I don't mind workin' but
Nov. 21st, 2024 12:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileAfter some lobbying I persuaded the politics book club to read Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin’s Detroit: I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution. This is a sort of case study in the labor and other organizing of Black auto workers in Detroit in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, focusing mostly on the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), the spinoff RUMs at other plants, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, although plenty of other orgs come into and out of the picture at different times.
This is a really nuts-and-bolts study of organizing and many of the concepts explored and debates had by the people involved will be familiar to anyone who has done socialist or labor organizing–the uses and limitations of the media, of art, of the court system, of electoral politics, of student organizing. What does it mean to believe in revolution? How much of following its own stated rules will the system “allow,” and when and how will it play dirty in the face of its own contradictions? What is the most effective way to talk to people, and what are the limitations on the effectiveness of talking, anyway? I would not go so far as to say these questions are definitively solved, but it’s helpful to look at how they played out in concrete ways in the past.
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying does not really cohere into a single narrative with main characters and all that; it’s the history of a time and place in organizing, not of a single person or even group of people. This occasionally made it hard for me to remember who was being talked about. On the chapter level it tended to be a little easier, as there were usually just a handful of key organizers doing any one project, such as taking over the student newspaper at Wayne State University and turning it into a radical community paper. There is also one extremely interesting chapter that does focus on just one guy–“Mr. Justin Ravitz, Marxist Judge of Recorder’s Court.” This is an excellent look at how much of a ruckus you can cause in the legal system merely by taking the things it says about itself seriously, although it also looks at the limitations of the time and attention it takes to do so–and the ways in which the people who didn’t want Ravitz to take the Bill of Rights seriously started to counter-organize.
Other very useful chapters for current-day organizers include the one whose chapter title I am not going to repeat but which is about automation (real and fake) and work speed-ups, and “Finally Got the News,” about the one good feature film they made before everyone got too excited about films and came up with a thousand half-baked ideas they were never able to follow up on.
Of particular interest to me were the retrospectives from the second edition added to the end of the main text–at “thirty years later,” they are now themselves nearly 20 years old, and it is sobering to read what has and hasn’t (mostly hasn’t) changed since then. They are also interesting because they stick with one person’s perspective longer than is usually the case in the body of the book, and there’s an interesting contrast of perspectives.
Highly recommended for organizers of all stripes, just don’t expect to zip through it in one sitting. This book is for studying a chapter at a time.
This is a really nuts-and-bolts study of organizing and many of the concepts explored and debates had by the people involved will be familiar to anyone who has done socialist or labor organizing–the uses and limitations of the media, of art, of the court system, of electoral politics, of student organizing. What does it mean to believe in revolution? How much of following its own stated rules will the system “allow,” and when and how will it play dirty in the face of its own contradictions? What is the most effective way to talk to people, and what are the limitations on the effectiveness of talking, anyway? I would not go so far as to say these questions are definitively solved, but it’s helpful to look at how they played out in concrete ways in the past.
Detroit: I Do Mind Dying does not really cohere into a single narrative with main characters and all that; it’s the history of a time and place in organizing, not of a single person or even group of people. This occasionally made it hard for me to remember who was being talked about. On the chapter level it tended to be a little easier, as there were usually just a handful of key organizers doing any one project, such as taking over the student newspaper at Wayne State University and turning it into a radical community paper. There is also one extremely interesting chapter that does focus on just one guy–“Mr. Justin Ravitz, Marxist Judge of Recorder’s Court.” This is an excellent look at how much of a ruckus you can cause in the legal system merely by taking the things it says about itself seriously, although it also looks at the limitations of the time and attention it takes to do so–and the ways in which the people who didn’t want Ravitz to take the Bill of Rights seriously started to counter-organize.
Other very useful chapters for current-day organizers include the one whose chapter title I am not going to repeat but which is about automation (real and fake) and work speed-ups, and “Finally Got the News,” about the one good feature film they made before everyone got too excited about films and came up with a thousand half-baked ideas they were never able to follow up on.
Of particular interest to me were the retrospectives from the second edition added to the end of the main text–at “thirty years later,” they are now themselves nearly 20 years old, and it is sobering to read what has and hasn’t (mostly hasn’t) changed since then. They are also interesting because they stick with one person’s perspective longer than is usually the case in the body of the book, and there’s an interesting contrast of perspectives.
Highly recommended for organizers of all stripes, just don’t expect to zip through it in one sitting. This book is for studying a chapter at a time.