456
TODD GITLIN
and activate a mass movement and develop an infrastructure of orga–
nization ("a new society within the shell of the old") for which the
idea of power would be conceivable.
It
would not be afraid to fight for
reforms - what Andre Gorz in
Strategy for Labor
(Beacon) has called
"nonreformist reforms," the campaign for which would illuminate the
necessity and possibility of democra tic power. Such a provisional "orga–
nization" - though it wou ld not be as rigid as that word has come to
imply - as more than the creature of a handful of intellectuals, say,
or a particular sect, is possible only if some critical mass of local and
functional g roups exists first, because on ly roots in such g roups would
legitimize it. So fa r there exist only a handful of constituent g roups,
mainly black workers' caucuses, profess ional networks and youth en–
clave associations.
This fact points to the central obstacle to a gathering of radical
forces - the class isolation of the existing white movement. The ac–
tivists of the sixties and again of the early seventies come primarily from
the upper social strata and have proved large ly incapable of spreading
effective and workable radical consciousness to industrial workers, the
white poor, secretaries, tellers, clerks, hou sewives, computer prog rammers,
teachers ... police. (The single important exception is the
GI
move–
ment, which has benefited from ex-student organizers, at least up to
a point.) Almost every movement project that has promised systematic
outreach - Mississippi Summer, SDS community organizing projects,'
Vietnam Summer, work-ins, People's Peace Treaty, etc. - has found–
ered on the rock of the organizers' programless insularity. Driven by a
combination of moral fervor and gui lt, unable to satisfactorily explain
their presence in' alien cultures, organizers have responded to the suspi–
cion and inertia of the chosen constituency by lapsing into elitist be–
havior, which in turn heightens the "apathy" of the unorganized. It is
not so much that the organizers have not known what to propose, but
that they have not known much about their constituency's culture and
needs, not known how to listen, observe, and translate observation into
program and tactic.
But what is significant is that orgal11Zll1g by outsiders who are not
exquisitely careful is almost inescapably elitist and probably ineffective
Of all these projects of the sixties and early seventies, there is sub–
stantive written analysis only of community organ izing. See Ronald Glick,
"Southern Community and New Left Organizers," Ph.D. disserta tion, Uni–
versity of California School of Criminology (Berkeley, 1969 ) ; Todd Gitlin
and Nanci H ollander,
Upt own: Poor Whites in Chicago
( New York: Harper
&
Row, 1970); Paul Potter,
A Name for Ourselves
( Boston: Little, Brown,
1971) .
