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.

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

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.

These are dramatic times politically, socially, and economically. What do you think are the most significant shifts happening right now, and how do they change the context of our work?

Some important dynamics at play are the housing crisis, the financial meltdown and the rising unemployment rate. Working people – the working class, the poor and the working poor – are facing the brunt of this crisis. They are feeling the impact of neoliberalism more sharply than ever, even if they aren’t articulating it as “neoliberalism.” The response is manifested as a resentment of corporate greed. There’s a growing anti-corporate sentiment in society today, which could mean that conditions are much riper for mobilizing than they have been in the past.

There are also important shifts under the Obama administration. People in the social justice movement can now have access people within the administration much more easily than we could have in the past. The Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, is a good example of someone to work with within the Obama administration. She came in with a strong record of working in collaboration with community groups as a legislator. She is very serious about enforcing the rights of workers, and she seems to be dedicated to using Department of Labor resources to do that. So we can expect that workers rights will be enforced in ways that have not even been considered for the last eight years. We need to see that as an opportunity. It’s not an answer, we still need a strategy for change, but it is an opportunity.

There are also new opportunities to work in collaboration with the administration to try to create new policy and new social infrastructure and to move legislation that can benefit the working class and poor communities, particularly measures that do not have huge fiscal implications. But we need powerful social forces on the ground to move that type of an agenda, and we don’t have that kind of motion right now. Even with the growing momentum of the Right and the powerful corporate lobby, a good organizing strategy and a solid, organized social force could contend. There are these opportunities for access and potential for real change, but we don’t have the level of on-the-ground organization and mobilization capacity that could serve as the social force that can drive an agenda to the left of the Democratic Party. I think the health care reform fight is a good indication of that dynamic. There may be a good advocacy infrastructure in DC, but – in the absence of a social force that can drive an independent agenda locally in communities on the ground with a level of national coordination- these reforms that our communities need so badly won’t get realized.

To me, the biggest lesson of this moment is that – in order for us to move a real progressive agenda – we’re going to have to ratchet up our ability to organize. We need to actually get our work to a different level of scale and depth in our organizing. That’s true across issue areas and across communities. We need to build a base that has the power to drive a real progressive agenda that’s to the left of what the Democratic Party is willing to settle for.

What are the key struggles where left organizers should be focusing that work to build real scale and depth in their organizing?

There are some key issues that resonate strongly with peoples’ difficult experiences during this crisis and where their consciousness is attuned with our vision, issues like housing, unemployment and jobs. With unemployment rates as high as they are, there are a huge number of unemployed people who are sharply aware of the importance of job creation. And people who are employed have huge fears that they’re going to lose their jobs. So we should be incorporating that into our work more strongly.

We also need to pay attention to the high degree of anger that people have towards the banks and corporate greed. The general public has a real sense frustration around the bail-outs, resentment at economic inequality and anger at the way in which the corporate lobby runs Washington. The health care reform fight and the debates over financial regulation have made the impact that corporations have on government policy more and more clear to people. There’s real popular resentment that could manifest in a serious fight to rein in corporations and the corporate agenda.

What do we need to do to build the kind of independent social force that you were talking about?

We need to build stronger connections between the social movements and the labor movement. Whether it’s the nonprofit social justice organizations or the organizing networks that have taken generally progressive positions, we all need more connections with the labor movement. At the moment, the labor movement is the strongest organized force behind any progressive policy agenda in Washington. It has real resources and a serious organizing infrastructure. That means that we need to understand and engage with labor’s agenda, and we also need to push labor to take on social justice issues from the various vantage-points that the working class experiences them. And, we need to craft campaigns that allow for those kind of connections to develop effectively.

The 2010 Social Forum in Detroit will be an important opportunity for that connection-building work. The Social Forum will bring together some really important social forces: the labor movement (certainly the more progressive unions and hopefully a broader cross-section as well), the non-profit social justice organizations who are organizing locally and moving policy in a range of areas, students and young people who were behind electoral organizing on campuses. The Social Forum will provide us with the opportunity to start distilling a comprehensive progressive agenda that cuts across our many issues and that reflect the core values that we all share: workers’ rights, immigrant rights, internationalism, women’s and LGBT rights and equality, universal health care, environmentalism and sustainable economic development. Even though we have debates about the specifics of strategy and implementation, we generally agree on these core values. Until we’re able to coordinate our work around that shared basis of unity, our energy will be diffused. We won’t be able to mount a real challenge or to be a real social force to move a real progressive agenda. The Social Forum is a place where we can start to see the synergy between our different struggles and to distill out our shared values. The Inter-Alliance Dialogue is another site where this kind of unity-building and collaborative work is starting to take shape.

Could you describe the Inter-Alliance Dialogue?

The Inter-Alliance Dialogue is a process initiated by six key grassroots alliances of social justice organizing groups that developed outside of the traditional organizing networks: the Right to the City Alliance, the Pushback Network, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and Jobs with Justice. Most of our national alliances emerged independently through our sector-based organizing, among domestic workers, day laborers and so on. First, grassroots organizations developed at the local level. As the local organizations gained some capacity, we formed these national alliances that were still very specific to our particular issues and sectors. But we all shared a commitment to grassroots organizing and movement-building, so we wanted to do work that moved beyond the narrow interests of our particular issues and sector to actually build power around a broader progressive agenda for change. We also shared a commitment to internationalism, to being part of a broader movement for social justice around the world. We started talking about coming together because we were seeing both the way that the economy was headed and the opportunities of a new administration. As our alliances were starting to grow, we wanted to combine efforts and share resources instead of reinventing the wheel. And, we wanted to see whether coming together would make us more than the sum of our parts.

The working class, the working poor and the poor haven’t had a strong voice in the national policy debate. The public dialogue about the economic crisis has largely been framed around the impact on the middle class, but the reality is that working people are suffering. There isn’t really a voice to tell that story. So, as this new political moment unfolds, we need to move the voices that have been on the margins to the center of the national policy debates. With the exception of Jobs with Justice and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in their work around immigration reform, none of our organizations have that kind of national experience. We came together so we could take on movement-wide issues, so we can have a voice for our communities at the national level. We wanted to experiment with putting forward a real national progressive agenda that comes from the grassroots because the hopes and dreams of our communities aren’t reflected anywhere on the Beltway.

We wanted to be able to put forward bigger and more transformative visions and policies than any of our alliances could win on our own. To give an example, we have been discussing the possibility of fighting for a “Community Reinvestment Bank.” The idea would be to take over one of the banks that received a bail out by the government (which means it was bailed out using our peoples’ resources) and transform it into a community bank that would reinvest in jobs, schools and local, economic cooperative development efforts. An institution like that could address many of the on-the-ground issues that that our organizations are working on.

It’s going to be challenging. There are fewer resources for organizing, and the local organizations are more strapped than ever. We’ve never done work at a national level before, so it’s very much an experiment.

