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

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MEDIA JUSTICE & JUSTICE COMMUNICATIONS:

BUILDING MEANING TO BUILD MOVEMENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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DISPATCHES FROM THE

CLIMATE CRISIS FRAMING BATTLE

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

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

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

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

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

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

Control Myth #1 Only The Market Can Save Us!

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

Control Myth #2 Technology Will Save Us!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ORGANIZERS ARE STORYTELLERS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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NARRATIVE STRATEGY &

STEPPING UP OUR GAME

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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ACCELERATING THE TRAIN TOWARDS JUSTICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last month in Cochabamba, the Bolivian government and social movements convened the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC).  The conference was ground-breaking, bringing together governments, NGO’s, indigenous communities, and social movements.  The goal of the conference was to re-ground and cohere the global forces that are working for climate justice in order to impact global climate negotiations.

Whether we work on environmental, social, or economic issues, what happened in Cochabamba is relevant to our work as Left organizers in the United States.  To help make the conferences’ relevance for our work as clear as possible, I’m going to talk about Copenhagen and the back story to Cochabamba, lay out some of the developments at the CMPCC, and explore how it all relates to the next phase of building a powerful climate justice movement.

The Back Story

Our situation is dire.  Science tells us that CO₂ emissions from human activity (principally coal-burning and oil consumption, but also deforestation) are already beyond sustainability and that today’s emissions will take seventy years to manifest their full impact on global temperature.  Even with the Kyoto protocol in place, the growth of emissions in the last ten years has been the fastest ever. We need a substantial decrease in global emissions over the next 10 years, and we need to almost completely move away from fossil fuels over the next 30-40 years. If we don’t  we will almost certainly end up with irreversible changes in temperature, weather, and rainfall that will have horrendous and unacceptable social consequences. 

This material reality provides the backdrop to recent international climate negotiations.  It would be a tall order to achieve that type of environmental change that we need under any economic or political system.  But the challenges are even greater under our current economic system; we are contending with neoliberal capitalism, an exploitative and often neo-colonial relationship between the global North and the global South, the corruption of most world governments by capital and corporations, and the arrogance and lack of accountability of the United States on the world stage.  The meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen laid these dynamics bare.  Although it was initially billed as “Hopenhagen” – a meeting where humanity would come together to protect ourselves and nature – the reality in Copenhagen’s meeting halls was class struggle.

In recent years, a great deal of energy has been spent in the international climates negotiations to get the US back to the table. Going into Copenhagen, it was clear that a comprehensive, equitable agreement wasn’t in the works.  Regardless, many social movements and governments from teh global South were hopeful that a global agreement would be reached that would use scientific estimates to set a global limit on emissions and provide a framework for transitioning away from fossil fuels.  There was hope that agreements could be reached that would allow for (1) adaptation by those who have already been affected by climate change and (2) the transfer of technology and funds to the South to make that transition possible without pushing the nations of the global South into poverty.  There was also the hope that developed countries would acknowledge the debt they owed to the rest of the world for damaging the climate.

Instead, with all the world’s governments assembled in the Bella Center, the global North (and particularly the United States) refused responsibility  The biggest polluters refused to commit to stop polluting. Would the North pay it’s debt for having used up the atmospheric space over the last 100 years?  Nope.  Transfer technology so that developing nations could develop with less emissions?  Nope.  Pay for damages or adaptation for communities that have already been impacted?  Nope.  Decrease domestic emissions to avoid climate chaos?  Nope.  Instead, these polluters wanted to use the UNFCCC as the basis to construct a new world order that would create a new set of economic rules to benefit northern corporations.

When President Obama showed up, he settled quickly into back-room negotiations to hammer out a proposal that would benefit the United States.  This proposal – now called the Copenhagen Accord – would create a process where each government had autonomy over what cuts it wanted to propose and where these proposed cuts would be added up and carried out through a world carbon market.  There would be no enforcement mechanism if nations don’t meet their proposed reductions.  If the US says it will decrease emissions by 4% (which is their current offer), and Costa Rica says it will be carbon neutral in the next 20 years, there is no mechanism by which the U.S. can be held accountable for greater emissions reductions.  The Copenhagen Accord was not allowed to pass during the meeting in Copenhagen, due to the resistance from ALBA (Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América) and African states and small island nations on the inside of the convention and to the social movements who were organizing on the outside.

Shortly after the Copenhagen Accord was released, a team of European scientists determined that if all nations lived up to their commitments under the accord, it would only amount to – at best -  a 2% decrease in emissions.  This is ten times less than what the science says is needed in order to prevent environmental catastrophe.  On the heels of this report, a team from MIT stated that – in material terms –  this 2% decrease by 2020 would commit the world to a 3-4 degree Celsius increase in temperature, an increase which would be catastrophic.

Pachamama o Muerte!

Leaving Copenhagen, there was a huge amount of righteous anger at the behavior of the US and the global North.  The time for action should have been 20 years ago.  But even this late in the game, the rich still acted with impunity.  What now?  Now that the Copenhagen Accord had come to light, the U.S.’s intentions were clear.  The next global meeting of the UNFCCC was already scheduled for Cancun in December of 2010, and the U.S. was clearly going to try to pass a proposal similar to the Copenhagen Accord at this meeting. But how could the movement that succeeded in stopping a bad agreement in Copenhagen defeat the US proposal and move negotiations back towards the kind of transformative proposals that are needed?

