Communities of Care, Organizations for Liberation

Yashna is a 1st generation immigrant desi (South Asian/Indian) queer femme organizer, healer, artist and yoga teacher. She works for justice, truth, love, compassion and peace through yoga, meditation, art, social justice movements and connecting with people. She teaches yoga, organizes for healing justice, works with the National Domestic Workers Alliance as an Administrative Coordinator.

Stop talking about Self-Care

In the last 3 years as I talk about the Healing Justice (HJ) work I am involved in I am met with dueling responses of either deep yearning and curiosity about sustainability or a look that says “how sweet” and “call me when you’re ready to do some real work.”

Each response often leads to the introduction conversations that get stuck on the idea that HJ is only about the practice of “self-care.” Self-care is important and essential but lets not get stuck here.

I love the idea of exploring ways to care for ourselves and our sustainability such as- honoring what unions won for us by working an 8 hour day (instead of working 10-14 hour days all the time), or other common self-care options like taking a bubble bath, or eating comfort food.

If we let ourselves be caught up in the discussion of self-care we are missing the whole point of Healing Justice (HJ) work. Talking only about self-care when talking about HJ is like only talking about recycling and composting when speaking on Environmental Justice. It is a necessary and important individual daily practice- but to truly seek justice for the Environment, or to truly seek Healing for our communities, we need to interrupt and transform systems on a broader level.

We need to move the self-care conversation into community care. We need to move the conversation from individual to collective. From independent to interdependent.

Too often self-care in our organizational cultures gets translated to our individual responsibility to leave work early, go home- alone- and go take a bath, go to the gym, eat some food and go to sleep. So we do all of that “self-care” to return to organizational cultures where we reproduce the systems we are trying to break; where we are continually reminded of our own trauma or exposed and absorb secondary PTSD, and where we then feel guilty or punished for leaving work early the night before to take a bubble bath.

Self-care, as it is framed now, leaves us in danger of being isolated in our struggle and our healing. Isolation of yet another person, another injustice, is a notch in the belt of Oppression. A liberatory care practice is one in which we move beyond self-care into caring for each other.

You shouldn’t have to do this alone.

Why are we seeking Care?

There is a growing rumble of yearning for healing in our movement work. Oppression and trauma do influence our well-being. On-going generational trauma and violence affect our communities, our bodies, our hearts, minds and spirits. Racism, sexism, classism, eats at our very beings. This leads us to seek care. We know this. Our bodies know this. Our friends can read it in our faces even if we have learned to ignore it.

We put our bodies on the line everyday- because we care so deeply about our work- hunger strikes, long marches, long days at the computer or long days organizing on a street corner or a public bus or a congregation. Skip a meal, keep working. Don’t sleep, keep working. Our communities are still suffering, so I must keep going. We risk and test our bodies to go further and we stretch our hearts or close our hearts to keep going- whatever it takes- and ultimately what it takes is a toll on us. This leads us to seek care.

We want to deny it- but abelism still shapes our movement work- “go hard or go home”. In the the Needs Assessment by Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, they state, “Changemakers are dying as a result of spiritual and physical deprivation from trauma, stress and unrest in our movements.”

We are burning out faster and at higher rates- unable to do the work we love. How can we win when our bodies individually and collectively can’t keep up? We are risking not just burn-out, but organizer loss and movement fragmentation. We cannot afford this.

How do we move from Self-care to Community-Care?

In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Dr. King says “I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” In that same spirit- can we be cognizant of the interrelatedness of our own bodies, of our own well-beings? I cannot sit and read a manifesto for liberation of mind without going deep and healing for liberation of body and spirit. I cannot sit and care for my body without being concerned with what happens to the bodies of my sisters. We are connected.

Can we understand how creating another world will require, or rather, demand our well-being? From small-town collectives and national organizations to strategy and pop-ed sessions to shared meals and parties- it is our responsibility not as individuals, but as communities to create structures in which self-care changes to community care. In which we are cared-for and able to care for others.

Disability Justice is mightily leading the way in showing us that we don’t have to keep doing our work in the same way nor do we need to do it alone. For example, Sins Invalid (“a performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities”) rescheduled an entire production due to a members health concerns and performed when it was safe for every-one’s bodies. Or another shining example is Creating Collective Access- creating a “new model of being in our movements …by resisting against the individualization of access” by organizing for collective care at social movement gatherings.

If your liberation is wrapped up with mine- for me that means that it matters how you feel and what you are feeling. Your well-being is our liberation, and I would hope that you would say the same.

We can take the lead from the field notes of many Healing Justice & Disability Justice organizers, collectives, events and organizations, work from visionary poets and examples from national organizing campaigns that center the principle of Care. There are resources out there and treasures that are many generations old. Find them, talk about them, practice them together, honor them.

Organizations for Liberation

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Dr. King (Letter from a Birmingham Jail)

As our conversation develops from the limited idea of self-care to the expansive reality of community care we are able to honor the depth of Healing Justice work and the depths of ourselves. We need to switch our thinking- individually and organizationally- to including well-being in our work for justice. Because when we are able to do that- that means we are cognizant of Dr. King’s “network of mutuality.” Because when we do that we will truly be working towards a liberatory and visionary new world.

So go on and call me when you are ready to do some real work.

…and because I did not do this alone- gratitude for the brilliant concept conversations & feedback-
B. Loewe
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Cynthia Oka
Shonettia Monique

Kai Barrow,  a long time left organizer, activist, mentor to many and inspiration to more, is leaving her long held staff position at the prison abolition organization, Critical Resistance. As she leaves she has reflected on her time in the movement and her work in CR, producing the “Swan Song Manifesto.” This enlightening piece is over 20 pages long! Here we excerpted two sections from the introduction, which bring very good and clear challenges to left organizers in these times, based in a personal historical analysis of movement work. For everyone who hasn’t met Kai, or learned from Kai, this is a great introduction to one of our unsung movement heros.

Born at the tail end of the fifties and raised in Chicago by activist parents, I cannot recall a time when I was not politically engaged. I was surrounded by influences and energy that (in retrospect) produced a visceral desire for revolutionary change/liberation.  In third grade, I organized a walkout along with a few of my friends against the Vietnam War. We made signs and chanted “Humphrey, Humphrey, he’s our man. Nixon belongs in the garbage can”! (not the most revolutionary message, but hey…we were in third grade).  In fifth grade I refused to stand and recite the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance because I found it to be “hypocritical to Black people.”  My parents supported my analysis and decision, and after meeting with the teacher and the Vice Principal, Mr. Phillips, my parents and I negotiated a victory. I would sit in the VP’s office every morning during the “Pledge.” Sometimes Mr. Phillips and I would spend our time chatting, sometimes I would read or work on my homework. But I always felt good about my decision. Perhaps for the first time I understood the importance of taking power.

My fifth grade school year was also the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. As is the tradition, many young people from throughout the country arrived in Chicago to protest the War and other repressive policies and my family and other residents of the co-op apartment we lived in, agreed to house several of these protestors, among them David Dellinger.  After Mayor Richard J. Daley gave the order for the Chicago Police Department to “shoot first, ask questions later,” my new out of town “friends” arrived back at our house broken, bloodied, and angry at the police, the mayor, and a system that shoots and kills its children.  I was heartbroken to see people in pain and I too became angry. Later that night, I was awakened by gunshots as the police surrounded our apartment and forced Dellinger out of the building. That day I experienced grief, anger and terror—all directly linked to the violence and abuse of power by the State.

During this period I also saw the rise of the Blackstone Rangers (a prominent Chicago street gang) who scared my grandmother, my best friend, and me. I saw families loaded with Christmas Day paraphernalia (bags of gifts, leftovers packed in aluminum foil trays) standing on the corner waiting for a bus while snow fell and the kids did the “I’m cold dance” to keep warm. I saw my mother cry for the first time and my father punch a hole in the wall in reaction to Dr. King’s murder. I attended a Saturday “survival school” organized by activists where I learned about the culture and contributions of African diasporic people.  I felt safe and proud when strangers passing me on the street raised a fist, gave me a smile and greeted me with “Black Power, little sister.”  I watched the creation of the Wall of Respect, one of the first murals of the Black Arts Movement, and had the privilege of placing a brush stroke of color on a corner of the Wall. My household was filled with the music of John Coltrane and Sarah Vaughn, West African masks, prints by artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner, and a library of books on the Black experience. Culture and the arts were extremely important to me—both as an educational tool as well as for the deep pleasure it stirred within.  Early on, I knew I wanted to be an artist.

My visceral experiences and the daily snapshots of a people in struggle were facilitated and named by my elders. They offered me a way to make sense of the problems, solutions, contradictions and victories and directed me to become a critical thinker. So, after finishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X, at the age of ten, I proclaimed, “I want to be a revolutionary!

A culture of resistance, protest politics and institution-building by people of color, feminists, queer people, and poor people in the 1960s and ’70s filled me with pleasure and purpose.  It was a period of design and imagination—a period where people re-envisioned and re-structured their lives. Even as a kid, I knew that things were changing. I saw and felt the electricity of change. Nothing was static.  It seemed to me that everything was in question: from diet to living arrangements; interpersonal relationships to altered identities, from the ways that people asserted and responded to power to a new articulation of labor and production.  During this period, people reached beyond national boundaries and re-defined themselves as members of a global community (and in some cases, interplanetary community—see Sun Ra). And though these shifts were taking place on different scales and at a different pace, corresponding to class, race, gender, age, geographic location and sexual orientation, everyone was influenced by this cultural, social, political and economic re-imagining. This was a transformative moment, one that unleashed our imaginations and spurred our actions. We saw what we could be.

We were unprepared for the brutality of the State. As beautiful as this period was, we were also powerful enough to pose a threat so significant to the functioning of the State, that it systematically set out to squash our burgeoning revolution. Individual leaders were discredited, driven into exile, imprisoned, and murdered. Intra-and inter-organizational conflict resulted in a weakened movement that we are still recovering.  Culture was depoliticized and exploited.

Since this period, our movement continues to fight.  However; our electricity is contained. The passion for liberation is muted. Instead, we fight for our survival. And this is not enough.

I am motivated to do this work because at an early age I experienced the possibility of what could be.  Despite the conditions that we struggle with on a daily basis—that belief in our ability to change our lives; to transform ourselves and our environment, has never left me. It is deeply rooted and difficult to pinpoint through a single transformative moment, experience or observation. Instead, I am an outcome of my geography—time, place, and location in both material and imaginative space.

I work to dismantle the violence of the State—particularly the multiple layers of the prison industrial complex (PIC) I work to build a society that neither needs nor relies upon violence—State or interpersonal—as a solution to social, economic or political problems.  I work to re-charge that passion for liberation that was so significant and yet, short-lived. With the privilege of history and analysis and the willingness to boldly assert a liberatory vision, we can redesign our lives and shift our material conditions.  I see this as both an artistic and scientific process. It requires organization and vision beyond the limitations and concessions offered by the State.  It requires us to take the risk of challenging societal normatives in both our values and our actions. Like my ancestors, who took on this fight to end the violence of slavery, I am a prison industrial complex abolitionist.

The PIC is energized by racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and capitalism. It reproduces these systems while simultaneously creating and reinforcing fear, violence, abuse, broken communities, isolation, scarcity, and dependency. In other words, it creates harm as it claims to be about the business of punishing harm.

Our responsibilities are to articulate vision, build organization, and create practices that are PIC abolitionist. We work to “shrink” the system into non-existence using four key strategies: 1) Intervention. Developing strategies of decarceration, disrupting policies and practices that strengthen the PIC (through scope and breadth), and decommissioning structures that currently exist. 2) Prevention. Working to stop the building of more (or “better”) prisons/jails, policing and surveillance methods and strengthening the capacity and resources of a community so that it’s needs are met. 3) Accountability. Developing community-driven holistic models for intervening, preventing and repairing harm and facilitating processes and practices that strengthen a community’s efforts toward self-determination. 4) Transformation. Challenging individual characteristics that reinforce and reflect the intersecting oppressive systems that empower the PIC and other systems of control.  This work is neither linear nor static. Intervention, prevention, accountability and transformation are ongoing and function interdependently.

This work is critical for fomenting fundamental social change. Movement-building, cultural paradigm shifts, education, institution-building, and action (campaigns, projects, mobilizations), all provide opportunities to inspire and support people in recognizing our own power; challenging normatives; and taking responsibility for the well-being of all. This work is a collaborative process that is rooted in history and joins a continuum of freedom struggles. Though it must be ideologically grounded, organizing work itself must also be pliable—this allows for critique and dynamism. During my thirty + years in movement-building I have learned that these are critical elements for creating a liberated society.

In 1978, I became actively involved in grassroots organizing. Since this period I have been a member of, or worked closely with, several national and local organizations such as The Republic of New Africa, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the Spear and Shield Collective, the Coalition Against Jon Burge, the Black Panther Newspaper Committee, the Black Panther Collective, the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM), the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, the NY3 Defense Committee, Jericho, the Ruckus Society, the Direct Action Network, Resistance in Brooklyn, Hands off Assata, Sista II Sista, Estacion Libre, FIERCE! INCITE! UBUNTU and Queers for Economic Justice (to name a few). I have lived and worked in Chicago, Atlanta, Jersey City, New Jersey, NYC, Durham, NC and now, New Orleans. I have been embraced by a broad community of activists and organizations throughout the U.S. and traveled to Chiapas, Iraq, Jordan, Buenos Aires, and Porto Allegro, Brazil to work with organizers and activists primarily in skill facilitation, grassroots campaign organizing, capacity-building, or organizing mass mobilizations. Additionally, I am one of the founders of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization to end the prison industrial complex, where I am leaving my staff role as the Infrastructure and Training Director.

My work with these organizations has allowed me to develop and assert a vision for social change that requires participatory democracy, agreed upon principles, harm-free methods for accountability and repair, and unleashed imagination.  Though the specific tasks have changed over the years, in essence, my contributions continue to center around stimulating collectivity, fostering abundance and creativity, practicing risk-taking, demanding self-determination, and building organizations with (social, political, physical and intellectual) rigor….

The major challenges facing Critical Resistance are also the most pressing challenges faced by the U.S. Left. In some form or fashion, we are all asking: How do we win?  And though I have problems with the concept of “winning” liberation (as I see this as an ongoing process), I think at the root we are asking “how do we topple a system that is hell-bent on escalating worldwide material and cultural genocide to serve its greed?”

Big charge.

I believe that this core question, leads to another set of questions: What is to be done? How do we build a mass movement? How do we articulate a revolutionary intersectional analysis through our theory and practice? How do we create strategic points of entry that weaken the system? How do we challenge the multiple ways we replicate systemic oppression?  These questions reflect the major challenges we face in our organization and in our movement and are amplified by the howls of our people.

Within capitalism, racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity, our desire for freedom is in constant opposition to condensed, restrictive, and rigid space.  This has been particularly true in the communities where CR operates and where I have lived and worked. Subways, housing projects, courtrooms, the lack of public space and the control of what remains as “public space,”[1] and the lack of money, work, housing, and healthcare, has created a people who are experiencing physical, spiritual, and mental harm. As a member of these communities, I experience this harm. Internalized oppression drives us to inflict self-harm: abusive relationships, substance abuse, deadly eating habits… while simultaneously fighting the harm of the State: homelessness, hunger, toxic environments, the bombardment of images that cast us as inferior, and police violence. Yet within this oppressive space, we still fight to be free.

This contradiction creates a “raw opposition” that is explosive.  It can change the terms of a space.  As organizers, our challenge is to identify the nature of our raw opposition and build/create within the space between oppression and freedom. We are charged with entering the space of raw opposition with clarity, precision, and analysis, passion, energy, and generosity. In Black tradition, this is known as the “Cool.” Think Miles Davis.

We are challenged to develop shared strategy and principles. Power-sharing, confronting privilege, and building trust are central to this work. We are challenged to willingly participate in ongoing critique of our methodologies and outcomes—making adaptations where necessary and continuing to build upon our strengths.

We are also challenged to “reproduce” a future generation of organizers across racial, gender, sexual-orientation, class, physical/mental abilities, geographic location, age, cultural, and political boundaries.  We are challenged to replace ourselves—share leadership in a responsible way, making space for “new” voices while integrating the knowledge and experience of the past. Yet, replication is complex because political, economic, and social contexts constantly shift and we want more than to simply mint newer versions of ourselves.

We are challenged to draw upon collective abundance. Acting from a place of abundance allows us to challenge scarcity. Collective abundance produces flexibility, creative problem-solving, and courage. I am reflecting here on the ways that the Black tradition models a practice of abundance. Without access to and control of resources, we have managed to pay rent, feed our families, send our children to college, and create hip hop.

We are challenged to utilize our agency in the service of our shared goals and charged with a demand for constant creativity, risk-taking, and self-determination. Agency is as empowering as it is messy. It helps us challenge the “cops in our head” or the complex ways we internalize power structures in our daily lives.

Additionally, we are challenged to foster a healthy culture of accountability and repair.  Understanding that contradictions are integral to any process of change, we are challenged to construct a dialectical analysis. We are challenged to be fluid in our work, transparent about our mistakes, seek non-punitive methods of repair for the harms we both cause and survive, and willingly struggle to transform.

This is not the work of a selective “we.”  It is work that must be done by everyone. To willingly and actively take on the challenges above, places one in this working group. This is work that demands a deep commitment to foment transformative revolutionary change within our individual selves and among our families, friends, communities, organizations, coalitions, and allies.

I choose the challenges listed above as our major challenges, because they feed the numerous challenges that we bump up against on an operational basis. Challenges related to membership recruitment and sustainability, policy wins, uneven political development, effective communications, and resource generation (human capacity and material resources), are woven into the fabric of our daily tasks. History dictates that these skill-driven challenges ebb and flow.  We will have a large number of members and supporters and then we will have few. We will have money to keep our doors open, and then we will not. Without cultivating strategies and tactics for our major challenges, these operational challenges are doomed to repeat.

