We came to Arizona from the copper mines in Cananea.  Recruiters came to Mexico trying to find people who would come work.  We came in wagons, there was nothing here..nothing!  They dropped people off from place to place.  Our job was to clear the desert.  And look at it now!   – Antonia Franco

I remember a childhood of listening to the stories of my elders, sitting at a kitchen table with thick mugs filled with more milk than coffee. There was my Nana Tonia, who came in the early 1920’s with her family from Sonora, México. My Tata Emilio’s eyes would gleam as he spoke, describing the orchard trees along South Mountain and Baseline Road, the ranches, the farms all around. He loved to point out how much things used to cost in the early days, break down what it cost to feed his family and pay the rent and match that to the wages he made as a janitor, a musician and a groundskeeper.

Stories like theirs constitute the backbone of the history of the state of Arizona. Their labor helped build the foundation upon which the 5^th largest city of the United States operates upon today.  And I wonder, what would they think about what is happening in Arizona now, days after the passage of the nation’s harshest anti-immigrant law?

In the Arizona of today, you can get charged with smuggling – yourself.

In the Arizona of today, the chain gangs of the Jim Crow era are alive and well.

In the Arizona of today, undocumented students are forced to pay triple tuition for a college education.

And, after the signing of Senate Bill 1070, police can stop and question you because you look illegal.

Arizona – a state built by the hands of many people, of many colors and many languages – has taken another step in the wrong direction. Since 2005, almost 6,000 immigration-related bills have been introduced in the state legislature; many have passed with examples noted above. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has made it his personal mission to hunt migrants in the community and humiliate inmates in county jails. Check points are scattered throughout the state.  Others have begun to follow this example, as day laborers have been attacked as they wait for work on street corners.  Last summer, nine-year-old Brisenia Flores and her father were shot and killed in their home; three members of the Minutemen Militia have been arrested and charged for the crime.

The state government has been converted into a legislative laboratory and thus represents an epicenter of the anti-immigrant movement. And as a result, a veil of fear and terror has been laid upon the population.  Daily routines have become a risk.  A child going to school has to wonder whether she will see her mother or father when she comes home.  A quick trip to the store requires heavy good byes reserved for long journeys.  I was in Arizona the week SB1070 was signed into law and I heard stories of pregnant women coming in to community centers to ask if it was safe to go to the hospital to give birth.  The answer was, “No.”

The struggles around immigration are among the defining civil and human rights issues of our time, and Arizona has become the new Alabama.  Governor Jan Brewer made the choice to stand on the wrong side of history last week.  In exchange for votes she has solidified her place in history alongside segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace.  Wallace clung to the institution of racial segregation in the South, defending it by arguing for state’s rights over the federal government.  Governor Brewer and Republican politicians in Arizona will echo this argument, a general strategy of the Right wing under an Obama Administration, which emerged in the health care debates this year.

In a state nearing bankruptcy, with exploding foreclosures and growing unemployment, elected officials have chosen to target the state’s most vulnerable population instead of develop serious solutions to the state’s problems.  In this time of economic instability, people are increasingly fearful and uncertain of how things can get better.  The rhetoric behind bills like SB1070 is reckless and irresponsible, as they paint a narrative that blames immigrants for all the nations ills.  But there is a silver lining that comes from characters like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, legislation like SB1070 and politicians like State Senator Russell Pearce: they wake the people up. Because of SB 1070 the nation has turned its eyes upon Arizona. Now, the question becomes: Will the resistance multiply, or will the hate?

Ya Basta! Enough is Enough

Something tells me that if Antonia and Emilio were here to witness this, they would say: “Esto no se va quedar aqui!” Translation: It ain’t gonna go down like that!

On the Sunday after the passage of the bill, thousands of people gathered to demonstrate at the state capital. Long after the official program had ended and the media had left, hundreds of people stayed and continued to march.  And there on the lawn of the capital, one man approached longtime organizer, Salvador Reza, and said: “The speeches are done. We need to talk for real now. What are we going to do?” A conversation unfolded, and the crowd grew to 200 people. In this spontaneous meeting, people gave testimony and made passionate calls to organize boycotts, to vote, to resist in any way possible.  One man said: “What more can they do to us?  I stand to lose everything, everything I’ve built here.  We have nothing left but to fight.”

SB1070 and the reactionary politic it represents do not represent the sentiment of all Arizonans.  And it’s showing.  Outrage and fear is growing into resistance and organizing – on the streets, in the schools and in the neighborhoods.  People don’t want another Jim Crow, or even a Juan Crow for that matter.  Student walkouts are in motion united by the rally cry, ‘Don’t Hate! Educate!’, bullhorn caravans cruise through the barrios, people are donning new t-shirts branded with the slogan ‘Legalize Arizona!’ People who have never been active are finding ways to do something. DJs are organizing cultural events.  Unity building across Latino and African American communities is happening.  Even my sister in law has been inspired to organize the parents and children of my nephew’s little league.  (yes!)

The battleground has emerged.  The latest invention from the legislative laboratory of Arizona foreshadows immigration enforcement in the U.S. if we don’t turn the tide.  This law must not only be stopped legally, it must be rejected in the court of public opinion.  Compañer@s, we have a window of opportunity – NOW.

Millions of people across the country are outraged – it spans across color, age, religion, and income level.  We have an opportunity to transcend the tangled web of legislations to ask ourselves the basic questions of what kind of communities we want to have, what kind of country this should be.  Now is the time to tell our stories, to state the alternative solution and most importantly, to create the arena for action- action that will turn the tide on immigration enforcement, as well as immigration reform.

We cannot allow the Arizona legislature to lead immigration policy in the United States. The enforcement of immigration policy is the sole function of the federal government, not local police.  Just as states cannot declare war or sign treaties, they are not to enforce federal immigration policy.  The stories of people in Arizona are the same stories that can be heard across the country.  Todos Somos Arizona. We are all Arizona.

SB1070 is set to be implemented in 90 days.  In that time, we will defeat this law and advance the agenda of justice for civil and human rights.  We are on the right side, now, we just have to make history.

Here’s how you can join the fight:

• Demand that Obama Administration take decisive action to defend civil rights in Arizona and assert that local police are not to enforce federal immigration policy.
• Donate to groups in Arizona who are on the frontlines of this battle!
• On May Day and beyond take the Todos Somos Arizona/We are all Arizona message and promote the demand for federal intervention in Arizona.
• Take action in your city: push for your local government to pass resolutions against 1070, to boycott Arizona, organize direct actions on the criminalization of immigrant communities.
• Come to Arizona on May 29^th, for a mass direct action to “Stop the Hate.”

For more information and updates, please go to www.altoarizona.com

Marisa is the Lead Organizer with the Right to the City Alliance, a national alliance of grassroots organizations working for urban justice. Prior to working at Right to the City, Marisa worked as an organizer at POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) in San Francisco where she focused on building the Women Worker’s Project. Marisa was one of the authors of Towards Land, Work and Power: Charting a Path of Resistance to U.S.-led Imperialism. Marisa also worked briefly with Domestic Workers United in New York City.

What do you think are the most significant political and economic dynamics at play  right now, and what do they mean for our work?