You’ve been doing organizing for more than 15 years now. What are some lessons that you’ve drawn from your work? Are there any organizing principles or political lessons that you’d want to share?

There are a lot of lessons that I’ve drawn from my experiences and from dialogues with other organizers:

• Build a Core to Build Your Base: First, I want to highlight the importance of base-building; we can never forget that base-building is the most central aspect of organizing and social change generally. We need to build our bases in a really serious and systematic way and make sure that we’re trying to reach more and more people all the time. In order to do that, you need to have a core of leaders who have strong alignment in terms of vision and practice. You can actually accomplish a lot in terms of base building with a core of even just four or five people. That kind of leadership core is a real source of power in organizing.

• Create an Inspiring Environment: We also need to be aware of the environment we’re creating in our work. Maya Angelou once said that, “People don’t remember what you say. They remember how you make them feel.” It’s really important for us to be mindful about the environment that we’re creating, about the feelings that we’re leaving people with. What is the feeling that you’re creating around people as you’re organizing? Is it inspiring? Does it give people hope? Does it encourage people to bring the best of who they are to the work? Does it make them feel like change is possible?

• Time, Place and Conditions: One thing that I learned from the Labor Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles is the importance of being aware of our “time, place and conditions.” We need to constantly assess the political environment that we’re working in and the historic context of our fights. That assessment allows us to be clear about what’s realistic and what’s possible in this historic moment. We often overestimate the power that we have to achieve our demands, and we underestimate what we’re up against. So our demands tend to be way off in terms of timing, and we don’t push ourselves to build the kind of power we need if we’re actually going to win. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t push the envelope as far as it can actually go and keep our long-term vision on the table; it just means that we need to be clear about our real conditions.

• Fight to Win: It’s important that we fight to win. Terry Marshall said here on Organizing Upgrade that, “We’re not going to lose our way to the revolution.” It’s really essential that we win the fights that we’re engaged in if we want to build power in working class communities and to build the broader movement. The working class has taken such a beating over the past several decades, and it’s only getting worse. We have a responsibility to try to make life better for the working class in an immediate sense. But in the longer term, we’re never going to build the confidence of the working class to contend for real power unless we win in our immediate fights. We need to build peoples’ faith in organizing and in using collective power as a path towards social change, but I don’t see how we’re going to do that unless we can show that it works. To build that faith and confidence, we have to be able to change the material conditions of life.

• Unite All Who Can be United: In the past, we haven’t been good at “uniting all who can be united.” We tend to bring together the same cast of characters to fight around our different issues, but almost all of our issues can be framed broadly enough to unite a wide range of social forces. That can increase our power exponentially. We need to learn how to do our work based on the principle “uniting all who can be united” We need to move beyond our cultural, organizational and political comfort zones in order to build power and start to impact politics on a different scale.

• Push Past Your Comfort Zone: I can give an example from my work at Domestic Workers United. In 2007, we organized our first Town Hall meeting for the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. We had many high-profile speakers who come from very different organizational cultures and had differing positions on other issues but who supported the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. We ended up featuring them as keynote speakers at our event, and I remember that I wasn’t sure if that was the thing to do in that moment. I didn’t know whether we should have put forward those voices instead of having more workers speak. While I was struggling with that discomfort, someone reminded me that you’re supposed to be uncomfortable in this work. We aren’t going to be able to impact change on the scale that we want if we stay within our comfort zone. We may make mistakes, but if we’re not uncomfortable, there’s something wrong. It means that we’re just doing the same things with the same cast of characters and we’re not pushing ourselves to have a broader impact by reaching different communities and changing perspectives. I learned that as an organizer, you’re supposed to be uncomfortable, and it’s important to embrace that.

• Don’t Burn Bridges that Don’t Need to Be Burned: That relates to the importance of building bridges and knowing how to relate to a wide range of people in our work. We need to remember to never burn any bridges unnecessarily. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take risks, but it’s very important to be very deliberate about what risks to take. If you’re going to burn a bridge with someone, you should be really clear about why. Things are constantly changing on the ground and forces are constantly shifting. Someone who is your enemy in one fight could be an important ally in another context. And people have very long memories for burned bridges. To give an example from my organizing with domestic workers, I had to train myself not to react negatively when an employer would call the office and ask questions like, “Why should we pay our domestic worker for a sick day? They’re not working.” When you’re organizing with domestic workers and dealing with those issues on a daily basis, a question like that is very upsetting. But we always need to keep our end goal in mind. Ultimately, you want that worker to get paid for that sick day. You want to be able to set the standards for the industry. So you need to be able to act as if you can hold that space, and that means that you need to be able to speak in a way that reflects authority. It’s not helpful to get angry and defensive with people like these employers. You need to learn not to react passionately. You need to be able to articulate why it makes sense for an employer to pay a worker for their sick day, and both speak to their standpoint and help them to see it as part of a broader dynamic. It’s very easy to respond and react from a place of anger and frustration, given how severe the problems are and how much people are up against. But our ultimate goal is to shift power, and our ability to shift power relies on the connections that we’re able to build.

• Transformation of Self: The transformation of self is an important part of social transformation. Joyce and Nelson Johnson from the Beloved Community Center and the staff at Social Justice Leadership have some really good thoughts and practice at this. We’re ultimately trying to transform institutions and structures. But if people aren’t being transformed in the process, that institutional change won’t hold. It won’t be practiced in the way that we need it to be. Institutional change lives through the people that change effects. We need a culture that supports being centered, focused and connected to our sense of purpose. That allows us to stay on track toward our real goals and objectives, rather than getting derailed by ego and exhaustion. People are starting to work on integrating individual transformation into organizing more; I think those efforts are crucial to developing a deeper, more sustainable organizing model. I practice yoga. Yoga’s not for everyone, but there is something out there for every organizer to create a consistent space to quiet their minds, take care of their mental, emotional and physical health and reset their vision toward victory.

• Campaigns Can Transform Us: There’s an incredibly transformative potential in campaigns. Good campaigns aren’t only about material change; they also offer opportunities for the kind of personal transformation I was talking about earlier. A compelling demand can give people a vision of what’s possible; it can help people to believe that what was once impossible can become possible. We need to bring together a broad cross-section of unlikely allies, knowing that when people come together to fight for things, they begin to see their connections more clearly. They can start to recognize and practice from the place of interconnectedness. We need to identify some key campaigns that bring together a broad cross-section of the working class to actually engage in social change at their points of connection and to feel what’s possible in a way that they haven’t in a past. Those kinds of campaigns will bring us to different scale of political impact, with a broader vision and more transformative demands.