Evo Morales stepped into that political space by convening the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (CMPCC).  As Willy Meir, a Left deputy from Spain stated at the opening ceremonies of the CMPCC in Cochabamba, “This conference has been produced from the failure of the Summit in Copenhagen, whose authors, the most developed countries, have taken us into a dead-end alley.”  The plan was ambitious: organize a conference with seventeen working groups that would develop social movement proposals on the major areas of global negotiation, proposals for other areas of importance for social movements that hadn’t been on the table in the UNFCCC, and strategies and plans to impact the negotiations.  The conference proposed responding to the back-room Copenhagen Accord which had been produced by unaccountable elites with a people’s proposal, developed in broad daylight through exchange and debate between global movements and communities.

What were these proposals?  Many of the proposals related directly to international negotiations. They included points such as:

• A 50% reduction of domestic greenhouse gas emissions by developed countries for the period 2013-2017 under the Kyoto Protocol without reliance on market mechanisms;
• The need to begin the process of considering the proposed Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth to reestablish harmony with nature;
• The obligation of developed countries to honor their climate debt toward developing countries and our Mother Earth;
• The incentivizing of models of agricultural production that are environmentally sustainable and that guarantee food sovereignty and the rights of indigenous peoples and small-scale farmers;
• The protection and recognition of the rights and needs of forced climate migrants.

Beyond the points that were specifically focused on negotiations, groups developed structural critiques of the causes of climate change. They crafted proposals and declarations that pointed the way towards the kind of broader social and economic transformations that will be necessary to adequately respond to the crisis.  This section from the final conclusions of the working group on Harmony with Nature provides a good example,

“Given that capitalism is a threat to life itself, it is necessary to forge a new system that reestablishes harmony with nature and among human beings based on the principles of: equilibrium among all and with all things, complementarity, solidarity, equity, justice, collective consciousness, and respect for diversity and spirituality.”

Or the following example from the Indigenous People’s working group, proposing

“The recovery, revalidation and strengthening of our civilizations, identities, cultures and cosmovisions based on ancient and ancestral Indigenous knowledge and wisdom for the construction of alternative ways of life to the current “development model”, as a way to confront climate change.”

The working groups were successful in crafting a shared vision, but they were not lacking in strong debates.  The conference was intended to create a big tent that would hold governments, NGO’s, and social movements, so it came as no surprise that – at times – these different groupings had different agendas and goals.  Governments that participated in Cochabamba were participants in the UNFCCC, and they had to decide what the tactics of their inside strategy would be.  Carbon markets were soundly rejected by social movements in the working groups of the CMPCC, but many governments (including the Cuban government representatives) supported the continuation of the Kyoto protocol as opposed to the Copenhagen accord.[1] To the extent that there was a debate around the use of market mechanisms, the governments were clear that they were arguing that market-based mechanisms should be seen as tactical demands. But regardless of whether this difference is strategic or tactical, it significant since the hope is to have unified demands inside and outside of the Cancun meeting in Cancun.  REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), a program which would incorporate forests into a global carbon market, was another big point of contention. Against the opposition of Bolivian government representations, the Indigenous Environmental Network from the United States organized hard and successfully to have the CMPCC oppose REDD.

In the end the Cochabamba protocol is remarkable for its unity.  The process was able to successfully weave together the best thinking and the on-the-grounds experience of social movements in areas as diverse as water, carbon markets, technology transfer and forests. The declarations stand as a movement-driven counter-proposal from the perspective of civil society in opposition to the perspectives of the elites.  As Colin Rajah of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights said “Cochabamba changed the game.  The U.S. will push what it’s going to push, but now there is a new proposal on the table.  It’s a counter-balance.”

What does this mean for us?

Looking back at the successes of Cochabamba and thinking about what they mean for climate justice work in the U.S., a few key questions and observations come to mind.  The overarching question that organizers and activists all over the world are asking is: What do we do about the U.S.? It’s not the first time that we have asked this question.  As recent history shows , the obstructionist position taken by the US government is the primary obstacle to meaningful coordinated global action on climate issues. We need to figure out: What do we need to do to either push the U.S. to move the right direction or – at the very least – to get out of the way and stop dragging the world in the wrong direction?  I would argue that there are three key tasks that we need to take up:

1. Building a Popular Politics of Climate Justice in the US

The world needs the U.S.-based movement for climate justice to reach a new stage in the development. There are signs that this is possible.  The public awareness of environmental issues has grown markedly over the past 5 years, both in social justice movements and the broader public. The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina played an important role in that process.  At the same time, this awareness is uneven. Significantly, there has been more growth among the middle class and white communities than among working people and communities of color.  This isn’t surprising, but it has meant that most environmental awareness has driven socially-conscious consumption rather than than political action.  It also has played into the hands of the Right, which has worked to make the public believe the environmentalism is a lifestyle choice made by people who have money to spend or who are recreationally green. 

The key for our work is to build and strengthen a popular politics of climate justice.  When I say “popular,” I’m arguing that our demands and our approach to climate change have to resonate with the perceived needs and demands of broad sectors of society. They need to respond to poverty.  They need to respond to racism.  They need to speak to those who are underemployed and lack affordable housing, to those for whom the current system doesn’t work and for whom it never will. They need to help move those sectors into action.

To accomplish this, our U.S.-based climate justice movement needs to follow the example of the movements that led the process in Cochabamba We need to get into fights around water, food, farming, transportation, land-use, housing, toxics, community resilience, jobs, and keeping fossil fuels in the ground.  My point here is that these fights – rooted in the dire conditions of neighborhoods, communities, and even bio-regions – can help us avoid making very technical macro-level policy fights our only site of struggle.  To the extent that we can keep these community-based issues front-and-center, we open the door to creating interesting new alliances and to making these issues tangible to folks who Al Gore isn’t going to be able to reach. 