By means of introduction, let me tell you a bit about National People’s Action.  In addition to our training and consulting work to build a strong affiliate network, policy analysis and big ideas work, we run three national campaigns, though our affiliates are active in others as well.  Our three national campaigns are the Housing Justice Movement which is organizing to preserve and create social housing in America, the Immigrant and Worker Justice Campaign that is active on city, state and national issues of inclusion and equity, and the Showdown in America Campaign that is in a major fight to win accountability and transparency in the financial system.  Together, these campaigns and our affiliates are developing our vision, roadmap, and campaign for a new economy.

I want to start by reflecting on the state of the different mobilization movements such as the right to organize/union movement, immigrant rights movement, health care movement, climate change movement, anti-war/peace movement, and financial reform movement. For each of these issues, there’s a set of organizations that can really mobilize. They each saw an important opportunity to move some important policies forward in 2009: the Employee Free Choice Act, climate change treaties, major health care reform, and so on.  They all ran national issue campaigns over the last year, and they were all disappointed in the outcome of those campaigns.  They either had to give up hope for now that something truly decent was going to pass out of Congress, or they were disappointed that nothing was able to pass last year but had hopes going into 2010. I’m not sure what is going to happen by the end of this year, but by April everyone in these different movements is likely to be seriously disappointed with the pace of reform.

There were a number of reasons why nothing is moving, but I’d say one major reason is that we each waged our campaigns on our own. For example, the health care movement built a big tent, and they brought a lot of people out. But it wasn’t like everybody was “all in” on the health care fight or on any of these other fights.  Of course, there were a lot of organizations and networks and unions that participated in several of these national issue campaigns, but we weren’t doing big coordinated efforts to mobilize together across movements last year.   But now I think we’re at a point where we could actually turn those disappointments around, where we can turn these different issue campaigns into something bigger.

When I travel around the country and meet with the different organizations that are affiliated with National People’s Action (NPA), I see people who have a lot of energy to organize.  These are regular grassroots folks that we’re talking about, and they’re not feeling that disappointment as despair.  They’re taking that disappointment and asking, “So what do we have to do to win?” The soil is rich; it’s not depleted. That’s led us at NPA to think about how can we play a part in creating a frame and a story that would allow some of these seemingly disparate movements to begin to work together.

At NPA, our strategy is to mobilize to and run sustained pressure campaigns and actions that force negotiations with people who have the power to make decisions. We don’t limit ourselves to just pressuring elected officials.  In this day and time, we need to target corporations.  If you had to distill the Right’s message, it’s “Big government is the problem.” It’s a really basic idea (wrong as it turns out) but definitely succinct.  On the left and in the progressive world, we tend to be a little more complicated in how we frame things.  We usually take more than three or four words to describe what’s wrong (more like three or four books).  But if we had to put out our message in equally succinct words, it’d be “Big corporations are the problem.” Those five words capture the idea that because of corporate power and all of the money that they’ve spent in Congress and in cities and states across the country, we really don’t have a functioning democracy. NPA is framing our national conference in May with “Reclaim our Democracy” because we need to reclaim our democracy from the corporations that have stolen our democracy, our money, and our economy from us.  Leading up to that conference, we’re planning a variety of actions based on the “Showdown in Chicago” model to force big banks – in particular Bank of America and Wells Fargo – to negotiate with us. Those actions will be happening at the Bank of America annual meeting in North Carolina, at the Wells Fargo annual meeting in San Francisco, on Wall Street and in other cities.

We think that the different movements can come together to target the big corporations that have gotten us into this mess that we’re in today.  So we’re trying to figure out what movements are in the same place as we are, what other movements are interested in joining forces to mobilize and negotiate. We’re not into symbolic marches; we want to do actions that can actually force negotiations. Our sense is that a lot of other people are coming to a similar conclusion about the need to work together. What if the health care people started marching with the immigrants and the unions started marching with the climate change people?  We’re back in a place that we haven’t seen for more than ten years, since the WTO and anti-globalization protests, where multiple movements were open to working together and were turning out sizable numbers of people.  We need to take advantage of this opportunity.

I know you’ve been thinking about what we can learn from the Populist Movement that took place in the United States in the 1880s.  Can you talk about the lessons you’ve been drawing from that movement?

There are a couple things that I’ve been drawing from the Populist Movement, particularly from a book written by Lawrence Goodwyn. He talks about the conditions for the development of a major social movement.  One of them is he says that you don’t automatically get a big national movement when times are hard. By itself, that’s not a sufficient condition for a movement. Also, having a clear platform (which is what we normally do on the left) is not a sufficient condition.

You have to create a political culture that actually injects spirit, discipline and energy. This political culture plus hard times plus a clear platform are the conditions you need to create the ground for a movement to emerge.  We can look at the Populist movement and the People’s Party as examples of a time when people were able to create this combination of conditions, forge a movement, and have millions of people acting together for serious change.

Goodwyn talks about the process of democratic movement-building that took place in the Populist Movement in four stages.  First, there was the creation of autonomous institutions where new ideas that run counter to the prevailing authority can develop, a development which – for the sake of simplicity – he describes as “the movement forming.”  And we have a lot of that kind of work in this moment. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen the formation of institutions focused on organizing and providing an autonomous space that runs counter to the prevailing political narrative.

The second stage in the movement-building process is the creation of a “tactical means to attract masses of people.” Now, this is a big stumbling block for organizers in this moment.  Haranguing doesn’t attract masses of people. Even our traditional style of disciplined door-to-door and congregation-by-congregation organizing can only bring together a certain critical mass of activists, but – even in the best of cases – we only reach a tiny fraction of the population of a neighborhood or a city.  Of course, the sad truth that we’ve learned over the last couple of decades is that you don’t actually need a majority to influence politics. You only need an organized minority.  But we actually do need to organize masses of people if we want to impact change on a more serious scale.  The development of the Internet and institutions like MoveOn.org have created the possibility of recruiting masses of people. Shifting to that scale of politics is a transformative question in the community organizing field right now.  Small has been beautiful for a long time; now we want figure out how to act on a truly bigger scale while preserving the dynamic political culture that we have carefully nurtured and rooted in the power of grassroots leadership.

If we can make a break-through on this question of scale, we can move toward what Goodywn describes as the next stage in movement-building which is the “achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis,” in other words the movement educating people on a mass scale.  In the Populist movement, they did this by developing economic cooperatives which helped people grow politically.  That education manifested on many levels, from the analysis of why they were necessary to the experiences of building them.  In many places, the cooperatives had a really hard time acquiring credit, and they had to fight with the railroads and the banks.  This was political education in real time for people.  It’s that kind of process – of trying to do something that you should be able to do and not being able to do it because these institutions are holding you back that is the most deeply radicalizing.  That happened in the Civil Rights Movement too, where people were radicalized by being prevented from doing something that they should have been able to do, like sitting at a lunch counter or sitting on a bus.  They tried to do those things, and they got held back. That was the basis for new innovations in the movement, like the Children’s March in Birmingham.  The Civil Rights Movement didn’t start out saying, “Let’s march out all the kids and get them all arrested.” But as all the adults tried to do what they should have been able to do and got arrested, this new strategy emerged.  And it ended up being quite a radicalizing and formative step for the movement, to have children take those risks and be treated the way they were.  So I think we need to take those kinds of actions today.  We have to stop doing symbolic marches, and instead we should start doing what we want to do in the world like trying to build our own neighborhoods.  And when people get stopped from doing what they should be able to do, that’s going to be really radicalizing for masses of people.