Picture it: A multiracial, multi-gendered, intergenerational group of about 250 people are marching down the middle of the street in a neighborhood of North Philadelphia. The people are a loud bunch, carrying signs that read “Free Mumia Now!” and “Stop the Execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal.”  Community members come out on their porch to wave at the group or raise a fist in solidarity.  There is a pick-up truck with a loud speaker rigged to a megaphone. People are reciting chants that rhyme and have each phrase and pause dedicated to memory. This performance has become ritualized.

There is a lull.  The speaker/chant leader is tired and needs a break.  He hands the megaphone to me. I am known for my energy. I hold the dubious title of “Cheerleader for the Movement.” Holding the megaphone, I wanted to see if we could transform our ritual. Could we inspire spontaneity and surprise within ourselves and each other? Could we share with this Black, working-class community whose neighborhood we entered, an expansive vision—one where Mumia’s freedom was tied in with their own liberation? I placed the megaphone to my lips and faced the crowd.

Me: What do we want?

Chanters: Free Mumia!

Me: When do we want it?

Chanters: Now!

[reprise.]

Me: What else do we want?

Chanters: [silence.]

Me: No really. What else do we want? Shout it out. It doesn’t have to rhyme. It doesn’t have to be scripted. Let’s make a cacophony of sound, shouting out our visions of what we want. [pleading] We don’t even have to do it for more than 60 seconds.

Chanters: [silence.]

Actually, there wasn’t complete silence. A few people attempted to shout out a vision, but it was mumbled and lacked passion. For the most part people were unable, more so than unwilling, to go along with this shift. I began to cry (I do this often—cry) and passed the megaphone back to the lead chanter.  A few people hugged me. The Mumia march served as a catalyst that has prompted me to struggle deeply with questions on the uses of imaginative space in revolutionary/liberatory organizing.  How do we take opportunities to scream our vision—whether through words, sounds, or actions—to the point where our ears are ringing from our own voice—with no regard for propriety, no fear of retribution, no authority reigning us in? How do we make revolution like jazz? I believe it is the artist’s work to stimulate the desire and the organizer’s work to organize the output from this desire. This leads to synchronicity.

“WHAT DO WE WANT?!” Before you say “Justice!” … what if we asked you to be a little more specific? As the Arab world builds new societies from scratch, as we prepare for another U.S. presidential election, the question of what we want is increasingly important. Chicago resident Daniel Tucker asked his neighbors to think a little harder this spring when the City of Chicago had its first new mayoral election in close to 20 years. Instead of simply responding to or critiquing the candidates’ platforms, this cultural organizer had hundreds of Chicagoans articulate their vision for the city in a novel community art initiative.  “Visions of Chicago” was featured by Timeout Chicago, art industry blogs, and the Chicago press. Its now being published as a book.  Daniel sat with OrgUp editor Sushma to discuss imagination and ideology during election season:

What blocks imagination and our ability to reinvent ourselves and our cities?

DT: In Chicago, I observed that the most significant casualty of having the same mayor for 22 years (who is also the son of another mayor for nearly that long) was the stifling of the collective political imagination of Chicagoans.

The trajectory for restricting they city’s imagination was, in effect, planned out and premeditated. A prime example was a 2005 PR campaign launched by the Chicago Housing Agency around the demolition of the city’s public housing stock.  The CHA worked with the Leo Burnett advertising agency (the same folks behind the Army of One campaign) to roll-out a re-branding effort for the CHA called CHAnge. The intention of this campaign was paradigmatic of the strategies cultivated throughout Daley’s reign (and I do not use that phrase lightly), which also have echos in Obama’s 2008 branding. They wanted to define, own, and formally close the definition of “change” as it related to demolishing public housing and the giving away former CHA land for nothing to private developers. The most egregious part was that they used testimonials from CHA residents to illustrate that the change was wholly positive, progressive, and a done deal.

Stepping back from the local context, I see our imaginations stifled by the perceived edges of our current reality. Robin Kelly said it best in the article Organizing Upgrade published, “How do we produce a vision that enables us to see beyond our immediate ordeals?” Meaning, we often cannot imagine a life which is that much better than our current reality because our current reality actually structures and dictates a significant portion our time, our relationships with other people, and the pragmatic objectives of our work as organizers. We spend so much time concerning ourselves with what is realistic that we forget how to imagine a significantly better life.

That is why when I asked people what their visions were for this project, many of the visions were articulated as slight improvements (to the status quo) that were barely beyond the edges of the current reality of life in Chicago: better schools, more jobs and less violence. If you are at the bargaining table, I understand that you sometimes have to take what you can get. But this public art project wasn’t the bargining table and much of our daily lives are not spent at the bargaining table. So why is it so hard to think about dramatic changes that would make life significantly better that can at least give us something to strive for? I’m not even talking about utopia or fantasy – I am just talking about having the ability to generate visions of lives which are better than some kind of social-democratic welfare state.

What mindset or experience were you seeding amongst participants and the Chicago public with “Visions for Chicago”?

DT: The Commercial Club of Chicago generated a vision for the kind of public-private partnerships they wanted to see in public education in this city. I want that kind of bold imaginative process to be encouraged amongst a diverse range of community activists across the city.

This project was really about going through an informal creative process to generate and visually represent our visions for the city. So I kept things pretty open-ended and simply asked people to make a yard sign about their long term visions for Chicago.

In my conversations with the contributors, I was struck by how many people found the process both difficult as well as rewarding and enjoyable. I think both of those reactions had to do with how little time most people feel they are allowed to think about big picture and long term plans. The challenge is finding the mental or creative time and space to brainstorm, draw and articulate ideas. That is also where the fun part came for many people…once they find that space, it becomes clear that it is actually really important to let yourself ‘go there’ sometimes. The “drawing board” shouldn’t just be for professional communications workers, artists, or students.

I hoped that this small effort might provide a platform for some of the visioning that most people had not done while Daley was mayor and most people were not going to do while scrambling to figure out who was going to replace him and if they could effect the outcome with relatively little lead-time. It was a way to use the occasion of the election and all the excitement, shit-talking, door-knocking, debating and energy to talk not about candidates but talk about the city as the subject in and of itself. Understandably that is not what some folks wanted to do, they wanted to get in the political ring and make moves. But it felt like it would be a missed opportunity if there wasn’t some effort at engaging people with political vision to actually articulate that somehow. The challenge of representing our ideas and visions is a truly important and overlooked terrain of possibility, inspiration and rejuvenation.

Visions for Chicago was featured in art blogs, art magazines, and the Chicago press. You’ve published a book to boot.  How do you understand ‘the media’ and communications in your art and organizing work?

DT: Getting press has a few motivations. One is quite simple, and that is that if you ask people to take the time to do something out of the ordinary (if it attend a gathering, an action or in this case make a yard sign and be photographed with it) then you need to reflect appreciation and respect for that on multiple levels. Obviously, that includes being kind and well-organized in direct interactions but I believe that people also respect media coverage (even if people get their news elsewhere) and have an understanding that if it is covered in the media that it is worthwhile. Without getting too much into how people value their time and energy, I think that a consideration of this dynamic is the duty of good organizers. There is nothing wrong with affirmation if it gives people the motivation and courage to keep pushing the boundaries of what they will do to express their discontent and aspirations.

The other major function of working the media angle is that it produces a kind of mythology around an idea, event or project. In real material terms, Visions For Chicago involved about 85 people making signs for their front yards, 15 people writing short vision statements and me and my intern walking around taking photos and sitting on our computer. It is small potatoes, dinky and insignificant if you see all these fragmented pieces as they are. But when you combine portraits of the signs and signmakers into a published catalogue, website and articles in the major weekly papers then it becomes this compelling story about tons of people across the city creatively refusing to express their visions through endorsing disappointing candidates and generating really compelling ideas to share with their neighbors and communities in this unique way. That the release party for the catalogue happened on the day Rahm Emanuel took over as Mayor meant that the story of this project was presented along-side the story of him taking office. It literally was a featured article in the same Timeout Chicago edition that had rare one-on-one interviews with both Rahm Emanuel and Daley which pretty much ensures that the story about all these people across Chicago making Visions signs and criticizing both of those guys made its way into their press secretary’s hands if not their own. The Tribune, Reader, Timeout or other outlets that promoted the event would not ever consider publishing articles about the abstract concept of political vision, but they will promote something done under the auspices of “public art” made by a diverse range of Chicagoans.

Finally, the media is just one among many sites of distribution for ideas and meaning. This project operated on multiple fronts, including but not limited to: the often collaborative processes the signmakers went through with their friends and families to come up with the words or images to represent their ideas, the incredible exchanges that I had directly with the participants about their perspectives on local politics and on the concept of political imagination and vision; the interactions the sign-makers had with neighbors about the signs in their yards; the sign-makers put in symbolic dialogue in the catalogue and website featuring the portraits of them with their signs; the media coverage of the overall effort; and then the word-of-mouth that circulates when something this multi-faceted happens.

In a recent interview, you mentioned that this project was about extracting and professing ideology. What do you see as the role and use of ideology in engaging people during the electoral cycle?

DT: The project engaged ideology in two ways. One is through opening up the possibility for people to express their complex and long term visions and goals in a manner that was all about their subjective point-of-view and without any direct correlation to their job, party, community or scene. They were simply photographed with their sign in front of their home and the book and website present them with their name and the ward number (correlating to our city council system) connected to their home address. There is no mention of who their elected representatives are or what they think about them. It is simply a way of indicating the political geography of the city. In this case they were invited to say what they want and that could potentially reflect a really honest presentation of their ideological position. This perspective allows the audience to encounter a wide range of positions that don’t neatly fit into commonly understood ideological frameworks because people are frankly more eclectic than most of our organizations, parties, and communities typically acknowledge.

A more critical perspective on this would require analyzing the ideas implied by their signs and reflecting on how those ideas do or do not reflect the dominant ideologies of capitalist society such as social democracy or neoliberalism. I did not attempt nor invite that level of critique though one can certainly learn a lot about what people do and do not feel capable of demanding by looking at and reading the signs and vision statements collected.

I think that electoral cycles are great opportunities to talk about seemingly abstract things like political vision because elections are the condoned time and space in which political thought and activity is allowed to take place. Since people commonly conflate politics with elections, I believe that elections are strategic terrain for engagement by those of us on the left. That is not a new insight by any means.  But I grew frustrated realizing who was in office and how their style of governance was stifling to political imagination –  for those taking elections seriously as well as those who were disengaged (like I typically was in the past).

Daniel Tucker has worked as a cultural and political organizer in Chicago for the last decade, initiating a number of large-scale local projects, publications, and events. The themes he focuses on are primarily public space, leftist history, and geography. As a communications consultant he has worked for activist groups such as Metropolitan Tenants Organization and academic groups like University of California Institute for Research in the Arts and the Center for Urban Economic Development in Chicago. From 2005-2010 he served as the editor of AREA Chicago, a print/online publication dedicated to researching and networking local social movements in Chicago. He has written and lectured widely about the intersections of art and politics, exhibited videos and artwork internationally, and recently published Farm Together Now, a book of interviews with activist farmers across the country. miscprojects.com

“It is part of our task as revolutionary people, people who want deep-rooted, radical change, to be as whole as it is possible for us to be.” – Aurora Levins-Morales

What if our movements made up one body – a living, breathing, loving thing – a healthy body that had the means to act and to communicate as a powerful, present and self-actualized whole?

And what if that body was made up of thousands of diverse parts distinct in their origins and functions, each with unique roles, but all fueled by connective systems that brought lifeblood, health, energy and spirit to the whole?

In this imagined community – this whole movement body – organizing would be the heart and limbs that drive our body forward to a better world.  And communications would be the lifeblood that enables us to dance, fight, witness and sing along the way.

I am becoming more and more convinced that to build real power for our communities, we first need to strengthen this body – our movements – from the inside out.   This might sound cliché,  or even like we got this.  But I believe it requires a significant internal culture shift in our movements.

Part of this culture shift involves treating communications totally differently.  We are getting better at carrying out sharp and creative strategic communications campaigns to strengthen our fights for racial and economic justice.  This is essential.  But if we want to build real power for our communities and become contenders in the battle of ideas, communications has to become as core to our justice work as lifeblood is to our bodies.

We need to weave a culture and a web of transformative communications that comes before, during, after, above, below and around our active campaigns.  This culture and web would begin with how we speak and listen with each other, permeate how we organize our communities, radiate to the way we build alliances, and hone how we do battle with opponents and targets.  In the tradition of  Eastern martial arts and Sun Tzu’s Art of War, this work would not be a “soft side” of movement-building but a fundamental and disciplined practice for both survival and transformative change.

Communications as a Healing Practice

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms,  protect me from throwing any part of myself away.

– Audre Lorde

Mass media treats us like criminals.  Schools treat us like foot soldiers.  Churches treat us like pawns of a higher power.  Capitalism treats us like exploitable competitors.  Racism and sexism treat us like subordinates.  Imperialism treats us like subjects to be pacified, assimilated, or eliminated.

No wonder it’s so damn hard to be whole.

But we have to try, otherwise we are fighting our battles half-starved.  Transformative communications would begin here, where traditional models of communications have never needed to go.  It would begin with acknowledging a truth at the core of all oppressed communities – that we have a very deep need to heal.

Justice communications – the model of racial and economic justice communications spearheaded by Makani Themba-Nixon and Charlotte Ryan, and continued by the Center for Media Justice and organizing institutions like the Miami Workers Center – can and must become a healing practice.  My dear friend, great healer and social justice warrior Spenta Kandawalla, has taught me much about the intersection of somatics and social justice through her work with Staci Haines at Generative Somatics.  Generative Somatics bases their work in the understanding that we embody our survival strategies and then act from these deep habits, and that we can transform ourselves and our collective movement body by cultivating practices to increase awareness, depth, and opening for trust, resilience and change.   The core purpose of this healing work is to use the transformative power of somatic practice to grow and support a social justice movement that is deeply aligned with its principles, strategies and actions.  When we were housemates in San Francisco, Spenta and I would spend hours talking over the kitchen counter about the connections between somatics, healing trauma, and authentic communication.  These conversations have convinced me of the need to deeply explore the integration of somatics praxis with strategic communications praxis in our movements.

This would be a step towards further developing a communications approach that is even more deeply rooted in and relevant to our communities.  By contrast, public relations (PR) was a field developed to sell products and manage the public image of corporations; it is a key instrument in developing false consciousness and maintaining the capitalist system and hence a key instrument in our fragmentation.  Our communications approaches must be wholly different from these PR approaches.  They must undo this false consciousness from the inside out by giving us space to address the impacts of poverty, fragmentation, silencing, and marginalization on ourselves and our communities.  They must help us touch into difficult but authentic ways to share our experiences and feelings in the process of healing and becoming whole.

This could begin very simply: by telling each other our personal stories.  I’ve seen personal storytelling practices used effectively as a tool for consciousness-raising and member development, and as healing and documentation practices in anti-domestic violence and youth development work.  These personal storytelling methods, used by Creative Interventions, Third World Majority,  ReThink in New Orleans, and many other organizations, can be expanded and perhaps integrated with strategic storytelling tools like smartMeme’s Battle of the Story framework.  This integration could help turn individual stories into powerful counter-narratives that address personal and collective pain, and that locate ourselves both within specific oppressive systems that must be changed, and within specific communities that can make this change happen.

This is just one example of a method we might develop to integrate healing and communications practices into our justice work.  This could help strengthen our core leadership and support holistic member development.  But to do this deeply and well, we need a different kind of communications role.  We need healing communicators – people trained in somatics and social justice, healing justice, and strategic communications – who can appropriately nurture this and related practices within our organizations.

Communications as a Visionary Practice

“Yo he preferido hablar de cosas imposibles porque de lo posible se sabe demasiado”

– Silvio Rodriguez

One big obstacle in our movement-building work is that we lack a common and pro-active political agenda and a clear articulation of alternatives to the current systems in crisis.  The related communications problem is that it’s hard for us to see and share how our collective stories end.

The internal communications practices that can help us be our full selves can also be a first step towards identifying the common desires, hopes and ideas that would constitute just resolutions to our stories.  To help create these just resolutions, transformative communications would prioritize regular practice in collective reflection, creative political discussion, and research for inventive solutions.

This could look like regular facilitation of exercises that allow people to express desire and bold ideas  – not just what we’ve already tried that has worked and that hasn’t worked.  These exercises could involve asking questions like: “what do you believe in about our work?” “what is the potential of our organization?” “What is the impossible solution that we want to make possible?” And asking questions about alternative systems like: “What role do we want government to play in our society?” “What role do we want culture to play in our society?” “What are our options for ownership?” “What are our options for decision-making?”

Take for example the successful fight to kick the U.S. Navy out of Vieques.  Intensive visioning and solutions development permeated every aspect of the work.  According to Robert Rabin of the Comité Pro Rescate y Desarrollo de Vieques (CPRDV), organizers went through regular visioning and solutions discussions that were both “strategic and very comfortable”.  This led to consistent visionary framing of the struggle.  The campaign became a fight for Vieques, not a fight against the navy, even though the navy was the campaign’s primary target.  The Comité’s name is a concrete manifestation of this visionary framing, as was a number of their slogans including “Paz para Vieques”, their current tagline “Vieques: Porque la Lucha Continua” and “La Protesta con la Propuesta”, which was developed during the height of civil disobedience actions between 1999 and 2003.  This forward-thinking framing created room for many different forces to join the immediate fight for a free Vieques, and the longer-term fight for a sustainable Vieques developed for health, peace and justice.

The CPRDV complemented this visionary framing and messaging with solutions-oriented research  that continues to improve the lives of Viequenses today.  In the mid-nineties – a decade before the navy was officially kicked off the island – CPRDV worked with several forces to create a sustainable development plan for a Vieques free from U.S. military control and toxic contamination.  They worked deeply with economists and planners, as well as with a broad alliance of environmental, health and peace activists, and also conducted participatory communications research using methods like community focus groups.  The resulting Guidelines for Sustainable Development on Vieques, published in 2003 and used as the basis for the Master Plan for Sustainable Development of Vieques, now govern development policy in both Vieques and Culebra.

