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One of these days I'm going to write a post that's all my own, and not a "Response," but right now, I need to respond to the Canvassers' Union series, about the Fund for Public Interest Research and its offices in Los Angeles.

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Almost every year in the last five or six years, a group of new recruits somewhere in PIRG/Fund/GCI has tried to organize in demand of better working conditions. We recruit an awful lot of bright kids, and many of them can sense right off the bat: this is not a system in which I can have a say at determining how things run. They think they know how things should be run; but management, of course, knows better. So when management hears about the organizing (and we almost always do) we have our ways of isolating these efforts, dispersing the group, even humiliating their leaders.

It's happened throughout PIRG history. It seems to be happening a lot more these days.
This is different.

So, a book just came out that trashes the organization for which I worked for eight years. Dana Fisher's Activism Inc argues that the Fund for Public Interest Research--along with the Public Interest Research Groups and Grassroots Campaigns Incorporated--is engaged in a rootless mode of activism that is "strangling progressive politics."

I have some problems with this.

My first problem is that Fisher has made some pretty bold, broad claims--and backed them up with really bad writing. This review by Jim B in Counterpunch is probably the most insightful and generally on-the-mark piece you'll find on the matter, and he says:

"It is an analytically incoherent book... a shallow, muddled, unrewarding account."

But that's just my first problem.  

I've been frustrated with Greg's series, at first because it seemed to me that he was out to `take down' something that I've put a lot of myself into. I worked in the PIRG world for many years--all my adult life. I was one of the people who built Grassroots Campaigns. I've since moved on from GCI, into a new life; but it still means a lot to me. I've had the kind of experiences that simply can't be nailed down in a few blog posts; Greg, on the other hand, worked for us for ten weeks.

But I'm also frustrated because as he pieced together his critique, I knew that it was something that essentially rings true. And the period of time that Greg worked for us was one of the most intense phases in all my experience with this model. It was intense enough to burn me out almost entirely. In the course of an extended, heated off-blog discussion with Greg, I decided that I would try to help this discussion by providing some context from above.