Vijay Phulwani

This dissertation is about the relationship between the politics of order and the politics of organizing. In particular, it argues that scholars who have taken order to be the central concept of political thought, a group often called political realists, can and should take up the study of organizing as a way of better understanding what order means in democratic politics. Popular organizing creates political power by way of strategically limited form of disorder within an existing political order. Rather than starting with the question of who the people are, how they are represented by the state, or how claims to peoplehood are made, organizing begins with the question of how existing opportunities for political action can be used to constitute the people as a political subject. Studying popular organizing means studying the ideas, institutions, and practices through which disempowered groups can be create new and empowering forms of collective political agency. I look at how the relationship between political order and political organizing has been theorized by a diverse group of realist thinkers—Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Saul Alinsky. These thinkers allow us look at how different identities and institutions are used to contest and organize against different kinds of political order. For Hobbes, political order is identical to the sovereign state, and organizing, particularly in religious institutions, is tantamount to rebellion. For Marx, order is not simply political but also economic, and the question of what role the state plays in the capitalist economic order is central to his understanding of what working-class organizing can achieve. Du Bois brings into focus the political order of the United States, which is defined by both capitalism and white supremacy, and he raises the question of how minority organizing against state-sanctioned racial capitalism relates to wider democratic aspirations. Finally, Alinsky’s approach to community organizing, which has been profoundly influential for organizers today, provides us with an agent-centric framework for thinking about how organizing confronts an unjust political order and what we, as political theorists, should take from the study of organizing

In this essay, Vijay Phulwani posits that Du Bois uses the language of tragedy in 1935’s Black Reconstruction in America to emphasize the constraints and limitations created by white supremacy and subvert the tragic legend of Reconstruction. Informed by his changing understanding of the role of slaves and freedmen in the Civil War and Reconstruction, Du Bois’s ideas moved from an emphasis on internal racial uplift and external political agitation to a theory of economic separatism and a strategic embrace of segregation. Du Bois returned to the subject of Reconstruction many times throughout his career, using it to rethink and further develop his ideas about the form and content of black politics. Phulwani argues that by continuing to analyze Reconstruction, Du Bois was able to simultaneously narrate its history and model alternative strategies for building black political and economic power.

This article presents Saul Alinsky's theory of community organizing as a democratic alternative to political realism's fixation on the coercive authority of the state and the ethical problems of statesmanship. Alinsky shows how the organizer can be used as a paradigmatic political actor in developing an approach to political ethics that treats power and self-interest as ethical concepts on which to construct a radical vision of democratic politics. His “morality of power” consists of learning how to use relational power and thick self-interest to develop democratic forms of deliberation and action. In contrast to the aim of the statesman, the organizer's goal is not simply to acquire power and learn how to wield it: An organizer helps the powerless learn how to use and think about power for themselves. Organizing is realist, pedagogical, and democratic, and Alinsky's ability to hold these ideas together makes him an important theorist of democratic agency in undemocr...

In this essay, I describe the ways W.E.B. Du Bois used Reconstruction—from the publication of Souls in 1903 to that of Dusk of Dawn in 1940—to rethink his ideas about the organizational form and programmatic content of black politics. Over the course of his career, Du Bois moved from an emphasis on internal racial uplift and external political agitation (in the early twentieth century) to a theory of economic separatism and a strategic embrace of segregation in the 1930s. As I will argue, this shift in his thinking was driven by his growing appreciation of possibilities for political agency exercised outside the official realm of state institutions and electoral politics, particularly in decentralized forms of black economic power that could use segregation as a weapon against white capitalism.

To illustrate this change, I focus on the relationship between his claim that slavery was ended by a general strike on the part of the slaves themselves and his advocacy in the 1930s for a separate “group economy” made up of African American consumers’ cooperatives. Seen against the background of black history from Reconstruction to the Great Migration, co-ops served a dual role as both a kind of economic marronage that weakened capitalism and white supremacy in America, as well as a positive, institution-building method for developing new forms of power and collective identity among African Americans. Du Bois presented the group economy as a strategy for organizing and institutionalizing the kinds of spontaneous agency exercised by slaves in the general strike while also recognizing the tragic limitations of black politics that were dramatically revealed in the failure of Reconstruction.

T his article presents Saul Alinsky's theory of community organizing as a democratic alternative to political realism's fixation on the coercive authority of the state and the ethical problems of statesmanship. Alinsky shows how the organizer can be used as a paradigmatic political actor in developing an approach to political ethics that treats power and self-interest as ethical concepts on which to construct a radical vision of democratic politics. His " morality of power " consists of learning how to use relational power and thick self-interest to develop democratic forms of deliberation and action. In contrast to the aim of the statesman, the organizer's goal is not simply to acquire power and learn how to wield it: An organizer helps the powerless learn how to use and think about power for themselves. Organizing is realist, pedagogical, and democratic, and Alinsky's ability to hold these ideas together makes him an important theorist of democratic agency in undemocratic times.