CPRDV’s example shows that seemingly impossible desires can be made possible with dedicated  visioning and creative research to develop solutions.  This piece of transformative communications practice can become more widespread with additional shifts in existing communications roles; in non-profits, we could turn all-too-common communications and development positions into  communications and research positions.  This shifts the focus of communications from prioritizing funders and grant-writing to prioritizing our constituencies and our own political capacity-building.    These researcher-communicators could be trained in communications research methods like media analysis, focus group convening and public opinion polling, as well as in policy and relevant academic research.  They could also be trained in creative applications of this research so they could help translate collective visioning outcomes into  frames, messages, narratives, and forward-thinking communications strategies.   This piece of the web of transformative communications would help us expand our bases and help bridge the gap between our current realities and our  dreams for radical change.

Communications as an Artistic Battle

“Oo wee sha sha coo coo yeah”  – Prince

If our internal communications can become more of a ritual and practice, then our external communications has more potential to become an artful battle.  Transformative communications would redirect how we channel the unity cultivated through internal communications toward opponents and targets on the battlefield of ideas.  Right now, we are serious fire-fighters.  But we need to become well-rounded warriors.  From the center of our full selves and collective visions, we can do battle to not just put out fires, but to win our creative solutions, to shift the terms of debate, and to shift the dominant cultural terrain.  As Ricardo Levins-Morales has said, “we can have good seeds – good leadership strategies and tactics – but if the soil is hostile nothing will grow.”

Cultivating the soil to shift dominant terrain requires fighting our battles in a different way.  First off, it requires keeping fighting words on the battlefield.  We’ve got to cultivate healing practice and constructive debate to deal with internal conflicts, and strategically choose to direct critique and attacks toward our true opponents and targets.  In relation to these opponents and targets, instead of reacting to every perceived threat with justifiable urgency and anger, we could shift to choosing strategic opportunities to fight, and to employing our full range of emotions and the full range of our diverse and bad-ass cultures as our weapons.

The Alto Arizona fight against SB1070 provides a great example of centering artistic communications  in political battle.  From jump, the fight – led by Tonatierra and the Puente Movement and by organizer/communicators including Carlos Garcia, Opal Tometi, B. Loewe, Marco Loera and others, AltoAZ– put cultural work front and center by creating bold visual art by artists like Ernesto Yenera, Favianna Rodriguez, Melanie Cervantes, and Shepard Fairey.  These images went viral through postings and downloads on the internet, and through on the ground distribution at strategically-timed mobilizations across the country.  They created a poster contest to invite artists to submit their expressions of resistance to the criminalization of immigrants, and to build a visual artist force for the struggle.  They’ve also been successful in getting big name musicians like Zach de la Rocha, Manu Chao and Lady Gaga to speak out against SB1070.  Last but not least, AltoAZ was ready with social media responses to moments when their opponents overreached.  For example, when Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s officers arrested one of Tonatierra’s leaders as he was getting into his car, AltoAZ tweeted, texted and viral video-ed the story to all ends of our movement networks. The headline that a human rights leader was being held as political prisoner was a cuttingly effective frame.  The leader – Sal Reza –  was freed the next day and is now suing Sheriff Arpaio for wrongful arrest.

Other examples of battling on our own cultural terms abound, including the role of poets and musicians in the MAG-Net battle to keep a free and open internet, and in the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI).  PACBI made a great video to pressure Elton John to cancel a June 17 concert in Israel this year.  Though the show went on, to me the video is a good example of using the power of our talent, wit and multi-media skill to drive a critical message home to a strategic target.  I also think it’s a great example of breaking a movement taboo of enjoying ourselves in public.  We know that the more serious things get, the more we have to find things to make fun of and things to make us laugh.  My thing is, social justice fighters are some of the most fun, joyful, hilarious, compassionate, and wonderful people I know.  Why hide it?

Instead, let’s share it.  Let’s channel all these parts of our full selves to transform our movements from the inside out.  Let’s develop healing communications roles and practice, to strengthen our core leaders and conduct holistic membership development; Let’s develop vision and solutions-oriented research communications roles and practice, to expand our bases and win victories that build toward systemic change; and let’s train culture workers to be strategic communicators who can make art and culture not just a tactic in strategic communications, but a core approach to communicating from the guts of our being.

The next ten years will be an intense decade for our people.  To help our communities survive and thrive, and to transition from the economic an ecological crises towards just alternatives, we will need to cultivate greater internal unity and resilience.  These are just some ideas for how we might do that through a holistic sort of communications practice for our people.  By shifting our communications approach from purely external campaign work to a combination of deep internal practice and strategic forward-thinking battle, I think we can build the cultural capacity we need to set a left pole that matters in the battle of ideas.  It’s just about recognizing that if we hope to transform power relations, rules, and conditions for the long haul – we have to do some real work developing our internal ability to transform cultural norms – beginning with our own.

Jen Soriano has been a culture and communications worker for more than 12 years.  She is a co-founder and board chair of the Center for Media Justice<http://www.centerformediajustice.org>, and serves on the leadership council of the Progressive Communicators Network<http://www.progressivecommunicators.net/>. She is currently communications coordinator for the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance<http://www.ggjalliance.org/> where she is learning in leaps and bounds about the potential of transformative communications.  Jen is also a musician with Diskarte Namin<http://dnamin.wordpress.com/>, and she sings cuz it just feels good.

We know people in pain.  Members in pain, leaders in pain and even organizers in pain.  While there is the joy and relief that can come from a strong campaign victory, there are some battle wounds that endure.  Standing on the shoulders of healers from past generations, a new cadre is emerging, integrating trauma and healing work into the everyday campaigns for social justice. Org Up’s Sushma sat with Tanuja Jagernauth, who enriches her organizing work in Chicago with young women and domestic violence survivors with trauma and harm reduction, skill sharing, and collective healing.

Q: What departures does healing / health justice work take from past practices?

I want to start with a working definition of healing justice. According to Cara Page, who wrote on Incite!’s blog about the Healing Justice work during the Detroit United States Social Forum (USSF), healing justice is “a framework that identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence and bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.  Through this framework we built two political and philosophical convergences of healing inside of liberation.”

Also, let me also make healing justice more distinct from health justice. For me, the two are inseparable but for others they are very different. Health justice is very much about access to health care, modalities that accessible, harm reduction, and having a race, class, gender, ability, etc. analysis.  But, health justice is not specifically targeted toward healing generational trauma and violence, nor is it specifically about developing community practices and visioning.

The way I understand it, healing justice acknowledges and addresses the layers and layers of trauma and violence that we have been living with and fighting for generations.  And, it asks us to bring collective practices for healing and transformation INTO our work. It recognizes that we HAVE bodies, minds, emotions, hearts, and it makes the connection that we cannot do this work of transforming society and our communities without bringing collective healing into our work. People have been asking more and more questions about “sustainability” in the work. I think that working within a healing justice framework is a way to institutionalize sustainability in our work.

So, we are asking ourselves after and before actions, for example, what was the impact on our bodies, minds, and emotions? What came up for us? What tools do we need or do we have to address what came up and the impact? And the actions themselves address trauma and violence as they are addressing systemic oppression. So the work is necessarily creating intersections between what tend to be separate issues.

Q: What openings has the national debate on health care created for this work?  What opportunities have closed?

At first, I thought that the national debate on health care would facilitate some awesome discussions on preventative health care and bring preventative and holistic health care into the national picture because it has been shown to be cost-effective to practice good preventative and holistic medicine. However, the debate ended up centering around access to emergency care, which we all do need because one night in the ER for a catastrophic event will bankrupt your family for sure. However, prevention and access to complementary and alternative modalities did not come into the discussion in a meaningful way, and I think a major opportunity was missed.

At the same time, at the 2010 USSF in Detroit, healing justice showed up in 2 amazing practice spaces and in one amazing PMA or People’s Movement Assembly (which you can read about in Cara’s Incite! blog). I was able to see first hand how awareness of healing justice elevated the discussion around making organizing work sustainable and I got to see within the Healing Justice Practice Space that people were transformed and restored and nourished on many levels by having access to various healing modalities WITHIN a week-long conference that can be triggering, very heady, and overwhelming for a lot of people.

Q: What are some exciting innovations taking place now?

I can speak to what I see in Chicago. The Young Women’s Empowerment Project, as part of their Street Youth Rise Up campaign, is focusing on Healing in Action. We are training the youth staff and outreach workers at YWEP in evidence-based herbal first aid and self care. Youth are documenting the harmful and unhelpful interactions they have with social services and hospitals and clinics via their Bad Encounter Line, which publishes a zine quarterly to describe and hold accountable the service providers. The Chicago Healing Justice Network is a network of people interested and invested in shaping what healing justice might look if taken to organizations and movement work within Chicago.  Finally, I am working with a collective of four healers to create Sage Community Health Collective, a worker-owned and run healing collective. Our work will create access to health care services for everyone, but it will also include addressing the generational violence and trauma of our communities, within and without non-profit organizations and groups. We have the opportunity to partner with existing orgs to address family and community violence and systemic oppression, bringing health care and healing to the same table where housing rights, racism, food security, worker rights, feminism, disability, gender and sexuality, the environment and everything else is discussed.

In Chicago, as we build Sage, we will include acupuncture, shiatsu, herbology, nutrition, and yoga plus workshops and skillshares as services but our healing justice practice will include working with the community to support struggles we collectively identify, offering skillshares, and asking questions of ourselves and the healing community that challenge all of us to reconsider the ways in which we do health care and healing.

Writing will be a huge part of our work as we further define and tease out what we mean by healing justice. Community visioning will be part of our healing justice practice. In fact, we are putting together focus groups with organizations in our target region to ask what it would look like to them to have a health care system that works for them, and what would it look like to apply healing in their community to address violence and trauma. In some places, folks will work with Reiki or craniosacral therapy; in other places they will use sound and vibrational healing or somatics but what is the most important thing is the application of the underlying framework of healing justice: healing generational and community trauma and violence and, because we are organizers, the needs and desires and interests of those with whom we work are paramount, so what modalities we offer and bring will be informed by our community needs. Healing justice does not exclude allopathy or more mainstream health practices but for sure would try to be non judgemental, harm reductionist, respectful, etc within the use of those modalities. I think healing justice seeks access for everyone to holistic healing as part of the healing of generations of trauma and violence but also honors where people are at today, so it would not exclude antibiotics, etc. Healing justice would, however, ask questions about who has access and what modalities are more harmful to people and what modalities enforce violence and trauma and which ones are even culturally appropriative.

Q: Where and how does health justice work need to inter face with other sectors of the movement?

Healing generational trauma and violence demands an inter-sectional, inter-generational approach. One way that we saw this in action in Detroit was that the Healing Justice Practice Space was shut down for one day so that the healers could participate in an action targeting the large incinerator in Detroit, which was actually shut down recently. Making the deliberate choice to involve healers in the action made the statement that not only do we need to be active in supporting folks to heal their individual asthma and respiratory disorders, but we need to be involved in fighting the sources of their asthma and respiratory disorders: the structures that pollute the air they breathe and the people in power who keep those structures running. Healing justice intersects with every sector of the movement, and I am excited to see how we will collectively tease out the ways in which the intersections and collaborations happen. Sustainably.

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Tanuja Jagernauth is a licensed acupuncturist and writer working in Chicago with the Young Women’s Empowerment Project, Devi Health, and Sage Community Health Collective. For fun and self-care, this November she is participating in National Novel Writing Month. You can check out her blog atwww.devihealth.blogspot.com or follow her on Twitter @tanuja_devi

Welcome back to Fast Forum!  We pick a hot topic and ask 3 – 6 organizers from across the country to weigh in. Our hope is to draw out new ideas and to encourage new voices to take a stab at the freshest challenges facing our community. This month, Joseph Phelan, one of our editors here at Organizing Upgrade, pulled together a FastForum exploring the intersection of strategic communications and left organizing.

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MEDIA JUSTICE & JUSTICE COMMUNICATIONS:

BUILDING MEANING TO BUILD MOVEMENTS

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Malkia A. Cyril is the Executive Director and founder of the Center for Media Justice. With more than 15 years’ experience as a community organizer, policy advocate, and communications strategist, Malkia has led local and national campaigns for racial and economic justice and is the author of numerous essays and articles on media, marginalization, and movement-building. Malkia is the recipient of the Media Leader award from the Alliance for Community Media, the Emerging Leader award from the Media That Matters Film Festival, and other awards from the Media Justice Fund, Rock the Vote, and others; with appearances in Democracy Now, Hard Knock Radio, Breakdown FM, Free Speech TV, the documentary Outfoxed, the documentary Broadcast Blues, the SF Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the New York Times, the Village Voice, and others.

Karlos Gauna Schmieder is an organizer and strategist from Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before joining the Center for Media Justice, Karlos worked for nearly a decade as a community and communications organizer with SouthWest Organizing Project (SWOP). As cochair of communications for the 2007 U.S. Social Forum, he coordinated media strategy for this groundbreaking event. He is also a former steering committee member of Grassroots Global Justice, resource ally with Right to the City Alliance and editor of Voces Unidas. Karlos is co-Chair of Progressive Communicators Network’s Leadership Council and co chair of communications working group of the 2010 U.S. Social Forum.

At the Center for Media Justice we believe that the human right to communicate, and therefore to organize and fight for a better future, should belong to everyone.

Unfortunately, in the context of the big money media environment of the U.S. and the dawning of Tea Party politics following the this year’s mid-term elections- the vast majority of voices are shut out of the public debates that shape the daily material conditions of their lives. Center-Left research and communications organizations have staked a color-blind poll in the middle of debates on race and equity, legitimizing a do-nothing approach when it comes to confronting racism in the context of wedge issues.

This has left us with not only a very real need to re-train a new generation of progressive organizers in the art of strategic communications for equity and justice, but also a public debate on race and equity dominated by regressive voices.

To be effective and to win campaigns, professional and embedded movement communicators working on justice issues must be offered new models and trained in strategies to confront and defeat wedge issues and build a powerful public voice.

“Justice Communications” is a new, participatory model for strategic communications innovated by such veteran communicators as Makani Temba-Nixon and Charlotte Ryan, and operationalized by the staff of CMJ.  Justice Communications integrates cultural change into all components of community organizing and movement building to echo a populist, values-based vision to reframe conservative narratives of governance, the economy, and race.

To build this kind of ideological power over the next 5 to 10 years, three critical steps are needed:

1.     Movements for justice need strategic, issue-based convening and relevant strategy tools to determine collective action meta-frames on critical wedge issues across the lines of issue and geography.

2.     Movement organizations must deploy professional and embedded movement communicators and use strategic opportunities to wage framing contests between Individualism and meritocracy vs. collective action and equity frames; Corporatism vs. the role of engaged, popular government and corporate accountability; and racist consumerism and poverty marketing vs. structural and institutional responses to advance racial justice and economic equity.

3.     Funders must invest in the building of movement communications infrastructure.  Our communications infrastructure and systems are woefully inadequate as we enter a communications cataclysm that has left even the most sophisticated communicators and organizers flatfooted and unsure of how to spend our communications collateral.

Our vision is a truly integrated approach to social, narrative, cultural and media change for 21st century media policy solutions, and communications and cultural strategies that ensure movements for justice have a powerful public voice in issues that profoundly affect our daily lives. Through strategic convening, strategic framing battles, and targeted resources- we can build a pipeline of leadership with the reach, skill, and capacity to make long-term impacts that ensure grassroots movements for justice have a powerful public voice.

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DISPATCHES FROM THE

CLIMATE CRISIS FRAMING BATTLE

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Patrick Reinsborough has been involved in campaigns for peace, the environment, indigenous rights and economic justice for over twenty years.  In 2002 he co-founded the smartMeme Strategy & Training Project (www.smartMeme.org <http://www.smartMeme.org> ) as a vehicle to explore the intersections of social change strategy, the ecological crisis and the power of narrative. Recently smartMeme has been supporting North American climate justice organizers in developing framing and messaging strategies. He is the co-author of Re:Imagining Change—How to Use Story-based Strategy to Win Campaigns Build Movements and Change the World <http://www.smartmeme.org/book> (PM Press 2010). Patrick spends his time fighting for a better world, parenting, playing music for his friends, and wandering through the urban wilds of San Francisco.

As movements around the planet mobilize to counter the effects of climate destabilization on their communities, cultures, and ecosystems, a framing battle of global significance is underway.

In the climate fight, as with so many other struggles, the heart of the framing battle is naming the problem, since how we define the problem determines what solutions are possible. To varying degrees, governments and multinational corporations around the world have acknowledged the crisis and they claim they are working to address it. However, they present the climate crisis through a reductionist lens as merely a problem of too much carbon in the atmosphere while ignoring the underlying issues of justice, equity, and humanity’s relationship with the Earth. This framing allows exploitation of the crisis to justify escalating the very policies and practices that have pushed the planet to the brink. Essentially the world’s richest countries and companies are co-opting environmental rhetoric to put a PR friendly “green” face on the same old politics of unlimited economic growth, resource thefts and corporate exploitation.

Meanwhile the ‘official’ climate movement has been dominated by a loyal opposition of largely northern, policy, and access-oriented NGOs who, although (mostly) well intentioned, have failed to reframe the debate or address the root causes of the crisis. But increasingly as more global movements begin to unite under the banner of climate justice, there is a different story to tell. The terms of the debate are being reframed from seeing the climate crisis as an isolated issue, to understanding the disruption of the climate as merely the most visible symptom of a much larger problem: our global system of growth-addicted, fossil fuel-driven, corporate capitalism that is undermining all the life support systems of the planet.