• Organize With Love and Hope: It’s important for organizers to assume the best in people. We shouldn’t be naïve, but we should assume that people generally want to do what’s right: they want to be good people; they want to be good neighbors; they want to do unto others as they would have done unto them. That desire to be good and right is an untapped reserve of energy that organizers can draw on if we are open to it, if we look for the good in people and try to find ways to bring out that goodness. You can always look at things as “glass-half-empty” or “glass-half-full.” We need to choose the fullness. We need to choose the good in people and remember that everybody has that potential to connect with what’s right. We need to try to build connection and relationship from that place. We need to organize with love, and that will allow us to build an infinitely stronger force.

The authors draw on their shared experience in a hetero-sexual marriage. In this society marriage is a privileged institution from which gay and lesbian couples are excluded. There is a vibrant struggle to reform this institution, as well as a debate among radical queers as to if the fight for marriage rights is really the right fight. In future issues of Organizing Upgrade we will be examining more of this debate, as well as bring much needed queer perspectives on organizing, revolutionary politics, and yes, even that mystical thing called love (which for queers is simply an act of resistance and asserting our own humanity).  Now on with it….

Rooted in Love

Tiffany’s story

I never wanted to fall in love. In my home, love made you weak. It made you a victim. Love was conditional, unpredictable, and came with a price. Most of all, love caused pain and suffering. At night, my brother and I would hear the beatings, sometimes even witness it. And, in the morning, mommy got flowers because my step-father “loved” her.

As I grew older, developed politically, and cultivated my feminist consciousness, I realized that patriarchy was imprinted on every conception I had about intimate relationships.  As a bi-sexual woman I learned that this was true for me whether I was with men or women.  I couldn’t fall in love with a man because to do so was to be dependent and abused.  I couldn’t love a woman because that would mean loving the weak.  So I swore off love all together.  I was going to be a strong, independent, smart and capable woman; and from what I could see “loving” anyone was a liability.

Hashim’s story

When I first started getting politicized in my late teens, I pictured meeting this beautiful woman who shared my passion for righting the wrongs of the world and was as committed to justice as I was.  As I matured, though, it seemed more and more like politics was strangely at odds with my notions of love.  I found that getting political with people I really cared about usually resulted in conflict because I couldn’t turn off the “analyze and question everything” switch in my head.  And when it came to my political and intellectual relationships, I had a hard time letting my guard down and showing people who I truly was.

For me, politics was all about theory and analysis – heady intellectual stuff.  Love and relationships was all about trust and vulnerability – scary emotional stuff.  I could handle either one isolated from the other, but I could never do both at the same time.  So I resigned myself to the likelihood that I would have to choose one over the other and would probably not find the revolutionary love of my life.

These are the places we started from.  Now here we are together writing about love and revolution.

If there are any human universals, love would certainly be chief among them.  Yet, when we take a look around the world sometimes it feels like love, for holding such a high place in our imaginations and creative expression, is the least actualized of our ideals.  Instead, fear and alienation maintain a stranglehold on humanity as they manifest in various forms of oppression – patriarchy, white supremacy, poverty, heterosexism, imperialism.  What’s worse, the very notion of love is often distorted and associated with everything from unhealthy and destructive interpersonal relationships to violent reactionary movements of religious extremism.  Not to mention that for our LGBTQ comrades, society has claimed that our expressions of love are immoral, wrong, and even evil.  So what then do we, as revolutionaries, make of this thing called love?  Do we really have time to be bothered with the trappings of the heart?  How does love fit into the picture of that better world we are all imagining and fighting for?  More importantly, how does love factor into the fight itself?

A Revolutionary definition of Love

It can be tricky to grab a hold on what love really is.  It is easy to get fixated on romanticizations of love and end up missing the boat on the real deal.  And it is not uncommon to cling to people or ideas out of fear – fear of being alone, being wrong, or being unimportant – and call it love.  But it is important to distinguish love from the emotional highs and lows that we often associate it with.  Love itself is not a feeling – it is a way of being and acting and, most importantly, it is a choice.  When we choose to come from a place of honesty and humility, we are choosing love.  When we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and trust that it will not be used against us, we are choosing love.  It is choosing to be present for ourselves and others and expecting to be held accountable for our actions.  It is choosing to have compassion for those who are unable or unwilling to offer us love in return.   Love is the choice to walk through our fears and insecurities so that we may reveal our true selves to those around us and be open to receive the true selves of others. From this perspective, love is a framework from which every decision we make is either based in love, or is not.

It is important to establish a definition of love that is action oriented so that we can use it to shape the practice of a revolutionary politic.  While we all have visions of a world built on the principles of democracy, equity, and justice, the society around us seldom shows us what these values actually look like.  Choosing love allows us to respond to oppression in a way that uplifts our vision of the future and brings forward our own humanity.

Systems of oppression intersect in complex ways and are felt at the individual and community level through various forms of physical, emotional, and psychological pain.  Take, for example, the process of gentrification.  Capital – in the form of real estate speculation  – targets working class and low-income communities in the urban core, removes the existing population, and builds up so called New-Urban “communities” that are consumer driven and designed for the middle class.  Working class communities of color are particularly vulnerable both because they lack economic and political power to resist while contending with racialized stereotyping that is used to justify their destruction.  The resulting displacement of families and disruption of people’s lives is destructive: psychologically, economically, and politically.

How does one respond to this type of injustice?  As conscious organizers we would like our first response to be to organize the community and build power to stop gentrification. From our analysis we understand the need to expand our fight and build the power of the left globally, so that we can replace this racist capitalist system with one that is more just.  Easy, right?

The truth is that building class unity and organizing collective power is not often our first reaction to oppression.  When we come under attack, it is both common and natural to wall up and protect ourselves. This walling up, or defensiveness does not stagnate action, but it does shape the action we take, it impacts how we build relationships, and can limit the scope and depth of those relationships. Limiting our ability to build healthy relationships in the fight for a better world is like tying one hand behind our back and getting in the ring with heavy weight boxing champ.

Love as a basis for a revolutionary practice and movement is necessary. Because oppression is felt at the individual level, our personal responses to oppression can be a form of individual resistance.  As we engage in the broader fight for whole scale societal transformation, we also fight the everyday battles that define our personal transformation.  When we base our interactions with comrades, friends, partners, and lovers on love, we are doing more than building healthy interpersonal relationships; we are making the work of movement building possible.  In order to come together and stay together to win, we need more than common material interest and political unity.  We need loving relationships that are both founded on and help us build trust. Understanding the critical role of love in building movement, it is the responsibility of revolutionaries to model what love looks like.  This is especially true when others around us fail to do so.  Just as oppression is internalized, reproduced, and enacted by the oppressed, so must we internalize our politics to the extent that the very act of our being becomes revolutionary.    

