francesca polletta, freedom is an endless meeting

preface

(vii): athenian democracy from 461 BC - 322 BC

chapter 1

(2): activists have been drawn to the solidary, innovatory and developmental benefits of participatory democracy

(3): in other words, there are practical/political benefits to participatory democracy

(3): social relationships shape participatory democracy in two ways

1. familiar relationships provide frameworks for group
2. activists' identification of the tactic have shaped it, too [this is part of the silly nonsense that it became 'white', so SNCC abandoned it]

(8-10): three features of participatory democracy

1. people share in decisions -- feel a part of things (solidary)
   
2. more inputs from everywhere (innovatory)
3. trains people as activists (developmental)

(12): another summary--solidary counters inability of groups to offer incentives to participate; innovatory benefits counteract the fact that politics is uncertain; developmental benefits counteract inexperience

(19): table of movements/decision-style, etc. [painful]

(24): battles were not between idealists and pragmatists--rather, they were between different ideologies--and, even, about other things (race, friendship [!], limits of liberalism)

chapter two

(29): AFL's Gompers calls himself 'three-quarters anarchist'

(32): deeply unsatisfying treatment of Labor in the 1930s

(38): mistaking the symptom of Old Left's failure, for its cause--if you were to extend the same kind of careful treatment to what she opposes the New Left to, we might have a book on our hands...

(53): coded insult of communists as 'nondemocratic' and the bureaucracy/liberals as 'democratic' -- what is this hogwash?

chapter three

(56): again, her main point--activists chose participatory democratic practices as much for idealistic reasons as for pragmatic reasons

(57): by April 1960, 50,000 students had sat-in at lunch counters

(60): extraordinary over- and under-representation of whites and blacks, respectively in these Southern counties

(63): Ella Baker emerges out of the SCLC to found the SNCC--democracy is part of what's at stake, in this break

(66): and this' populism' would be at the heart of what inspires SNCC in later years

(73): again, if you hadn't noticed already--there is a developmental rationale to participatory democracy

(74): prefigurative commitment and political change [!?]

(79): meetings as Durkhemian 'collective rituals'

(85): what is this nonsense! 'hurtful', 'friendship', ahhhhhh!

(86): in sum--participatory democracy is eminently practical for social movements, for four reasons

1. participation helps decisionmakers gather information
2. developmental benefits of shaping preferences/skills
3. specifies a range of possibility, heightening sense of belonging in minorities [?]
4. foster conventions of scruitny that endure [?]

chapter four

(89-90): SNCC unraveled because came up against limits of tutelage and friendship as basis [?]

(90): perceived as white by black staffers [!?]

(117): goals became unclear after 1964 Atlantic City Convention -- didn't solve programmatic and racial questions, and this was the reason for the decline

(118): more of this nonsense about black, white, identity--this is not an explanation!

chapter five

(121): SNCC in between top-down and bottom-up, actually.

(124): explanation for SDS failure is, well, "dynamics of friendshp and exclusion"

(127): participatory democracy as a model for social change--not internal organization

(140): more on friendship, and how it constrains groups

(142): newcomers challenging old guard on hypocrisy

(145): 100,000 members

(145-146): reason for decline, also, had to do with fact that there was an upsurge of action, elsewhere [implicit in this, though, has to be a recognition of the limits of this kind of organization -- what could capture the upsurge? labor in the 30s did, to an extent that this doesn't come close to doing]

(147): a missed opportunity, proposing to make it participatory and democratic and national?

(200): badly done p. democracy gives you structurelessness; badly done organizing give you authoritarianism

conclusion

(203): purpose was to recuperate a rationale for doing participatory democracy

(204): again, a caricature of the Old Left that depends on her having ignored it

(205): participatory democracy had explicitly political impulses driving it

(207): again, the limits of friendship -- this is when participatory democracy stopped working!? [oh god save me]

(213): four conflicts that explain the decline of groups (problems of p. democratic groups, then, have been exogenous to the form of organization)

1. conflicting demands of making social change
2. orientation toward goals or process
3. tension between conventionality and innovation
4. behavioral limits on the social relationships on which activists have modeled their interactions [oh god]

(217): obstacles lie in "broader cultural conceptions" (as well as these conflicting demands, etc.). at certain prssure points in the 'associational relationships', these appear. [in other words, we have 'friendship' doing most of the work, with culture as an auxiliary. mighty fine book, this is.]

1968:
Meanwhile in France, a revolutionary insurrection was erupting. What began as a demonstration against curfew rules in university dormitories in Nanterres spread across France, igniting universities and the streets of Paris. By the middle of May the workers of France had joined in and President DeGaulle was considering launching a military attack against the French people-something which had not occurred in France since the days of the Commune in 1870. Students spent their days holding open organizing meetings in the commons areas of their schools and spent the nights fighting the police. Workers throughout France took over their factories and ran them with workers' councils. Workers in one Renault plant in the hinterlands locked their managers in their office and ran the plant themselves. Their goal was to show how needless management really is. Then, just as they did at Columbia, the powers regrouped. The workers' political parties-the Communists and the Socialists-reneged on their support of the strike in favor of immediate pay raises and some changes in working conditions. In addition, the Socialists ended up with a substantial share of political power. Although the more conservative Gaullists and their allies did lose some ground and although it could be argued that the balance of power shifted in France after May 1968, one would be hard put to prove that now.
(...) When everything is branded it becomes considerably more difficult to separate one's existence from that reality. Heck, at the January 27th protest against the war in Iraq there were people holding signs opposed to the war that were distributed by Working Assets communications company and included their corporate logo.