The fourth stage that Goodwyn identifies in the movement-building process is the “creation of an institutional means whereby the new ideas shared by the rank-and-file of the mass movement can be expressed in an autonomous political way.”  So this would look like a national campaign with a transformative demand.  In the Populist movement, their transformative demand was for a new basis for the currency of the United States and a new way to distribute credit outside of the Eastern banks. At the time, in 1890, it was radical to demand something like that.  In a way, they achieved their vision because that idea was the foundation for the Federal Reserve system and the elimination of the gold standard. Today, we need to do some more thinking about what our transformative demands could be. What is a fundamental demand that could be very transformative with far-reaching implications for the U.S. economy, like, “Corporations should not be people.”  What we need to avoid is very abstract ideas like, “What we want is a worker’s democracy;” I don’t even know what that means really. We need a concrete demand that is somewhat inconceivable, but at least 1% conceivable.  So we’re asking everybody, “What is your transformative demand?  And what can we do right now that radicalizes people?”  What we’ve settled on for the interim is that we need to fight with the banks.  You don’t have to go through Congress to try to get Bank of America to stop foreclosing on people. You can go to Bank of America to get Bank of America to stop foreclosing on people. We can go to Bank of America and Wells Fargo and say, “Stop financing payday lending. Stop foreclosing on people. Stop breaking the budgets of cities and states with these interest rate swaps. And start doing X, Y and Z.”  We can put some intermediate demands on the table telling the banks what they should do that would help our economy and rebuild our communities.  But in order for it to actually be radicalizing, lots of people have to be involved.  So, therefore, we need lots of people in the streets doing these bank actions next month.

You can tell you’ve achieved the kind of transformative political culture that we need when you have two things.  First, do the people who join the movement because that movement helps them develop individual self-respect?  Having the ability to act, to have a say in your life and to have a say over the institutions that control it, that’s profoundly human. If you don’t have power, you can’t really feel self-respect. Movements should provide people the space to be powerful in a very individual way, and it should help them regain their individual self-respect. I think that’s the reason why people join organizations, because they feel like they’re going to regain some self-respect. The second point is on a more collective side; it’s collective self-confidence.  We need to build organizations that have the possibility of winning and are therefore self-confident. Organizations should feel like they can develop a strategy, execute that strategy with discipline and win – or at least win benchmarks along the longer road.  If an organization doesn’t have self-confidence, people will drop out of it pretty quickly.  We can use those points as litmus tests for the political culture of our organizations: Do people develop individual self-respect through our work?  Do we have collective self-confidence?  Do we have a political culture that will win?

How do you integrate your left politics into the organizing work?  Why do you see organizing as a central method for left people to use?

I’m quite committed to fundamental change in America, change that will allow us to actually realize the unachieved promise of America. This could be a country where people vote and actually have their say about things, where we’re not subject to tyranny. But today we are subject to tyranny. I would call the control that multinational corporations have over the U.S. government a form of tyranny, just like I would call the English government’s colonial control of America tyranny. But I came to understand a while ago that it’s a long road to get to that kind of fundamental change.  My hope is that I will see something pretty positive by the time I pass away, but I’m not sure. I’ve never thought that it was right around the corner.  It’s a long road, and that road goes through organizing.  I don’t know any other way to have radical fundamental change in America other than organizing masses of people.  People develop analysis by having the experience of building with each other and fighting on campaigns together.  I don’t believe in handing analysis to people. I think that radicalization happens through the practice.  Of course, we have to read our history books, and we have to talk and debate.  But I’ve never seen that as something separate from organizing.  We can’t just develop a political line and apply it to everything; instead we need to integrate reading, talking and reflection into the practice of organizing.

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

One of the old strategies we need to turn away from is the orthodoxy about scale. This question of scale challenges orthodoxies about the structure of our organizations. We need new ways to think about how to structure the memberships and leaderships of our organizations so they can be built for speed and built for scale.  One of the orthodoxies that has limited us is that people have to be super active to be members.  What if – instead – you could have members who are basically committed to your work but are not that active? Of course, you need to build a set of super active people to be your leaders, but you could also have another 10,000 or 15,000 people who buy into your work. You could find them through a canvass or internet work or through public events. Then you could actually have 50,000 members in the Bronx, not 5,000.

We also need to move beyond the orthodoxy that the “local” is everything. The local is important, but we need to move beyond the local.  National Peoples’ Action was founded by local groups in 1972 to run a national campaign, so “scale” was in our DNA from the beginning. But I think that people are starting to understand that – even though organizing is local and you need to talk to people where they are at – you can also link up and connect campaigns across a state.  State-level organizing provides a great platform for working on a larger scale.  You can have lots of local organizing projects across a state – individual membership-based organizations in a single city, unions that have memberships across a state, religious denominations and so on.  If we can knit those different organizations together, we can build a permanent grassroots power blocs state-by state. Those power blocs should bring resources and expertise and energy to the local organizing, but they should be able to fight at the state level: to move progressive policies that could lay the groundwork for national fights, to prevent reactionary policies and even to corral a congressional delegation. Building a permanent alliance like that is different from starting new issue coalitions. Every time we start to work on a new issue, we shouldn’t start a new issue coalition.  We should run that issue campaign though a permanent power structure. As long as it has a core set of values and principles of operation, a structure like that can address many different issues and can incorporate many different types of organizing. There are a number of tremendous experiments across the country – in ten or twenty different states – where people are building state-level alliances that are working towards permanent progressive power. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is one exciting example, and there’s tremendously interesting things happening in Minnesota.  But you can keep going down the list: Florida, Virginia, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and plenty more. These are important experiments to keep an eye on.

Another orthodoxy that we need to overcome is, “No permanent friends. No permanent enemies.”  Well, guess what? I have permanent friends and permanent enemies. We should actually form permanent alliances with our permanent friends.  And our enemies?  We want them defeated and neutralized.  I don’t want Bank of America to exist as it does. It’s hard for me to conceive of a world where Bank of America is not an enemy of mine. I want to break it up. That’s what we’re doing through our financial reform campaign, trying to break up these big banks that are our permanent enemies. And if this campaign against them doesn’t work, then you know we’ll do? We’ll take the hammer to them again until we succeed in breaking them up.

James Mumm is the Director of Organizing at National People’s Action. James began his organizing career at NPA in 1990, serving as their Chicago organizer, national conference coordinator and newspaper editor.  He subsequently worked in Chicago for the Metropolitan Tenants Organization and Organization of the NorthEast before moving to the Bronx to become the Co-Director of Mothers on the Move and then Executive Director of the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition.  James has led successful campaigns for inclusionary zoning, living wage jobs, and community-led development in both Chicago and New York.  He served on the board of the National Organizers Alliance and the Chicago Community Organizing Cooperative, writes periodic articles for progressive media.  After fifteen years away, James rejoined the NPA staff in late 2008 and is excited about building a powerful network and social justice movement.

Joseph Phelan initially interviewed Gihan Perera in person in September 2009. Gihan further developed these ideas after leading a get out the vote effort, in Miami, in November 2009.