When this deeper framing of the problem is accepted it becomes clear that we will never re-stabilize the climate without addressing the roots of the problem. This means acknowledging the Global North’s historic responsibility for the problem (“climate debt”) as the first step towards fundamental shifts to our economy, political systems, and cultural assumptions. This is why one of the over-arching and unifying messages coming out of global movements fighting for a just response to the climate crisis is “system change NOT climate change”.

However, as people’s movements around the world ramp up their organizing in the lead up to the next round of United Nations negotiations in Cancun there are a number of dangerous frames––control myths––that must be challenged.

Control Myth #1 Only The Market Can Save Us!

In this case a global carbon market that effectively privatizes the atmosphere, justifies massive land grabs and further commodification of forests, soils, and grasslands. Two hundred years of ideology have bestowed the “invisible hand” of the market with debate-shaping qualities of alleged efficiency, fairness and power. This is a familiar narrative to many of our movements fighting privatization and displacement but we still need better, shared strategies to reframe the myth of the market.

Control Myth #2 Technology Will Save Us!

Hand in hand with the story of the all-powerful market is the obsession with techno-fixes. Techno-fixes masquerade as solutions but just distract us from making the fundamental changes that are needed. The assumption that some benign “experts” will provide new, innovative technology to solve the problem justifies continuing unsustainable policies while removing people’s agency from the frame. More and more climate techno-fixes are being proposed: from overt lies like “clean coal” and “climate ready” genetically engineered crops to terrifyingly disruptive, untested new technologies like synthetic biology and geoengineering.[i] Beware!

Control Myth #3 Climate Is Too Big An Issue: Only Governments Can Save Us!

The debate has been overly focused on global and national policy while social movements and community-based responses are left out of the frame. Many mainstream environmentalists have even argued that any global emission reduction agreement (regardless of how weak or unfair) is better than no deal. Variations of this narrative have been used (particularly by the U.S.) to evade historic responsibility and blame China, India and other developing economies for blocking an international deal. Certainly a global agreement is important, but the reality of the scale of the climate crisis is that we need transformative action in all sectors of society.

Given the wide-ranging implications of the debate, climate is an essential arena for our movements to develop more holistic narratives and shared frames that mutually reinforce efforts across different sectors and struggles. At the heart of this framing battle is the emerging climate justice movement led by frontline impacted communities, indigenous movements and environmental justice organizers.

Climate justice framing is challenging the control myths above (and many more) by refocusing the issue on the core problems of fossil fuel addiction, the ongoing legacy of historic inequities and the need for systemic change. At the center of the evolving narrative is the role of community-based solutions in stewarding a just transition towards a society that is both sustainable and just. As different movements like migrants rights, reproductive justice and organized labor articulate the connections between their struggles and the climate crisis there are many opportunities to experiment with applying and broadening climate justice framing.

With the historic adoption of the Cochabamba People’s Agreement on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in April there is now a powerful new narrative emerging that unites ecology, justice and social movement action. This platform offers a potent counterpoint to the corporate driven, false solutions of the United Nations process. Most importantly it offers an invitation to organizers everywhere to connect their issues with this multi-faceted struggle to transform our world. In the words of one of the key slogans uniting movements in the lead up to the COP-16 meeting and beyond: “grassroots organizing cools the planet!”

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ORGANIZERS ARE STORYTELLERS

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B. Loewe comes out of the Chicago Worker Center movement<http://latinounion.org> and is currently supporting the National Day Laborer Organizing Network<http://ndlon.org> in communications to turn the tide from the fear-based backwardness of Arizona policies to a world that recognizes and respects our human rights. B. recently served as a field organizer for the US Social Forum<http://ussf2010.org> on the belief that big crises require big demands that come from movements beyond any one organization.

Opal Tometi is a community organizer in Arizona. She recently earned her Masters in Communication Studies with an emphasis in Rhetoric and Advocacy. She is currently organizing and working on strategic communications with Alto Arizona, PUENTE and other migrant justice groups in Maricopa County.

Organizing is the process of retelling our lives with ourselves scripted as the protagonists instead of objects in an unjust world who’s future is up for grabs. If our inactivity is a result of being told that we don’t deserve better and that there are no possible alternatives to the world we’ve inherited, organizing tells us our personal problems are not ours alone. They are social. There are solutions. And we can be the ones to solve them.

 Simply put, organizers are storytellers. The stories we decide to tell and how we decide to tell them shape our consciousness and shape how we engage in our world. Thus strategic communications is not about the magic bullet phrase we utter nor is it about having the most communication technologies at our disposal. Strategic communications is about asking ourselves: what narratives are powerful enough to pull the wool from people’s eyes and expose that the emperor has no clothes.

For the migrant rights movements, we find ourselves suffering because of the confines of the stories we’ve been telling and that are being told about us. Our recent organizing approach has woven a web that sought to exchange enforcement for legalization via “comprehensive immigration reform.” And now, without legalization, all immigrants are seen as criminals. To undo that fiction and rebuild a powerful proactive path to legalization, we have to reframe the debate. We’ll have to find ways to tell the story of the global economy that links unemployed workers in the US with displaced workers from the global south, the story of the threat to democracy that criminalization plays, and remind ourselves of the story of history’s long arc toward justice. Just as it takes a long look forward to remain optimistic in these troubled times, it takes a long look at history<http://altoarizona.com/videos.html#featured> to understand and communicate this moment in its proper context.

In Arizona we know too well what compromised messaging and inaccurate storytelling can do, however it has caused us to be more resolute in not only our storytelling, but also our <http://goog_1251661410> truth telling<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFA_qUh0pQw&feature=player_embedded> in the face of a reality that becomes less real every day. The road ahead is long and arduous, but rather than be embittered, we know that we can be organizers and storytellers, strategic communicators that reveal the truth about the inherent dignity in each of us, the interdependence we share, and laugh along the way<http://blog.altoarizona.com/blog/2010/10/sea-captains-learn-babies-make-bad-anchors.html> to winning.

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NARRATIVE STRATEGY &

STEPPING UP OUR GAME

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Doyle Canning is co-director of smartMeme, a strategy and training center that amplifies the impact of grassroots organizing with the power of narrative. She is co-author of Re:Imagining Change – How to Use Story-based Strategies to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World (PM Press, 2010), and has collaborated on framing strategies with groups like Student/Farmworker Alliance, Iraq Veterans Against the War, Indigenous Environmental Network, and SCOPE. Doyle lives in Boston where she practices yoga, walks her dog, and dreams of one day having a garden.

While the first Tea Party convention, with its 600 attendees, was covered extensively on every major network, the US Social Forum, with over 12,000 people, was largely ignored by the establishment media. Of course, there are many structural reasons for this. But we’ve got to be honest with ourselves that when it comes to the shaping the conversation in the mainstream media, we’ve got to step up our game. There is a critical gap in many grassroots organizations between great organizing on the ground, and getting the message out on primetime.

In the big picture, we are losing the Battle of the Story for this historical moment to regressive forces. There are cultural conversations happening now about the role of government, race in the US, the market’s implosion, the ecological crisis, and so much more. And, with a few exceptions, we’re not the ones commenting on talk shows or stealing the headlines on Sunday.

Our movements sorely need more media and communications capacity – and that means money, skilled people, time, and tools. But the heart of the matter is much deeper, and much more difficult. What we really need is a coherent narrative.

Narrative is at the very heart of strategy, and is what truly defines a social movement as a social phenomena. Narrative is the set of frames that define the ways in which we imagine and understand who we are, what we want, and where we’re going. It is the story that we believe in, and that we co-create in a movement building process.

In order to succeed in creating systemic, transformative change, we need to build infrastructure to develop shared narrative strategies, and spaces for forging symbols, memes and messages that can capture the imagination of the people and motivate action. This means taking our story seriously, and bringing strategic rigor, discipline, and creativity to a sustained conversation across sectors.

Luckily, I have no doubt that we’ve got a good story. In fact, we have plenty. Tales of struggle, liberation, resilience and reconciliation are as old as time. Our task now is to unearth these gems and polish our narrative until it shines brighter and sounds better than what’s currently on offer.

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ACCELERATING THE TRAIN TOWARDS JUSTICE

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Sangita Nayak is currently serving as Freedom Inc’s communications consultant, a racial justice agency in Madison. Her forte has been in coalescing effective organizing and communications networks. Over the last dozen years, she has organized for working rights at 9to5 National Association of Working Women, for Gulf recovery through the Katrina Information Network (KIN), for corporate influence transparency at the WHO through the Network for Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals, and for refugee access to local services through the Hmong American Women’s Association. She has consulted and facilitated workshops for numerous groups in relation to strategic communications. She has also facilitated several gatherings for the Progressive Communicators Network, and is serving as co-chair on their board.

Grassroots organizing and strategic communications should be resourced in tandem to grow and deepen our work and advance the struggle. If organizing gets people on a movement train, then strategic communications should accelerate and fuel that train for justice.

Communications should help identify and invite more audiences that organizers need to win the battle for the short and long haul. It can also help identify the tracks, or ways of moving, so the organizing has greater impact. In tandem with people-centered organizing, communications assists by amplifying messengers and exposing targets, so that more and more people jump on the movement train.

Today, we face dangerous narratives from the opposition’s communications that seem more like an air assault then a train. One of these messsages is that our communities are destroying themselves. That narrative includes a certain inhumanity about communities, that justifies a denial of services. Rebecca Kleefisch, Wisconsin’s newly elected Lieutenant Governor, captures that attack in her comparison of marriage in gay communities to marrying a dog. We’ve also seen this narrative in how the Hmong community in Wisconsin face a media bias that domestic violence is a cultural norm.

This narrative about our communities asserts that our communities should be changed if not destroyed.  It is fundamentally linked to this nation’s white supremacy and it must be challenged by our growing movement train through thoughtful and well-funded strategic organizing and communications work.

When we offer visionary narratives, we continue to directly expose the communication of white supremacy and Patriarchy. For instance, Freedom Inc. in Madison, WI regularly exposes the racist lies about Hmong and other communities in relation to preventing violence. And after the recent deaths of LGBT teens, we mourned and supported the families of the victims while we challenged the notion that white communities were the only communities suffering.  LGBT communities of color continue to get ignored and silenced–no one mourns our lost. This deeper and liberating narrative all possible when strategic communications is on the train with community organizing.

Though many of the crises our communities endure were not created by us, we must assert our role in creating solutions to our health, economy, and environment–by looking at the age-old practices and remedies in communities of color.  We must drive solutions that respect the wisdom of people across the life span. Our communication and organizing is part of this narrative working to create a healthy society, honor the history of our ancestors, knowledge of our elders, insight of women as well as the dreams of our youth.

Ricardo Levins-Morales – veteran movement activist, artist and one of the founders of the Northland Poster Collective – shared his reflections on the “political ecology of change” with Organizing Upgrade in preparation for the U.S. Social Forum.  Levins-Morales will be speaking at the following sessions at the U.S. Social Forum:

Creative Organizing
Jun 24 2010 – 1:00pm Cobo Hall: DO-03D

Cultural Organizing for a Just Society: making art & culture integral to social justice organizing and movement building
Jun 24 2010 – 3:30pm UAW Building: Escort

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Don’t fight the riptide. It’ll wear you down. A riptide occurs when water at high tide gets pooled behind reefs or sand bars so when the sea goes out again, the trapped water has to find a channel through which to escape the pool. It empties through that opening with such force that it can sweep a swimmer out to sea. Our instinct is to start swimming toward shore as hard as we can. The better strategy is to swim parallel to the coast until you are out of the riptide, then ride the regular waves to shore. Left activists know the feeling of being caught in a riptide without knowing the way out. When the political tide runs against us it takes all our effort just to stay in place. Our standards slide until a “victory” just means that we didn’t get screwed as badly as we could have been. Our gains are swept away the moment we turn away.

When conservative activists faced this problem, back in the mid-1960s, they tried something different. Instead of swimming faster they looked into what it would take to turn the tide around. They pulled it off. With the tide behind you, you can achieve all kinds of success even with less that brilliant leadership. It’s a lot easier to slash local school budgets when half the population already believes that government is incompetent, teachers are lazy, taxes are evil and the private sector can do it better. That’s the tide.

One swimmer swims against the rip tide and is steadily pushed out to sea. Another heads out of the current and floats in on the surf. They both faced the same challenge. The difference is what was in their heads. This essay is about what’s in our heads and how it can transform the terms of struggle and therefore the course of history. It is also about butterflies.

When butterflies migrate they don’t just start flapping their wings in the right direction. They don’t want to work that hard and get blown in to bushes and buildings by every gust of wind. They go straight up, sometimes up to twelve thousand feet, find a current headed their way and ride it for a thousand miles.

Their light, fragile wings, a liability among the treacherous ground winds, are now their great asset.

The visible world is defined and determined by an invisible one.  A glance at the landscape won’t tell you the likelihood of earthquakes.  You have to know that invisible pressures accumulate along subterranean fault lines formed in the distant past. The butterfly and the organizer must be attuned to currents that are not apparent unless you look for them. The activists who launched the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 knew that undercurrents of anger at racist indignities were reaching critical levels and were searching for a way to turn them into a force to challenge segregation. The conservative activists who gathered in the wreckage of the Goldwater presidential campaign nine years later sought to harness fears stirred up by the civil rights struggle, the spread of consumerist immorality and the erosion of religious certainty and give them ideological and organizational expression.

In the USA we don’t like to overthink things. We prefer action.  We run off to parties without grabbing the address. If we feel a current we swim against it. We fight oppressive conditions without asking what holds them in place. We swing between wishful thinking and hopelessness without seeing that they both reflect a disconnect between the strategies we repeat and the successes that elude us. But it is not just harsh conditions that confound us. All seeds start in the dark, after all. It’s how we interpret and respond to them. Among Malcolm X’s many abilities, his most remarkable gift was his oratory. He used the magic of language to help traumatized people uncover a new interpretation of their story. This change in perspective exposed new avenues for action and turned what had been dreams into possibilities. The rest is history.

Strategic vision is the precondition for effective strategies. It is the rain that spurs the strategies to growth just as strategies in turn seed to tactics. A strategic vision encapsulates our perspective on the landscape we are challenged to cross and our understandings of who we are and what we dream of becoming. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how strategic vision is the pivot which can turn our defensive struggles into political initiative, unite isolated reform efforts into a movement for change and open up new possibilities for effective action in every field of struggle.

The lay of the land

The transformative promise of the Obama Presidency was not, in the end, derailed by Republicans or sabotaged by conservative Democrats or even betrayed by Obama himself. It never existed. The illusion that it did and the collapse of that illusion result from a structural dilemma which defines both dominant political parties but particularly bedevils the Democrats.

The Republicans are a coalition between the corporate elite and an array of conservative movements and institutions comprised of the Christian right, nativist, gun rights, white supremacist and anti-choice groups, small government Tea Partiers, corporate front groups and others. This conservative base delivers votes, campaign workers, foot soldiers for corporate front groups and an ideological message which galvanizes popular support. In return they get to advance their patriarchal and racist moral agenda and receive ample funding for their cultural warfare apparatus. The reactionary opinion molders (the “perceptioneers”) on talk radio, cable TV, blogs and in legislative offices translate the agenda of the corporate elite (anti-labor, pro-deregulation, privatization, interventionist and anti-democratic) into a populist narrative of personal liberty that resonates with the conservative base. The result is that the demands of the conservative social base are closely aligned with (or at least do not impinge upon) the agenda of the corporate sector.

The Democrats are a coalition between the same corporate elite and a constellation of non-profits, unions, communities of color and environmental and social reform movements. Their demands revolve around basic needs such as access to food, education, livable wages, healthy workplaces and communities, affordable housing, quality education and an end to discrimination.  In other words the satisfaction of the aspirations of the Democratic grassroots would require a massive transfer of resources to the base of the social pyramid and consequently would tilt the balance of power toward labor and organized communities. They have to implement policies that their corporate sponsors require and which hurt their constituents in every respect. To the base they can offer little more than placebos, small measures that don’t cost much or symbolic gestures such as White House dinners, Presidential declarations and seats on advisory panels.

The existence of a corporate elite that pursues its collective interests is the invisible planet of our political system. It is possible to discover the existence of an unknown planet by observing its gravitational tug on the orbits of its neighbors. The discovery of such a body allows us to understand the motion of the rest of the system.

The policies that guide our government are researched and outlined within a network of brain trusts housed in political institutes, policy think tanks, academic institutions, corporate departments, business associations, intelligence agencies, specialized publications and private strategy centers. Their role is to define policy goals, develop the “framing” with which to secure public support and develop candidates to fill top and mid-level government jobs. These broad policy outlines define the parameters of the “accepted wisdom” in the corporate media.

Henry Kissinger’s career provides a window into this world. His trajectory carried through many top corporate and quasi-governmental institutes including The Psychological Strategy Board, the Harvard Center for International Affairs, the Operations Coordinating Board of the National Security Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rand Corporation and the Trilateral Commission. He was a protégé of oil magnates David and Nelson Rockefeller whose patronage landed him in the inner circles of government. (Many of Obama’s first and second tier appointees are drawn from these groups.)

By 1974, as Secretary of State, Kissinger had concluded that US allies were a greater threat to its world dominance than were its enemies. The growing clout of Europe and East Asia marked their emergence as worrisome rivals. Kissinger’s doctrine called for establishing undisputed dominance of the world oil and gas supplies on which these economies would depend for growth. This policy became integrated into the elite consensus and remains in place. This fact makes sense of US policies toward West Asia and the Middle East. It explains its behavior in the lead-up to its invasion of Iraq: each time Iraq sought to appease US demands the United States declared that the effort was too little, too late, increased its demands and insisted on escalated international reprisals. The Kissinger policy framework of seeking direct control of the oil fields would not be consummated by a diplomatic resolution. The Obama administration is reading from the same script in relation to Iran. Inevitably there will be a campaign to bring the vast oil and gas reserves of Venezuela and Bolivia back into the corporate fold.

