A wonderful little book, The Essential Staughton Lynd, edited by Walter Howard, focuses attention on Staughton and Alice Lynd’s non-conformist unusual, intensely vibrant insights towards non-institutional organizing. The first of five short pieces in the book describes four “epiphanies”. Each points to an aspect of non-institutional organizing.
By “non-institutional organizing” I mean organizing that does not intend to create or result in any particular institution as a permanent vehicle for addressing injustice. The idea is best described by Lynd’s examples.
In the American Revolution, some working class people (including some enslaved people), sided with the British; others sided with the revolutionaries. Lynd’s point is that working class people evaluated their alliances based on who was against the landowners or in their particular circumstances. “Whichever side your landlord supported, you chose the other side.” They weren’t invested in an ideal of independence from the King, or allegiance to the King. They were invested in getting out from under the thumb of someone immediate and known.
The demise of SNCC. Lynd’s analysis is that SNCC’s power and successes came from living and learning side by side with sharecroppers and domestic workers in Mississippi and Alabama. But SNCC had a model of organizing (which Lynd ascribes also to Saul Alinsky—despite many differences) whereby organizers intentionally moved into a contested area for only limited periods, averaging maybe two years. This was true in the Mississippi Delta and in Lowndes County, Alabama, for example. They intended to build a local organization. Then they left the local organiztaion to struggle on its own. Lynd believes this is short-sighted. He believes the right organizing model is to move in and stay put. He references here, as in many of his other writings, Salvadoran Archbishop Óscar Romero’s notion of “accompaniement”, which must be sustained for a much longer time.
Fascinating examples from labor history whereby “winning a contract” as an accomplishment of an established union is less useful and much less empowering than flexibly responding to unacceptable working conditions, wages, etc., on an ad hoc basis without a contract. Lynd points out that “a comprehensive collective bargaining agreement, assumed by today’s labor historians and union leaders to be self-evidently desirable, and which I too took for granted” is often an obstacle because it can constrain workers from immediately organizing at the shop floor level for whatever they need in the moment, and using whatever strategies or tactics they find most empowering.
“The relationship of trust” that developed between the Lucasville Five, sentenced to death for murder allegedly committed during a prison uprsing in Ohio in 1993. Staughton and Alice worked for decades to bring justice to the Five, and Staughton teaches that huge reservoirs of unexpected resources open up from detailed listening to people who have almost unthinkably bare resources for institution building; the prisoners were for years restricted to solitary confinement for 23 hours a day. But through gathering their stories, the Lynds were able to force courts to impose conditions on the use of such confinement, even in the cases of the “worst of the worst” as they are called.
These examples collectively teach a lesson about youth organizing and education. Young people’s allegiances are not necessarily institutional, and the more alientated they are, the less they are likely to find insitutions that meet their needs. Therefore, they must be listened to—but not listened to so that “their voices are heard,” though of course it’s important for young people to feel that they are heard. Rather, they must be listened to so that we can help arrange or leverage structures that allow them to mobilize power. And this work must take place over a very long time, so that the lessons of those mobilizations can accrue and beome grounded in the culture of the people.