- Nutter Town Halls Back on Tonight
- Brian Hickey Seriously Injured
- Filmmaker sought to Document and Follow the Timeline of Political, Zoning and Environmental Crimes in Philly
- FDR, Obama, and the Path to Health Care Reform in 2009
- How We Vote
- It's Our City Interview with Mike Nutter
- Witnesses to Hunger
- Reardon's Actual Library Closing Criteria
- Books for everyone: Buy, buy, buy, buy, buy
- Giving Thanks
What Next?
Submitted by Lance Haver on Fri, 05/18/2007 - 10:59am.
What next?
As I look at the election returns, I am struck by just how important an ongoing organization is.
I don’t think that those people who define themselves as progressives will ever build a power base until we build an organization that we can rely upon to fight all year round, on issues we care about and for candidates who support our platform.
We will be wasting all of the hard work that went into this past election, if we don’t use the lessons learned to build for the future.
I would be interested in knowing what other think about the next step. For while the election is over, the struggle for social and economic justice continues on a daily basis.
Lance Haver
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On the next step
I agree that building a year-round, issues-based power base is key for progressives to have a more significant effect than what manifested in the last election. Unfortunately, it seems that people are much, much more interested and motivated in focusing on a candidate-based effort.
Be that as it may, given that the "progresssive movment" (such as it is) is largely white and middle to upper middle class, I see the key to empowering the "progressive" power base as looking to progressive labor unions to provide manpower, organization, and leadership, and making person-to-person connections in minority communities.
I do not think that, contrary to a widely held belief at YPP, the way to go is to suck up to the existing Dem Party machine.
organization building
Some of us in the "progressive" wing of labor along with community partners in the housing and community-group world are taking steps to form an enduring progressive organization, in collaboration with the Partnership for Working Families. In Pittburgh, SEIU and a few other labor orgs joined with a variety of community groups to form Pittsburgh UNITED, which, among other projects, is leading the fight against transit cuts in Allegheny County. In Philly, as I've written before, we are hoping to use the Philadelphia Campaign for Housing Justice as the nucleus for a similar organization. I'll have more to report on this subject soon
We invite any and all progressives to get involved. Email me at jhornstein@seiu32bj.org if you're interested.