A new and unsettling force: the strategic relevance of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign

This is a revised version of an article originally published in Interface: a Journal for and about Social Movements. Volume 2 (1): 262 – 270 (May 2o10).  It was written in response to David Harvey’s “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition.”

My name is Willie Baptist, like a Baptist Church. I am formerly homeless and still poor. I have been poor all my life and have been organizing among poor people in the United States for over 40 years. I participated as one of the organizers in the National Union of the Homeless nationwide organizing drive back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. We developed chapters in 25 cities across the US with over 15,000 members and it t was perhaps the first time that homeless people organized homeless people on this scale. I also served as the Education Director for the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, an organization of poor and homeless white, Black and Latino families based in Kensington, the poorest community in the entire state of Pennsylvania, for 10 years. I have worked to build networks of grassroots organizations fighting poverty and connect them with international struggles of the poor including the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) of Brazil and the Abahlali base Mjondolo Shackdwellers movement of South Africa. I currently serve as the Poverty Initiative Scholar-in-Residence at Union Theological Seminary and the Coordinator of the Poverty Initiative’s Poverty Scholars Program.

All of my life experiences and all my life studies and all of the experiences of this growing national and international network of which I am a part confirm at least one important and inescapable point. That is, that we the poor can think for ourselves, we can speak for ourselves, we can fight for ourselves, and we can lead not only for ourselves but that we can take part in world leadership. The majority of the world’s population are the poor of every age, gender, educational background, ethnic group and color. This, of course, includes the growing numbers of poor white Europeans and North Americans. There is somewhere between 3.5 to 4 billion human beings who are eking out a meager and miserable life globally. This is compared to some 400 to 500 billionaires who own and control most of the world’s wealth and means of subsistence. We the poor are unlike the poor in past. We live and die under new conditions shaped by the new information technology, which has given humankind an unheard of productive capability to end all poverty now and forever. Of course the political will is not there; there is only the complicity of complacency.

Poverty with all of its complexity is the defining issue of our time, particularly within the wealthiest nation in the world. In today’s Great Recession, realities of growing poverty are soaking into American consciousness. While recent periods of economic growth overshadowed the poor—rarely portraying poor people as agents of change—poor leaders and their organizations waged successful campaigns to demand access to living wage jobs, healthcare, immigrant rights, workers rights, education reform, and housing. Today, emerging and veteran organizers stand poised to offer leadership to a broader movement to end poverty as more Americans face increasingly insecure times. In order to resolve this growing and defining problem, we need a movement to unravel not only poverty’s manifestations, but also its roots and causes. Segments of our population most affected by poverty must be central in shaping both strategic questions and resolutions to this complex problem at the local, state, national and international levels.

Historically, successful social movements have been led by those most affected by the problems they are working to resolve. Slaves and ex-slaves led the anti- slavery movement; people of color led the Civil Rights Movement; women led the women’s suffrage movement. In their own time, those very people struggled for recognition that the problem they were facing was immoral and their struggle was legitimate. They fought to be considered fit for leadership of such a movement themselves. Yet today, we recognize the moral evil of slavery, and the right – and necessity – of slave and ex-slaves to lead the struggle to end it. The social position of the poor gives them the least stake in the economic status quo. And given the current economic and political direction of society this position of the poor anticipates the position of the mass of the population. Both these and other circumstances make the poor, whether they are yet aware of it or not, the leading social force for ending poverty and accordingly changing society and a system that creates poverty. Our mission to unite and organize the poor is essentially to raise their consciousness of their social position, shared across borders and lines of difference, thereby giving them greater mass influence and impact.

Based on my experience organizing amongst the poor for more than 40 years, I believe the crucial question today is: “what is the social force that has the potential if united to make fundamental social change?” I believe this question intersects with David Harvey’s essay, “Organizing for the Anti-Capitalist Transition”. David Harvey’s work is very important because he consistently goes deeper than the superficial discussions of policy that dominate much of left critique of the economy. His focus on the structure and dynamics of the economy is necessary if we are to understand the challenges of our times. It is Harvey’s comprehensive survey of left social actors in this recent essay of his where I would like to make my intervention. While Harvey identifies the need to coalesce five broad wings, tendencies and epicenters of anti-capitalist sentiment (including NGOs, anarchist GROs, traditional labor organizing and left political parties, those movements that resist displacement and dispossession, and emancipatory identity movements), I propose that a social movement to end poverty, and the system that creates it, led by the poor in the ‘belly of the beast’ – a core country of the capitalist world like the United States – represents our best hope for the future, especially if it is intimately linked to the struggle of the poor internationally.

