Why Big Organizing
Why Big Organizing
Becky Bond and Zack Exley
Truth Dig
We believe that it’s time to get back to big organizing in a big way. It’s already happening, as evidenced not only by the Bernie Sanders campaign, but also by other campaigns and movements before it, such as Obama in 2008, Occupy Wall Street, the effort to unseat George W. Bush in 2003–2004. We also see it in the immigration movement, in particular the DREAMers, the Movement for Black Lives, and to some degree in movements on the right such as the campaign of Ron Paul in 2004, the rise of the Tea Party, and even some elements of the madness that was the Trump campaign.
What do big organizing goals look like? Make public college free. End the drug war and stop the mass incarceration of black and brown people. Let everyone enroll in Medicare and make health care truly universal. Pursue an industrial policy that seeks to put everyone to work in the best jobs possible. None of these are crazy things to ask for. And it’s not crazy to ask for them all at once. In fact, all of those things are the status quo in almost every high- and middle-income country in the world. Bernie Sanders called for them, and he almost won the presidential primary. Our problems are big, so our solutions must be big as well. To achieve them we need a new kind of organizing, and that is big organizing.
Big organizing rarely works around a single issue. Our struggles are all connected. We can’t achieve universal health care until we have immigration reform. We can’t fix income equality until we deal with structural racism and the historical legacy of slavery. We can’t resolve national and global security issues or reach full employment without working as hard as possible to stop climate change. Big organizing also needs to have a clear and credible theory of change that explains why organizing matters. Bernie’s message was that if we wanted to win on all of the issues, we had to organize for a political revolution.
This may sound daunting to actually accomplish, given the big numbers of people necessary to make it work well enough to win. The good news is that people are waiting for you to ask them to do something big. What we’ve learned from the Bernie campaign and many other movements is that far more people are willing to step up if you ask them to do something big to win something big than they would be if you asked them to do something small to win something small.
"People are waiting for you to ask them to do something big"