Reading the announcement for SRRT's 2026 Afternoon of Social Justice, I found myself asking a simple question: When did SRRT stop being radical?
I do not ask that nostalgically. I ask it historically.
SRRT was not created to make liberal democracy work more efficiently. It was not founded to encourage civic participation as an end in itself. It was born in the political ferment of the late 1960s by librarians who rejected the mythology of professional neutrality and understood that libraries are inseparable from the structures of economic, political, and cultural power. We challenged war, racism, McCarthyism, censorship, sexism, colonialism, corporate power, and the complacency of our own profession. We did not mistake reform for transformation.
Yet this year's "social justice" program is almost entirely devoted to voter mobilization, civic engagement, democratic participation, and strengthening democratic institutions. Worthy causes? Certainly. Radical politics? Hardly. Specific to SRRT's mission, analytic frame and values? No.
The assumption underlying the entire event is that injustice results primarily from exclusion from the democratic process and that social progress follows from bringing more people into that process. That is the classic liberal reform tradition. It assumes the institutions themselves are fundamentally legitimate and need only become more inclusive. It asks how more people can participate in existing arrangements rather than whether those arrangements systematically produce inequality, exploitation, and domination.
The irony is unmistakable. An organization created to question power now celebrates participation in power's existing institutions.
What is missing is more revealing than what is present. Where is the discussion of capitalism as the organizing principle of inequality? Where is the analysis of corporate ownership of information, surveillance capitalism, union organizing, militarism, colonialism, or the political economy of libraries themselves? Where is the critique of the profession's own complicity in reproducing social hierarchies? Where is the willingness to ask whether representative democracy, under conditions of concentrated economic power, can deliver the justice being promised?
Instead we are offered a familiar parade of nonprofit executives, university researchers, policy advocates, and foundation-connected organizations. I do not question their commitment or the value of their work. But this is the language and politics of the nonprofit-industrial complex: partnerships, stakeholders, civic engagement, capacity building, democratic participation. It is the language of managing injustice, not dismantling the structures that produce it.
Even libraries have disappeared from the conversation. SRRT once insisted that librarians examine our own institutions critically-our collections, our labor practices, our governance, our funding, our relationship to state and corporate power. Today libraries appear merely as convenient venues for discussions about public policy. The profession itself is no longer subjected to the searching political criticism that once defined SRRT.
This is not an isolated event. It is the culmination of a long political drift within both ALA and SRRT. Over the years, radical analysis has steadily yielded to respectable advocacy. Structural critique has been replaced by professional programming. The language of liberation has been translated into the language of civic engagement. Conflict has given way to consensus. Politics has become administration.
Many younger members may assume this is what SRRT has always been. It is not. Those of us who remember the origins of SRRT-and who participated in the struggles that shaped it-know that social responsibility once meant challenging the assumptions on which institutions rested, not simply helping those institutions operate more fairly.
Voting rights matter. Civic participation matters. But if SRRT's vision of social justice begins and ends with expanding participation in existing political institutions, then it has abandoned the radical imagination that once made it unique within ALA.
The tragedy is not that SRRT has become liberal. Liberal organizations have an important place. The tragedy is that one of the few places within ALA that consistently challenged the profession from the left now seems content to echo the assumptions of mainstream progressive politics. That is not the SRRT many of us helped build, defended, and believed was necessary. And unless we are willing to recover that tradition of structural criticism and intellectual independence, "social responsibility" will become little more than a slogan attached to programs that never ask the most fundamental question of all:
Who holds power, in whose interests is it exercised, and what would it mean for libraries-and librarians-to challenge it rather than merely participate in it?
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Mark Rosenzweig
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Mark Rosenzweig
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