2. Same struggle.  Same enemy.  New Vision?

What about the Left?  When I was on the plane coming back to the U.S. from Bolivia, I was imagining the next six months and making mental work plans.  When I landed, I was struck almost immediately by the developments in Arizona.  The racist political forces that birthed SB1070 are the same forces that are responsible for the economic meltdown in recent years, and they are the same forces that stand in the way of the development of a just and sustainable economy. 

For those of us on the Left, although some of the details of climate negotiations may be  different, the nature of the struggle and the enemy is the same.  But there are some differences. Specifically, Cochabamba may offer us a different vision.  When we envision a society that exists in a sustainable relationship to nature, this society has material limits.  These limits imply things about how subsystems of the economy – like the food system or the energy and transportation systems – should be run.  These limits shed some light into what a sustainable people’s economy could look like, whether it’s in the Bay Area or Phoenix or Seattle.  They help us to think about what our cities should be like.  An understanding of ecology combined with a critique of economy can help reground our Left Vision, giving us clarity in areas where we lacked it before.  The working groups in Cochabamba developed thinking along these lines that we need to take  the time to examine.  The Left in the U.S. would be strengthened by incorporating more of this type of thinking into our analysis.  We’ll have a chance to do that soon at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit in June 2010.

3. The Road from Cochabamba to Cancún

The CMPCC laid the groundwork for global movements to make a hard stand over the next year.  The US government is pushing hard for the adoption of the Copenhagen Accords in Cancun, but organizing in opposition to those Accords gained strength and clarity in Cochabamba.  In a recent message, Via Campesina called for thousands of local actions globally, and they called for a large-scale mobilization in Cancun.  And all signs point towards these mobilizations being stronger than they were in Copenhagen, from the scale of the protests and the coordination of organizing to the clarity of our proactive demands.  These public protests and actions will provide an important opportunity for our communities to weigh in and be counted.  We need a massive converegence and mobalization on the scale of the protests against the WTO in Seattle a decade ago. 

What can we fight for and win in Cancun?  There are two key battles on different fronts. First, there is the battle for public opinion.  We need to broaden the public understanding of the breadth and relevance of these issues. We have the potential to shift the debate on domestic climate policies, like offshore oil drilling.  Second, we need to challenge the game plan of the U.S. delegation, especially with respect to the Copenhagen Accord.  We can have victories on both fronts if we can organize effectively. The U.S. Social Forum will provide an important jumping-off point to build the kind of coordination we need to make these victories possible.

Pa’lante Siempre!

Popular politics, deeper vision from the left, and an action plan…isn’t that what everyone’s looking for?   The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth moved the climate justice movement a few steps forward in all three areas.  But we still need to figure out how it all will come together into a successful fight over the next year.  My organization, Movement Generation, believes that the next step is to clarify our shared demands and our action plan during the U.S. Social Forum through the People’s Movement Assembly process.

On the days when I feel hopeless and when the type of change we need seems impossible, I look at kids playing outside my home and at my own children. And I know that, one day, they will ask me what I did when our planet was in so much danger.  Whether we asked for it our not, this is the defining challenge of our generation.  It’s a challenge that will be decided – one way or the other – in our lifetimes. Let’s get to work and make it count.

Jason Negrón-Gonzales is the former Director of Movement Generation, and a co-founder of the MG Justice & Ecology Project. He began his political work organizing as a student around Puerto Rican community issues.  As a student at UC Berkeley he was involved in building multi-racial student alliances and worked against the ending of affirmative action and the cutting back of ethnic studies.  After graduating he began working with People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER), a membership based community/labor organization in San Francisco.  In his time at POWER Jason served as Organizer, Campaign Director, and Education Director as well as in alliance building work locally and nationally.  Jason is now a Program Associate at Movement Generation and works as a trauma nurse at SF General Hospital.

Our Window

In December, a delegation of racial, economic, and environmental justice organizers went to Copenhagen for the UN Climate Negotiations. They were there fighting for real solutions to the crises that capitalism has created in poor communities around the world. The “Copenhagen moment” must now rapidly become the “people’s moment” if we are to win a just transition to a new world. Left values and vision will be essential in leading us out of the ecological crises we’re in. And taking on this mission can take the Left out of the defensive and reactive stance that we’ve been pushed into over the last few decades into a proactive and visionary approach towards leading the transition to a new world.

It’s clear that the world has entered a period of drastic transition.

After two-hundred years of industrial-scale, increasingly globalized capitalism, we have been catapulted into a set of interlocking ecological crises of food, water, climate, waste and toxics and of biological and cultural diversity. In particular, the past two hundred years of mining fossil fuels from deep in the ground and spewing them into the atmosphere has drastically impacted the earth’s climate systems.

What we heard Al Gore tell us in “An Inconvenient Truth” three years ago has gotten drastically worse; tipping points have been breached and multiplier effects are taking effect.

In an interview with Democracy Now in Copenhagen, Bolivian President Evo Morales laid it bare. “Capitalism is the worst enemy of humanity. Capitalism—and I’m speaking about irrational development—policies of unlimited industrialization are what destroys the environment. And that irrational industrialization is capitalism. So as long as we don’t review or revise those policies, it’s impossible to attend to humanity and life.”

The internal logic of capitalism pushes it to continue to keep growing exponentially on a finite planet, even if it has not found a way to do that with pushing us towards a breaking point.

History shows us that a key question in these moments of transition is who has the power to lead. The nature of the economic and social reorganization that we need in the face of these impending crises will depend entirely on who is politically positioned to lead that reorganization. It is not al all inevitable that the next world system will inherently be “better” in terms of social progress.

Actually, it’s not hard to imagine that the world will become increasingly militarized and that the rich will plunder the resource wealth of the global south while the poor are pushed to further plunder the earth in order to survive.