Attention to the invisible world does more than illuminate the workings of the power elitel: it reveals sources of popular power as well. In 1969 the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party established an alliance with the Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization and the white Young Patriots. They called it the “Rainbow Coalition,” a name later appropriated by Jesse Jackson for his 1984 presidential campaign. The Patriots were the kids of recent immigrants from southern, mostly Appalachian, states. They wore confederate flags on their jackets and had family members back home in the Klan. Brining them into alliance with communities of color around common class issues required deliberate and persistent courtship on the part of the Panthers. It meant attending their court hearings, shooting pool in their bars, sleeping on their couches and talking late into the night about police harassment and substandard housing. In the end, as Panther organizer Bobby Lee put it, they would have “stopped a bullet for me.”

Had the Panthers followed today’s practices and looked just at the surface of the political landscape, they’d have written the Patriots off as hopeless racists. Instead they asked why these folks were hurting: was their racism based on vested interest or were they been fooled into it. They concluded that in the big picture they all had more to gain as allies than enemies.

This approach has nothing in common with the Democratic strategy of courting white, suburban swing voters by catering to their prejudices. The Panthers came to the table with an organized political base united around an alternative program. What they offered the Young Patriots and their community was a more promising vision.

Offering an alternative vision, so central to history’s most successful movements, is foreign to today’s left-liberal non-profits whose operating principle is “fight for what’s winnable.” This in a nutshell summarizes the contrast with the right: we fight for winnable “gains” while they fight for power. We go as far as we can without brushing up against the barbed wire. They decide when to move the wire closer, steadily limiting the “winnable” possibilities.

The battle over health care reform lays bare how this plays out. Corporate lobbyists were invited to the White House to draft legislation that would regulate their industry, thus guaranteeing that their core interests would be protected whatever the outcome. They then backed a campaign to defeat it, resulting in the steady removal of what little nutrition was in the package. Desperate to pass a law, the White House continually watered it down in successive attempts to win Republican approval. When finally introduced, the bill came under heavy Republican fire and was compromised further. The President suddenly found his populist voice, touring the land, blasting the evils of corporate greed. This galvanized the unions and non-profits to pull out all the stops to pass what by now was a giant, brightly colored placebo. The final bill incorporated some “gains” that progressive spokespeople could point to even as it entrenched the position of the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations at the heart of the “reformed” system. These corporations not only gained an expanded captive market but are in a comfortable position from which to deploy their vast army of lobbyists and bottomless campaign chests to undermine and erode any progressive gains that irritate them. We measure our progress in “gains,” they measure theirs in power. At the end of the day power it’s power that counts.

In the martial art of Tai Chi, the practitioner enlists the force and direction of motion of her opponent to achieve victory. A similar sensibility can be applied to political struggle. I like to adopt the outlook that our enemies exist for the purpose helping us to defeat them. Our job is to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. The first thing they will do for us is tell us where they are vulnerable. The ways they deploy their resources is a map. The fact that I wear a helmet when I bike to work tells you where I think I need extra protection.

When we step back from our daily struggle to encompass the entire political landscape in our field of vision, one of its most striking features is the exponentially expanding penal system.

Communities of color are subjected to a punitive social management regime that has little apparent connection real crime. This system has quickly emerged to take the place of the segregationist Black Laws, fashioned to keep the African American populace vulnerable and off balance under the guise of being color-neutral. A tremendous immigrant workforce is likewise regulated through a quasi-military system of intimidation and mass punishment. This should tell us that these are powerful constituencies whose hands are being tied precisely because they represent a potential threat to the operation of the system. Freeing them from their legal straightjackets is therefore strategically vital if we hope to loosen the grip of corporate rule.

Republican strategist Karl Rove has taught us that what an opponent assumes to be a major advantage can be transformed into a strategic weakness. The “swift boat” offensive against Democrat John Kerry, for example was directed at his military service, a credential he assumed to be unassailable. The strategic heart of right wing power resides in its unparalleled ideological warfare apparatus. It is able to transform the agendas of corporate managers into the battle cries of the angry masses. Any resistance can be quickly declared to be communistic, fascist or terrorist.

Core vision

The left abandoned any pretense of posing a real alternative in the wake of COINTELPRO repression and the Red Scare that preceded it. Understandable, but it has put us in the awkward position of seeking winnable improvements for specific groups while our opponents proclaim a grand moral mission.

What would it look like if we had the audacity to challenge the moral vision of the right with one of our own? What if we placed the New World that we say is possible on the public menu of choices in clearly understandable terms? It depends on how well that vision resonates with people’s dreams. To take this notion for a test drive I humbly submit a partial list of core values that reflect the world I am fighting for, translated into language that a second grader can understand.

1) No one gets seconds until everyone has had firsts.

2) You don’t make a mess you can’t clean up.

3) Food is for feeding people.

4) Share.

5) Don’t take stuff that isn’t yours.

6) The Earth is a home shared by everyone who lives here.

7) Everyone gets access to clean water, air, food and shelter.

8 ) People should get to make decisions about their lives and share decisions that also affect others.

9) Human habitat can be healthy if natural habitat is healthy.

10) No group of people is inherently better or more deserving than other groups of people.

11) The wellbeing of all children is the responsibility of everyone.

These are not alien values to most folk. If you asked people you know about running our society along the lines of these principles, the most common response would probably be that it would be nice if it were possible but it’s not realistic. In other words if we organized explicitly around such a core vision statement we could expect two sources of opposition: those with a vested interest in defeating it and those who wish they could embrace it but don’t believe it is possible. That is not a bad starting position for an ideological struggle.

Let’s bring this back to the perceptioneers, the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs and others who provide the intellectual soundtrack for the right wing movements. A major part of their effort is devoted to protecting their followers against contagion by such values. More specifically, they want to make it clear that only a deserving few are worthy of such respectful treatment. Outside that small circle of wagons is a big world of jealous, hostile enemies whose very souls cry out to destroy us. A big part of the perceptioneer’s job is to define and police those borders, continually explaining why Muslims, immigrants, dark people and GLBT folk are a threat to all that is civilized and decent. It is worth noting that they are actively engaged in keeping their own base from drifting toward these values even though no voice in the public square is advocating them. Can anybody say “vulnerability”?

When an animal senses danger, its “fight or flight” response is triggered. Its heart rate and blood pressure rise, blood rushes to its motor muscles and bodily systems not relevant to crisis management—digestion, energy storage, reproduction, normal immune function and construction of bone and tissue—shut down or go into low gear. It’s a good emergency reflex but comes with a cost if left activated too long. The right wing sound machine is a perpetual panic generator, continually stimulating the fight or flight response in their followers and triggering memories of past traumas, real or contrived. Fear makes every shadow into a potential threat and makes people easier to manipulate. It also resonates with a carefully cultivated narrative of white victimhood in which US history is remembered as a series of unprovoked ambushes by ruthless enemies. In this memory, all that remains of the genocidal conquest of the continent is Custer’s last stand at the Little Big Horn. The annexation of Texas becomes the siege of the Alamo. The seizure of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines is the sinking of the battleship Maine. Pearl Harbor summarizes the war in the Pacific and the war against Viet Nam is about MIA/POWs. The struggle for racial equality is merely a backdrop for “reverse discrimination.” The attacks of 9/11 are just the latest assault…

This sense of victimhood is put to work by the perceptioneers in the interests of capital. Restrictions on tobacco sales, pollution limits, assertion of worker’s rights, regulation of food additives, social services for the poor and, in fact, any limits on corporate power, are proclaimed to be assaults on personal liberty. Little 9/11s.

The ideological offensive of the right fills a void created by a crisis of legitimacy. The derivatives meltdown and subsequent economic crisis; the rewarding of the culprits; the slow mo’ military defeats overseas; the deterioration of our basic life support systems such as health care and food; the decimation of the public sector; lack of policy in the face of a growing climate crisis; the devastation from the BP disaster and the inability of government to address the pain caused by all of these has undermined the legitimacy of the status quo to a degree not seen for half a century. Obama’s promise to transform that system is what swept him into office, but all of the candidates in the last election were running against the status quo.

The progressive reforms of past eras were granted against a background of labor militancy, mass protest movements and ideological competition with the soviet bloc. No such pressures exist today and so the top 1% has little incentive to be generous toward poor folk. In fact they are hell bent on eliminating public expenditures and are cutting back on support to the non-profits. The integration of the corporate sector and the state has emboldened the corporados to the point that they have little fear of consequences for even the most brazenly criminal behavior. All this is creating pressure along a fault line that runs through the non-profit sector.

A public health lens can illuminate the nature of this tension. We’`ll compare two basic approaches in public health to guarding against disease outbreak in a population. One strategy is to pursue what is known as vertical immunity: indentify the pathogen for the disease in question and develop a vaccine or anti-biotic that is designed to defeat it. The other is to confer horizontal immunity: support the overall health of the population so that it is better able to resist whatever harmful organisms or other insults it is exposed to. Horizontal immunity is less precise in its response but confers a level of general security by making the human population a less receptive environment for infection.

There’s no great mystery in how to confer horizontal immunity and healthy resilience in a population. It is not very capitalist-friendly, however. It consists of providing what bodies need and removing what causes them harm. Take nutrition: healthy food is as fresh as possible with minimal processing and the absence of pesticides, preservatives and hormones and other junk. It is safest when provided by agriculture on a scale that does not leave us vulnerable to national disease outbreaks from huge processing centers. Other contributing factors include exercise, supportive social networks, safe housing and self-determination (feeling in control of one’s life). Effective care emphasizes supporting the body’s natural healing capacity with minimal intervention. All these measures could be within reach of people without need for corporations to insert themselves in the process.

Capitalism hates horizontal immunity because it undermines the market in significant ways. Profitability in the food market is to be found in over-processed foods, centralized mass production and massive chemical inputs to improve shelf-life, yield and visual appeal. If sales for Burger King, snickers bars or Coca Cola show a decline the corporate response is not to exult in people’s healthier choices but to escalate advertising.

Secondly, the capitalist market depends on people experiencing a myriad of particular, clearly identifiable dissatisfactions that lend themselves to specialized products. It is far better to market a thousand skin and hair products to address a thousand conditions than to face a population of healthy eaters whose skin takes care of itself.

Finally, raising the overall health of a population entails raising the social wage, the combination of social benefits that support the collective quality of life. When people have enough resources in their lives and under their control they are able to make healthier decisions for themselves and their communities. An increased social wage would naturally address a constellation of social problems associated with inequality, lack of control and poverty. It would significantly reduce homelessness, prostitution, chemical abuse, street crime and hunger for example. A greater social wage also leads to greater security among the broad population and therefore undermines the ability of corporations to dictate the conditions of work, environmental protection and land use. Public health surveys indicate that communities place a high value on preventing contamination of their environment, the workplace and the food supply and would protect them if they could. Governments that devote significant resources to the pursuit of horizontal immunity become the targets for destabilization and overthrow by the larger, corporate-friendly powers. Investment flows to places where labor, environmental and human rights advocates are taken care of by repressive regimes. The capitalist market, with its quiver of vertically oriented solutions can only create a market where people’s needs are not being met in other ways.

Tens of millions of people are engaged in activities which they hope contribute to improving people’s lives. Whatever their specific venue, they experience the frustration of having to implement vertical solutions for problems that require horizontal strategies. Teachers, for example, have long complained that they are in an uphill struggle to teach children who come to school suffering from poor nutrition, inadequate health care, toxic exposure, unsafe housing, and violence at home or in the street and have few prospects for employment. Progress in any area of social concern is quickly undermined by the persistence of vast inequality in all other areas. The solution to any of these problems is out of reach absent the solution to all the others. The non-profits are prevented by their structures and funders from addressing their root causes because that would require a horizontal strategy that undermine the conditions for maximizing profit.

The Cat in the suit

All organisms live in our own worlds even when we coexist in the same space. A bacterium in your mouth, for example, might as well be on another planet. It weighs so little that it can float in any direction, indifferent to the force of gravity that governs your every move. At the same time it is buffeted by miniscule bursts of energy, heat and chemicals which you have no awareness of whatsoever. You share one universe—if the sun goes cold you will both freeze—but the ways in which you behave are based on completely different sets of considerations.

A corporation is not an organism (however confused the US Supreme Court may be on this point). It is, however, a self-perpetuating entity that transforms its environment as a byproduct of its existence. It is functionally and legally structured around the goal of generating profit for its owners. It makes sense of the world by processing incoming information through twin organs known as the balance sheet and the profit/loss statement. Anything that does not appear in the window created by those two instruments is not part of the corporation’s functional environment and therefore, as far as it is concerned, does not exist.

A corporation that scrapes the ocean floor for shrimp, for example, will “see” the shrimp as it is harvested and therefore appears as an asset on the balance sheet. The thousands of square miles of destroyed habitat, displaced species, crippled ecological resilience and the cascade of downstream impacts do not appear as costs or liabilities however. These unrecorded costs include the elimination of entire ecosystems and the dumping of millions of tons of “by-catch”, the fish, sea turtles, marine mammals, coral reefs and plant life that are killed in the process (an estimated third of the annual global catch) and ejected back into the water. In short, the marketable wealth of the ocean system is extracted and transformed into profit while the costs of doing business are “externalized.”

These costs do not go away. They are internalized by the inhabitants, human and otherwise, of the natural world. The term “regulation,” which we hear so often in the news, simply refers to attempts by civil society to force some of these costs onto the balance sheets of corporations . The cost of environmental destruction of keeping their workers alive (labor costs) are burdens that corporation go to great lengths to avoid.

This is the dirty little secret of capitalism: it’s based on bad math. If the real costs of doing business had to be accounted for on the balance sheet the capitalist enterprise as a whole would not be profitable.

Exxon Mobil, Chiquita, Coca Cola, Massey Energy, Intel and the rest of their specie are quite right when they claim that too much regulation would kill them. They have to get those costs off the ledger by forcing them down the throats of millions of people—Guatemalan banana workers, Somali fishing villagers and Mexican maquila workers– who do not share in the profits. There is an unlimited supply of bayonets, battleships and unmanned drones to make sure that they swallow. Only in this way can the system reward its “owners” with unlimited riches.

Try convincing your cat to stop hunting birds. It would certainly be in her interest to leave enough birds to reproduce so that there will be birds in the future. You have identified a problem—the decimation of the bird population—which you assume your cat will have an interest in. The cat can immediately see the problem but defines it differently: it’s that you’re bugging her. The solution is obvious to her: she must get you to go away so she can get back to killing birds. In a similar way the destruction of biodiversity, melting of glaciers and increasing infant mortality do not register on the corporate radar because they are not relevant to next quarter’s profit statement. There is no mechanism to account for them. What does register, however, is that people are upset and that could lead to regulation and limits on profit. Chronic hunger only registered as a “crisis” in 2008 when it found expression in the form of riots and demonstrations, a development that threatens the stability that most corporate planners value. Once the unrest was brought under control it disappeared as a “crisis” even though the hunger persisted. The corporate response, therefore, is to do what is necessary to address the threat (the threat being that people are making a fuss). They can increase campaign contributions, deploy lobbyists, invest in public relations, contract amenable scientists, offer funding to environmental groups and paint their corporate jets green.

Corporate decision makers are not driven by a desire to cause harm. It’s just that the world outside of the market—the forests of the Niger Delta, the dreams of coal miners or the nesting grounds of pelicans–is not visible to them. Any undeveloped regions of the earth seen to be wasted until they have been replaced with farmland, resorts or strip mines. The flows of capital, on the other hand, the sudden hot spots of investment, the jostling of exchange rates and shimmering investment instruments made out of thin air and audacity, and ultimately those sweet, sweet cascades of profit, these define the real world to them. It’s a dynamic world. A beautiful world. They will defend their world as fiercely as we defend ours

There is another world. In the marshes of Louisiana, the rain forests of Indonesia and the crevasses of the Mariana Trench there are teaming, interconnected communities of organisms who pursue their own causal paths without concern for trends in the currency markets. Contrary to the pop caricature of Darwinian evolution as a brutal war for dominance, the drama of life consists of millions of species creating themselves in relationship with and dependence on, each other. The undersides of leaves are micro-environments for insects that in turn play host to microorganisms. Cells take in nutrients and excrete waste that serves as the nourishment for other life forms. Multiple ecosystems exist with varying degrees of separation and integration. This is no idyllic state of balance but rather a dynamic one of continual change in which living beings, by the act of living, alter their surroundings in ways which produce multiple pathways of change and feedback. Many non-capitalist cultures view the human species as one society among many in that natural world. In Indigenous South America preserving the integrity of that world is a responsibility which comes with utilizing it. It is seen as necessary to maintain a viable habitat for the animals and plants that are harvested. These creatures are tended as a part of their natural community rather than isolated on farms built on cleared land.

The traits that allow an organism to prosper can also spell its downfall. A parasite that reproduces prolifically can quickly spread throughout its host’s body. If it spreads too quickly, however, it can kill the host before it has had a chance to pass the infection on to others of its species. The parasite can, in its very moment of triumph, destroy the possibility for its own survival. This is the closest analogy to the reality introduced by capitalism to the natural world. With an unstoppable drive to turn everything in its path into profit, it quickly destroys habitats and depletes the resources it consumes. It demonstrates remarkable flexibility: having destroyed one natural community it can quickly adjust its appetites and move on to another. If shrimp become scarce, investment can be redirected to retail, advertising or private prisons. When biofuel promised a higher rate of return than food, the nature of agriculture changed in a flash.  In fact no rate of profit is sufficient if there is a way to get a higher one. Every system has limits beyond which it cannot stretch. A humming bird that loses its capacity to sip nectar will not survive. A corporation exist s as an expression of its hunger for profit. It s flexibility lies in its ability to adapt enough to preserve the profit imperative in a changing environment. Like a lizard after a rain, if the market around it turns green, it will change its color in order to appear in synch.