Intimate Liberation

If we accept that we must learn how to build relationships based on vulnerability and shared trust in order to transform society, then it is our most intimate relationships – i.e. with our partners, lovers, and closest friends – that are central to developing a revolutionary practice of love.  Because they are closest to us, the ones we love most are also the best positioned to cause us pain.  For this reason it can be especially hard to let our guard down and allow ourselves to be open and available.  Moreover, if we take the ones  we love for granted, our intimate relationships are particularly vulnerable to being turned into places where dynamics of oppression are played out. But when we practice love in a transformative way in our deepest relationships, we both learn more about who we are and are also better able to bring love into relationships that are more strictly political.  More importantly, we are also able to build relationships that free us from the oppressive bonds that reinforce this inequitable society.  Loving in this way is something we call “Intimate Liberation.”

As revolutionaries we make sacrifices in so many areas of our lives; we must be equally willing to sacrifice the security of our comfort zones.  We must be ready to examine how we work and how we relate to each other. We must ask ourselves, “Is the way I treat my loved ones liberating for them? Is it liberating for me?”  And then we must ask the same questions directly to our loved ones themselves.  If at any point the answer is “no”, then we must be willing to change our behavior.  For if we are not committed to Intimate Liberation, then any commitment to societal transformation is empty and hypocritical. 

Love for the long haul

The road to victory is long, winding, and unpredictable.  If we are to successfully traverse the path of revolution we will have to rely on a whole lot of leaning on each other.   None of us has all of the solutions we’re looking for, but together we certainly have some.  It takes trust and humility to build the type of unity needed to implement those solutions.  Finding the courage to have trust and humility begins with choosing love.  The world is a scary place and the reality is that the odds are stacked up against us.  But as long as we choose love we will have more than a fighting chance.   Our victories may be far and few between, but our defeats will never be permanent and the sparks of our movement will never be suffocated.

Sushma: These are dramatic times, politically, socially and economically.  What do you think are the most significant shifts happening right now and how do you think they change the context of our work.  Clearly, your knowledge and skills base is broad.  So please draw from whatever is relevant, especially from your experiences organizing within the black community as well as your media work.

Makani: The first thing is that we are in a period of extreme contradictions.   On one hand, our people are celebrating an important racial benchmark — Obama’s election.  On the other, we are fighting to counter the narrative that his election is a sign that we’re now in a post-racial context while we are in the midst of this highly racialized context as evidenced by the rise of hate crimes, hate media and speech and increased media stereotyping in news and entertainment media.

When you consider what might be indicators of a society that is dealing fairly and justly with communities regardless of race and ethnicity, you think of educational attainment, income, equal protection before the law, equitable access to services, to the vote, etc.  We are at an all-time low in this indicators since the early 1970s and yet we have a Black president. In many ways, it is reminiscent of Black political discourse in the 1930s where we were engaged in this debate about whether we as a people should be fighting for  “hiring Black” or “buying Black.” The “hire Black” camp was about what is going to be the best way for the masses of Black people, the vast majority of whom are working class, poor and not college educated, to improve their lives?Buy Black focused on creating a Black middle class and owner class as a primary strategy.  Through Black buying power, Black providers would replace the mostly Jewish retailers in Black communities and this new class of entrepreneurs would reinvest its wealth into building our communities.  Essentially, we are faced with a similar question: is having a Black man at the “top” going to result in a trickle down of power and access to the rest of us?,

“Well, what does it mean to have a Black president when so many Black people and other people of color,immigrants, etc., are under incredible criminalization.  We have raids and  families being torn apart.  There’s a rainbow of people who are affected, not just Latinos. It’s people from almost every continent who are being exposed to this kind of hatred and militarization and trauma and terror in the midst of this election that  people believe is a huge victory.  Organizers are having a hard time figuring out how to negotiate it without being “downers.”.

It seems as though we have opportunities. Progressives are being invited to the White House.  Many of our ideas are getting a hearing for the first time.  So we’re not quite sure how to protest, what to do or what to say.  We’re in a place where we are stuttering politically – both figuratively and actually – about what it is that we do next.   And this is really very different. I don’t think anyone can remember a time like this where the left has been so paralyzed by division around what to do next. That in itself is just profound.  We need to reflect on what this means and what is our understanding of the state.  We need to rethink completely our sense of the state and step away from Marx for a minute and think about, “What is our theory of the state? How do we interact with it? What does it mean?  How do we build real change and make sure our people don’t suffer even more during these hard times? How do we let go of this Western paradigm that dichotomizes direct service and organizing as if organizing is some kind of profession?”  All of these contradictions are way up a front right now because our people are suffering   Too many of our folk are hungry, unemployed, abused at work and home, homeless and we will not be relevant if our work ignores this  These are  critical pillars of the contradictions that we have to navigate for the rest of the work to make sense.

S: What opportunities do you think are coming up through the Obama administration and the economic crisis? In the midst of these opportunities, what do you think is the role of the community organizing sector and particularly the role of left-leaning organizers within that?

M: I think that the first thing that we need to do is step back and draw a much broader map about who’s “left”.  And we have to abandon the idea that being left means that you’ve read some left stuff or had certain conversations. We have to step back and say there are people who have analysis drawn from their lived experience.  They may not have read the books or use the terminology but, they’re a part of the left.

The left needs to be able to navigate the opportunities of the current moment. We have to be able to embrace the researchers and folks who have been imagining solutions that are outside of the market paradigm. That means we also have to rethink our division of labor in this left, that this left is not just about the people who knock on doors or build base organizations – which is critical – but we also have to fully embrace the whole division of labor and the whole range of people who are thinking about policies and imagining our lives and our institutions beyond the current system and its oppression; the people who are dreaming and painting that work and singing about that work, the artists.  All of that is part of the tapestry of what the left is.

Having said that, therein lies the opportunities. One part is: how do we move people to a place of concrete hope or belief in the  possibility of  a real alternative? Because people know that things are messed up; they are living it. But there are so many people who just don’t believe that there is another way. And so we have to build relationships with folks who have thought about the alternatives, the other way. It’s about us translating those policies and those visions into concrete fights and into concrete changes in conditions.  It’s about working with with progressive academics and artists to help tell a story that allows people see themselves in the narrative; see themselves in the picture  of what the world can look like without this madness.  This is an amazing opportunity.

Clarifying this vision will help us more effectively leverage the openings in the Obama Administration   It will give us an opportunity to experiment with some of these ideas – within limits – both at the local level and at the national level.  We can actually work the system to provide glimpses of the next world, glimpses of how to be engaged in the governance of our lives, because people do not take anything that they do not believe belongs to them. If you look at any major change in any country, there was  first a point where people engaged the system and understood the way things worked – or didn’t work for them. Then, they made a decision that it needed to work better for them.  Why?  Because they began to understand it as theirs.  And the gift of this election is that there is a new set of people who believe that this society belongs to them. Now, the question is, what do we do as organizers, broadly speaking to help people see:

1. Yes, this does belong to us.

2. Yes we  can run it.

3. Together, we have what it takes to make it run better and make it work for more of us.

That is the opportunity.

