In her new book Activism, Inc: How the Outsourcing of Progressive Campaigns Is Strangling Progressive Politics in America, political sociologist Dr. Dana Fisher focuses on the ethics and practical effects of having organizations specializing in canvassing hire low-wage workers for progressive organizations to do the physically and emotionally draining work of door to door canvassing.
Michael Connery--at http://michael-connery.dailykos.com/-- wrote an excellent diary on this important book earlier today for the Daily Kos. Connery's diary and Fisher's podcast accessible from the dairy is vital must reading and listening for anyone who deals with canvassing operations.
The ethics of campaign recruitment is both an old subject and a subject perennially in need of current re-examination. The paradox is this: to get needed change requires people willing to sacrifice. The sacrifice may be greater than the benefit of the change for those who make the sacrifice. The biggest winners of the change may be those "free riders" who do nothing. But, if everyone does nothing, there will be no change and no winners at all.
In the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King, Jr. and his closest associates believed that the only way to win the battle for civil rights in the South was to get white people from the North involved. But doing so endangered the lives of white volunteers and blacks who worked with them.
It also hurt the feelings of black leaders, who felt that they were being devalued. These hurt feelings led to bitter rhetoric which undermined the climate of racial brotherhood that King was desiring to create. They also made it much easier for the FBI and other agencies interested in discrediting the civil rights movement to find grievances and rivalries with which to work.
Organizing social movements takes a leadership with extraordinary skill, dedication, competence, purpose, financial resources, media credibility, and luck. Critiquing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., likely the greatest organizer of social movements in the history of our country and a phenomenal moral leader on an international scale, shows how extraordinarily difficult and virtually impossible the task is. The window of opportunity is open just a small fraction of an inch.
A few of the civil rights volunteers were killed--Goodman, Chaney, Schwerner, Liuzzo most famously and others more obscurely. A much larger number were wounded or beaten or burned out.
An organizer of student volunteers--Allard K. Lowenstein, later an anti-war organizer and one-term Long Island Congressman--was killed in 1980 by a mentally disturbed volunteer furious that Lowenstein had exposed him to a destructive life-altering severe beating and had made what he considered manipulative and outrageous homosexual advances towards him.
As one who has organized volunteer work and seen the risks of physical and emotional injury that are associated with it, I have become very cautious in what I am willing to ask of people. I tend to believe in the applicability of the priniciple of the Hippocratic Oath for doctors: at least do no harm.
For instance, I vigorously argued against any attempt to advance the bill I was sponsoring--ultimately successfully--to raise Pennsylvania's minimum wage by 39% by 2007, by employing the tactics of civil disobedience. I feared civil disobedience would alienate the mainstream Republican conservatives whose support we needed to ultimately pass the bill.
I also feared that civil disobedience could provoke violence against some demonstrators that both would hurt the demonstrators and detract focus from the minimum wage efforts. I wanted people visiting legislators, not fellow activists in hospitals. I wanted people talking about raising the minimum wage, not raising bail money or money for legal fees. The debate over tactics ended when a very reasonable compromise was negotiated with legislative minimum wage skeptics who accepted the inevitability of our victory.
I am hardly alone in understanding the risks of activism. It is this understanding of risks that contributes to leading various progressive organizations to engage in the distancing from activism that Dr. Fisher describes. Yet she is absolutely right that the distancing from activism--and any maltreatment of activists by any responsible person--hurts the goal of building up a better more progressive society by limiting the pool of future activists and leaders of activists.
The truth is that there is not a heck of a lot of money for most people to make by political or social activism. Money is often especially important to those who are short of it or without it entirely. Civil service jobs generally pay more--and have far greater job security--than political ones do. Business and professional careeers have far greater economic potential than do careers in social or political activism.
There is no substitute for honesty in dealing with prospective political activists. They should be asked to volunteer and contribute time and money only to an extent that it does not interfere with their pursuing a successful life. They should not be asked to do unnecessary or unwise things or things that unnecessarily expose them to great personal risk.
Their dignity and worth as people should be recognized at all times. Neither their labor nor their bodies nor their enthusiasm should be exploited against their interests.
Working for progressive causes should be an ennobling, inspiring, and enthusiasm-building experience. That is a statement of an ideal, and we as a broad national progressive community need to figure out many practical steps to achieve this ideal despite all the difficulties inherently involved in doing so.