In fact, the Obama administration tried to buy off third world governments into accepting that kind of path at the UN Climate talks in Copenhagen in December 2009. We had a chance to win a unified agreement towards reducing global emissions. In Copenhagen, most third world governments & social movements came together to call for a deal that would allow the poor and working-classes of the world to survive and have the resources to adapt.  But the U.S. and other wealthy nations sought to balance the climate debt on the backs of poor farmers and slum dwellers in Africa and Asia.

We’ll get one more chance to win a fair deal at the end of 2010 in Mexico City where the next round of negotiations is scheduled to take place. But we are going to need to build more power to win a fair deal during those talks.

What does that mean for our work in the United States?  A forward-looking Social Movement Left should work to provide key leadership in this period. So far, we’re way behind in taking on the ecological crises and responding to fact that climate change is requiring a whole new policy framework. City, regional, and state governments are already developing climate action plans (OCAC) and developing policies about how to parcel up new funding related to carbon fees. If we don’t build up our own ecological justice vision and strategy, we’ll be left simply fighting the false solutions like “cap and trade” or biofuels.

And we’ll continue to be small and demoralized.

Instead, we need to connect across issues and constituencies. We shouldn’t drop any of our issues; instead we need to add a “climate” lens that can help us develop the type of systemic analysis and transformative vision that a serious left should be providing to our social movements.

Reimagining: Towards a World of Many Worlds

Our challenge today is to re-write the story of the kind of victory that we’re fighting for. Our new story needs to be believable, irresistible, and worth fighting for.

The finale of the story of our victory will be a post-globalized world based on local democracies, driven to meet residents needs in an equitable way and deeply rooted in a relationship to ecological place. It will be a world where many worlds fit, where there are a million different solutions to the question of how we should meet our needs and a million different forms of local participatory economies that emerge to meet these needs.

So, if that’s the finale of the story that we’re working towards, how does the plot unfold over the chapters in the story where we shift out of our current fossil fuel-driven, industrial growth-driven world that is rooted in exploitation and oppression and into this world that makes space for many different liberatory worlds? What are our central tasks towards winning that transition?

First, we need to cultivate an ecological sense rooted in our land-based traditions. We need to learn with and from Indigenous & land-based people’s ways of knowing. This includes asking and listening to our living ancestors and elders and to new immigrants in our communities. We need to draw upon the laws of nature: symbiosis, limits, cycles, balance, zero waste. And we need to cultivate a reflective, responsive relationship to place. We shouldn’t call for going “back to the land;” we should build a “take back the land” movement.

Second, we need to work towards a transition that quickly shifts us out of a green capitalism agenda towards a resilience agenda by winning local equitable control of resources and by investing in the work required to shift us from a “get mine” to a “share ours” world. This means shifting from “green hard hats” to “green roles.”

Our stance in carrying it this story needs to be solution-oriented and hope-based. In this moment of insecurity, a social movement left has a real chance to win over key social forces in winning a just transition to a new world, but we need a proactive vision to make that possible.

Solutions from the Land and Our Histories as Land-Based People

For too long, the Social Movement Left has equated “environmentalism” with white, privileged hippies or plush non-profit junkies. And consequently, with the brave exception of the environmental justice movement, environmental work has been mostly given over to those kinds of folks. But our communities have historical relationship to the land that we must reclaim in order to take back the land.  This doesn’t mean going “back to the land” but instead, laying down roots with a right relationship to the places we live.

The connection of most working-class people of color to our own lands was severed by colonialism, slavery or forced migration. We have the right and the responsibility to reclaim the knowledge of our ancestors and to draw upon the worldviews of the indigenous and land-based peoples who have survived to this day. All of our peoples — immigrants, people of African descent, people still in the global south — are originally land-based people. Before capitalism, the ancestors of most white people also worked the land that their ancestors had lived on for generations in Europe.

Reclaiming the teachings and the lessons from our ancestors is not about “going back” to those ways.  It is about evolving them into new kinds of knowledge and new ways of being that can serve as our new tools for survival. When we talk about cultural diversity, we need to be talking about an evolved knowledge of place and the importance of cultural beliefs and practices in connecting our different peoples with the places we have evolved to inhabit.

Today, the reality is that – with the exception of indigenous people – we are all now far from our ancestral homelands, and we have built our lives in cities and towns we now call home. Our traditions are rooted in lands that are far from where we ended up laying down new roots. This is a contradiction that we must work towards resolving in dialogue with native people.

In order for humans to survive on a post-globalized planet, wherever we live, each of us must cultivate a reflective, responsive relationship to that place. We can learn from the laws of nature: symbiosis, limits, cycles, balance, zero waste. And we need to spend a lot of time observing and learning about where we live in order to live there sustainably.

There are many points to be worked through related to our displacement and re-settling from one part of the earth to another but we can start by repairing and reclaiming our own relationship to the land, learning basic principles of ecology, and evolving our knowledge of place in dialogue with its native peoples.

Shifting from “Get Mine” to “Share Ours”

Another central task is to win the infrastructure that helps move us from a “get mine” world to a “share ours” world. Grace Lee Boggs, for example, talks about a (r)evolution for self-determination.

One key step in this process will be winning a new world framework that gives communities local control over resources. Ultimately, this is what we want to win through the UN climate negotiations process that is moving from Copenhagen to Mexico City in November 2010.

We need to win the decentralization and democratization of the control of resources: food, water, land and energy. Communities require these resources in order to begin fostering the local, living and participatory economies that will move us off the catastrophic trajectory that we are now on.