We also have to respect the division of labor. There are people who can put on a suit and go up to the White House and make that work. They can figure out how to move these ideas and open up more space for more  to step into that place of co-governance.  They can push the envelope, push the rhetoric. But we also have to understand that  protest in still very necessary.  There are things  we have to do to call attention to the terror.  Raids – they need to be protested, not negotiated. The need for real health care for people, not just a privatized health insurance system.  There needs to be an outside strategy, not everybody in suits having polite conversations. And it goes on.  And so we need to have a strategy that is about power. A strategy that has this vision of the next phase of this work but does not abandon the outside strategy and the need for people to express rage; a way to confront wrong things directly so that folks understand that they’re not crazy.  But we also need to be there with clear solutions like what should the banking system look like? How should people deal with capital and their own personal money? Why is that we have all these check cashing places? Many tools and solutions that – as organizers – we haven’t really explored. Maybe this is because we think, “We’re organizers. We knock on doors. We help people think about the fight.”  But the fight and the policy and the solution and the framing and the story telling, they’re all a tight braid. We can’t abandon any of that.

S: You’ve been getting at the need to expand our division of labor but not letting go of the outside strategy, the protesting and the agitation.  But I want to push you on that a little more. At some point, we’re going to have to make choices. And, at some point, priorities have to be set.  That gets to our next question. What are old strategies that may not work in this new climate, that we need to let go of?  Are there particular analyses or particular methods that you think may not be as relevant now?  And can you talk more about what you are finding innovative or exciting?  Anything you are experimenting with?

M: One thing that we should never abandon is building personal relationships.  There’s this rush towards certain kinds of technology without the understanding that what makes the technology great is the ability to find new opportunities to build relationships with people.  So there’s a lot of folks who are not knocking on doors and they’re not meeting new people directly; they’re not having direct, physical ties with their base.  Yet, these are times when we really have to expand our relationship-building.

Again, I think that we also have to let go of the false dichotomy between direct service and organizing. People are suffering.  If we are not doing anything to deal with their suffering, then we will become irrelevant. We’ve tended to thumb our nose at the idea that direct services are a part of organizing, but they are. Service provision can be both a base-building strategy and a condition-changing strategy. In this climate, good organizing groups need to think about either providing their own services – like food banks – or about having good relationships with service organizations.  I’m not saying that every base-building group has to expand into direct services, but I am saying that everyone needs to let go of the idea that the two don’t go together. To criticize groups that  engage in service provision totally misses the point.   I’m excited about the organizations that are bringing the two aspects of the work together and are really stepping fully into this experiment. I’ve seen some exciting examples in the Northwest like the Idaho Community Action Network.  They have this low-income base. Their people are hungry; they don’t have enough food.  So ICAN asked, “What are we going to do about that? How can we talk about you coming to a meeting and engaging in the organizing work if you haven’t eaten?” But also,  “How do we politicize those services?”  Mississippi Workers Center is trying a similar thing: providing direct services toto improve  their work conditions and then building off those services to develop a base that engages in work that is highly political. Many workers centers do the same thing.  I’m glad to see more groups paying attention to the needs of the base and not just seeing the process of organizing as moving people through meetings and into actions.  I think this idea of organizing as some narrow arena of work is passé.  It’s not going to survive  during this period of incredible social dislocation.

The other practice that I love is Web 2.0 stuff, all of the interesting things that groups are doing with websites and blogs and so on.  You’re able to tell stories; you’re able to bypass the mainstream media, or what’s left of the mainstream media because the mainstream media is in incredible flux right now.  Our understanding of how we tell our stories is dramatically changing. The traditional newspapers are becoming somewhat obsolete. Some people think that doesn’t matter because newspapers never really did a good job of telling our story. That’s true in a lot of ways.  But when we lose these newspapers and these news outlets, we lose the ability to capture an official story about what is happening in the world.  There is no paper record; there is no clear official story based on the principles of journalism.  That means that the people with the most money will get to dominate the narrative more easily.  In the past, when we were able to capture the daily newspaper or the New York Times or 60 Minutes even when we didn’t have money, we got the credibility of being a part of the official story. We’re losing some of that leverage today.  In response to these changes, progressive people are trying to create mega-websites to put out our stories.  They’re trying to brand their institutions as a credible source of information for the media and for the broader public. These big organizations and websites are asking smaller organizations to join in and to merge their credibility with them as a way to fill the vacuum that mainstream media used to fill: legitimate sources, credible stories, a following of people who will read this information and learn from it.  That’s good in some ways, but there’s also some dangers to it. When smaller organizations pool our credibility under these mega-organizations, they suck resources away from local groups. Then they frame our stories using their own political frames, and they often water our stories and our analyses down. So then there’s fewerclear left messages out there.  As a result, we have seen the same kind of concentration of power and voice that we were fighting with the corporate media.  I’m not sure what a better answer is. We do need to have these high-traffic sites that tell our stories, but we also have to be aware of what these sites are saying about our work.  We need to strategize about how they can actually help us to build our work. But at this point, I think the jury’s still out on whether we can do that well.

I think that the other important trend in this period is the development of national-level formations like the Right to the City Alliance, the Pushback Network and Grassroots Global Justice. By developing these formations, people are saying, “There is clearly a vacuum.  We are doing great work locally.  But we need to figure out how to link up, how to have a national or an international frame for our work.” In other contexts, that vacuum would be filled by a political party. But given the absence of political parties in this country, it is primarily non-profit organizations that are building power. They are forming these networks that mirror some of the functions of political parties, specifically the function of building power on a national scale.

Of course, people are still working out what national work should look like.  There is a push for people to come together and examine how to work collaboratively, how to build power together, and how to magnify their local work.  But one of the inherent contradictions in these networks is that people have ambiguity about the kind of power that they want to build, about whether they want to build that power together or whether they want to just learn from each other and build that power wherever they are.  In that case, a national network is a space where they can hang out and be cool with each other; it’s more of a learning community. And if they decide they do want to build concrete power together, then people struggle to figure out how to do that work together without losing their organizational self-determination.  This is especially complicated when the relationships are new and people are still building trust.

We need more collective spaces to get clear on this question of building power.  The Social Forum might be that space, but it isn’t really designed for large-scale discussion.  Hopefully someday, a forum will emerge that will allow larger and larger groups of people to think about how the left can build power. Again, in other contexts, that discussion would have happened inside of a political party. Today, people are afraid of parties, and I understand that.  So that forum may not need to look like a party.  We could be imagining some new amazing and different kind of formation. For the last 150 years, when people talk about the “left,” they’re usually talking about certain kinds of formations like left political parties. But that definition has really shifted since the 1970s.  Right now, when we talk about the left, we’re talking about a completely different set of networks.  The left today is much more like “swarms,” as they say in community psychology, groups of people who come together and then come apart but not in formal institutional ways. We have to learn more from anarchist work and other political models that help us understand how people can work together and have networks and connection with each other but also maintain self-determination.

