Organizing for Change - Last Part

 BIMBO CABIDOG

Reengineering communities for the people's empowerment

A thought that must be straightened out is the inversion of the phrase community organizing into organizing community.  Social workers in government and the private sector surely do not mean this. They do not mean to build yet another political-administrative structure other than the barangay that already exists. But the empty thought could dwell in the head for a long time, and encounter a lot of frustrations in practice, simply because the hired workers have never been up to organizing community.

Organizing new/alternative communities is a radical concept that can only be a product of revolutionary theory. It falls within the programme of replacing the old social order with a new social order, and of overhauling the old power structure, so that the ruled now becomes the ones who rule. That in essence is the mission that community organizing must ultimately accomplish.

Widely practiced among the development initiatives that proliferated after the Edsa 1986 uprising, community organizing would refer simply to convening assemblies of local folks and electing officers, such as members of the board of directors, Chairman, President, Vice President, Treasurer, Secretary, and so on down the line, i.e.: reposting merely the institutional arrangements prescribed by the prevailing power structure. 

It is formulaic organizing, adopting the templates for association provided by the old social order. The so-called organization hibernates after election. But the model of organizational dysfunction would be replicated in CO practice a thousand times all over the archipelago.

Community organizing is not a job for hire. It is a political task borne by the commitment to wage struggle for basic social change. The change is the liberation of the people from bondage to poverty, their long-held release from the trap of underdevelopment. Community organizing is not an 8:00-5:00 work affair, five days a week. It is a more than 24/7 full-time devotion to waging struggle and living with the masses.

Mere immersion in communities doesn’t even begin to define it. Social transformation is not guaranteed by some proselytized individuals getting out of the way to experience what the poor go through in their hovels and villages left behind by the times. CO is of course socially transformative. It is so, because it stems from an encounter with the reality of deprivation, powerlessness and struggle. Thus, it takes up the lot of the oppressed. This is not mere immersion, but being them itself.

Some mistakenly approach community organizing from the technical point of view. They think that knowing methods and processes can already carry it to success. Nope. They must take to heart its meaning. They have to absorb its historical context, the critique of the existing order or status quo from which it derives relevance, its place in change, and what it essentially is for.

In summary, the following points must be clear:

1.  Community organizing is about the people gaining power to transform the conditions and  situations of their existence by doing so themselves. It is not about herding them into meetings  and seminars and making them say what you want to hear. It is neither making them good  enough to follow set of instructions in conforming to requirements of getting aid from donors.
2. The people can only change society if they change themselves. They cannot hope to transform  the conditions in which they live, if they don’t discard the manner of thinking and attitudes  that have long kept them away from doing what is right. They sneer at attending meetings or  participating in training, because they won’t get money in it. But if they can’t even take that  risk of betting an hour or day to find out what course may help shape a better tomorrow, why  will those who have money to give take their risk on them either?
3. Development happens when folks learn to solve their problem by solving it themselves. The mistake of many interventions is to think for them and worse, do things for them. Their lack of advancement is not reversed by somebody taking it upon himself to wage their strife, because he is superior and better equipped. There are no heroes of their liberation other than they.
4. The people actually still have to meet such a creature called community organizer. They who comprise community organize themselves. That’s the whole truth. What the others can only do is facilitate their getting organized. What forces other than themselves can just do is help them access information or avail of technical support.
5. Community organizing is not just about uniting and coming together in meetings. It is about going into action, and deploying everyone in it. It is about doing, not just talking. The way a community has been structured before could not solve problems anymore, much more realize the fundamental aspirations of the people. Community organizing restructures it to enable them to do what they haven’t been able to do so for a very long time. It doesn’t bury itself in winding analysis and theoretical deepening. It advances a bias towards action.

The ruling elite love to organize themselves into talking shops – parliaments, councils, board meetings, leaders or experts' conferences, leaving the dirty job and the sweating to the working bodies below. For that they already amass all the wealth the latter create. For that they already hold sway over men, money over will, matter over mind.

But the truth is they have nothing to grasp, except the obedience of the people, and their acceptance of a supposedly higher authority over them.

The masses are not talkers. They are workers, producing the things that society needs, and creating the wealth the ruling classes that dominate the political economy accumulate. They join up not to talk and discuss endlessly, but to get into action.

But what they have in their minds and in their hands is a power no might by any human being can surpass. The only thing that is lacking is to get themselves organized for their own empowerment, for their own supreme good.