{"id":34764,"date":"2024-07-10T12:52:20","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T19:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=34764"},"modified":"2024-07-10T12:52:21","modified_gmt":"2024-07-10T19:52:21","slug":"jane-mcalevey-believed-workers-can-win-everything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/07\/10\/jane-mcalevey-believed-workers-can-win-everything\/","title":{"rendered":"Jane McAlevey Believed Workers Can Win Everything"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It\u2019s a tragedy that Jane didn\u2019t get to live long enough to see \u2014 and to help lead \u2014 this world to come into being<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
ERIC BLANC<\/a> JUL 9, 2024 (laborpolitics@substack.com)
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Jane McAlevey was a friend and a comrade and I can\u2019t believe she\u2019s gone. After she won the battle against her cancer so many times over the past few years, up until the very end part of me thought she\u2019d find a way to beat it yet again. As a mutual friend texted me yesterday, \u201cJane was like a superhero, it seemed like if anybody could defeat death, it was her.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jane \u2014 organizer, writer, and teacher \u2014 will live on in the tens of thousands of organizers around the world committed to deep organizing methods. But like so many other people in what Jane affectionately called her \u201ctribe,\u201d I\u2019m gutted that she\u2019s gone. She had so much more to give the movement. And she would have loved to see the day when workers won on the scale she knew they were capable of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rather than attempt the impossible task of summing up Jane\u2019s life in a few paragraphs, I want to offer a few thoughts on what I think what Jane would have wanted said and a few points about her legacy that might get overlooked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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First, I\u2019m sure she\u2019d want me to ask everybody to sign up immediately<\/a> for the January 2025 Organizing for Power (O4P), the free, six-week international training program she founded to teach organizing fundamentals, from identifying leaders to charting workplaces to having effective one-on-one organizing conversations. With good reason, Jane was convinced that workers had the power to radically transform society and that these time-tested tactics were the<\/em> central mechanism to make that potential a reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The single best thing you can do to honor Jane is to sign up for an Organizing for Power (O4P) course \u2014 or read her classic<\/a> No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age <\/em>\u2014 and then go out and organize your coworkers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Confidence in Working People<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

This takes me to the second point that I know Jane would want me to mention. It drove her up the wall that some leftists in the United States and abroad claimed that the organizing approach she espoused was \u201ctop down,\u201d \u201cantidemocratic,\u201d or \u201cbureaucratic.\u201d In fact, in one of our last conversations I spent considerable time convincing her that it wouldn\u2019t be worth her precious remaining time to write a reply to such critics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contrary to claims that Jane placed too much emphasis on the agency of paid staffers, her project over the past decade has been to spread the methods of deep organizing not only to full-time organizers, but to as many ordinary people as possible. As she insisted in an interview<\/a> I did with her early in the pandemic, the approach taught in her books and in O4P was \u201ca method of work that you can do effectively positioned inside or outside [the rank and file].\u201d The crucial thing for her was whether you had confidence in the intelligence and fighting capacities of working people, and, accordingly, whether you were \u201cskilling people up.\u201d From transforming your union to promoting class politics, she believed, \u201creally good organizing is really good organizing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Part of the reason she wanted to clarify this point \u2014 and this is a part of her legacy that might get overlooked \u2014 is that Jane was, among many other things, a committed leftist. Though she derided the sectarianism, insularity, and ineffectiveness of much of the socialist left, Jane was, in her words, a \u201csmall c communist.\u201d This mattered. Not only did she understand the importance of winning over today\u2019s new generation of radicals to serious organizing, but her horizons were never limited to winning particular campaigns, or even to revitalizing the labor movement. What she wanted above all, and what she believed could realistically happen if our side \u201cgot more serious,\u201d was for workers to seize power. This conviction \u2014 that working people could and should run the economy and the country \u2014 fueled Jane\u2019s exceptionally intense dedication to what she quite literally treated as the class war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Organizer\u2019s Role<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Jane was, above all, a teacher. Here\u2019s how she put it in that early-pandemic interview: \u201cFor me, the question is whether you understand your role as an organizer as fundamentally doing radical political education.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think it was Jane\u2019s role as a teacher that made her unique. Of course, she was also a brilliant organizer and strategist; there\u2019s no one else in the world you would rather have on your side in a hard battle. But she by no means invented the organizing tradition she espoused; these were skills, as she always emphasized, that she \u201clearned from extraordinary mentors in the real tradition from the old 1199 [union].\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What made Jane\u2019s impact extraordinary was her ability \u2014 and her desire \u2014 to provide these tools to as wide an audience as possible. Countless leaders of today\u2019s labor uptick were trained by her writings and courses. When it came to teaching the fundamentals of building working-class power, nobody was as clear or as compelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her words carried the weight of someone who had fought and won extremely tough campaigns. But I also think she was such a brilliant teacher because she believed so intensely that workers could win, and you couldn\u2019t help but be convinced. Jane\u2019s confidence in working people was infectious. And, like any great organizer, Jane knew how to help make that confidence a self-fulfilling prophecy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the past weeks, I\u2019ve taken some comfort imagining that when workers finally defeat the billionaires, there will be many toasts raised in Jane\u2019s honor. But it\u2019s a tragedy that she didn\u2019t get to live long enough to see \u2014 and to help lead \u2014 this world to come into being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Republished from Labor Notes<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a tragedy that Jane didn\u2019t get to live long enough to see \u2014 and to help lead \u2014 this world to come into being ERIC BLANC JUL 9, 2024 (laborpolitics@substack.com) Jane McAlevey was a friend and a comrade and I can\u2019t believe she\u2019s gone. After she won the battle… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34764"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34764"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34764\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34765,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34764\/revisions\/34765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}