S: It’s helpful to have someone with experience like you remind us about similar points in history where some of these questions have come up, and provide some bookmarks from history that people should be going back and looking to so we don’t have to re-imagine or rethink everything today in isolation.

M: I’ve been watching these kinds of national formations come and go for years.  In the 1980s, in the face of Reaganomics, there was another period where these national formations were in vogue.  I don’t think that people doing this work today have sufficiently studied what happened with those earlier formations. There are important lessons to be learned, like how to understand the needs of the individual members and the relationships between groups, that networks should remain actual networks and shouldn’t devolve into becoming their own organizations, that it’s crucial to think about power and to have clear strategies, etc.

Actually, I think we need a serious conversation about what organizing was like in general during the 1980s.  For example, there was this amazing Family Farm Alliance (though I might be getting the name wrong).  It was this amazing left formation that came directly out of thoughtful organizing in response to a political moment when the savings and loan crisis became a family farm crisis.  The campaigns were phenomenal, and their analysis was really clear and nuanced. Once in a while when I’m traveling around the country, I run into people  that were part of that formation. Those folks are still doing great  work. They have this deep analysis of the economy, and they have strong race politics. We’re talking about places in Nebraska or Idaho or Montana. So these are mostly white folks surrounded by white folks and maybe some Native folk.  And their work is still holding in the hearts and minds of a wide range of people in their communities.  Iowa is a great example; a lot of people don’t realize how much of Obama’s victory in Iowa was directly related to that organizing from twenty years ago.   It’s invisible now; other people on the left don’t know about it or don’t understand it.  But there was a point in the late 1970s and the 1980s where there was a commitment to organizing white people in a  profoundly anti racist, left way. I often  wonder what would have happened if that work had taken off at a different level of scale.

S: Any other kinds of closing thoughts?

M: I think that one challenge we have – particularly in racial justice work – is people’s ambiguity about Black liberation.  There are ways in which Obama’s presidency heightens those contradictions.  We have an administration that is basically afraid to deal with anything “Black” because they’re afraid of what it will mean politically because many people are Afrophobic.  There’s a great deal of fear and hatred of Black people that we  just don’t want to confront openly.  Now, I’m not talking about white people liking hip-hop music or saying “Whassup” or whatever. People think that’s the same thing as liking Black people.  But it’s not. And it often seems like people doing racial justice work feel like Black people had their day in the sun in 1960s, that because other communities of color were rendered mostly invisible during that time, that Blacks should take a step back because other communities  need to be seen, too. It is true that other communities  need greater  visibility,support and solidarity for their work.  We need to be clear about the way in which white supremacy makes it seem like we have to pick one group to be the special one, like, “Let’s pick the colored people who are going to be in the sunshine because we can’t really concentrate on more than one.”  That idea – that there just isn’t enough space for all of us to be seen and heard and fought for – is at the root of these challenges.

But the people who are engaged in the work of Black liberation are having some really important conversations that I think would interest  lots of organizers outside of these communities.  There are concrete benefits to be gained through building alliances in our community beyond the sheer numbers.  And we as a community need the solidarity ourselves.  The Obama administration is not addressing the incrediblevulnerability of Black people in this economy  Of course, we’re not the only folks dealing with these challenges. I’ve mentioned the immigrations raids — lots of different folks are under the gun.  But there are ways in which some of these targeted communities are  avoiding solidarity with the African American community.  They want support from  African American communities but they are not building genuine alliances. Some of this is driven by funding.  For example, there are dollars moving to non Black groups to do outreach  in African American communities to increase their support on a whole range of issues, from marriage equality to immigration. That’s good, but it’s being done without any sense of quid pro quo.  Black groups rarely receive support from these pools and it sets up an uneven dynamic that essentially conveys a lack of commitment to Black self determination and institution building.  We are not going to have a viable base of progressive power in this country until we figure out how to develop a multi-racial cross-community work that is deep and principled and that explicitly addresses the general Afrophobia and Islamaphobia in this country.

Aarti Shahani is a public service fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a writing fellow at Justice Strategies. She talked to Roberto Lovato, businessman, activist and founder of Presente.org, the face of the campaigns to demand Lou Dobbs’ ouster from CNN by Latino and pro-immigration activists. Here’s their conversation (which was originally published on the

A.S.: Why did you go after Dobbs?

R.L.: To be clear, CNN was our target. Lou Dobbs was their 800-pound gorilla. We used him to get to (CNN/US President) Jon Klein. Dobbs was repudiated among colleagues and managers. Peers confirmed that he’s a volatile person. We assessed his vulnerability, and decided it was ripe.

We also looked at the market conditions. His ratings and CNN’s were both falling. Like any media company, CNN has to establish a beachhead in a mission-critical Hispanic market. It’s 50-million strong and growing. If you have a problem in the Latino market, you have a problem with your very future.

CNN’s gotten other threats of boycotts. None had delivered anything resembling a credible threat.

A.S.: What’s a credible threat?

R.L.: We didn’t call for a boycott. We made a strategic choice to tease out a contradiction. CNN was preparing the series “Latinos in America,” a major attempt to court [us]. We produced a YouTube video that contrasted Dobbs with its host Soledad O’Brien. We made it clear that we’re not targeting her.

Our video went viral. We had events in eighteen cities.

In the 2006, millions of immigrants marched for rights with their feet and defeated laws that wanted to put us in jail. We haven’t had wins since then. We went back to where people marched, in Denver, Miami, Oregon. Hundreds signed up via text messages after we talked on Spanish radio. Immigrants are incensed. They marched with their fingers, so to speak. We gathered 100,000 signatures online in just over a month. It stunned even us.

CNN knew what that meant. Klein says that Latinos had nothing to do with Dobbs’ departure. What do you expect? Power concedes nothing without a demand. It conceded our demand. Obviously CNN doesn’t want to encourage other activists.

The funny thing is, Dobbs left at an inopportune time. We began conversations with CNN advertisers and were planning a hemispheric press conference in ten Latin American countries.

A.S.: When I asked Newt Gingrich about your campaign at a public event last month, he said, “If we can get conservatives to petition for MSNBC to dump a couple of people, then I’m pretty happy to look at this petition for Lou Dobbs.” Are you surprised he didn’t run to Dobbs’ defense?

R.L.: A lot of people don’t like Dobbs. Funny thing is, the majority of people adversely impacted by him didn’t even know who he was. Our campaign got the word out to Spanish speakers.

A.S.: Dobbs called you a flea. How do you respond?

R.L.: Dobbs is a mouthpiece for the extreme right’s hate. Our campaign was as an act of love. I don’t care if people think that sounds touchy-feely. Strategy is nothing if not the spirit of one adversary taking on another. The combative spirit of Latinos was central to our calculations. We won’t take verbal violence that results in physical violence. We started and ended with love for ourselves.