We are living in very particular political and economic times. What do you think are the most significant shifts that are happening right now?  How are they changing the context for left grassroots organizing?

I think there are two bipolar opportunities.  On one hand, there is the possibility for mass, large scale electoral participation based on progressive values. The Obama Movement (very different from the Obama Administration) that a year ago had so many inspired, showed that core left values, a broad multi-racial constituency, and anti-corporate sentiment may be forged as a mainstream popular movement within the existing political system.

On the other hand, we have the deep economic and ecological crises which expose the fundamental fault lines of capitalism: its wasteful production processes, and its basic inhumanity in deference to pure greed by the powerful.  The conditions beg for inspirational, morally just, and militant acts of resistance.  It is the best time in decades to expose and highlight the need for a new moral, political, and economic order.

These openings may seem to be opposite choices, but really they are two parts of what we can see as a larger strategy, a larger movement. We must be, at once, engaging the state as it rules and contest for more power in governance as it exists today, while at the same time demonstrate, through inspirational action, the world we want to be living in. This is a dual approach of engaging power and prefiguring a new world with different power relations. It is from this grounding in a two pronged strategy that I want to engage the question and lessons of electoral participation.

THE OBAMA MOVEMENT: The Obama Movement produced an absolutely amazing level of local, national, and global excitement; including a major uptick of young people’s involvement in politics. This movement was a sound indictment of the Bush regime which if continued (by others of his ilk), would have surely escalated its level of regressive policies. It put fundamental questions of race, the role of government, militarism, and unilateral United States aggression on the table. And, I would say, the Obama campaign moved those questions solidly in a left direction on a mass level. The contradiction for the left is that this mass movement came in the form of a Democratic Party electoral campaign for President of the United States.  And in President Obama’s electoral victory, it put the future of those questions largely in his hands.  Now we must answer: did the Obama Movement present a huge breakthrough or just provided a way to coopt an opportunity for real, radical change?

I would argue that this would have been a cooptation if we (the left) had something to coopt.  In fact the left was in a tailspin, with no ground game to speak of, no mass movement, and little critical mass of left activism.  The immigration, labor, post-Katrina, gender, anti-war, and environmental movements were all fragmented. The Obama electoral campaign not only gave them life but a possibility to go back on the offensive.  In that sense I think we have to understand the campaign/movement and the administration as to different beasts.

Just because a consolidated left didn’t produce Obama’s campaign doesn’t mean we should not learn from it.  Organizers trying to build grassroots-left organization in working class communities of color, saw a dramatic shift on the ground. After years of struggle the sense of possibility for change was absolutely palpable.  That feeling shifted the context of organizing. People were in motion, and expectations raised, both in terms of what was possible and what they wanted.  Every grassroots organization that engaged in the presidential campaign experienced a spike in activity and membership at that moment.

The “new technology” components of that campaign showed that we can move ideas and raise political money from regular people at an enormous scale in new ways. We should be using these technologies in a concerted effort to put out bold demands, ideas, and possibilities.  We need to unleash our creativity at the level of mass communications, and learn to use new, cheap, mass accessible technologies to do that.

Finally, we still have not recognized the impact of the Obama campaign in terms of race possibilities in the United States.  We should be asking ‘what was right about Iowa?’, where a solidly white state in the heartland, went for Obama against all odds and conventional wisdom.  The conventional wisdom on the left is based on a theory that the white working class has always sold out communities of color here and abroad, in order to satisfy their own private deal with corporate America and the government.  Iowa showed that that pattern may have real cracks, that now with clear betrayal of banks and manufactures, there are wide opportunities to organize white people to support a multi-racial popular and potentially progressive platform.

Looking at the Obama campaign, we can learn to make strategic interventions in electoral politics, especially at the local level, as a way to shift the broader political climate in the areas we’re working. It can significantly raise the scale of our influence and be a medium to engage a broader range of our constituency base and be a central arena to build alliances, raise resources, and learn how to impact ‘real’ politics in cities and states across the country.  Through electoral opportunities we can significantly expand our reach. There will be a learning curve, but tying this arena to our ongoing agitation and issue organizing is the key to building a movement with enough people and impact to shake things up.

DIRECT ACTION: Now, the second point, the need for out of the box direct actions, may seem completely counter to the first.  But we should be developing a range of strategy and tactics to inspire, win, and build.  As we build mass scale through electoral work we need to maintain deep bases that engage in direct challenges to the state and/or challenge hegemonic ideas.

The door is now open for actions that are both moral and militant: actions like the Republic Windows and Doors worker takeover in Chicago, eviction defenses, the squatting of foreclosed houses and buildings, and recent street movements to directly go after the Banks and their lobbying institutions. These actions inspire and have huge impact on ideologies and values. More importantly they show a way for people to do something very concrete, at the level of body and soul and their own power.  These actions are in stark contrast to the unfathomable amounts of dollars that were stolen and spent on the crises, the confusing policy discussions, and the mud of politics that get stuck while people continue to suffer.  These actions allow a smaller group of people to take a stand, assert our own thinking and values, and potentially spark much broader engagement. We need to ask ourselves, “Who are our strategically placed morally indignant forces who can speak up and change the debate?”

Beyond the direct action nature of these actions there is a huge possibility for people to start demonstrating and actually building the world we want. These practices in new forms of governance, economy, and simply ways of relating to one another are needed experiments and lend vision to the large scale electoral work.

How has the shift from the Obama Movement to the Obama Administration changed how the left should engage with the administration?

As we are now almost a year into the Obama Administration it’s important to understand the difference between the “Obama Moment” and the “Obama Presidency.”  Many on the far left point to his centrist positions and appointments, his weak stances and commitment on health care, climate, immigration, and the continued wars abroad and claim they were ‘right all along.’ This position is ideological comforting but it doesn’t do much to forward a real powerful alternative. The politics of the Obama administration are wholly predictable. I don’t find that very interesting, nor surprising.

We must understand that like any politician, Obama’s going to be a product of power battles raging at the national level. The right is correctly applying and leveraging pressure, but we are not pulling our side of the rope to force him left.  We don’t know how to play that game while still maintaining a relationship to the administration itself where there continues to be incremental and some important opportunities to engage and make some real differences.

As the Right attacks Obama, liberals and many progressives will have a tendency to simply circle the wagons around him, to try and protect him as an individual and to protect his positions at all costs.  They will shut down and ostracize any staking of alternative positions by the left and shut down our own discontent with what the administration is doing, even if ultimately serves the broader interest.  But the left will make our usual mistakes, in our difference and disdain, we will tend toward pure polarization as a principle. It’s what we do, but in this time it could easily play into the hands of the right at a time when we are not strong enough to sustain anything on our own.  This would be a cardinal mistake.

With that said, our role can’t just be in relationship the administration.  We need to go to the source.  Only we can directly challenge and call out the right and their institutions.  This is both around their political program which will not resolve the economic crisis, and around their political and racial witch hunt.  Whether it is ACORN, or Van Jones or immigrants or whoever is next on the list, there needs to be an organized response that draws a common line.  Initiatives like www.stopthewitchhunt.org and others that are emerging to directly confront the structural nature of these attacks should be supported. This is not a rallying around a particular organization or individual but a collective response and call out and targeting of the hate-mongers.

