"I saw something I desperately wanted to learn"

"I went to graduate school to study political theory, in hopes of figuring out what to do about the dilemmas that weighed on me. But it took something else to give that theory meaning in my own life." Alyssa Battistoni's "Spadework: On political organizing", in the Spring 2019 issue of n+1, shares her experience in union organizing. (I was gonna post this to MetaFilter but saw someone already had.)

The relationality of organizing is maybe the hardest thing to understand before you’ve done it. But it is the most important. This is not because people are governed by emotions instead of reason, though they sometimes are. It’s because the entire problem of collective action is that it’s rational to act collectively where it’s not to act alone. And you build the collective piece by piece.....

...Many were suspicious of organizing itself: we said that grad students should be able to choose for themselves whether they wanted a union, but here we were trying to convince people that they did. It didn’t seem very democratic. Why not just take a vote right away? We could even do it online — the software was pretty good these days.

I thought the union was intensely democratic — we were, after all, seeking some amount of self-rule in our workplace and asking more people to take part in it. But democracy was more than aggregating our individual preferences or adhering to procedures; it was more like the attempt to find the general will. We were declaring ourselves a people, and that meant coming to see ourselves as part of a collective, not just a sample of rational actors. We want nondomination, another political theorist in the department said; things are pretty good now, but we’re vulnerable to arbitrary power. This went over surprisingly well with the empiricists. Finally — the academic discussion I’d been waiting for! In any case, it was true that I wanted to persuade people of my position. I thought the union was good, and important, and I wanted them to vote for it. But I didn’t just want their votes; I wanted them to want the union. There was no union without them. .....

But this isn’t the part of the essay where I conclude that political life is tragically impossible. It’s where I try to figure out how to get back to it.