Planetwork, Move-On, and Top Down vs Bottom Up Organizing

So i’m in SF for the Planetwork conference and Reclaim the Commons. So far i’ve spent all my time at the former. I only one to two actual talks. The first of which was by the folks from MoveOn who talked about how progressive values were as american as apple pie. It was a talk for, by, and about americans. They talked about creating a political culture and advocating for the progressive agenda. They had some interesting things to say. I was especially interested in how they managed and directed a fair degree of participation under a top down professional organizational structure.

They’ve tapped a nerve. They’ve figured out how to create enough participation and communication so they don’t loose touch with their membership base. They’re democratic in the sense that their ability to act is restrained by the voluntary work of the network they’ve constructed. If they propose something which isn’t popular, which i’m sure they done many times, then it simply doesn’t get picked up. In this way it’s similar to the indymedia network’s way of deciding what to do. Of course indymedia’s formal structures revert to consensus democracy of each local imc instead of a centralized professional NGO.

In the afternoon there was a session on Top-Down vs Bottom-Up organizing. It was mostly focused on what worked, and devoid of any ideological value judgment. It was just, what works. Nobody seemed to be arguing that from a political perspective a top-down type organization would be unacceptable. It’s very different from indymedia where the top-down professionalized type organizations are considered at times the enemy.

The other thing which surprised me by the whole topdown/bottomup discussion was that it was couched in a way of assuming you had a staff. Which of course means that you’re not really talking about top down. You’re just comparing democratic-centralism (leninism) vs leadership by directorship (centralism sans democracy). Both of which are really quite different from a indymedia which is more of an autonomist network type model. What’s amazing is groups like MoveOn have managed to take advantage of many of the network effects without giving up the centralized power structures. Beyond that, they are actually a lot more effective at organizing networks like middle class progressives than the more democratic networks. This is similar to how Rumsfield is reforming the US military to remain hierarchical but incorporate much of the flexibility and organizing ability of networks.