What do you think are the priorities in building left electoral work, and how does it allow us to shift ideas and values in this time of crisis?

For those of us who see serious potential in the mass electoral work, the main questions are: What vehicles are we creating for that electoral work?  I don’t think we’re in any place to create a mass independent left or progressive electoral party, but what we can and should start building the functions of an organization that can provide practical political information and direction to our communities, and at scale. At the most general level, we need to build operational infrastructure that will enable us to simultaneously engage masses of people in electoral and issue politics and use that infrastructure to promote alternative values and visions that are fundamentally different from the logic of how electoral politics currently operate.  In doing so our goal should be to build at two levels of scale: to build our own autonomous power to influence ‘vote shares’ in local and state politics, and to utilize these processes to grow and strengthen the relatively small numbers of core community activists in left community grassroots organizations. This difference is most possible and needed at the local and regional levels where the major parties are largely non-existent and/or non-important in the functioning of local politics.

I’ve found that electoral work is very different than the usual activism and organizing that I’ve done in community and labor organizing.  In the kind of organizing we’ve done in the past, we’ve become very practiced at defining an issue, taking the morally correct position, explaining why we’re right, and campaigning targets to agree with us by shame and through positive mobilization. To do this, we often work long, slow, and hard with relatively small groups of leaders to promote a deeper vision and to expand the realm of what is politically possible.  That work is extremely important and will provide leadership to the broader movement and will set our direction.  However, that has to be combined with other levers of power to be effective.

In our initial efforts at electoral organizing, I’ve learned that you have to build operations that effectively and efficiently reach people at a large scale. The trick is to employ simple messages that still align with our core values.  The issues have to be moved in an actionable way. The windows of opportunity are much shorter in electoral organizing than they are in community organizing, and to win you have to operate within the realm of what’s presently politically possible, even if you are at the edge of it. It feels and is much more transactional than what I’m used to.  I find that being clear about this is very difficult for most activists. We want every part of our program to be our maximum program, and electoral work clearly is not that. But as part of our strategy it can be extremely effective, especially in giving us much greater leverage on local elected officials and policy. It is effective as part of  larger two pronged strategy.

A veteran Civil Rights Movement leader helped me understand this. He was telling me about organizing SNCC [the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] in Mississippi in the early years.  He talked about his key lessons from Ella Baker, and he raised something that was incredibly enlightening for me.  He said that the basis for the success of the Civil Rights Movement was that they were able to find the edge of the current community consensus in those small rural areas.  The consensus was around some set of core values and political sensibilities, but not everything they thought was right and needed. They deliberately rode on the edge of that consensus and worked to expand it, but never went outside of it. That was the strategy of the Civil Rights Movement in its building phase, and that should be the role of our electoral work now. Our other organizing work, and other forms of organizing and organization can focus on shifting that consensus altogether, from both within and outside the current consensus. That’s the real inside/outside game.

If our electoral work is riding on the left edge of what our communities believe is important and what is possible, then our deep community organizing work is actually trying to shift the parameters of the consensus altogether and expand community consciousness and vision of what’s needed and what’s possible. We may sometimes choose to stand outside of the consensus and push it from the outside, and sometimes we may be coming from within that consensus and riding with current values knowing that they actually converge with our longer-term visions. That work of shifting ideas – which is as much “organizing consensus” than it is “community-organizing” – needs to continue in a deep way. One way this happens is through inspiring prefigurative actions and projects.

So you are saying there is an imperative to do electoral organizing in this moment.  What should be the approach of left community organizers to electoral work?

We need to ground ourselves in who we really are politically and what kind of work we prioritize as organizers. As left organizers, many of us will feel uncomfortable with the constraints of electoral organizing: working within the window of an election cycle, building different kinds of operations, using different messages and staying within the limits of what’s currently politically possible. We need to shift our culture to do this work, to be able to organize voters at scale and within the constraints of time and politics and electoral rules, but we need to keep a clear read on how this work relates to our longer-term visions.

If we do so, there are other dangers for the left movement as we move towards taking up electoral work. It can be seductive. There is such little actual organized base in our communities, that parties and candidates and demagogues are able to count on very small organized pockets, usually seniors and homeowners associations, to win the right to govern.  On our side, translating our organizing skills to establishing voter bases can quickly make us players in that realm. A relatively small organized electoral force can make a big difference, which comes with the seduction of being part of the power-brokering. We can easily narrow our demands rather than expand them. We need to guard against that drift away from our issue organizing, from our ideological work, from our movement-building work and from our long-range view.

We need ideological and structural guards against political drift. Our collective intelligence on how to do this well is pretty low right now. In the short term, we will need to be grounded, and ensure that our practice remains accountable to our base and to other leftists, both in the lessons and power and when the danger signs emerge. But we can’t figure out these dynamics in a vacuum. We need to get out there and start doing the work. We need to grapple with these questions and try to figure out how to do things right. It doesn’t mean that we’ll always land in the right place, but the practice of the work will help us to develop an advanced approach to electoral work and a sharper analysis of our current political system.

What are some examples of the new approaches to the work that are happening right now that you’re finding inspiring?  What are some old tactics or strategies that left organizers should turn away from?

Overall, it’s an amazing time for innovation and experimentation. I think there’s a tendency on the left to say, “You have to choose one. Either it’s radical outside tactics, or it’s electoral work within the system.’  Either it’s base-building work, or communications, or policy, or legal fights, or leadership development; the movement or it’s building strong institutions.”  In fact, we need a range of strategies to make a complete package for a movement. We may have a division of labor within that range of strategies; different people and different organizations will have their specific focuses and specializations.  But, for a mass movement, all of these different strategies would be seen as related aspects of that movement.

Currently, the existing organizations neither constitute a mass movement nor a mass electoral party. These experiments may spark one, but that’s the point. Since we don’t, we can’t actually have a coordinated strategic view except through fragmented lenses. Now is the time to re-imagine, both the forms and the strategies to win.

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?

Present Situation

Any approach to social change, organizing and leadership development has to be based on your assessment of the situation and of the problem.  If you have one assessment or one diagnosis, you’re going to have a particular prescription and a particular approach to the solution. Either we’re dealing with a teddy bear or we’re dealing with a grizzly bear, and either estimate will determine your set of tactics, your organizing approach.  If you think you’re dealing with a teddy bear and in reality it’s a grizzly bear coming at you, you’re going to be in trouble. So this estimate of the situation is absolutely crucial to the process.

I’ve learned some important lessons in my experience of having, for example, helped organized among homeless people in the Detroit area where we established a local chapter of the National Union of the Homeless.  In Detroit, many of the homeless people had been stable “middle class” autoworkers, but they had undergone such a dislocation as a result of the computerization and automation of auto production.  What you find, throughout the entire economy, is this gigantic and unprecedented technological revolution that is shaping sources of income, places of work, but also communities.  Communities are undergoing tremendous changes.  So if you organize from prevailing influences of organizing that served the past, and you’ve had this tremendous change that has taken place, then your organizing approach and your tactics are not going to fit the new situation.