A.S.: Didn’t you infringe on Dobbs’ right to free speech?

R.L.: Is it a legitimate business model to make money off hate? Dobbs himself started hiding behind the 1st amendment. Sure he can speak. But the Constitution doesn’t say anything about his right to a show on CNN. Even Ted Turner said in a 2008 interview that he would fire Dobbs immediately. There’s precedent on hate speech. Remember Don Imus?

Media hasn’t done serious coverage of media justice issues. We expected the reception context for our message in liberal editorial rooms to be unfavorable. We assumed we’d be racialized and interpreted not advantageously. Rather than whine and lament, we strategized. We got good, significant press coverage, even in mainstream national media.

A.S.: Nicco Mele, the cyber-organizing guru who ran Howard Dean’s online campaign, says “the internet is very powerful for anti-establishment underdogs and issues.” Now that Presente.org won, what’s next?

R.L.: A whole lot of listening. We’ve amassed a modicum of people power. Our mission is to build on it by hearing our base. We’re consciously celebrating our victory. It’s important for a people to stop and reflect. This is my first day of rest. I turned on CNN at 7 pm and there’s John King. Oh my god. What have we done?

These are dramatic times politically, socially, and economically.  What do you think are the most significant shifts happening right now, and how do they change the context of our work?

I think that the most significant shift is the intersection between the new media and Obama. I do not mean his election itself, but his campaign that became a symbol for a changing terrain.

Obama’s campaign surfaced what was already in play.  It uncovered race relations in the United States and the status of leadership within black communities.  The campaign symbolized the changing of the guard from the old civil rights establishment in the black community to a generation of black people who benefited from the civil rights revolution in the US. Obama represents this new black middle class that came up from the achievements of the civil rights establishment, but with a different worldview.

His campaign also symbolized a growing coalition. It brought together different segments of society suffering under the Bush Regime and the stolen election. There has always been talk of the “net-roots”, mostly the white middle class who had careers in silicon valley and became politically active through both the Bush’s stolen election and the falling economy. The anti-Bush stuff was their reaction to it.  Obama’s campaign brought those folks, black people and young communities of color a new leadership.

His leadership brought a lot of things to the surface: it’s not the 60s anymore. People from the 60s took for granted that post-WWII, all the imperialist nations economies were weakened.  That opened space for communist and revolutionary forces to start having liberation.  We have gone through a process now where a lot of people who thought that this was the solution are now stale. We are coming up in the world now, where we have to deal with this.  We do not have revolutions jumping off in front of us everyday.  The socialist project, in the eyes of many worldwide, has been discredited.  The old model does not work.

We are coming out asking what are the new solutions?  We are in a stage of experimentation.

There is all this rave about new media, but the key thing about it is its democratic nature.  Old media was built for “from one to many” and in new media its about “from many to many”.  A large scale or numbers of people can communicate with each other much more easily than in the post. We think about in Karl Marx’s time, it took weeks or months to get the word about something from one country to the next (Us to Europe).  Now, no matter where you are there are so many communications devices so that is instantaneous.  Time has effectively shrunk. What does that mean for us?  How does this change human beings? I think we are just in the middle of this.   The new media was produced by capitalism, the main mode of production.  The left has not comprehended how to change society and use new media as a liberatory project and not something that just seeks to make a profit.

During the immigrant marches that re-sparked May Day in the US a few years ago, a lot of young Latino folks were using MySpace.com to organize spontaneous walkouts on mass scales.  People find difficulty in organizing people in this day and age and yet you have all these examples of people self-organizing.  People are using new media technology but in a very organic way because new media has become such a part of their life.

Can we communicate our stories effectively to people? Which of youtube, myspace, Facebook all these social networking and peer to peer networks can we use to communicate more effectively our reasoning and our thoughts and make it a priority to expand the left as we know it.

New communication and new media allow us to share stories and deliver our narrative and which challenges the current hegemonic order and create counter-hegemony, as discussed by Antonio Gramsci.

There are a number of new opportunities for organizing presented by the new Obama administration and the economic crisis.  What are the key interventions that the community organizing sector should make in this moment? Are there particular contributions that left organizers should make in this process?

The key interventions right now should be:

FOLLOW OBAMA. What is the most progressive out of what he is doing, even if its limited. What are the loopholes where we can intervene?  Personally, I’ve been following Obama’s approach to service.  In the US, we do not have a clear national identity.  In just about every other country there is a full national identity. In what Obama refers to in his speeches, he seems to think that service is one way we can start to develop that national identity.  In a lot of ways, this is like nation-building.  (And people can argue with me on this!)  Service is an easy way to get people involved in organizing. They are one step away.  A person involved in service obviously cares about an issue or cause and is willing to do service around it. This is not that far from connecting them to Mao’s line on mass line and “serve the people” and connect that sentiment to organizing projects. Obama has set up a government site for service to connect service projects nationwide.  I am trying to get people to connect into this as a means of recruiting new, young people. We can connect them to organizing in general, as well as to the Left.  Its an open opportunity, an experiment.

WE NEED TO CREATE NEW MAJORITIES. There is no Left in this country.  When I say there is no Left is this country, there is no phenomenon or force that has impact on a societal scale and identifies with principles we call “left”.  There is nothing like that exists like that here, much less a large section of society that abide by these principles. There are only a few scattered individuals in reality. There maybe more people who can benefit from this, but are not aware or are caught up in their lives. We need to grow our forces in general as well as grow the left.  We need to think about how to do this in the US context.  We need to build new majorities. We can learn some things from the Obama campaign.  Obama created a new “we” – a new force, call it a coalition or alliance.  He created a new foundation of people, who in many cases were not active. My mother is from Barbados and recently got her citizenship.  She’s been in the country since 1968. She voted for the first time, not just because he was black. It obviously excited her, but there was an excitement to vote.  His campaign made people feel they were part of something bigger, part of a movement.  We talk about this, but he did it on such a massive scale.  What can we learn from this? How can we build a left? How can we build new majority? In what ways to storytelling, new media, and technology intersect with that?

USE NEW MEDIA TO AMPLIFY WHAT WE ALREADY HAVE MOVING.  What are the key projects we are engaging in? What are the political projects we are engaging in? Organizing projects? How can we see these media tools and technologies as amplifying or adding to what we are already doing? In my studies, I find that these technologies do not create social networks.  They only amplify connections that are real or networks that already exist.  Offline, we should learn how to build day-to-day connections to everyday working people. How do we build social networks with people?  I am not saying anything new. Churches, mosques, etc already do this. They are deeply entrenched in people’s lives. How do we translate this in a secular sense of the left.  Also, there is a religious left and (how do we) translate this into a emanicipatory project. These tools are only helpful if they are amplifying something that is already real.  How does developing relationships affect people’s connection to ideas?  There is a quote from Amilcar Cabral – people do not fight for ideas in the sky, they fight for real things. They fight for real, material things.  It does not matter if you come talking about “revolution etc. etc.” but the question is “how will I feed my family? Find work? Life a sustainable life?”