What we understand about the corporate world will determine how well we come out of our interactions with it. No matter how many organic community gardens we plant on the deck of the Titanic, it will not change the ship’s direction if the people steering it are not on our side. Even more confusing, they are funding the gardens!

The internal logic of the capitalist and natural systems propels them down paths that we can no longer pretend are compatible. The unfolding BP disaster will provide a very public stage on which the corporations, the non-profits and the government will all play their parts. The non-profits will urgently insist that this is a tremendous opportunity to shake or fossil fuel addiction. The government will make angry noises about accountability and corporate greed and a sustainable future. At the end of the day the power of the oil and coal companies get what they want will be intact, undaunted by the theatrics of a mere government. If the Titanic is to change course, it will be up to the crew and passengers.

Fighting for honey

The emergence of a political current that places human and ecological interests, instead of profit, at the heart social life would be both shocking and exhilarating. Such voices are gaining strength on the world stage but remain weak and compromised in the US. Advocates for the rights of children, for example, must resort to describing them as “an investment in the future” or “a natural resource” in order to make them visible to corporate politicians. Community activists fight to have “input” into development projects where they are excluded from real power. There are increasingly restless sectors of the population that would respond with relief (as they did to Obama the campaigner) at the establishment of such a viable alternative project. Crystals in a solution will form around whatever poles are present in the solution. If the only poles are the far right, medium right and soft right, we should not be surprised that the people only choose from among the options that they see. If you don’t build it they won’t come.

Applying an ecological perspective to movement organizing challenges the ways in which we understand our friends, our opponents and the tendencies of motion of our political environment. Let’s tease out some of the implicit assumptions in this view and then consider how they might translate to the street.

1)      People naturally gravitate toward the most hopeful option they can see. Left and right wing movements have in their ranks people who started out on the opposing side. It seems that they did not switch sides due to a change in their fundamental values but rather they changed their minds as to what political current could best fulfill those values. Such basic aspirations as providing safety for our children, being rewarded for our efforts, experiencing pride in our identity and looking toward a future brighter than the past. Political movements provide differing narratives as to who we can share that future with and who stands in the way. Our task is not to change who people are but to change the environment in which some choices make sense to them and others do not.

2)      How we frame our struggle determines how large our circle of solidarity is. I was privileged to work in the 1980s with a Midwestern farmers’ movement that was protesting a high voltage power line being built, without their agreement, across their fields. This movement became the nucleus of a regional alliance with urban environmentalists and the American Indian Movement. That happened because defined their struggle as one of national energy policy rather than local property rights. That meant that federal attempts to exploit uranium on Native land, the shift of coal mining from the unionized east to the non-union west and the erosion of democracy in rural electric coops all became part of their world. White farmers who had shown little sympathy during the civil rights movement were now studying its tactics, blocking roads and driving long distances to support Native American political prisoners.

The trajectory of Malcolm X’s thinking from a street paradigm of “each-for himself” to one of Black self-sufficiency to one of broad solidarity might seem like a wandering route through mutually contradictory visions but actually represents a continually expanding view of what is possible, each opening to a larger circle of solidarity.

3)      What we are fighting for is more important than what we are fighting against. Bees don’t go flying around the countryside looking for animals to sting. They will, however, sting whoever messes with their home hive. The hive is a complex society within which bees fulfill a range of jobs including defense of the village. Enemies come and go but the work of making honey goes on. We must be clear that the honey we are fighting for is more than a dream in our minds. It encompasses the heroic efforts people make every day to experience solidarity in their personal lives and secure the necessities of life for loved ones. Our vision incorporates respect for the needs of other species–known and unknown to us—to pursue their existence in a natural world not under constant threat of demolition.

4)        It’s about power. The last election exposed our hunger for symbolic victories. If they dangle those to us we could be kept entertained for decades arguing about whose turn it is next to run the empire. All they have to do is put a lesbian the ticket next time. Or who could resist the profound symbolism of a Cherokee in the presidential race in the US of A? We are better off learning from the Chicago Panthers. It’s about power, not appearance.

5)      We are poised at a moment in our human story when audacity is called for and timidity can only lead to disaster. You are on a chunk of coastal ice that has broken off from the shore and is drifting away. You know that if you stay put you will float out to sea until the ice melts beneath us. It feels as though leaping across the gap would be the big risk because we could fall into the cold water. If you stay put and float out to sea you will get all kinds of praise for being responsible and level headed. The longer you hesitate, the wider the distance you’ll need to cover. What do you do?

In translation this means that the capitalist feeding frenzy is colliding with the limitations of a planet that can’t sustain it but will not let anyone interfere with the feast. Only a complete social transformation can alter this trajectory. The national and international mechanisms that are supposed to protect us have been corrupted and now only seek to distract and divert us. The cats must kill birds. That’s what they do.

The leap that is called for is for a renewal of radical opposition around the explicit objective of ending corporate rule. History does not support the idea that radicalism in the US is marginal or irrelevant. At least twice in each century it has swept across the country, imposing new conditions and leaving an indelible imprint in our peoples’ consciousness.

6)      We have an opportunity to step into a political vacuum which only the right is attempting to seize. The polarization which now exists is between right and left wing versions of how corporate rule should be normalized. The right calls for the abolition of all regulation and white lefty populists want us to “take America back,” presumably to a time when their constituents, at any rate, got a better deal from the elite. They dream that those days can return.  We live in the time of an empire’s decline, however, when the only thing certain is that the future will not look like anything like the past. A time when people are angry but are aware that they don’t know what to do next. In such a time the operative slogan is “name your dream and fight for it.”

7)      The most powerful arena for struggle is inside people’s heads. The right has long known that every campaign is a story. Every story leads back to your core message, strengthens your base and weakens or divides your enemy. Even if you lose, you can still come out ahead if you have further implanted your story.

If we wished to take control of the national narrative on immigration, a strategy that incorporated blocking barges carrying GMO corn to Mexico would bring small farmers, food advocates, immigrant workers and labor into the same side of a struggle we have redefined to be about neo-liberal trade policies and corporate power. Each campaign can bring the underlying conflict between greed and solidarity into view. This approach can be applied to every struggle.

If the fabric of a new world can be found around us in the form of political movements, social support programs, alternative institutions and reform efforts to improve conditions or protect against abuse, open borders, connect divided constituencies, sustain the marginalized, constrain the military, expand Native sovereignty, protect the natural environment and increase the social wage, then a core vision is the needle we need to sew them together.

How do we apply it? Remember what we said about promoting public health? “Provide what bodies need and remove what causes them harm.” Suppose we applied this in our communities?  We can declare our support for all endeavors that align with the core values and we assert the moral authority to oppose, disrupt and prevent those which violate them. This can provide the basis for blocking toxic waste shipments through poor neighborhoods, defending against anti-immigrant raids, distributing foreclosed housing and appropriating unused plots for urban farming. This does not mean we indiscriminately challenge all bad things. We do not wish to alienate everybody. It provides us with a common language with which to define the issues we choose to take on. It also serves notice that there is now a political center of gravity that is serious about a world in which people matter.

Much as the South African freedom charter was viewed as the nucleus of a future South African constitution, our core vision (whatever we choose to call it) must emerge as the seed of a new stage of human blossoming. The creation of such an instrument would need to be a broadly participatory process that places the most marginalized and targeted sectors at its center. That process itself would be a rich unity-building experience. Converging around core human values would bring us into communion with growing numbers of mobilized people around the world. The Cochabamba climate convergence was a powerful, recent demonstration of the widespread appeal of visionary audacity.

A unifying strategic vision can reward us with the most coveted prize of a social movement: the political initiative. It is what allows you to set the rhythm and pace of unfolding events and define the issues that will be in play. Better yet, it’s what releases the initiative and creativity of people who have been waiting for someone to validate what they believed in private. Strategic vision sets the stage for practical strategies to emerge. It is our way of saying “this is who I am; this is what I want.” Then we can properly get to “this is what I will do.”

We are coming out of a forty year cycle of employing strategies and tactics without a vision. It doesn’t work. There are understandable reasons why we did that. But it still doesn’t work.

Before the arrival of trading ships, Hawaii did not have amphibians, reptiles or small mammals that preyed on insects. Birds were the predators to fear. Therefore the island insects developed the strategy of dropping to the ground at the first sign of danger. Today conditions have changed and the ground crawls with fauna eager to feast on bugs. The insects keep dropping to the ground. It worked for them in the past. They keep getting eaten. Whether they will survive depends on whether they can adapt to a world that has changed.

One more thing. It turns out that the darkest hour is not the one just before the dawn. It’s the one just before we remove the blindfold.

Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist-activist who uses visual art to strengthen and support organizing, movement building and education for social justice. He was born into the Puerto Rican independence movement and came of age in a time of mass movements in the United States. He has been active in the labor movement for thirty years and was a founder of the Northland Poster Collective which produced art and organizing materials for labor struggles. He worked as both an industrial and artistic screen printer for much of his adult life. His writes about strategic organizing and movement building.

TRANSFORMATIVE ORGANIZING:

Towards Liberation of Self and Society, Part 1

Social Justice Leadership

SJL is organizing two workshops at the 2010 U.S. Social Forum to discuss their transformative organizing model.

Transformative Organizing 101 Wed, 06/23/2010 – 1:00pm – 3:00pm, UAW Building: Ford

Transformative Organizing 201 Wed, 06/23/2010 – 3:30pm – 5:30pm, TWW: 5

An Authentic Reckoning

Incredible shifts have happened over the past few years that will forever change how people in the United States relate to politics, the economy, and the world.  The election of Barack Obama, despite the mainstream character of his policies, undeniably signals a new dawn in American politics that many did not think possible for at least another 50 years.  In addition, the economic crisis that continues to affect the US and the world is having an impact on the well-being of many families generally, and is having a devastating impact on communities already economically and politically marginalized, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression 80 years ago.  Finally, the reality of global warming will force the entirety of the planet’s industrialized economy to permanently change its relationship to energy use, one way or another.

Important political battles are raging.  Merely a few months ago there was an opportunity to dramatically change healthcare in this country, something that the majority of Americans is in favor of, yet what we witnessed instead was a surging backlash against change.  And most recently, the battle to redefine immigration policy has taken a turn for the worst, as shown by the passage of SB1070 in Arizona.

The past year has revealed more sharply than ever the glaring deficiencies in the infrastructure and capacity of the social justice sector.  Obviously social justice work, and in particular grassroots organizing, is incredibly important to the building of an authentic democracy.  Historically, major social advances in this country can be traced to the spark of grassroots organizing, whether that be in the South in the 1950s or in Northern and Western urban areas in the 1960s and 1970s.  Yet in the last couple of decades that infrastructure has weakened to the point where much of the sector has been caught off guard and unable to seize incredibly important organizing opportunities, made even more poignant by the healthcare and immigration battles that progressives are losing.

It is time for the social justice movement to have an authentic reckoning with its effectiveness.  The current moment indicates that in many ways history is at a turning point.  This is also a potential turning point in the evolution of social justice organizing – although the environment is changing rapidly, the organizing models that are most prevalent date from 40 years ago or more.  There is a major opportunity for the social justice movement to reassess its approach, envision a new way of organizing, and greatly increase its impact.  The question is:  Will the social justice movement of the 21^st century meet the changing times as they demand, or be swept into the dustbin of history?

Social Justice Leadership is proposing a new framework, Transformative Organizing (TO), with the potential to change the basic approach and assumptions of social justice organizing and to greatly expand its impact.  TO is about creating deep change in how we are as people, how we relate to each other, and how we structure society.  It brings together approaches to transformative change, ideological development, and impactful grassroots organizing to create a new paradigm for organizing. For the past few years, SJL has been working with over a dozen organizations to experiment with and develop a model for Transformative Organizing.

Most social justice organizing in the United States, both current and historical, has had an outward focus on building power and leadership to change local conditions, public policy and resource allocation.  It generally has been pragmatic in its orientation, focusing on short- to medium-term change.  While this approach has won important victories that have affected the lives of millions, its focus on external, short term change has greatly limited its potential.  Transformative Organizing combines an ambitious organizing approach with attention to personal and organizational transformation, and an emphasis on long-term vision, ideology and movement building.  The result is an approach to social change that can be far more powerful than the sum of its parts.

Most importantly, Transformative Organizing demands that organizers and the social justice movement step fully and powerfully into the uncertainty and opportunity of the present historical moment in order to best bring about a societal transformation to true justice and compassion, equality and interdependence.

The Goal:  Liberation from Oppression, Liberation from Suffering

The long-term goal of Transformative Organizing is simple: to help transform society into one that is free from oppression and free from suffering.  The path to get there, on the other hand, will undoubtedly be fraught with difficulties, setbacks, moments of victory, uncertainty, and even downright mystery.  There are no easy or straightforward roads to this vision.  And undoubtedly what is required to get to true social transformation is more than just organizing – there are other components that are required to transform society that must work in tandem with the on-the-ground organizing.

Transformative Organizing, however, is foundational for the social transformation process because it engages the populations most excluded from the workings and benefits of society.  It differs from more traditional notions of social change in at least 2 aspects:  1) TO does not confine itself to systemic or structural change alone, but seeks to integrate personal transformation and transformation of our relationships, and 2) TO, as the name suggests, seeks transformation, not merely change – it seeks a process so deep and thorough that a reversal to previous conditions is impossible.

Transformative Organizing recognizes that people experience oppression and exploitation from the political and economic system, and that people also experience suffering from the situation of their existence.

Oppression, Suffering, and How They Are Related

Oppression generally takes the form of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, able-ism, etc.  wherein the dominant group in society subjugates other groups and extracts their labor, wealth, bodies, identity, dignity, and more, for the benefit of the dominant group.  More specifically it manifests as some form of violence, exploitation and exclusion such as police abuse, poor wages, lack of healthcare, homelessness and substandard housing, domestic violence, racial profiling, deportation, etc.

The current form of social justice organizing is well-oriented to these forms of direct and indirect violence and has for the last 50 years tried to systematically organize people to oppose this system and fight for an alternative that is more just.  Oppression manifests in the lives of individuals, but it is systemic – it is structured through the political system, the economy, and civil society.  Thus, while individual lives can be sheltered from abuse and exploitation, oppression is a system-wide phenomenon and therefore can only be transformed at the systemic level through changing the structures, practices, and culture of the whole society.

Suffering, on the other hand, is simply a way to describe the anxiety, fear, stress, disappointment, self-loathing, and other psychological and emotional conditions that show up in people’s lives.  The social justice movement is in general not particularly well-oriented to dealing with this.  The key distinction is that suffering is an internal response to the external conditions that we face.  Some suffering is a result of oppression, other suffering is not.  In many cases the suffering that poor and working class people, or any exploited group, experience is directly related to the oppression they are subjected to.   Job exploitation, police violence, or other forms of oppression can be physically incapacitating (even deadly) and it can also be psychologically and emotionally paralyzing.  The fear, doubt, self-hatred, and internalized oppression that can come from these experiences is a form of suffering.

Suffering can be related to oppression, but it can also be generated from other life experiences.  For example, a consistent feeling of self-disappointment may be related to having an “over-achieving” older sibling, and always feeling the need to play catch-up.  This can evolve into a paralyzing lack of confidence, particularly if a person’s parents discouraged or ignored their achievements while showing greater support and encouragement for the sibling.  Paralysis, disappointment, and doubt can result from these kinds of conditions and from traumatic experiences, or from other relationships at work or with loved ones (or even people’s relationships to themselves), but these feelings may have little to do with systemic oppression.

In either situation, the internal response can take the form of suffering.  Suffering (whether it is stress rooted in police oppression or stress from being ignored by one’s parents) becomes a barrier to people bringing their best selves, particularly in interpersonal relationships or in their relationship to themselves.

Many people in the world, and many organizers in the social justice movement, are caught in the grips of suffering.  The suffering shows up as non-productive behavior, moods, or mindsets that can hamper effectiveness, be the cause of difficult relationships, and even derail whole organizations.  At its worst, the suffering takes the form of people unconsciously playing out their trauma in the organizational or movement space, with predictable results of broken organizational relationships, isolation from allies, and ultimately stagnation.

Although both oppression and suffering can be isolating, damaging, and imprisoning, and they can even be related, they are not the same thing.  Suffering is internally generated whereas oppression is imposed from the outside.

The experience of Nelson Mandela is instructive.  The South African government imprisoned him for opposing the racist apartheid regime, a clear example of oppression. The political system imposed a condition of oppression on him that he didn’t want and that he was powerless to stop.  The oppression was externally generated.  Still, his 27 years of imprisonment was undoubtedly brutal and dehumanizing, yet he never let the experience take away his own sense of dignity and self.  It was an experience of oppression and pain, but he refused to let it be one of suffering.  He did not allow the experience to generate feelings of suffering that eroded his own internal integrity, his internal wholeness.  At the end, Mandela left prison seemingly more balanced and poised than many of his comrades who were not jailed.  He ultimately led his country into a new era from a place of vision, compassion, and reconciliation.

The difference between oppression and suffering is important because it means that different actions are required to transform them.  Oppression is exerted from the outside, whereas suffering, as the term is being used here, comes from the inside.  Thus oppression requires engaging society’s structures in order to abolish it, whereas suffering requires engaging ourselves in order to end it.

Transformative Organizing sees that both oppression and suffering are impediments to people living whole lives, bringing their best selves, reaching their potential, and finding fulfillment.  True freedom is incomplete without liberation from oppression and liberation from suffering.

Steps on the Path

It is essential to engage external oppression and internal suffering at the same time and through an integrated process because they work together in a vicious cycle to keep each other alive.  When people are oppressed, their reaction can often be to internalize the oppression by taking on the narrative of inferiority that the oppressor promotes.  This internalized oppression is a form of suffering – it is conditioned by external oppression but it is an internally generated response that degrades the wholeness, integrity, and sense of self of the person.  This internal suffering (and actually any suffering) can impede people from taking action to end the external oppression because the stress and self-loathing hinder them from bringing their most effective, confident, clear-thinking and clear-feeling selves to the task of liberating themselves from external oppression.  The inaction caused by the internal suffering then allows the external oppression to continue and become normalized, and even to grow, in turn causing ever more suffering.