I don’t think you would have had certain social theories such as Marxism or industrial unionism if it they were not shaped by tremendous technological changes that were taking place back during the latter 18^th century and in the 19^th century.   Before the Industrial Revolution, you had the feudal agricultural societies that dictated an approach towards organizing different from when the industrial revolutions took place.  Changes in our times are analogous to those changes, but I think it’s on a scale more comprehensive and a rapidity much greater than ever before.  Deindustrialization alongside of the growth of urban populations globally is historically unprecedented. I think we’re dealing with a grizzly bear, because there’re tremendous dislocations happening in communities today, and I think the current crisis punctuates this problem.  Our organizing has to reflect that.

Pitfalls of large parts of the Left

You can see the continuing influences on large part of the Left of the 1930s  trade union organizing and of the 1960s  community organizing, which is heavily shaped by the influences of the Civil Rights Movement and world’s National Liberation Movements. There’s a saying that ‘most generals are always fighting the last war.’  That is what we’re finding in the Left.  We’re dealing with a totally new situation.  In this new day you must do things in a new way.

Last year, the food riots that took place in more than 30 countries globally had the immediacy that Watts had in the 1960s.  Our approach today has to reflect these new elements, elements that didn’t exist in 1930s and 1960s.  On the “Left,” there’s a tendency to categorize different issues, different fronts of struggle – put them in different silos – and approach them from the perspective of solely organizing among this ethnic community or organizing among that trade union, or among women as a separate group. Although organizing in the different fronts of struggle is very important, the perspective in approaching them has to change given the changed situation.  The problems today are problems that revolve around the growing concentration of wealth on a global level on the one hand, and the spreading of poverty on a global level on the other. Our organizing strategy and tactics have to be based in a comprehensive and ongoing assessment of this fundamental polarization that defines our times.  This is crucial because to limit your perspective as to the fundamental problem and solution is to ultimately make your effort aimed at leveraging pity, not power.  At most, this results in sort of a “militant do-gooderism” or charity paraded as ”social justice” or “the end to extreme poverty.” It amounts to much corporate funding of efforts that only strike down the leaves and branches of the problem leaving it roots untouched, only for the leaves and branches to grow back in more devastating and fascist forms.

In history, different periods were defined by major social polarities.  And the class forces or elements of class forces that were most dislocated or most affected by that problem had to be organized and placed at the forefront in order for that problem to be brought to a solution.  The struggle against the British Crown in this country had to be led by the colonists, because they were the ones that were immediately affected.  There was opposition to the British Crown coming from Spain, from France, even from within the United Kingdom.  And these forces played a role in the struggle against the British Crown.  But it was the colonists in that particular period that had to be at the forefront – that had to exhibit initiative – to actually galvanize and bring those other forces into play.  The French support of that struggle was very important, but it was all predicated on the fight – and the military and political organization of the fight – by the American colonists themselves.

The overall struggle against slavery in this country had to be led by the struggle of those forces oppressed by the slavocracy, that is, the slaves of course but also the industrial classes of the North. These most adversely affected social forces had to find some organizational expressions and thereby place their needs and demands at the forefront in order for that struggle to be brought to a successful conclusion.  Take the struggle for women’s suffrage.  Can you imagine a struggle for women’s suffrage led by men?  Those forces most affected by the problem have to be at the forefront. They know when their pain is relieved.

In organizing today around the issues of poverty and the issues of extreme wealth concentrated in a few hands, to resolve this problem, social hegemonic leadership must come from that segment of the population that is the most directly affected, that is, the poor and dispossessed sections in the struggle.  Our organizing and developing leaders today must first focus on uniting this segment. This must be the only basis of developing and uniting revolutionary leaders.

Power and Organizing

Part of an accurate estimate of the social problems we face involves power relationships. In the National Union of the Homeless we coined the slogan, “Power grows from organization… Freedom is never given. It must be taken. And therefore you only get what you are organized to take!” All of history – US and world history – confirms this statement. Are you able to generate a critical mass of power to counter the existing power relationships to make change?  We’ve got to be real about that. Otherwise we’re playing games. As Malcolm X once stated, “power only respects power… power never takes a step back except in the face of more power.”

A lot of the Left tends to avoid this question, but you can’t get away from it.  One of the problems we’ve had in American history is that, although there have been a lot of social movements over time, they have been basically divided into two types of movements. One, dealing with power changes: shifting power relationships, a social-economic group or section of a class out of power taking power. Here I’m not talking about the regular electoral changes in government administrative and legislative offices. And the other type of movements that generates a tremendous amount of activity but ultimately results in the reinforcing the position of major social elements in existing power relationships by social reform.  They allowed for a modification or an adjustment of existing power relations, not changing those power relations.

For example, the Anti-Slavery Movement, including the Civil War, resulted in power changes in terms of the slaveocracy being taken out of power and the Northern industrial classes being put into power.  Or the American Revolution:  the Tory elements within the colonies connected to the British Crown were in power.  And what happened as a consequence of that struggle was that you had a change of places in terms of power relationships.  But most of the other major struggles – the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the industrial movements of the 30s, the Civil Rights Movement – these movements were reform movements, but they didn’t result in power changes.  We have to look at history and see what we can learn from movements for power as well as what we can learn from reform movements.  The problem is that there has been very little study of US history with regard to these two types of social movement and social changes.

Today, again, we are confronted with the question: Are we dealing with a teddy bear or are we dealing with a grizzly bear?  Are we dealing with a fundamentally a reform movement or are we dealing with a transformation movement?  My experience and the experiences of others I’ve been involved with over the last forty years – in my study of American history and world history – suggest we’re dealing fundamentally with a problem of power.  That raises a question of how you generate a critical mass that’s strong enough to take power.

The only thing that the oppressed classes have at their disposal is their numbers.  They only enter in the scale of power struggle if those numbers are organized and are led by knowledge or an understanding of what they’re up against.  The influences of industrial union organizing and of community organizing – Saul Alinsky and some of the Civil Rights organizing – have left us very ignorant on the problems of power.  Power grows from organizing, but how you organize – your approach to organizing under different circumstances – is something that’s very critical.

Part of the problem of power in this country – a central aspect of the problem – is the relationship between color and class. The history of slavery, the slaughter of the Native Americans – these things have impacted American society all the way to today and have placed the color factor deeply in the thinking of the American people.  You disregard this question at your own peril.  But how you pose it is very important.  The position of the poor and the dispossessed in the struggle to end poverty is very crucial, because what the poor shows in their social and economic position is that ultimately the color question is inseparably tied to the class question.  And then not only is it tied to the class question, but that the color question ultimately is or revolves around the question of class,  that is the problem of the concentration of wealth and power.

The tendency has been to separate these issues because the prevailing influence around the issue of race, for example, has been the kind of petit bourgeois, “middle-class” kind of conception that is closely allied with the upper classes.  This conception says: “The economy?  I have no problem with the economy.  Even with the current crisis, I have no problems with the fundamentals of the capitalist economy.”  Therefore, you can discuss the problems of race separate, as if it’s parallel to the problems of whether I eat or not, have a house or not, do I have the power necessary to at least have my basic necessities secured or not.  From the standpoint of the economically exploited and excluded, I can’t discuss the questions of whether or not we’re going to be able to resolve the problems of color or resolve the inequities of gender and all of the other ills in society disconnected from the questions of class and power.

