Dans Mon Catalogue

Paperback, 232 pages

English language

Published Aug. 9, 2011 by Beacon Press.

ISBN:: 9780807047354

(1 review)

An organizing manifesto for the twenty-first century, Playbook for Progressives is a must-have for the activist’s tool kit. This comprehensive guide articulates pragmatically what is required in the often mystifying and rarely explained on-the-ground practice of organizing. Here, Eric Mann distills lessons he learned from over forty years as an organizer, as well as from other organizers within the civil rights, labor, LGBT, economic justice, and environmental movements.

1 edition

Jim Brown reviewed Playbook for Progressives by Eric Mann

Organizing is Inductive

No rating

I'm including books that I read for research here, meaning that I'm including books that I skim or "read around" in. This was one of those books.

This is an interesting guide for organizing, and it's pretty specifically focused on the interpersonal dimensions of organizing. My main focus at the moment is the infrastructure of organizing, and that gets less attention in this book.

One thing that occurred to me while reading this book (a really obvious point that probably is more about my own gaps in knowledge than the book itself) was that organizing tends to begin from specific issues or campaigns and then spiders outward to question of infrastructure, sustainability, and eventually broader structural change. Organizing tends to be inductive, and I guess I'd never really thought about that prior to reading Mann's description of campaigns like the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union. What began as a specific …

I'm including books that I read for research here, meaning that I'm including books that I skim or "read around" in. This was one of those books.

This is an interesting guide for organizing, and it's pretty specifically focused on the interpersonal dimensions of organizing. My main focus at the moment is the infrastructure of organizing, and that gets less attention in this book.

One thing that occurred to me while reading this book (a really obvious point that probably is more about my own gaps in knowledge than the book itself) was that organizing tends to begin from specific issues or campaigns and then spiders outward to question of infrastructure, sustainability, and eventually broader structural change. Organizing tends to be inductive, and I guess I'd never really thought about that prior to reading Mann's description of campaigns like the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union. What began as a specific campaign and set of demands eventually became a broader organizing space and effort.