Is There A Civic Duty to Organize?

Citizens of unjust societies will often be under an obligation to participate in activity which contributes to the establishment of more just arrangements. In the work of Candice Delmas, Tommie Shelby and others, the active participation that civic duty can require of citizens is usually thought to be limited to legal protest and civil and uncivil disobedience. In this article, I ask whether these forms of political activity really exhaust the possible ways of discharging the civic duty of active participation. More specifically, I investigate whether there might be a case for claiming that a much less-discussed practice might sometimes serve as a more appropriate way to discharge this duty of participation: political organizing. The type of political organizing I am interested in is sometimes referred to as "deep organizing": it can be defined, somewhat roughly, as the attempt by an agent to enhance an oppressed social group’s ability to fight for egalitarian social change. Organizers typically seek to achieve this through (a) persuading individual members of such groups in one-on-one conversations to participate in collective action with other group members and (b) the planning and facilitation of democratic meetings, where group members can collectively determine their goals and develop strategies for reaching them. Some real-world organizers, such as Ella Baker, did sometimes talk as if they were under a duty to engage in "deep organizing", yet despite the popularity of this kind of language among many activists, there is still no account (at least that I know of) of the basis for this duty in political philosophy. My aim in this paper is to make a first attempt at filling this gap. I begin by granting authors like Delmas and Shelby that sometimes protest-attendance or engaging in disobedience will be the best way to help bring about social justice. As the contentious politics literature shows, a sufficiently big protest will sometimes create opportunities for social change where they did not exist before (lessening public support for the ruling government, creating disunity among those in charge, and leading increasing numbers of public figures to align with protest attendees). I then move on to build my positive case by focusing on cases where we lack the confidence that enough of our fellow citizens feel similarly to us and have similar aims and are thus uncertain that the protest or act of disobedience will be sufficiently large-scale to have these aforementioned benefits. In circumstances like these - which are, I would suggest, closer to the ordinary set of circumstances facing citizens in contemporary democracies - deep organizing represents another crucial candidate practice for discharging the duty of active participation. The reason for this is that deep organizing primarily involves politicizing the apolitical, thereby expanding the base of potential protestors for future acts of political resistance. I conclude by suggesting that engaging in limited acts of deep organizing which work towards this end, should not be considered unduly burdensome for at least some citizens under present circumstances.