Starting with People Where They Are: Ella Baker’s Theory of Political Organizing

Abstract

This article argues that Ella Baker’s ideology of radical democracy shaped her theory of organizing, including her theories of mass action and indigenous leadership. Against the emerging consensus in realist and radical democratic theory that both Baker’s praxis and democratic organizing more broadly are nonideological, I argue that all organizing is ideological if, with Stuart Hall, we understand ideology not as a rigid set of beliefs but as a dynamic framework for understanding society. Organizers make decisions based on their own ideologies and they attempt to maintain or reshape the dominant ideologies. In this sense, organizers are political theorists: they have self-conscious theories of how society works and changes based on which they make strategic decisions. I demonstrate a method for interpreting organizers’ political theories and argue that Baker’s theory of radical democracy offers democratic theory insight into the practices and organizational structures that advance democratization.

Activism versus Criticism? The Case for a Distinctive Role for Social Critics

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India’s Farmers’ Protest: An Inclusive Vision of Indian Democracy

“…Social justice movements like the farmers' protest can lead to a deepening of democracy (della Porta 2005a;2005b) and perhaps to the promise of a more radical democracy (Inouye 2021;Pineda 2021). Movements such as Occupy Wallstreet, Gezi Park, and Shaheen Bagh pushed back against increasing illiberalism through inclusive forms of protest that experimented with alternative models of democracy (della Porta 2005b, 337; see also Contractor 2021;Einwohner et al 2021;Karakayali and Yaka 2014;Montoya 2019;Tormos 2017;Weldon 2006).…”

Beyond (and Before) the Transnational Turn

“…To trouble these binaries and multiply the conceptual resources available for transnationalizing civil disobedience, I suggest that we pluralize its history of political thought, taking seriously the idea that disobedient activists themselves produce political theories of their own-whose orienting frameworks, motivating questions, and normative vocabularies may depart significantly from those adopted by scholars, even those scholars writing about them (on this, see e.g., Celikates 2015;Inouye 2021;Kelley 2003;Livingston 2018;Pineda 2015Pineda , 2021). 1 I then provide one example of how we might go about this pluralization, by revisiting the way that civil rights and anticolonial activists moved across seemingly disparate contexts to construct a world in motion against linked structures of racist imperialism, colonial rule, apartheid, and Jim Crow, producing a novel account of civil disobedience.…”