I think this is where Martin Luther King in the last years of his life offers a bridge in terms of getting people to understand the inseparableness of these things.  He pointed at the inseparableness of the three major evils: of unjust foreign policy in terms of the global situation and how it is tied to race relations and how race relations are inseparably tied to the problem of economic exploitation and poverty.  You can’t deal with one without dealing with the other.  If we orient ourselves on the basis of those at the bottom, we’re going to tend to see the inseparableness of these questions in reality.

There’s this poster that I saw on one of my trips from Philadelphia to Atlanta to see my daughter.  There’s this billboard put up by the furniture industry in South Carolina.  And it references a very common slogan put out in our country that I think influences the Left, that I think influences the whole of society.  It said: “Let the sons and daughters of the former slaveholders unite with the sons and daughters of the former slaves.”  Now what’s critical about that formulation is that they leave out the fact that most whites in the South were not slaveholders.  They were mostly poor and working-class whites.

Left out of most discussions of history is this formula of power that W.E.B. DuBois talked about that pitted the poor non-whites against the poor whites.  Even today, when we are discussing the need of people of color to unite, it’s usually done in a way to leave out the strategic necessity of finding ways of uniting with poor whites to ensure real emancipation from poverty and all forms of human misery.  As DuBois suggested and Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr directly pointed out in his 1967-68 Poor People’s Campaign, this can and must be the starting point in building the necessary critical mass to move power relations in this country of 300 million. And historically that has been a stumbling block in terms of any kind of struggle for power in this country.  When you consider the power relationships as expressed in the composition of the civil bureaucracy and government jobs on all levels — municipal, state, and federal —  or you consider the military and police forces, you’re talking about mostly white folks. This also true of the key corporate jobs in the “commanding heights” of the economy, i.e., the auto industry, housing, steel, energy, etc. A growing number of these strategically positioned employees, their relatives and communities are beginning to have difficult times. Poverty is increasing among whites at a faster rate than among non-whites, especially resulting from the current crisis with the dismantling of the so called “middle class.” These are real pivotal problems of power. Aristotle once stated, and this has been more than corroborated by world history, that “Where the middle class is large, there are least likely to be factions and dissension.” Today we are confronted with greater opportunities and dangers with regard to problems of political influence and power relations than have rarely happened in American history. Yet we leave these opportunities for the fascists to win sections of the poor and working class whites.

W.E.B. DuBois pointed out this problem of power in his Black Reconstruction, where he talks about how the political situation of slavery in the South was different from slavery in the Caribbean and South America. There, the opposition among the slaves tended to have a much wider and more of a mass character. That even culminated in the Haitian Revolution, which is the only actual slave-led uprising to successfully take the slaveocracy out of power.  You had this massive uprising in the Caribbean and South American slavery, but in America – in the Southern United States – you had smaller resistance in the forms of runaway slaves and preempted slave rebellions. DuBois pointed out very clearly, that at its height in the Southern United States, you had something like four million black slaves, but at the same time, right alongside the black slaves, you had something like five million poor whites.  You didn’t have that kind of demographics in Haiti where enslaved blacks outnumbered whites by 12 to one.

The poor whites in southern United States were plentiful. They were the social base for the police forces, including the slave drivers and slave patrols. The ruling slaveholders were able to use these two sections of the bottom against each other.  And with the accumulation of wealth from the brutal exploitation of black slaves, the powers that be controlled the poor whites, and they employed poor whites to control the poor blacks.  This formula of plantation power politics is what we have been dealing with in the US all the way up to this day.  For instance, we can see how this racial political formula is being effectively employed to control and oppress immigrant workers. For us to not completely appreciate power relationships of class rule is to our detriment and to the peril of the struggle.

You see this lack of appreciation in most discussions of gentrification and the growth of global cities today.  The tendency is to limit the discussions as to the whole complexity of these processes by only seeing what is perceived as simply white folks coming in and displacing poor peoples of color.  You don’t see the whole class question. You don’t see that the people coming in are not poor whites, because poor whites can’t afford to come in.  Or you don’t see communities like poor multi-racial Kensington in Philadelphia, PA that are proliferating throughout the country, where you have an equality of poverty developing.  I’ve gone to places within Kensington and the neighborhoods around it where we’d go into these homes, and you see homeless families – poor whites – who are stacked up in the housing; where you have the holes in the roof, holes in the ceilings, holes in the floor, living under horrible conditions.  Certainly the blacks in the community of Mount Airy, for example, where the petit professionals live have better homes and far better living standards than these poor whites in Kensington and neighboring Fishtown.  And the key political question is: Do poor blacks in Kensington have more in common with poor whites in Kensington, or do they have more in common with former Merrill Lynch CEO, multi-millionaire Stanley O’Neil or with Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice or other upper class blacks folks?  No, they have absolutely nothing in common with these black folks and everything in common with poor whites.

In fact, I think that speaks to a dangerous kind of racist exceptionalism that says you can have class differentiation among whites but it doesn’t exist as a factor among people of color.  And no the upper class blacks are not puppets or modern “Uncle Toms”. Despite their adroit use of racial colloquialisms and coquetries, they are quite class conscious of their integration into the ruling capitalist class and bent on intelligently and steadfastly defending their class interests like any other of their capitalist brothers and sisters. Of course, the questions of class factors in majorly in terms of how the political dynamics are played out – in terms of the prevailing and historically evolved formula of power in this country, that is, the cruel and shrewd manipulations of the color divisions within the bottom class.  And I think this persistent aspect of power relationships in the US has to be taken in account if we’re going to have the tactics and the organizing approach that really brings about social change.  Otherwise, it’s ultimately comes to pity for poor folks – especially poor nonwhite folks who are down and out and people should feel guilty about that.  Well, people don’t feel guilty about that especially when they are beginning to hurt from increasing class exploitation and dislocations.  Historically and politically, we have to have them understand how their oppression is tied to your oppression, how their exploitation is tied to your exploitation.

Your arm is cut off and my finger is cut off. A cut off finger is certainly less than a cut off arm, but it still hurts. If we don’t link your hurt with my hurt but keep comparing whose injury is worse, we’re not going to be able to unite the critical mass necessary to move the existing power relationships. Somehow we’ve got to solve this formula of power described by Dubois if we’re going to succeed.

The development of leaders with a proper grasp of social theory and political strategy allow for a deeper grasp of the big picture so we don’t become a pawn to a greater power game.  You can see the Left – the so-called “Left” – falling into that trap where the tendency, because of the influence of the recent Civil Rights Movement and the National Liberation Movements is for the Left to gravitate and hover around the inner-cities and the people of color exclusively.  Whereas the Right – the so-called “Right” – gravitate and hover around the poor whites.  Therefore the bigger picture is that both the “Left” and the “Right” are manipulated by the powers that be.  And they’re continuing to play out a game W.E.B. Dubois described as beginning with the origins of this country.

Lessons From MLK’s Last Years

One thing that’s very crucial in this period is the role of education and consciousness raising.  What I’ve learned in my experiences in organizing is that building socio-political movement is about more than simply mobilizing bodies.  It’s essentially about moving minds and hearts.  And education is central, especially in an information age.  The technological revolution I alluded to earlier has created this ability to impact on people’s worldviews that ultimately influence people’s political wills, which is what we’re trying to get at.  Today, unlike any other period, these influences work like a 24/7 netwar against the poor as the first line of attack against all of us.

