The Process of Change
By Chris Ney
The Activist’s Handbook: A Primer for the 1990s and Beyond. By Randy Shaw. University of California Press, 1996, 299 pages; $5000 hardcover, $17.95 paper.
The Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. By Sam Kaner. New Society Publishers, 1996, 255 pages; $49.95 hardcover, $24.95 paper.

BOOKS OFFERING practical advice on organizing can serve a vital purpose for a Left with diminished resources and numbers and limited access to the media, facing greater challenges than at any time in several generations. But the usefulness of such guides is limited by the degree to which they address the Left’s ongoing demobilization and the increasing threat from the Right. Manuals, like mentors, must share not only strategy and skills, but vision and hope.

Two recent releases seek to update and rearticulate the practice of organizing to respond to changing circumstances and to train a new generation of activists. Although both books emerge from progressive political struggle, they are vastly different in quality and content. Sam Kaner’s Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making focuses narrowly on the topic of group facilitation skills, while Randy Shaw’s The Activist’s Handbook: A Primer for the 1990s and Beyond takes a broad view of the current state of the progressive movement, addressing theoretical and practical problems within the Left and community-based organizations.

The Activist’s Handbook lives up to its title and will likely join the company of organizing classics like Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, the WRL Organizer’s Manual and the Midwest Academy’s Organize! It is the kind of book that should be on every activist’s reading list, one that deserves to be read and reread. As the Director and Supervising Attorney for the Tenderloin Housing Clinic in San Francisco, Shaw has seen the impact of 15 years of reactionary social policy and the inability of the Left to rebuild a viable alternative. His analysis is simple and familiar: Progressives have spent too much time responding to increasingly virulent attacks by the Right rather than mobilizing communities in support of their own programs and solutions. What is compelling is his description of how community-based groups can do that.

He uses a phrase that sounds like jargon: tactical activism. But his understanding of the meaning of these words is the message of the book: Actions should be tied to clearly defined strategies to win specific goals. Rather than respond to the right-wing agenda, he says, progressives should learn from their success; we should develop a proactive agenda and organize around it with clearly defined strategies. From the first chapter, which outlines the pitfalls of progressive organizing in the response to homelessness and get-tough-on-crime criminal justice policies, Shaw takes us through many areas of activism and many sectors of the movement to show that victories are possible and that social change activism is not dead.

The book is organized topically. Each chapter deals with different areas of activist concerns. Shaw urges activists to "inspir[e] fear and loathing" in elected officials (to pressure them rather than counting on their good will), to build coalitions that include other than obvious allies and to use the media to advocate, rathr than just cover an issue. Additional chapters discuss ballot initiatives, the role of lawyers in the movement and direct action. When I started to read The Activist’s Handbook, I feared it would be entirely theoretical, repeating the many clichés of activism. I was pleasantly surprised to find each chapter filled with real-life stories of community-based activism. Whether the activists won or lost (or some of each), Shaw draws lessons out of their experience so that it can be applied to other situations.

Strategic Decline
Although the Handbook clearly emerges from anti-poverty and civil rights organizing, it includes an analysis of the current state of environmental activism and its decline in influence due to the movement’s failure to develop a strategic agenda. Notably absent from the book are references to the peace movement, except for passing comments on the nuclear-freeze movement and international solidarity. Yet the lessons gleaned from community-based work can inform peace work,as they have in the past,through the material in this book. The chapter on direct action is of particular interest to WRL audiences as Shaw shares the drama of the founding of ACT-UP and the history of an often overlooked action by disability rights activists in the late 1970s that led to the longest occupation of a federal office building in U.S. history.

The anecdotal format of The Activist’s Handbook thus acts both to preserve some activist history that might otherwise have been lost, and to examine the lessons to be learned from that history. While reading is no substitute for progressive participation, Shaw’s book offers a prescription for change and the hope that critical thinking and dramatic action can restore the vitality of social change activism and help communities survive through increasingly difficult times. In this election year, it is definitely worth the read.

Corporate Consultants
In contrast, The Facilitator’s Guide, with its narrow focus, seems to be directed more toward corporate consultants who seek high fees for promoting participatory management; as such, it can do little to revive grass-roots organizing and progressive resistance in the United States.

Dedicated exclusively to the topic of group dynamics, The Facilitator’s Guide repackages already well-known materials, breaking no new ground. It opens with an overview of the importance of meetings,according to Kaner, 85 million of them a day worldwide,followed by a history of group facilitation that goes back 3,000 years to "the tribes." Although the guide tries to place itself within a millennia-old, global tradition, it is clearly a product of the New Left, describing skills and practices now taken for granted by anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the New Left and New Left-influenced movements!skills most people learn by observing and practicing participatory decision-making. Littered with clichés and jargon (like "the diamond of participatory decision-making" and "the groan zone"), the book is also filled with full-page diagrams and charts of the ways groups make decisions,diagrams and charts that are probably the most annoying part of the book, distracting from its text and message.

Yet the text is also problematic. Kaner gives instruction on minute details like handwriting on flip charts and even putting caps back on the marking pens (lest they dry out). One would therefore expect at least a few words on taking minutes and recording decisions so that groups can act upon them and be held accountable,but those genuinely useful topics are nowhere addressed.

The book includes an impressive bibliography, most of it developed from movement sources. Yet I became convinced by the end of it that intended audience for The Facilitator’s Guide is not the progressive movement, but the business community, which has recently discovered group process. The book’s charts and diagrams fit nicely with that favorite tool of corporate consultants, the overhead projector. Kaner’s message, however, would probably be lost even on that community. As a friend who works in the financial sector said after examining the book, "This would be a three-ring binder and a three-day seminar that they would force everyone to attend, then wonder why everyone is bored to tears."

I place a high value on good facilitation of participatory decision-making, a democratic process that can empower people to take action. It ensures that minority opinions are heard and, at its best, draws out the best thinking from each member. But it is not a perfect process. It is cumbersome; it is not unsusceptible to manipulation; it can lead to decisions that everyone has helped to craft but that ignore critically important data.

In a strange way, The Facilitator’s Guide reflects those flaws. Kaner lists five contributing authors, and his introduction indicates that the book took 10 years to produce. It’s too bad that in spite of that many hours of creative input, the end result is incomplete, sophomoric and misdirected.

[War Resisters League Website] [Nonviolent Activist Index]
November-December 1996: [In Bosnia, Politics is Our Obligation] [The Influence of Resistance] [The Process of Change] [Right Turns] [Activist News]

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