Planting Liberally

Yet another post in the "I wish I had more time to comment" category: Mike Connery discusses Social entrepreneurialism and youth today at Future Majority. Update: These grafs at the bottom are quite right, in my view:

I think that one of the reasons that most college activism knee-jerks into some form of protest is because most college kids have no idea where the levers of power are in their community. They don't know how to navigate student government, or city council, or the Chancellor's office or Alumni Association to accomplish change on their campus. So they grasp at what the media has always told them social change looks like in our country - people marching, rallying, sitting in, protesting. Most young activists could use a little more experience to help them navigate traditional power structures. But those who possess that experience need us outsiders just as much to keep their work cutting edge and relevant. We need a little more formal knowledge, and they need our social entrepreneurialism. It's a partnership, and how well we do over the next few years in creating a vibrant, coherent youth movement will in part be determined by how well we navigate that relationship.

In fact, I would say this is a problem that extends well beyond youth. We in the progressive movement often lack a good understanding of how decisions get made, particularly within the private sector, and this is a major weakness in trying to affect goings-on in the business world. We've hit on some rather blunt tools in the post (the boycott, pressuring advertisers for media shows), but we don't really know how to pull back, say, the purchase of the Wall Street Journal by News Corp, or the decision of a company to hire a union-busting "employment consultant." It was this exact type of lack of knowledge I was trying to open up in a post I wrote a few weeks ago, arguing that progressives should develop pro-labor employment consulting firms, to counter the junk statistics which employers typically get from anti-labor firms. I think if progressives had a better understanding of why certain corporations do the things they do, we'd be much better equipped to affect how they act, and indeed, to start our own, progressive competition for those companies.