In looking at the way you fight today as opposed to how we fought yesterday, the question of the relationship of education to organizing is more intimate and integral.  You’ve got to talk as you walk.  You’ve got to teach as you fight.  You’ve got to learn as you lead.  These things are inseparable to the problem of organizing, and I think the Saul Alinsky influence and some of the trade union influence and even standard community organizing has separated those questions.  These approaches tend to de-emphasize the importance of education and thus miss out on the opportunity of using the daily struggles as a school to elevate consciousness particularly in terms of leadership development.

Part of that education is a recognition of lessons from history.  The powers-that-be have done a great disservice with regards to curriculum and the philosophy of education in this country.  They’ve left out whole periods of history and obscured certain periods of history that have direct bearing on what we are trying to do today.  The experience of Martin Luther King in the last period of his life is obscured.  It is something that is pushed under the rug.  Clearly up until a certain point in his development, he was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement that was focused on de jure racial apartheid in this country.  But at a certain point towards the end of his life, he began to recognize that – even though they were able to get the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Right Act of 1965 passed -  the black masses who were succumbing to economic exploitation couldn’t benefit from the results of the Civil Rights Movement.  He pointed out: What good is it to be able to go into a restaurant now since they’ve taken down the “whites only” sign if you can’t afford a hamburger?  Today you don’t have the “whites only” sign in the front window of restaurants.  You have another sign.  It’s the menu, and the menu has the different items and their costs.  And if you can’t afford what’s on that menu, I don’t care what color you are; there’s no need for you to go in there.

This is a very significant development because it offers us the opportunity to move American thinking in a way that focuses on power shifts and social change.  But we’ve got to grapple with this reality.  Martin Luther King said “It didn’t take a penny to integrate lunch counters in this country” (that is, to defeat de jure segregation). But when we talk about ending poverty, to paraphrase him, you’re talking about a whole reconstruction of “economic and political power” relationships.  He recognized that.  And the powers-that-be saw that not only did he recognize that, but that he begin to utilize his great international prestige to take actions that were a real political threat to them and their domestic and foreign policies. That’s why he was killed; that was proven by the virtual media black-out of the 1999 MLK assassination trial in Memphis, Tennessee.

People should look at the transcripts of the testimonies of this historic trial where they proved that MLK’s proposals threatened the powers that be.  The evidence showed that the much-publicized theory – that a lone fanatical white racist killed MLK – was false, that this was the big lie spread by the FBI because they knew public opinion would be  prone to believe it at the time. Indeed his murder involved the complicity of elements from all levels of government and intelligent services. It says a lot in terms of lessons for us today.  How do we resolve this fundamental problem of power?  How do you unite the dispossessed – the bottom – in order to turn things upside down in terms of resolving the problems of homelessness, healthcare, and all of these problems that are manifestations of this basic problem: the polarity between the concentration of wealth on one hand and the spread of poverty on the other?

4 Cs: A Networked Core of Clear, Connected, Competent, and Committed Leaders

When we talk about really developing a successful movement, there has to be an advanced theoretical and intellectual development to the movement.  It has to be an engaged intellectualism.  This is something that is indispensable, and this is where the education and consciousness raising element is critical.  Theory is basically the summary of historical experience.  It’s a means to take the general lessons of history as a way to guide your analysis, so you don’t find yourself bumping your head against walls that other people before you have bumped their heads against.  Yet we have in our culture and mindset an anti-theory, anti-intellectual approach especially when it comes to social struggle.  Now, this anti-intellectualism is not coming from the poor and dispossessed.  It’s coming from the intellectuals.  In fact the whole anti-theory philosophy of pragmatism came out of Harvard. It came out of people thinking through a philosophy that would divert attention and be an apology for the economic and political status quo.  And it still has influence today as expressed in its most recent variants such as “post-structuralism” and “post-modernism.”  It has the effect of having people not see the importance of taking the lessons of history and the lessons of experience in terms of theory and using them to guide our analysis and actions. This is something that is a real disservice, because – even though there’s reference to theory on the Left – a large part of the anti-intellectualism comes from the Left.  It doesn’t come from poor folks or people who are trying to figure out what in the hell is happening to them.  They’re hungry for analysis of why it is that they are poor and who benefits from it and what their strategy is and how we counter their strategy with a strategy.  These are the basic yearnings of those who are in a position of pain and suffering every day.

We need advanced theory that enables a kind of organizing that allows us to match our sophistication with the sophistication of the strategists, ideologists, and theologians of the present “powers and principalities.”  You can’t meet sophistication just with sentimentalism.  There has to be an engaged intellectualism – an engaged scholarship – to successfully guide our thinking and fighting.  If we don’t outsmart the enemy, there’s no way we’re going to outfight them.

If we’re going to go forward, we’ve got to resolve this problem of education and theory.  The important thing that I’ve learned in my political life was that the major defeats and mistakes were largely a result of a lack of a historical perspective that comes from theory, a lack of understanding of political economy that comes from theory, a lack of leadership development that comes from theoretical development.

And not having leaders – a core of leaders – who are connected to the struggles of the poor and dispossessed, who are committed, who are competent, and who are clear in terms of their analytical approach is problematic in terms of your ability to sustain an effort, to stick and stay the course, to go up against the sophistication of the forces we’re dealing with.  What I’ve learned most is that the first stage in any kind of organizing is how do you identify and develop those leaders that emerge in those struggles, how you use those struggles to identify leaders and concentrate them into a guiding intellectual force that can then organize the movement.  They have to have the sophistication that matches the sophistication of the powers-that-be.

I don’t think that we understand what we’re up against.  The forces we’re up against, on the one hand, don’t give a damn about us.  They go around the world and subject people to the most excruciating horrors.  You think they’re not prepared to do that with us?  Certainly the history of people of color suggests that they are prepared to do dirty to anybody for dominance and the dollar.  Still among broad sections, people cannot think that the people we’re up against are people who are very fascistic and who are prepared to sweep us under the rug, throw us off the cliff and have us to live out the most horrible existence.  These people don’t give a damn about us.  You’ve got to understand that.  That’s what you’re up against.

At the same time, we must respect them, which means to study to know and keep up with them in their strategic thinking and moves.  They are the powers-that-be, and they are the most organized. They have the chambers of commerce and the different trade associations and most importantly, they have very sophisticated “think-tanks:” the Rand Corporation, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the Carnegie Endowment, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), and other such groupings.  The Carnegie formation is now organized as the first global think-tank.  These major think-tanks study the daily developments around the world; they study a problem before it becomes an issue.  This is a tremendous opposition that we face. We’ve got to know our enemy and strive to know what they know. For if we only know ABC and they know A to Z then we stand to be outmaneuvered and manipulated.  Our organizing strategy and tactics must be and can be developed directly in opposition to theirs.

But a lot of organizing makes general references to capitalism and the oppression of people of color at the hands of white folks or something like that, and not an examination of what and who we are really dealing with.  Leadership development and the theoretical development that undergirds that leadership development has to take those kinds of things into account if we’re going to proceed effectively, if we are going to organize an independent mass socio-political movement that can move the issues that affect us today.