A second key step towards a world driven by sharing resources will be shifting from a “green growth” to a “green needs” economic agenda. In the U.S., we consume 18 times more resources  in our daily lives than do people in India; we simply cannot continue to live in the ways we’re living.  To begin with, we will need to live more compactly and cooperatively.

As people begin live more densely and cooperatively. we will need more peer counselors, facilitators, organizers, mediators, and educators to help reweave the fabric of our communities. We need to restore our ability to communicate and work together, nurturing the means for democratic systems on a human community level. We’ll need the capacity to relate to each other, organize ourselves, make the decisions that affect our lives and our world, and work together to get things done. This means that we need to fight for compensation for the meaningful work that sustains people and places, rather than just fighting for “green jobs” in a growth-driven capitalist economy.

Shifting the debate to focus on meeting people’s real needs—materially but also on social and emotional levels—will be critical to winning a just transition. Some of the most crucial green roles will be therapists, healers, coaches, mediators, teachers, organizers, and facilitators as well as bus drivers, farmers, greywater plumbers, and repair people.

So, as a Left, we need to move the debate from green construction sites to kitchen tables. That means that we need to value social labor and the invisible work of weaving community – which is mostly done by women –  more visible.

Strategy

So far – with the exception of groups like the Indigenous Environmental Network, Kentuckians For the Commonwealth and other environmental justice forces – the social movement left has been largely absent from climate or other ecological justice debates. It’s as if the system has created so many little fires for us to fight in our distinct organizations, issue sectors, and communities that we’re missing the tidal wave that is about to hit. We need a canopy-level view of the crises that capitalism has created.

We need a strategy of building movements and communities of resistance, resilience, and reimagining. We can do this wherever we are – through our housing, immigration rights, or economic justice struggles – by weaving in new frames and organizing models that build on our people’s wisdoms, gather up critical resources, and spark imaginations.

There are exciting examples of this happening around the country that we can learn from. These are the seeds of what we might call “Liberated Zones,” spaces where community members take control of their local resources and begin to shift to more cooperative modes of meeting needs. This is an important way to break out of the hegemony that boxes us in.

In Detroit, local organizers and residents have been reclaiming abandoned lots for gardens as a way to provide for local needs while taking control of local resources and the land.  Meanwhile, developers are looking at that same resource as a mine for a new wave of green growth. In Detroit, private developers have already invested at least $30 million buying up vacant property to convert large areas back to agriculture.  The moment of transition is upon us and if a coordinated Social Movement Left doesn’t act fast to reclaim resources for the common good, those resources will just shift hands and continue to be exploited for profit-generation at the increasing expense of the poor.

In San Francisco, POWER is adding an ecological lens to its work building organized power amongst working-class communities of color. The organization has steadily begun shifting from solely fighting against green-washing of dirty development to taking a proactive and visionary approach to winning. Having learned that the SF Unified School District is the largest landholder in the city, POWER is working towards winning rights to use schoolyards for farmers’ markets, gardens, community meeting spaces, and more.

These experiments in places like Detroit and San Francisco can help write a new story in which the people reclaim the commons and begin to forge local, living, participatory economies.  In fostering economic and ecological justice in liberated zones, people can also begin to name and heal the spiritual and emotional crises created by oppression and exploitation. Gardens, for example, can become places to heal emotional wounds as well as learn to foster healthy working relationships.

Conclusion

The social movement left can garner immense strength from this moment. We have the chance to birth a new politic that can re-inspire Left activists to see themselves as architects of a new world, a self-conception that we have been missing since the 1960s.

If we fail to reorient our organizations and movements to win this new world, we risk a nightmarish sci-fi future of ever-increasing militarization, inequality, and genocide.

In Copenhagen, G77 chair Lumumba Stanislaus Di-aping helped to unite much of the global south to reject the catastrophic deal that the rich nations wanted. Presidents Evo Morales and Hugo Chavez then helped to frame the possibilities of uniting around an anti-capitalist vision: the only way to actually cut greenhouse gas emissions to head off the worst effects of climate chaos.

As Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said, “Copenhagen is not the end, I repeat, but a beginning: the doors have been opened for a universal debate on how to save the planet, life on the planet. The battle continues.”

Many of the ideas and frames contained in this article (but not its errors) come out of the collective brain of Movement Generation.

Joseph Phelan of Organizing Upgrade interviewed Bill Fletcher Jr. by phone in early June 2009.

Joseph: Bill, the first thing I want to get to with you is: What do you think are the most significant things happening right now in the world? What are the shifts that left organizers in particular need to be paying attention to?

Bill: We are living through the convergence of three crises: economic, environmental and a crisis of state legitimacy.  It is a moment where we’re dealing with more than a recession or even a depression. We’re dealing with these forces that are coming together and opening up tremendous possibilities in terms of the development of a new set of politics and a new political practice. But at the same time, it’s very dangerous and very scary.

Unfortunately what’s happened within the left and among progressives is sort of an unwillingness to grapple with the dynamics of this period.  Some level of denial, some level of lack of urgency. I’d say that’s what makes this particular period unusual and that necessitates a deeper level of analysis and thinking and urgency at the level of action and organization.

J: I want to come back to that urgency and even that denial of opportunities within the left.  But you said that in the convergence of these crises, there are danger and possibilities; could talk more about the dangers that we’re facing in this time.

B: The dangers exist at a number of different levels.

We are faced with a very serious threat to the future of humanity. Not to be melodramatic. Any numbers of things that could happen. During the Cold War the big worry was a nuclear exchange.  That remains a real possibility, especially with these nutcases in Pakistan and India who posses nuclear weapons.  They could end up using them against one another.  In another part of the world, Israel could end up using nuclear weapons against one of its opponents. Nuclear war is always a possibility.

