READERS FORUM: New Strategic Directions
Organizing Upgrade wants to engage you – our readers – in the strategic dialogue we have started here. At the recent Social Forum, we heard from so many of you that you have been reading the site regularly and that you really appreciate the dialogue. We are honored that you appreciate the space we have created.
But now we want to hear from YOU!
We are experimenting with a new type of forum – a “Reader’s Forum” – designed specifically to draw out the voices of the many left organizers, activists, and thinkers from around the country. We know you are reading. We also want to know what you are thinking!
Consider the following question:
Reflecting on recent events - the US Social Forum, the enduring recession, the enforcement of SB 1070, the Tea Party’s race politics and the recent overturning of Proposition 8 in California – what should be our prime takeaways and new approaches to organizing strategy?
Use the “Comments” function below to tell us what you took away from the US Social Forum or how you think left organizers should respond to SB 1070 in Arizona and similar measures moving across other states today. The recession is not ending and may dip once again, what should we be doing? Who should we be organizing?
Don’t worry about your thoughts being perfectly formed or argued. This is not a test, but a conversation, and something to inspire and encourage the rest of us. Click “Comments” below, and start typing!
Coming out of Detroit and back in my daily work, I am reminded of the necessity of responsiveness, acceleration, and devotion in movement work, not unlike Lupe Fiasco’s “kick, push, and coast”. As grassroots organizers and progressive communicators, we devote ourselves to communities of struggle on the daily and yet remain responsive to larger networks of movement work.
A “kick, push” is possible in deep, powerful, communities of struggle networks that serve as constant critique and improve our work at home. The sheer honesty, transparency, and dialogue in powerful networks like PCN, NNIRR, and USHRN keep movement work vetted, refreshed, and intersected.
Critical networks also accelerate movement work by threading the needle on necessary action. Movement folk can act on catalyst points, where we dismantle “silos of injustice”, while maintaining our daily relationship to our communities.
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Joseph Reply:
August 9th, 2010 at 11:46 am
Thanks for posting this Sangita. I really like your metaphor of “kick, push” (maybe because I think that song should have been way more in play).
When you say, “Critical networks also accelerate movement work by threading the needle on necessary action,” I think this is where i think differently. I feel like networks are a good training ground for us to get joint practice, work through some practical and political differences. But I think if we are to win we need to be moving to solidify our dispersed networks. Although there is some danger when institutionalizing our work (loss of momentum, energy spent on structures as opposed to movement etc)I think the pay off in the long run could be pretty good if we could bring our forces in closer alignment.
just some early Monday thinking.
-Joseph
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[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Sangita Nayak, Jeff Arp. Jeff Arp said: @sangitanayak gets a "kick, push" for grass roots action from involvement in national networks – #organizerupgrade – http://b2l.me/afgs9g [...]
Coming out of the USSF I am struck by the scale of opportunity in which we find ourselves as people organizing for liberation. The interlocking ecological, economic, and political crises of our time are laying bare the enduring structures of slavery, genocidal colonization, and capitalist exploitation at the core of the U.S. project. It is no coincidence that so many at the Forum were talking about transformation and transformative change–we need it bad. I attended the Forum as part of a delegation from Community United Against Violence (CUAV), a queer and trans anti-violence organization founded in San Francisco in 1979 that has been in the process of transitioning from a traditional social service approach to a membership-based organizing model working to build our communities’ power to create safety. From the perspective of CUAV as part of a growing number of racial and economic justice-focused queer and trans organizations and organizations working to popularize transformative justice, I left Detroit with two central questions: what opportunities do we want to seize and what capacity will we need to seize them?
On opportunities, it was inspiring to see so many at the Forum working to build powerful multiracial alliances to advance strategic and unequivocal demands against state violence. The expansion and enmeshment of all arms of this country’s prison-police regime—as seen in ICE-police collaboration (287g, Secure Communities, SB1070), technological advancements in surveillance, widespread criminalization legislation and policies, hate crimes enhancements, the transfer of anti-domestic funding into criminal justice funding streams, and the continued buildup and privatization of prisons and border patrol—is being felt by more and more people. Importantly the crux of this regime is the white supremacist and imperialist belief that “public safety” and “national security” are created through black and brown death and detention. Unfortunately often our struggles to pick off pieces of this system naturalize two things: (1) the necessity and inevitability of the system as a whole, and (2) the continued lockdown of black communities. As the tentacles of state violence expand, we have the responsibility and opportunity to join with poor, black, brown, queer, and immigrant communities to build a popular movement to refute the idea that any kind of cage or any kind of cop creates any kind of safety for anyone, and amplify the transformative approaches to harm that are emerging within communities themselves.
On capacity, I think Ng’ethe Meina of Social Justice Leadership said it best in the Labor/Community Strategy Center’s powerful session on transformative organizing: How can we create a process that transforms individuals as deeply as it transforms the structures of society? He talked about the “gamble” of relying on changing conditions alone, and invites the movement to take a rigorous approach to personal transformation so the “toxicities” of capitalism and empire don’t create the foundation for the new society we are building together. When we think of scale we often think of bigness, but it can be harder to think of depth. Our personal transformation and how we are with one another can be seen as secondary to or outside of our organizing strategy, instead of as part and parcel of it. Maybe before asking how big we can get, we might ask ourselves how deeply we can feel. A key tactic of oppression is to distort our sorrow and our longing so that we accept false solutions—hate crimes laws, multicultural representation, corporate pride, victim’s rights, gender-responsive prisons, and endless consumption are a few of many painful examples of this. Part of how I understand Ng’ethe’s invitation is to get in the practice of being with our grief long enough to begin divesting our hearts, minds, and bodies from capitalism and empire—from the idea and feeling that capitalism and empire can fix the problems they have created. The unfinished projects of abolition and decolonization require not only the capacity to turn out and win, but also the capacity to be present with the unspeakable loss in which we find ourselves.
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