew up in the Church of Christ (not to be confused with the liberal United Church of Christ). She was never a liberal, she pretty much went directly from Republican-voting Christian to Marxist. We often talk about how for her, growing up in a culture that had a strong sense of values that countered the materialism of the dominant culture made it a lot easier for her to recognize the deep inhumanity of capitalism, once exposed to a Marxist critique of it. (To be transparent, the other members of her family are all over the map, politically).

Similarly, when I think about why the UE is so different from the rest of the American labor movement, and had such a transformative effect on me, there are plenty of structural reasons, sure — the ongoing commitment to a grassroots steward system, strict rules on preserving democracy within the union, frequent opportunities for local leaders to get together regionally — but I keep coming back to the culture of the organization. As just one example, UE meetings are officially run using Roberts Rule of Order, but they are far more participatory than many of the lefty "convergences" and "spokescouncils" and so forth I've been at that are run through consensus, with lots of agreements and ground rules and sitting in circles and so forth. This, I think, because there is a deep culture of leadership which sees the role of the person with the gavel as facilitating discussion and building consensus.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that the UE's organizational culture is the end-all and be-all; it is a culture that comes out of industrial trade unionism, and I don't think that trade unionism alone is going to get us where we need to go. But I think we need to think about organizational culture seriously, and especially think about how it connects to broader cultural struggles.

We talk a lot about "culture" on the left, while simultaneously bemoaning how we don't incorporate it enough into our work. But I think we have too narrow an understanding of culture. We frequently have an admiring but ultimately utilitarian and tokenizing relationship to artists or "cultural workers" — we open our meetings with the reading of a poem, or have a mural painted on our building, or ask musicians to play benefits for our organization. Or we get everyone singing — before we get down to the "real job" of presenting a panel discussion or hashing out who is going to be overworked by how much at a staff meeting. Or we try to get broader exposure for our issues by linking it to a bit of popular culture or enlisting a celebrity to back our case.

All of which is good, but what we don't do is see cultural work as the work of transforming how people think, how people see the world and relate to each other.

Social transformation is complex and contradictory, and the tools that we use — leaflets, YouTube videos, online petitions, marches, rallies, occupations and strikes — simply can't hold all of that complexity and contradiction. At least not the way that stories, music, poetry, and the other arts can. And I think this is important, especially in the current moment when we need to hold both a sense of victory from the elections and a realistic assessment of the Obama administration and the Democrats.

This is not simply an encouragement for "organizers" and "cultural workers" to rethink how we relate to each other — though we should certainly always keep having that conversation. I think we need a deeper conversation about how organizers can think of our work as cultural work, and how (left) cultural workers can think of their work as organizing — and how we can all build a movement, and organizations, that are relevant, participatory and deeply (counter-)cultural.

* * *

One of the pieces I keep thinking about is this New Yorker article about Rick Warren, one of the most successful leaders of the "mega-church" movement. The mega-churches (unlike the unions, or the traditional churches) have actually been growing, and most importantly, they have been growing in the places that most embody the tearing-apart of the social fabric that has been characteristic of neoliberalism. You should go read the whole article, but what I take from it is that mega-churches combine all three of the elements I discussed above - relevance (meeting people's needs for community, spirituality and frequently for material assistance), participation (in small groups, doing manageable tasks), and a strong culture that counters (some aspects of) the dominant materialistic culture of neoliberal America.

Christian mega-churches, of course, benefit from already having one of the most market-tested stories ever told — and one that has, over the millenia, easily adapted itself to not challenging hierarchies. We don't have anything that can compete. Yet. But that is our challenge.