But the big worry regarding the future of humans as a species is the shift in the environment.  Will these shifts make the planet inhospitable? Will we be able to stop or reverse the damage down to the environment? These are real worries and part of the three crises. So we are operating at that level of analysis and action.

We’re also operating on the level of political dangers.  One of the biggest political dangers in the Global North and the Global South are variants on right-wing populism.  Populism’s proponents often steal arguments from the left; morph them into almost their opposite and use them to touch a sentiment in the masses of people who are feeling constrained, oppressed, dispossessed.  Right-wing populism looks for scapegoats. Those scapegoats are another ethnic group or a racial group, women, gays and lesbians…it can be any number of things.  We must expect right wing populism to become stronger unless we thoroughly defeat it [ed. Note – As we have seen with the successful targeting of Van Jones and the 9/12 movement].

Given the competition for resources on a planet where resources are limited by the ecology of the planet and the economic system that we live under there is a constant danger of a war of “…all against all…”.  When you have limited resources people have two options. One, they fight the system that handles the resources in an undemocratic way, and that’s generally the way that the Left wants to go.  Two, they identify a particular “other” ,another grouping that is perceived to be the grouping that is suppressing everyone else and is hoarding resources. So right wing populism can – under those circumstances – be very persuasive.  We on the left need to better understand it and take issue with it.

J: You just identified the big global impacts on the environment and the political levels. You also identified, earlier, the crisis of state legitimacy. In all three of these there seems to be an opening for a left response.

B: There’s actually an opening for both: an opening for a left and a right-wing response.

When I talk about state legitimacy, I’m referring to the changes in that the state has gone through in the Global North and South under neoliberal globalization.   When you start thinking about the philosophy and ideology that accompanied the development of the modern capitalist state, it is important to keep in mind that it was shaped – first of all – with the idea of a nation-state, even though capitalism has always been global.  The myth of the nation state is that the state would protect the population and that protection takes various forms.  It can mean social services or it can mean military protection or whatever the case may be. That’s the role of the state.

With neoliberal globalization and the global reorganization of capitalism, what’s happened is a slow transformation of the role of the state. In the Global South, it’s very apparent that the nation-state has been significantly weakened, particularly with regard to multinational corporations and the transfer of wealth.  The capitalist state in the Global South finds itself at wits end trying to find resources to conduct services for the population.

As the state weakens, and as the state’s ability to distribute wealth in a more equitable way weakens, you then see again the rise of left and right wing alternatives. The right wing alternative in an extreme is “war-lordism.” That’s an extreme right-wing solution to the crisis of the state, and it can be justified in terms of xenophobia, etc.

A left-wing response to neoliberal globalization can be found in things like the global justice movement, which has been challenging neoliberal globalization for years and has been raising this question about the unequal distribution of wealth on this planet: who controls it and what must be done about that.  And it rises  that while the capitalist state in the Global North is not weakening in the same way that the state in the Global South is weakening, it is weakening in a different way.

In the North we see that the state is  delivering fewer resources to the people because of policies that have been voluntarily engaged the political elite. This weakening, so to speak, is taking place at the same time that the state is becoming stronger in other ways, most especially at the level of repression.  Nevertheless, these diminishing resources combined with the ideology of neoliberalism that encouraged the privatization of services has resulted in a changing state.

When you have a situation where the state is not delivering what it once was delivering, you can have a right and a left wing response.  The left wing response, as I mentioned before, includes the global justice movement, but it’s not limited to that because it also raises the question of whether or not we need something different, and that’s where the opening exists for the left.  The Right, depending on which Right one is talking about at any one moment, may advocate a stronger, authoritarian state—even if it advances neo-liberal globalization—or it might advocate more of a balkanization along regional and/or ethnic grounds.

J: We just talked about the crisis of state legitimacy. And when you’re talking about the global justice movement, you’re identifying them as people who are raising questions around the global distribution of wealth and so on.  But you’re also saying that we can push beyond a broad global justice movement and start to demand more specific changes.

B: That’s right. Absolutely. And that exists on a couple of different levels. One is that the global justice movement is a very broad movement; it that includes anarchists, socialists, progressives, i.e., a variety of forces that do not necessarily have a coherent alternative to capitalism. And that’s OK because it’s done a great job, and it’s supposed to be broad.  That said, what we need is to have an organized radical left that is in fact posing the question of an alternative, and in my opinion specifically socialism. We need to flesh out how that socialism will look different than the socialism of the twentieth century, which was a mixed bag.  So that’s one of our theoretical challenges right now. If we don’t advance alternatives, we can only continue resisting for so long till the point comes when we’re weakened and we’re tired. In that situation, the right will take advantage.

J: Within this need for a more organized left I’m curious about the danger and possibilities that you identified with the left having a lack of urgency. I’m wondering where you see that playing out, even within the broad global justice movement and where do you see that playing out in the existing radical left.  In this moment, what are the opportunities for the radical left..

B: Part of the problem at the level of the radical left is that it is content for the most part to engage in resistance struggles within the confines of existing social movements. Part of the damage that’s been done to the left over the last 25 years has been (in addition to repression in certain places) is ideological; the growth of postmodernism and post-structuralism which basically suggested that there really is no alternative. It’s a very subjective ideology: there is no alternative; there is no overarching theory or project that can link together the various progressive social movements other than some vague resistance. This ideology fits nicely in the position of resistance.

If all you’re doing is resisting, then you don’t need any higher forms of organization; you just coordinate every so often, go to joint conferences and things like that and then go back into your bunker.  The problem is that people do not operate by and large only within a particular social movement.  They operate multi-dimensionally.  There are a lot of struggles going on, and these struggles are interconnected. At certain moments, particular struggles become primary, but that doesn’t mean that other struggles ever disappear.  So you need some sort of overarching theory that is able to help link these together. You also need organization that can link these various movements and can bring together the leaders (with a small “l”) of these movements towards the development of a coherent collective vision.