Liberation from oppression and liberation from suffering require transformation in at least two spheres: 1) the transformation of society based on the highest form of justice, democracy, and equality and 2) the transformation of ourselves and our relationships based on authenticity, interdependence and compassion.

• Creation of a society based on justice, democracy, and equality

This broader goal of social transformation focuses on the political, social, and economic structural relationships between people and groups (by race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration status, etc) that determine laws, allocation of resources, and decision-making at the societal level.  Structural relationships would be reorganized so that systemic oppression no longer existed.

Social transformation would mean transforming the economy into one that is rooted in guaranteeing that all people get their needs met, rather than one based on individual gain.  It would be an economy where “productivity” is a measure of fulfillment and not a measure of how much product can saturate a market.  It would be an economy that has a fair and just distribution of wealth amongst all people.

It would also require re-imagining and re-creating how people engage with politics, moving it from marking a ballot once every few years, to creating structures that allow real participation in the decision-making of community, city, state and national affairs.

• Transformation of ourselves and our relationships based on interdependence, compassion, and authenticity

The practices and habits of society as a whole are deeply embedded in its people.  And despite the uniqueness of every individual, the practices of individuals help to keep the collective culture alive.  The habits of society are replicated in the behavior of individuals, and how they relate to themselves, others, and society as a whole.  Thus if the goal is true social transformation, it is essential to greatly increase self-awareness of default habits, and to begin embodying intentional practices that reflect the values of a more just society.

Of all people, those who have taken up the challenge of transforming society, be they paid staff or grassroots members, have the responsibility of identifying the ways that they individually replicate and promote practices of the individualistic, competitive, and oppressive society.  And they have the responsibility of demonstrating through lived practice what a renewed and just society can look like – embodying interdependence, compassion, and authenticity in all relationships.

These two spheres are integrally linked.  The shape of society, its systems, and institutions has a profound impact on the experience of individual people’s lives.  As discussed already, oppression can lead to internal suffering, on top of the externally imposed injustice, pain, and misery it can cause for the oppressed.

Alternatively, if society is fundamentally just, if society is structured to help people get their needs met and to find meaning in their lives, then it will help alleviate individual suffering.  It will alleviate it certainly from the abolishment of oppression, but also from reducing conditions that cause people to have stress, fear, anxiety about the future, self-loathing about the inadequacies that society tells them they have, and other forms of degraded sense of self.

The converse is true also.  When people are stressed, anxious, uncertain, or self-hating, then they are more brittle and fragile, and thus more self-protective rather than being more outwardly compassionate.  They are less likely to extend trust to others and be more curious about them, instead becoming pre-occupied with their own well-being and not the well-being of others.  The well-being of others can in turn often be seen as an annoyance, and can even escalate to being seen as a threat.  The scapegoating of immigrants, African Americans, and other disenfranchised groups  — which we have seen happen time and again – comes in part from this place of society-wide stress and suffering, most prevalent during eras of uncertainty or shrinking resources, such as during wars or periods of rising unemployment.

Thus, if people reduce their level of anxiety and doubt, if they have less reason to look for quick fixes to alleviate the background stress in their lives, whether it be through scapegoating other ethnicities, genders, or nationalities, or through alcohol and drugs, sugar, television, or shopping – if people have less suffering in their lives – there is a greater likelihood that they would be able to extend compassion to those who are living harsher lives, to those who are being excluded from the benefits of society.  They would be more able to support long-term solutions for addressing society’s problems, solutions that help to alleviate the overall conditions that contribute to both oppression and suffering.

This raises the question of how much of a democratic, just, and equal society can we have if suffering isn’t ended.  And it raises the converse question of how much can people, all people, be free of internally-generated stress, doubt, and suffering if oppression, exploitation, and exclusion in society as a whole is not abolished. This dilemma is illustrated in the two figures below (see Fig 1 and Fig 2)

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The above figures imply that society cannot reach the highest form of democracy, equality, and justice if the people in that society endure stress, anxiety, and other forms of suffering (regardless of whether or not that suffering is related to oppression).  And that people in society cannot be free from internal suffering if society has external oppression structured into it.  In other words, freedom at the societal level is conditioned by and related to freedom at the internal/individual level, and freedom at the internal/individual level is conditioned by and related to freedom at the societal level.

Transformative Organizing sees the need to engage both levels, simultaneously and integrated, as essential to bringing about the long-term and sustainable social transformation we all seek.  It puts us on the best footing for transforming our political, social, and economic systems, our relationships to other people, and our collective relationship to the earth.  Not doing so will ultimately limit the kind of social change we are able to bring.  It is only when significant progress in the two arenas happen that we have the possibility of true transformation.  When societal structures and practices irreversibly evolve, and when people’s hearts, minds, values and behavior fundamentally advance, only then can authentic transformation happen.  All else is merely change.

You can download a PDF of this document here.

This is the first of a two-part strategy statement produced by Social Justice Leadership.

For more information, visit www.sojustlead.org

Sushma Sheth interviewed  Ng’ethe Maina for Organizing Upgrade in August 2009.

We are living through dramatic times. What do you find to be the significant shifts and how do they change the context of the work we are doing now?

I go back and forth on how significant the shifts are for the movement.  Obviously the economic crisis and the election of Barack Obama are pretty significant shifts.  Those two combined allow for a different conversation of what the conditions are.  However, the response by the administration to the crisis has not been a significant shift. The initial response (i.e. We need to Save the Banks) and the later response focused solely saving the financial industry, instead of taking the opportunity to invest in other kinds of economic recovery.  The response followed pretty mainstream and historical reactions to crisis.

From my perspective, the potential shifts around the economy are giant and have made two things clear to me about the left and progressives: The first is, our generation of movement folks have never experienced anything quite like this and do not know what to do. We have witnessed a huge opening where the mainstream media has been talking about the death of capitalism.  I think it was The Economist that had as one of its covers “Capitalism as a dying animal.”  Even a year and a half later there is still a huge opening and my sense is that this is completely beyond the experience of our generation.  Nothing like this has happened since the 30s, since the Great Depression. And in some way, I feel as though we are a deer in the headlights: either we are stuck and we do not know what to do; or we see the shifts, but we are so mired in our current ways of doing things that our inertia will not allow us to move.

Minimally, there is an opening to do vast quantities of political education with everyone: grassroots leaders, staff, the mainstream public. My feeling is that there’s been nary a peep from the Left in terms of a loud and concerted response to frame the crisis that we are facing.  Nor does it seem that there has even been a determined and systematic effort to do this simply within the community organizing world. There was an opportunity to engage and force a real conversation about what is a just economy.  I think that the opportunity still exists. But the movement proved that in the last thirty to forty years of organizing we have not done enough to be prepared for the moment of crisis.  As a result, the debate is not about the end of capitalism.  Instead, it’s a conversation about “what kind of capitalism do we want to have.”

The second thing is the utter lack of power we have.  It just seems as though the left, the social justice movement and progressives (I am putting a wide range on this) are relatively powerless to do anything.  We see the U.S. government doing things like nationalizing parts of the financial industry. This is something that many of us on the left would say that’s a really good thing. But, it is happening through Democratic bureaucrats, rather than people on the left.  There are some exciting pockets of organizing happening in various places around the country, but they are relatively small and weak given the scale of challenge we face.

What are key interventions that community organizers should be making right now and are there particular contributions that left identified individuals in that process?  Can you comment on the kind of power we have?

In the conversation so far, we have been looking through the lens of power and consciousness. When the opposition is strong, then it is understandable that our power is weak.  But it is inexcusable that consciousness-raising is weak.  There are ALWAYS opportunities for consciousness-raising. Part of the reason why we are not in a position of having the power to seize the moment in front of us is because of a lack of consciousness-raising.  In the community organizing world, political education seems to be narrowly issue-focused, and/or trying to understand the channels of power within government or the private sector in order to leverage the power we have to win victories for very concrete and specific demands. There has been less focus on larger ideological issues and understanding the nature of the economy which really undergirds the society that we have.  This is a big indicator for me of why we are weak and paralyzed now.  There is an opening to debate the nature of the economy and we generally have little to contribute to the larger public discussion, or even to the discussion happening within and between organizations.  Moving towards interventions, my hope is that the lessons of the economic crisis can teach us that we can never slack or stop doing that kind of consciousness raising and political education.

I think it is also a flaw in how community organizing has evolved. Community organizing evolved over the last wave of movement in the 1960s and 70s to a more micro community focus. The model took on issues without putting them in an ideological context. As a result, we did not create room to have a broader conversation about the economy, how the government should work, etc.  And those who were trying to do political education were engaging fairly small numbers of people.  There has been no mass consciousness-raising.

If we want to take the long view, we can say that the crisis and lack of response is an indicator of the failure of community organizing as we know it.  From my perspective, community organizing plays two roles. The first is that it helps lay infrastructure. Real societal change happens through movement, in terms of fundamentally altering power relations, and changing culture and people’s hearts and minds. The role of community organizing is then to help lay infrastructure prior to movement so that it can spark and anchor the movement and help it grow.  The second is then within movements or post movement, the role of community organizing is to take advantage of windows of opportunity that open.  Community organizations represent concentrations of resources, people, staff time, skill and expertise so that when a window opens these organizations can point those resources in a focused way.  They can also point these resources to helping secure and institute the victories during the implementation phase, even after a movement has faded away.  Community organizations can do this when movements open opportunities, or when crises open opportunities. Years from now, we may look back at this moment and say that the community organizations failed at doing what they are designed to do.

So, then what is the role of left identified people?

Simply stated, it is to push things to the Left. To push community organizing to the left: base building, consciousness-raising, but also how we consider campaigns, how we structure them and our demands, how we structure our organizations, the kinds of practices we engage in inside them.

There are roles to be played.  People need to decide on what their role is and then play that role.  The role of left leaning organizers is to figure out how to do organizing and consciousness-raising, and make sure campaigns are connected to a broader ideological debate. We should not be doing campaigns that cannot be connected to a broader ideological conversation. We also have a responsibility to not create 1000 more tiny organizations.  There is probably a more efficient way to have scale, and I think it is the responsibility of people on the left to figure that out and talk about why that needs to happen.

But there is also a role for Left thought. To think that organizers are going to do all things is unfair and not realistic.  There are intellectuals on the Left that should be putting forward ideas:  ideas on the economy, what expanded democracy looks like.  They need to put them forward in a context that is directly related to organizers doing work in the field. There needs to be discussion and debate around those ideas.  Otherwise, ideas are disconnected and being put out by people who are just critics.

When Antonio Villaraigosa was elected mayor of Los Angeles, he received an agenda from the business community. But from our side, we weren’t sure.  There were some ideas like “a home for every homeless person” that were righteous and just, but also unrealistic given the conditions. We need ideas that can lead us towards a policy agenda that is doable and lead us towards somewhere else.

Another thing that left organizers can do is to prepare people for roles outside our organizations, in running the economy and government, which is something we are putting very little attention on.  We do not encourage our organizers to go to policy school. We do not encourage our organizers to go to business school. We do not pay for them to go.

We look at the economy right now and say we want to be engaged with the (Obama) administration. But the reality is that we do not have that many people who can sit across the table with the level of expertise needed to engage in that conversation, and who are connected to the on-the-ground work.  We do not actually have the skills and expertise inside of our organizations or even inside of our movement to be putting forward alternatives. We have been anti-intellectual for so long. We do not support it and we do not encourage it. So much so that when someone wants to go back to school, they get shouted down.

Our movement needs dedicated experts who can focus on policy, research, economics, etc., but we also need organizers who have some of those skills inside our organizations as well.  I can remember a time a few years ago when people would freak out if they could not be an “on-the-ground organizer.” Because it was cool.  People were not interested in trying to develop the multi dimensional pieces that we need in order to actually call ourselves a movement.

It seems like among organizers there is disdain or fear around a breadth of development. Things like being able to do demographic or economic analysis, or policy development. We need to think about a division of labor and the relationship between the different roles: how organizers relate to researchers and policy analysts, etc.  But that should not narrow the set of skills that organizers need to also develop. Otherwise what happens, and I’ve certainly seen this here in New York, is an over reliance on “experts” to move a certain piece of work; and organizers, in the absence of that capacity, end up waiting.  There is a timidity in terms of taking steps to do that work on their own.

We need to build internal expertise so that we can engage with our external allies.  But we have to be careful about believing that we can “do it all”.  While we may hesitate from engaging policy organizations because they may have a more conservative approach, by avoiding a relationship with them, we also get more caught up in our “pie in the sky” notions of what is possible.  At the policy level, I think we lack political savvy. We believe that the bill we write is the bill that should be passed, no compromises. And that isn’t how legislative processes work, especially when we ain’t got no power.

When someone tells us that something is not practical, we say they are “sell outs.”  But we are often unrealistic about the things that we think can happen because we are trying to make it all happen at one time. By not engaging and not having pushback, we end up talking to ourselves, creating echo chambers, and not winning.

I know that it may sound like I am saying contradictory things:  we need to be ideological and boldly visionary, and we need to be practical and not pie-in-the-sky.  But the truth is we need to be both of those things.  We need to be ideological in our political development and in being clear about how today’s work will lead to a transformation of society years from now.  And we need to be open to being practical at certain tactical levels, such as policy work and the building of united fronts.  But such tactical practicality is expressly a function of lack of power.  We aren’t the majority power, and so we need to have tactical flexibility in order to succeed.

What are old strategies that our sector should be turning away from?

Good question. The frame for me is looking at the conditions we are in and how they have changed over the last 40 years. And then taking a look at the organizing models we use and how they haven’t really changed in the last 40 years. In this country, non-profit community organizing is a descendant of the Industrial Areas Foundation (1950s) and ACORN (early 1970s).  The models we use came from a specific era, in response to a specific set of conditions, and the question we need to ask is if those models fit the changing conditions of our present time.  This is not a knock on the hard work that people are doing in organizations now, but I am asserting that we aren’t even asking the question of does the model fit the times. I mostly feel we are blind to this (though there are notable exceptions like the advent of workers centers).

We gave some critique as to why we think organizing models need to change in terms of lack of ideological development. I think another point of change is our time frame and orientation. It is always astonishing to me that people tend to think five or ten years out, but do not have a vision for society in fifty or seventy five years.  If we are serious about making history, we have to look at the long arc of change and recognize that the country has had 300 – 400 years of practice in disenfranchisement, social exclusion, dispossession, economic exploitation. This has laid the foundation and been woven into us in a very deep mass and individual level. In contrast to this reality, on the left we almost have Star Trek-ian ‘transporter’ approach where we work hard, do some left things for a few years, there is a blank spot, and then thirty years from now we will have revolutionary change. I think that shows a deep denial about what it will take to make that change.

For example, we mostly think about structural change in society (civil society, government, how people relate to decision making, the economy, etc.).   We do not think about changes in culture (society and individual level).  Each of us, in our daily actions, replicates and reproduces capitalism. The notion of buying, the notion of money, we are mainly blind to how deeply they are ingrained within us. If we want to fundamentally change society, we have to change culture at the mass level and individual level.

From my perspective, structural and cultural change starts with those who are tasked with pushing change in society: organizers, grassroots leaders, and people on the left. We need to be fighting for and modeling change in culture. This has been mostly absent from left or progressive work in the last thirty to forty years.  Cultural nationalism is an example of some attempts but it’s been absent from schools of organizing, and its got its own set of pros and cons. More recently, we see pre-figurative approaches that try to address this problem.

How do we need to shift our orientation to current conditions, i.e. with relation to the Obama Administration?

We need to let go of the notion that we are only the opposition.  That we are somehow here only to wave banners and noisemakers and not here to figure out how to govern.  This is the character we have created of our organizations and of our movement. I think we talk about structural change and broad social change but we never imagine ourselves running anything or taking over anything. This limits the way we build our organizations and the way we develop leadership.

When there was a push to staff the Obama administration, everyone was complaining about the kinds of people that were getting jobs. When you spend thirty years acting as if you do not care about governance, then you do not prepare yourself to take advantage of opportunities when they come.

There is no question that Obama has limitations in terms of his politics.  But its also true that there were openings for us there.  The truth is our movement is not thinking about governance.  I wonder, when the revolution comes, who will rewrite the constitution? I think Barack Obama is a shock to everyone. And even with his limitations, suddenly we are scrambling. We are scrambling because we were not building real power in our communities, in our states, nor in our national networks. We are scrambling because we didn’t do good mass education. We did not think about how we are partnering in the governance of this nation. We have to decide that this (governance) is a part of who are and what we are going to do. This is it.  We have to decide whether we are in it govern or that we are in it just to complain.

What is inspiring you these days?  What do you find hopeful?

I do not want to sound like someone who does not believe in hope.  But, I feel that hope is not appropriate at this stage.  For me, the term “hope” connotes either that we have the solutions to our long term problems and hope we can win them, or that we have abdicated responsibility for our destiny and hope that an equitable  society just sort of happens to us.  I believe we are in a moment where need a lot of experimentation – we don’t have the solutions yet, but we cannot give up responsibility to try different things to figure it out.  And some of those things, many of them even, will fail, but our responsibility is to keep experimenting diligently, with loyalty only to the vision and to the quality of our work.

We may not have a blank canvas, but we do have a shifting canvas where we can pretty much insert anything we are creative enough to come up with.  I think of many of the conversations that are happening around consolidating small organizations into bigger ones, working together in different kinds of ways, and recognizing our weaknesses — that alone is inspiring in and of itself.  For so long, we pretended as if we were not weak.

I am inspired by the potential for broader conversations about alternative economies and rebuilding movement infrastructure in the black community where it has almost eroded to the point of nonexistence.  How do we have a black president and not have black people engaged?  Those conversations are exciting.

