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Starting with People Where They Are: Ella Baker’s Theory of Political Organizing

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 September 2021

MIE INOUYE Open the ORCID record for MIE INOUYE [Opens in a new window]
MIE INOUYE*
Affiliation:
Bard College, United States
*
Mie Inouye, Assistant Professor, Political Studies, Bard College, United States, [email protected].
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Abstract

This article argues that Ella Baker’s ideology of radical democracy shaped her theory of organizing, including her theories of mass action and indigenous leadership. Against the emerging consensus in realist and radical democratic theory that both Baker’s praxis and democratic organizing more broadly are nonideological, I argue that all organizing is ideological if, with Stuart Hall, we understand ideology not as a rigid set of beliefs but as a dynamic framework for understanding society. Organizers make decisions based on their own ideologies and they attempt to maintain or reshape the dominant ideologies. In this sense, organizers are political theorists: they have self-conscious theories of how society works and changes based on which they make strategic decisions. I demonstrate a method for interpreting organizers’ political theories and argue that Baker’s theory of radical democracy offers democratic theory insight into the practices and organizational structures that advance democratization.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 116 , Issue 2 , May 2022 , pp. 533 - 546
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Political Science Association

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