There is a comfort in networks and there is a comfort in coalitions, but there is a fear of organization. Part of that comes out of a legitimate criticism of many of the organizational experiences of the twentieth century.  Part of it comes out of anti-communism and the impact that anti-communism has had over the years in  promoting the notion that all organization is dangerous and that all organization contains within it the seeds of authoritarianism and that therefore the best route is not to promote organization at all, but to remain within loose networks.

There’s a role for networks; that relates to my earlier point about the global justice movement. There is a role for networks, and there’s a role for that level of interconnection. But in order to advance mass movements, to really challenge for power, you need a much more cohesive organization and vision.

I think that many people on the radical left don’t see that.  At the same time, you have people on the radical left that do have organizations, but in many cases, those organizations are small and relatively weak. They may have good politics or they may not, but there is what Mao Tse-tung referred to as “mountain stronghold mentality”. It was a metaphor that came out of the Chinese Revolution where you would have a guerrilla band that would be literally on top of a mountain. They would secure the top of the mountain; they could keep the enemy away but that was all they could do.  Every so often, they would come out and attack. At a point when the struggle necessitated a different form of combat, these guerrilla bands would not  want to come down from the mountain and form new forms of organization.  Part of what I’m arguing is that we need different forms of organization if we’re really going to struggle for power.

J: With that, we’re in this place with these three converging crises: economic, ecological and the crisis of the legitimacy of the state, there is an international global justice movement.  Particularly in the United Sates, what do you see as the role of left organizers?  And to be specific by what I mean by left organizers, I mean people who are engaged in practical organizing work on the ground who are probably engaged in social movement work.

B: I would say that the role of left organizers in this period is primarily involves three things.

The first is identifying the real leaders of the oppressed.  That doesn’t mean that the left organizers may not be themselves leaders, but the idea is to always be looking for the new emerging struggle and emerging leaders and again, I mean leaders with a small “l,” that is, people who have followers.

The second piece is conducting educational work and engaging those leaders in a combination of struggle but also political education, helping them to develop an ideological framework to be able to look at the world and be able to analyze it from a progressive if not radical standpoint.  The objective here is that such an analysis leads to transformative action.

The third thing is the building of organization.We on the left must always be thinking about building and strengthening organizations of the oppressed; whether we’re talking about labor unions, whether we’re talking about community-based organizations, whether we’re talking about networks and whether or not we’re talking about a left political party, a party for socialism.  We’ve got to be the ones that are building and supporting  the building of institutions of the oppressed.  When we’re in the labor unions, for example, we need to be the ones that are fighting for their democratization, for their vigilance, for their outreach to other segments of the oppressed, etc. We have to fight for organizations to have breadth, that is, they really need to represent different segments of the working class and the oppressed. But we also have to be the ones that are asking the questions like “How do we get to an alternative society? What does that mean at the level of organization? Therefore, why is it necessary to build a party of the left or parties of the left?”

So I think that we have those tasks: identifying the leaders, linking real education with progressive action, and the third is promoting the development of organizations among the oppressed.

J: So these are the three things you’re seeing as the primary opportunities in this moment.  We’ve talked about the denial about what needs to happen on the left, so now let’s talk about the urgency. I’m hoping you can relate it to the three things you just laid out.  Where is the left faulting on the urgency? What are some practical things that leftists should be doing?  Can you give some real-world examples of things that you’re seeing or things you would like to see?

B: Well, much of the left is trapped in what the old man, Lenin, referred to as “spontaneism.”  Unfortunately when people read Lenin and look at the issue of spontaneity, they often look at it very narrowly.

There’s a spontaneism that exists within sections of the left when it comes to issues of organization.  I would argue that it takes the form of the idea that radical organization will emerge when the masses realize that it needs to emerge.  Therefore, according to the spontaneists, our role is essentially to be ideological gad-flies who whisper into the ears of the masses and then at the appropriate moment, the masses will awaken and say, “Damn.  Now I get it.  Let’s form a party!”  I’m obviously exaggerating it somewhat, but only somewhat, because this spontaneism is very pervasive within the left.  So you’ll have people waiting, basically, and not posing this question. This goes to this question about urgency. Not posing this question of organization and not actively building it because they actually believe that the organization will emerge on its own or that the signs will be so clear, that the sun will rise in the west instead of the east and at that point we will know it is time to form a party.

So I think that is something we have to actively defeat and realize that we have to help to put into place those institutions that can help to strengthen the oppressed and build the Left. Now you said you wanted me to be concrete about something specific, remind me again.

J: You gave these three points and touching on the urgency point, there’s this spontaneity feel among large portions of the left.  You put out these three points – identifying leaders of the oppressed, doing real educational work and building organization.  I was wondering if you were seeing real-world examples of moving towards these three things that you’re prescribing – or if you’re not seeing them, then if you could put forward some things that you see that could be good.

B: There’s a lot of good work that’s going on.

The workers’ center movement or the social wage movement has been very good at identifying leaders among the poor, of linking those leaders to action and linking that with education.  But I think that much of the social wage movement has also been trapped within a certain kind of NGOism where the activists from the middle strata remain reluctant to give up their leading roles, so the leaders from the oppressed become instruments, even unintentionally, rather than becoming self-conscious leaders. There’s a dependency relationship that develops.