And speaking of… I don’t want to say this in a way that sounds crude, but “white folks need to organize some poor white folks.”  We can be certain in the next two to six years there will be a tremendous backlash in terms of the Obama election. Some people think it will be a worse backlash than Nixon, a worse cultural backlash than Reagan. We can expect that because history tells us to expect it. But not many folks seem to be preparing for that.   There has to be some strategic investment in poor and working class white communities, beyond organized labor that has failed in its job to develop working class white consciousness that is tied to the rest of the social justice movement. We need to think about strategies to mitigate or preempt what could be a huge cultural and economic backlash in the next decade. Burt Lauderdale cannot organize all the poor working class white people in America.  There have to be other institutions and individuals willing to do that work.

We need to experiment to see what will get traction. I think it’s a mistake to think that whatever is working now will work thirty years from now. When we are on the cusp of qualitative change towards justice, equality, and democracy, I do not believe that what we are doing now is the same thing that will push us through that moment.

There is more openness to try new things and to look more long term.   There is more and more discussion on form of organization. What form do we need for the functions that are necessary?  I do not think that these were the conversations ten years ago.  How do we look at the culture of society that is ours? How do we change our root habits? These questions were not asked inside organizing ten years ago at the scale that they are now.  There are also good questions around class and race dynamics inside organizations and evaluating leadership development within the constituencies they are organizing in.

I would not say that these things make me “feel hopeful.”  I would describe the feeling as a confidence in change. Things will always keep moving.  I believe in the nature of reality, or rather the reality of nature.  It is the reality of nature that things will always change.  Things may be tough now, but if we pay attention and do our practice diligently, we might just be ready to make history when the time is right.

Ng’ethe Maina is Executive Director of Social Justice Leadership.  The mission of Social Justice Leadership (SJL) is to help usher in the transformation to a just society by catalyzing a new generation of social justice leaders and organizations with the skills, analysis, and competency to lead a renewed social justice movement.   Ng’ethe was a founding organizer at SCOPE, a grassroots community-based organization in Los Angeles from its inception in early 1993, helping to develop it into a leading voice for poor people in struggles for social and economic justice.  As a Senior Organizer, and eventually as Organizing Director, he helped lead successful economic justice campaigns to win jobs and training for poor people across the Los Angeles region, as well as set policy precedents for the use of public capital; he also helped pioneer cutting edge tools and technologies for social justice organizing.   After more than 10 years at SCOPE, Ng’ethe moved to New York in 2003 to found and launch Social Justice Leadership.  He brings to his position more than a decade of social justice organizing, and several years of transformative organizational change work and coaching.

This 2002 essay – drawn from Robin D.G. Kelley‘s inspiring book,  Freedom Dreams – is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

I am at a crossroads. I spent more than half my life writing about people who tried to change the world, largely because I, too, wanted to change the world. The history of social movements attracted me because of what it might teach us about our present condition and about how we might shape the future. When I first embarked on that work, nearly 20 years ago, the political landscape looked much clearer: We needed a revolutionary socialist movement committed to antiracism and antisexism. Buoyed by youthful naiveté, I thought it was very obvious then.

Over time, the subjects of my books, as well as my own political experience, taught me that things are not what they seem, and that the desires, hopes, and intentions of the people who fought for change cannot be easily categorized, contained, or explained. Unfortunately, too often our standards for evaluating social movements pivot around whether or not they “succeeded” in realizing their visions rather than on the merits or power of the visions themselves. By such a measure, virtually every radical movement failed because the basic power relations it sought to change remain pretty much intact. And yet it is precisely those alternative visions and dreams that inspire new generations to continue to struggle for change.

How do we produce a vision that enables us to see beyond our immediate ordeals? How do we transcend bitterness and cynicism, and embrace love, hope, and an all-encompassing dream of freedom, especially in these rough times?

Rough times, indeed. I witnessed the World Trade Center go down from my bedroom window. Bombs have rained down on the people of Afghanistan and unknown numbers of innocent people have died, from either weapons of mass destruction or starvation. Violence will only generate more violence; the carnage has just begun. Now more than ever, we need the strength to love and to dream. Instead of knee-jerk flag-waving and submission to any act of repression in the name of “national interests,” the nation ought to consider Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision and take a cue from the movement that proved to be the source of his most fertile ideas.

The civil-rights movement demanded freedom for all and believed that it had to win through love and moral suasion. Those committed to the philosophy of nonviolence saw their suffering as redemptive. The very heart of the movement, the extraordinary Southern black folks who stood nobly in the face of police dogs and water cannons and white mobs and worked as hard as they could to love their enemy were poised to become the soul of a soulless nation, according to Dr. King.

Imagine if that soul were to win out, if the movement’s vision of freedom were completely to envelop the nation’s political culture. Democracy in the United States has not always embraced everyone, and we have a long history to prove it, from slavery and “Indian wars” to the 2000 presidential election. Indeed, the marginal and excluded have done the most to make democracy work in America. And some of the radical movements have done awful things in the name of liberation, often under the premise that the ends justify the means. Communists, black nationalists, third-world-liberation movements — all left us stimulating and even visionary sketches of what the future could be, but they have also been complicit in acts of violence and oppression, through either their actions or their silence. No one’s hands are completely clean.

And yet to drone on about how oppressed we are or to merely chronicle the crimes of radical movements doesn’t seem very useful. I’d like to begin an effort to recover ideas by looking at the visions fashioned mainly by those marginalized black activists who proposed a different way out of our constrictions. I’m not suggesting that we wholly embrace their ideas or strategies as the foundation for new movements; on the contrary, my main point is that we must tap the well of our own collective imaginations, that we do what earlier generations have done: Dream.

My mother has a tendency to dream out loud. I think it has something to do with her regular morning meditation. In the quiet darkness of her bedroom, her third eye opens onto a new world, a beautiful, light-filled place as peaceful as her state of mind. When I was growing up, she never had to utter a word to describe her inner peace; like morning sunlight, it radiated out to everyone in her presence. Her other two eyes never let her forget where we lived. The cops, drug dealers, social workers, the rusty tap water, the roaches and rodents, the urine-scented hallways, and the piles of garbage were constant reminders that our world began and ended in a battered Harlem/Washington Heights tenement apartment on 157th and Amsterdam.

Yet she would not allow us to live as victims. Instead, we were a family of caretakers who inherited this earth. We were expected to help any living creature in need, even if that meant giving up our last piece of bread. Strange, needy people always passed through our house, occasionally staying for long stretches of time. We were expected to stand apart from the crowd and befriend the misfits, to embrace the kids who stuttered, smelled bad, or had holes in their clothes. My mother taught us that the Marvelous was free — in the patterns of a stray bird feather, in a Hudson River sunset, in the view from our fire escape, in the stories she told us, in the way she sang Gershwin’s “Summertime,” in a curbside rainbow created by the alchemy of motor oil and water from an open hydrant.

She simply wanted us to live through our third eyes, to see life as possibility. She wanted us to imagine a world where gender and sexual relations could be reconstructed. She wanted us to see the poetic and prophetic in the richness of our daily lives. She wanted us to visualize a more expansive, fluid, “cosmospolitan” definition of blackness, to teach us that we are not merely inheritors of a culture but its makers.

So with her eyes wide open, my mother dreamed and dreamed some more, describing what life could be for us. She wasn’t talking about a postmortem world, some kind of heaven or afterlife; and she was not speaking of reincarnation (which she believes in, by the way). She dreamed of land, a spacious house, fresh air, organic food, and endless meadows without boundaries, free of evil and violence, free of toxins and environmental hazards, free of poverty, racism, and sexism … just free.

She never talked about how we might create such a world, nor had she connected her vision to any political ideology. But she convinced my siblings and me that change is possible. The idea that we could possibly go somewhere that exists only in our imaginations — that is, nowhere — is the classic definition of utopia. Call me utopian, but I inherited my mother’s belief that the map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes rather than in the desolation that surrounds us.

Now that I look back with hindsight, my writing and the kind of politics to which I’ve been drawn have had more to do with imagining a different future than with being pissed off about the present. Not that I haven’t been angry, frustrated, and critical of the misery created by race, gender, and class oppression — past and present. That goes without saying. But the dream of a new world, my mother’s dream, was the catalyst for my own political engagement.

I came to black nationalism filled with idealistic dreams of a communal society free of all oppressions, a world where we owned the land and shared the wealth, and white folks were out of sight and out of mind. It was what I imagined precolonial Africa to be. Sure, I was naive, still in my teens, but my imaginary portrait, derived from the writings of Cheikh Anta Diop, Chancellor Williams, Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Kwame Ture, and others, gave me a sense of hope and possibility about what a postcolonial Africa could look like.

Very quickly, I learned that the old past wasn’t as glorious, peaceful, or communal as I had thought — though I still believe that it was many times better than what we found when we got to the Americas. The stories from the former colonies — whether Mobutu Sese Seko’s Zaire, Idi Amin’s Uganda, or Forbes Burnham’s Guyana — dashed most of my expectations about what it would take to achieve real freedom.

In college, like all the other neophyte revolutionaries influenced by events in southern Africa, El Salvador and Nicaragua, Cuba and Grenada, I studied third-world liberation movements and post-emancipation societies in the hope of discovering different visions of freedom born out of the circumstances of struggle. I looked in vain for glimmers of a new society, in the “liberated zones” of Portugal’s African colonies during the wars of independence, in Maurice Bishop’s “New Jewel” movement in Grenada, in Guyana’s tragically short-lived 19th-century communal villages, in the brief moment when striking workers of Congo-Brazzaville momentarily seized state power and were poised to establish Africa’s first workers’ state. Granted, all those movements crashed against the rocks, wrecked by various internal and external forces, but they left behind at least some kind of vision, however fragmented or incomplete, of what they wanted the world to look like.

Like most of my comrades active in the early days of the Reagan era, I turned to Marxism for the same reasons I looked to the third world. The misery of the proletariat (lumpen and otherwise) proved less interesting and less urgent than the promise of revolution. I was attracted to “small-c” communism because, in theory, it sought to harness technology to solve human needs, give us less work and more leisure, and free us all to create, invent, explore, love, relax, and enjoy life without want of the basic necessities of life.

I fell in love with the young Marx of The German Ideology and The Communist Manifesto, the visionary Marx who predicted the abolition of all exploitative institutions. I followed young Marx, via the late English historian Edward P. Thompson, to those romantic renegade socialists, like William Morris, who wanted to break with all vestiges of capitalist production and rationalization. Morris was less concerned with socialist efficiency than with transforming social relations and constructing new, free, democratic communities built on, as Thompson put it, “the ethic of cooperation, the energies of love.”

There are very few contemporary political spaces where the energies of love and imagination are understood and respected as powerful social forces.

The socialists, utopian and scientific, had little to say about that, so my search for an even more elaborate, complete dream of freedom forced me to take a more imaginative turn. Thanks to many wonderful chance encounters, I discovered Surrealism, not so much in the writings and doings of André Breton or Louis Aragon or other leaders of the Surrealist movement that emerged in Paris after World War I, but under my nose, so to speak, buried in the rich, black soil of Afro-diasporic culture.

In it I found a most miraculous weapon with no birth date, no expiration date, no trademark. I traced the Marvelous from the ancient practices of maroon societies and shamanism back to the future, to the metropoles of Europe, to the blues people of North America, to the colonized and semicolonized world that produced the likes of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and Wifredo Lam. The Surrealists not only taught me that any serious motion toward freedom must begin in the mind, but they also have given us some of the most imaginative, expansive, and playful dreams of a new world I have ever known. Contrary to popular belief, Surrealism is not an aesthetic doctrine but an international revolutionary movement concerned with the emancipation of thought. Members of the Surrealist Group in Madrid, for example, see their work as an intervention in life rather than as literature, a protracted battle against all forms of oppression that aims to replace “suspicion, fear, and anger with curiosity, adventure, and desire.” The Surrealists are talking about total transformation of society, not just granting aggrieved populations greater political and economic power. They are speaking of new social relationships, new ways of living and interacting, new attitudes toward work and leisure and community.

In that respect, they share much with radical feminists, whose revolutionary vision has extended into every aspect of social life. Radical feminists have taught us that there is nothing natural or inevitable about gender roles, male dominance, the overrepresentation of men in positions of power, or the tendency of men to use violence as a means to resolve conflict. Radical feminists of color, in particular, have revealed how race, gender, and class work together to subordinate most of society and complicate easy notions of universal sisterhood or biological arguments that establish men as the universal enemy.

Like all the other movements that caught my attention, radical feminism, as well as the ideas emerging out of the lesbian and gay movements, proved attractive not simply for their critiques but also for their freedom dreams.

Black intellectuals associated with each of those movements not only imagined a different future, but, in many instances, their emancipatory vision proved more radical and inclusive than what their compatriots proposed. Those renegade black intellectuals/activists/artists challenged and reshaped communism, Surrealism, and radical feminism, and in so doing produced brilliant theoretical insights that might have pushed the movements in new directions. In most cases, however, the critical visions of black radicals were held at bay, if not completely marginalized.

My purpose is to reopen a very old conversation about what kind of world we want to struggle for. I am not addressing those traditional leftists who have traded in their dreams for orthodoxy and sectarianism. Most of those folks are hopeless, I’m sad to say. And they will be the first to dismiss me as utopian, idealistic, and romantic. Instead, I’m speaking to anyone bold enough still to dream, especially young people who are growing up in what the critic Henry Giroux perceptively calls “the culture of cynicism” — young people whose dreams have been utterly co-opted by the marketplace.

In a world where so many youth believe that “getting paid” and living ostentatiously was the goal of the black-freedom movement, there is little space to even discuss building a radical democratic public culture. Too many young people really believe that is the best we can do. Young faces, however, have been popping up en masse at the antiglobalization demonstrations beginning in Seattle in 1999, and the success of the college antisweatshop campaign No Sweat owes much of its success to a growing number of radicalized students. The Black Radical Congress, launched in 1997, has attracted hundreds of activists under age 25, as did the campaign to free Mumia Abu-Jamal. So there is hope.

The question remains: What are today’s young activists dreaming about? We know what they are fighting against, but what are they fighting for? Those are crucial questions, for the most powerful, visionary dreams of a new society don’t come from little think tanks of smart people or out of the atomized, individualistic world of consumer capitalism, where raging against the status quo is simply the hip thing to do. Revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement; collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge.

While that may seem obvious, I am increasingly surrounded by well-meaning students who want to be activists but exhibit anxiety about doing intellectual work. They often differentiate between the two, positioning activism and intellectual work as inherently incompatible. They speak of the “real” world as some concrete wilderness overrun with violence and despair, and the university as if it were some sanitized sanctuary distant from actual people’s lives and struggles.

At the other extreme, I have had students argue that the problems facing “real people” today can be solved by merely bridging the gap between our superior knowledge and people outside the ivy walls who simply do not have access to that knowledge. Unwitting advocates of a kind of “talented tenth” ideology of racial uplift, their stated goal is to “reach the people” with more “accessible” knowledge, to carry back to the ‘hood the information that folks need to liberate themselves. While it is heartening to see young people excited about learning and cognizant of the political implications of knowledge, it worries me when they believe that simply “droppin’ science” on the people will generate new, liberatory social movements.

I am convinced that the opposite is true: Social movements generate new knowledge, new theories, new questions. The most radical ideas often grow out of a concrete intellectual engagement with the problems of aggrieved populations confronting systems of oppression. The great works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Franz Boas, Oliver Cox, and many others were invariably shaped by social movements as well as social crises such as the proliferation of lynching and the rise of fascism. Similarly, gender analysis was brought to us by the feminist movement, not simply by the individual genius of the Grimké sisters or Anna Julia Cooper, Simone de Beauvoir, or Audre Lorde.

Progressive social movements do not simply produce statistics and narratives of oppression; rather, the best ones do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors, and, more important, enable us to imagine a new society. We must remember that the conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way. It is that imagination, that effort to see the future in the present, that I call “poetry” or “poetic knowledge.”

Recovering the poetry of social movements, however, particularly the poetry that dreams of a new world, is not such an easy task. For obvious reasons, what we are against tends to take precedence over what we are for, which is always a more complicated and ambiguous matter. It is a testament to the legacies of oppression that opposition is so frequently contained, or that efforts to find “free spaces” for articulating or even realizing our dreams are so rare and marginalized.

Another problem, of course, is that such dreaming is often suppressed and policed not only by our enemies but also by leaders of social movements themselves. The utopian visions of male nationalists or so-called socialists often depend on the suppression of women, of youth, of gays and lesbians, of people of color. Desire can be crushed by so-called revolutionary ideology. I don’t know how many times self-proclaimed leftists talk of universalizing “working-class culture,” focusing only on what they think is uplifting and politically correct but never paying attention to, say, the ecstatic.

I remember attending a conference in Vermont about the future of socialism, where a bunch of us got into a fight with an older generation of white leftists who proposed replacing retrograde “pop” music with the revolutionary “working class” music of Phil Ochs, Woody Guthrie, pre-electric Bob Dylan, and songs from the Spanish Civil War. And there I was, comically screaming at the top of my lungs, “No way! After the revolution, we STILL want Bootsy! That’s right, we want Bootsy! We need the funk!”

Sometimes I think the conditions of daily life, of everyday oppressions, of survival, not to mention the temporary pleasures accessible to most of us, render much of our imagination inert. We are constantly putting out fires, responding to emergencies, finding temporary refuge, all of which make it difficult to see anything other than the present.

Despite having spent a decade and a half writing about radical social movements, I am only just beginning to see what has animated, motivated, and knitted together those gatherings of aggrieved folks. I have come to realize that once we strip radical social movements down to their bare essence and understand the collective desires of people in motion, freedom and love lie at the very heart of the matter. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that freedom and love constitute the foundation for spirituality, another elusive and intangible force with which few scholars of social movements have come to terms. That insight was always there in the movements I’ve studied, but I was unable to see it, acknowledge it, or bring it to the surface. I hope to offer here a beginning.