RE-ENGINEER DIRECT ACTION. There are actions around the world where people use GPS and Google Maps that helps decentralize the power that the state has. So many of these things, funny enough, that capitalism developed we can now leverage to use again elite power.

What are old strategies that our sector should turn away from? Which new tools and ideas are you now experimenting with?

A lot of stuff is old now.  First of all, there is something about Left culture where we are quick to polarize; where in some cases, it may not be the case.  You definitely want to polarize you and your allies from the elite powers that be.   The Left has taken this to be cannibalistic towards itself.  One small difference within different sects of the Left is polarized – we set a pole, only one of us can be right, and we battle to the death. It has helped kick-in sectarianism. We need to relook at how to have serious political debates and disagreements and not be at war with each other.  We can co-exist with different ideologies within the left. The truth will come out in practice. In my organizing work, it was not a concern to me what someone’s ideology to me.  At least it was not my primary concerns (we are progressive, revolutionary, etc.) , but when we finally put stuff in practice and we see what works and what does not.  Ideology cannot be primary.  I am not saying it is not important.  But that cannot be the only factor – how can we negotiate, debate and struggle together?

Second, we cannot continue newspaper selling. A lot of sectarian groups call themselves Left but do not represent Left forces.  They are very alienating to everyday people.  They develop a culture of talking down to people.  We are “above and away from the masses.”  “We come down and bring you the truth.”  This needs to stop.

There is outside knowledge as well as people’s knowledge from their everyday experience (Paolo Friere approach).  We need to combine the two.  Instead, I think you see one or the other.  That there is only people’s everyday experiencial knowledge and you cannot go beyond that or there is only this outside knowledge and we need to bring them the truth.  There has to be a combination, a dialectic, and come to a real emancipatory project.

Third, a lot of the tactics we use have gotten old, like marching and so on. We need understand the current conditions and which tactics and strategies need to flow from our analysis of current conditions.  We have a lazy period of non-studying or non-analysis studying and we are relying on a lot of tactics from the past. We are stuck in the 60s. The civil rights establishment is stuck in the 60s and the left is stuck in the 60s in this country.  We are not recognizing in front of our face what is new, what is different. How do we move forward, study it, move on, and make an assessment and concretize some gains? We rely on a march or a protest, and people do not come out to that. What will pull people out? What do people connect to?  At one point, marching was new and came out of new conditions.  It was part of the Industrial Revolution where people were coming into cities. There could be a debate now – should we leverage gains from the state or build alternatives? Or a combination of both?  This depends on the objective conditions.

Finally, we need some serious study. The left is lazy and does not engage in study. There are pockets of people trying to do that now. This project itself is an attempt to do that.

What is inspiring you these days?

Two things are inspiring me right now. They may not be typical of the left – or at least at first glance, they do not appear to be “left.”

THE ARTIST MIA: If you read her interviews, she talks about how people cannot define her genre. The reality is, she’s produced her own genre. She talks about her experience growing up in a third world country, but more growing up in refugee camps. And then, she talks about moving to the first world and having to live and cope with all this hybridity. Through technology and new media, the world is really connected.  When you are an immigrant or refugee, you are at the intersection of this.  She wanted to find a way through her music, through her art, to connect. The world is not longer in these distinct silos. This fact really comes out in her music. When you are an immigrant kid, she talks about how, “you do not know what is cool.” You might rock a Michael Jackson t-shirt and some stone-washed jeans. You are this mismatch of things, these excesses of the first-world that get dumped on the third-world.  Through mass media, for the most part, the first world used to produce what is “cool”. But with everything as connected as it is now, everyone is sharing. Third world, refugee kids are producing what is up. Her music and message reflect this. Some of her lyrics have revolutionary content.  But often people complain that all of her music is not revolutionary, that sometimes it is just about dancing or sometimes  too difficult to follow what she is saying! But what I have learnt from her is that we have been transfixed on narrow concept of political art. Some of us believe that when there is a revolutionary era, then all songs will have revolutionary lyrics, quoting from the Communist Manifesto. But is this what moves people?  Maybe you can have a song, where they lyrics talk about dancing and partying, but the feeling and effect of the song is more revolutionary. Can a song make people feel something or bring change in people’s lives?  Though her lyrics are often political, her fans concentrate on how she blends sounds from Aborigine people in Australia, to folks in Sri Lanka to folks in Jamaica. The sounds come together and become a way to connect people around the world. The song could be about dancing, but people recognize the sounds and start connecting to one another. It makes me think about how are we, as the Left, connecting people? It makes me question how we think about culture, music and what we think is revolutionary.

THE DANCE CREW CRAZE: Dance crews have popped up in the US as well as internationally.  Sean Paul came up at the same time that new dances came out in Jamaica. These spread across the Caribbean and through the Diaspora spread to the US, UK and around the world. At the same time, there are dances that come up in hip-hop songs. But the hip-hop artists are not making them up. They are going to the hood where kids are doing this organically in LA, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and Harlem. This is very self-organized and organic. What’s amazing is that these kids now have jobs. They are now artists, they teach dances, they tour, and they perform in videos. They are part of the industry now. This is happening in an era where people really question the potential of these young kids.  Statistically, the prison population goes up for young black children and unemployment rises for young black men.   And yet, these young black kids are creating jobs for themselves.  Robin D. G. Kelly talks about people creating jobs out of play. Work out of play. All of these groups organize themselves, dance and have created an international network of dancers.  I like looking at the self-organization of the under-class, if you can call them that. The working class is self-organizing through culture.  How can we tap into this as a model and help them reach their full, emancipatory potential?

Any closing thoughts?

A lot of what I have been discussing can be traced back to Gramsci.  It’s all about hegemony.  In the US, we live in an advanced capitalist society. We cannot use pure force to effect change. Therefore, the question becomes: How are we going to have a revolution here? How do we create counter-hegemonic culture?

We need to be more effective in telling our stories and understand how stories affect people. How does the left design a left narrative?  This was the key thing that Obama figure out. After Bush, the country was divided.

Sometimes we are closer to crisis than we realize. Elites in this country have an understanding of how close we are to crisis, more than we. Maybe some feared another civil war given the country is so divided on so many issues.  Obama was concerned about division. To get elected, he needs a 51% majority.  For this to possible, he needed to build unity. He used a story, he retold the narrative of the US to build the unity he needed to win.

His new narrative: The US is an unfinished project.  He asked people to look at the founding fathers, and then the civil war. He marveled at US innovation and reminded us all that we are lucky to be here.  He took some truths of American mythology and created new myths with a more progressive feature.

The question for us is: Can we do this? Can we create a left myth that is more revolutionary?