So I think that there are a lot of good things that are happening that I see out there.  A lot of the attention over the last twenty years, for example, to popular education, was very good.  It was largely inspired by the Brazilian experiences (e.g., the work of Paulo Friere). The good news there is that it’s focused on the needs of the student or the learner as opposed the idea of simply pouring knowledge into someone’s head.  The problem is that some people who have adopted the popular education pedagogy have at the same time adopted a semi-anarchist view of change and have come to believe that all one needs to do is to conduct educational work and that people will move on their own.  I think that’s a very wrong read of the Brazilian experience but also of history. So I think that what we see is that there is right now a lot of experimentation.

At the level of building organization, I’d say the votes aren’t in yet frankly.  You have some good experiences within the radical left of people talking more with one another, so that’s good.  And people are friendlier.  But our level of theoretical development remains fairly low and there remains a reluctance to push the envelope on questions of moving to higher level of organization, and I think that reflects the spontaneism as well as a level of distrust.

J: OK so we have the economic crisis in the United States and then we have the election of Obama.  The election of Obama is a point of contention within the left. Some see it as an opportunity; some see it as same-old-same-old, no big thing.  It’s now past the 100 days mark, and I know that you’re involved in Progressives for Obama. So I’m wondering what are you reflections on Obama and his presidency.  And what are the opportunities for the left in this Obama moment?

B: Well I think that there are a lot of opportunities. On many levels the Obama administration  broke with key elements of the Bush administration’s approach towards governance, towards the role of government as well as foreign policy.  It doesn’t mean that it’s a complete break, and this country is still at the heart of the global empire. So we have to be clear about all of those things.

The Obama campaign inspired millions.  The biggest challenge for the left, out of the Obama campaign, is what to do with that energy, how to really tap into it, how to encourage some level of continuity from the campaign.  And don’t think that we’ve answered that question very well, in part because most of the left remains ambivalent about electoral politics.  While much of the Left may have been inspired to varying degrees by the Obama campaign, it is really uncertain as to whether that’s a realm that we want to spend a lot of time in.  So I think that is a challenge.

The Obama administration represents additional challenges. I think that – for African Americans – there is a very particular challenge because we’re going to have to figure out how to criticize Obama when he doesn’t do something, when he follows a less-then-progressive course of action. And there’s going to be – and it’s already evident – significant numbers of African Americans who are going to remain silent about things that they don’t agree with. And I think that’s a challenge for the Black left.  You have some people in the Black left who always opposed Obama and who continue to oppose Obama, and they take on something of the form of a mosquito that flies by your ear at night, making it very difficult for you to sleep.  They don’t have a lot that’s useful to say, and they certainly don’t have a lot in terms of practical direction. But it’s enough to keep people unsettled.

The role of the genuine left is to approach the Obama administration critically, by which I mean that it’s not an approach of total support or total opposition but evaluating on a case-by-case basis where we can support the Obama administration, in which case we need to support and we can’t just remain silent, and where we need to be critical like on issues like Palestine.  I think that Obama has not gone nearly far enough on this, and he has caved into anti-Palestinian forces in the United States. So we need to keep the pressure on them around Palestine. Or take with the stimulus package.  I think on balance it was important to support it, even where we disagreed with specific provisions, but the thrust of it was the right thrust.  We need to be prepared to speak out, on both counts, when we are in agreement as well as when we’re in disagreement.

J: I agree that optimism is a crucial piece of sustaining a movement and a left movement.  And victories are crucial to maintaining optimism because if you’re constantly in defeat, then you’re going to be set back. So I’m wondering right now, what are some things or organizations or movements or actions that you’ve found to be very inspiring.

B: There’s a lot that I find to be inspiring.  I think that if you want me to name names, I’d say that the Miami Workers’ Center, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, the Domestic Workers United, Tenants and Workers United, the Bus Riders Union as well as alliances like Jobs with Justice, Grassroots Global Justice and the Right to the City Alliance…I think that there are great examples. There are people who are trudging away in the labor unions who are attempting to fight the good fight like the recently formed National Union of Healthcare Workers that split off from SEIU after the unfortunate and ill-considered trusteeship of United Healthcare Workers West.  There is the on-going work of people who are in union reform movements like the Teamsters for a Democratic Union or the Longshore Workers Coalition, not to mention the critical work of those associated with the magazine Labor Notes.  I think that there are these and other efforts that are very, very important, but they are simply not enough.

All of these examples are very important and I’m not trying to diminish them. But we have to have a proactive organization and organizational practice that really is engaged in a fight for power. One level of that is certainly electoral and engaging in those politics. But the other level is much more long-term, and that’s where I keep coming back to the necessity for a party for socialism.

J: Well I think that covers about everything we wanted to cover in this conversation.  That’s a strong note to end on, but if there’s anything that you want to add, we’re open to it.

B: Very quickly.  Organizing in the United States has been dominated – since at least the 1960s or early 1970s – by what I call Alinskyism, which I would summarize as an activist practice that attempts to operate within a de-ideologized framework. It is an activist framework that borrowed organizing practice from the communists of the 1930s and 1940s, but borrowed left the ideology behind.

Alinskyism can be extremely militant and has been used by progressives and some left forces as an approach towards organizing that in its essence is another form of spontaneism, that is, that people will come to their own conclusions through struggle. The reality is that struggle is one part of the educational process, but engaging in struggle does not necessarily result in people developing an overarching view of society and the issues of oppression and emancipation. We need to recognize that people walk around with worldviews; they do not walk around vacuous.  They walk around with very complicated world-views, and part of our job on the left is to engage in struggle with people. Those views may be complicated, contradictory, etc., but that those world-views often help to explain to people why capitalism exists and why there’s nothing greater that we can ever win. And we need to challenge that.

J: Thanks for taking the time to talk with us Bill.