The poor and dispossessed today differ from the poor and dispossessed of the past. They are compelled to fight under qualitatively new conditions and to creatively wield new weapons of struggle. In other words, the socio-economic position of the low waged, laid off, and locked out is not that of the industrial poor, the slave poor, or of the colonial poor of yesterday. The new poor embody all the major issues and problems that affect the majority of other strata of the country’s population. Our growing ranks are filled with people economically “downsized” and socially dislocated from every walk of life. Therefore the massive uniting and organizing of the poor across color and all other lines has “a freedom and a power” to inspire and galvanize the critical mass of the American people needed to move this country toward the abolition of all poverty. The late Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called this leading social force the “non- violent Army or ‘freedom church’ of the poor,” about which more will be said shortly.

Any discussion of poverty and the poor that tends towards a very narrow definition of these terms falls into the stereotypes and images that are projected by the forces that are arrayed against us. To not have an accurate estimate of who are the poor and why they are poor would have us all descend into subjective and divisive personal judgments of who’s poor and who’s not. To leave out people who are in fact poor is to fall into the trap of the Powers That Be and their representatives that say that we should only be concerned with ‘extreme poverty’ and not all poverty. If you can’t get the basic necessities of life, you’re poor. A narrow definition of poverty further isolates and divides the poor. When you have a narrow definition of poverty, it leads to separating the homeless poor from the day laborer poor from poor artists, obscuring what people have in common, when the task before us is to unite all the poor. The division of the growing ranks of the poor upholds the powerful stereotypes, which blind the main mass of the people from understanding the cause and cure of all poverty.

Presently, we are experiencing the wholesale economic destruction of the so- called “middle class” in the United States. This is huge in terms of U.S. domestic political power relations and strategy and tactics. This “middle class” is beginning to question the economic status quo. And this has major economic and political implications for the middle strata and poor globally. The point here is that the economic and social position of the poor is not one to be pitied and guilt-tripped about, but rather that it indicates the direction this country is heading if nothing is done to change it. Poverty is devastating me today. It can hit you tomorrow.

If poverty is to be ended the minds of the bulk of the 300 million people that make up the U.S. need to be changed. The united actions of the poor across color lines break down stereotypes and unsettle the thinking of the mass of the people. We are building a big movement to solve a big problem, and we need a lot of leaders, coming from different social strata bringing different social skills and resources to carry this out. Central to the uniting and organizing of the poor as a social force is the identifying and training of massive numbers of leaders from the ranks of the poor. This has to be our point of concentration at this initial stage of building a movement broad enough to end poverty. However, for this very reason we must challenge every person, including those coming from other important social ranks, to commit themselves as leaders and to be trained as leaders as well. Only leaders can ensure the development of leaders. This is no easy task.

Here we must understand the strategic difference between the leadership of the poor as a social group and the leadership of individuals from the ranks of the poor as well as from other ranks. History and our hard won experiences have taught us a lot in this regard. Leadership of the poor as a social group is secured primarily through united actions and organization. The development of individual leaders is secured primarily through theoretical and political education and training.

The content of the development of individual leaders is the acquiring of the clarity, competence, and commitment necessary for the development of the leadership of the poor as a social group united around their immediate and basic human needs. For example, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who initiated the organizing of the historic Poor People’s Campaign, was himself not poor. However he was a highly insightful and trained leader committed to organizing the poor across color lines and giving his life to the struggle to end all poverty everywhere. His words and work contributed greatly to the development of both kinds of leadership, social and individual. A very important lesson for us today from his life, especially his last years, is that we can and must develop “many Martins” especially from the ranks of the poor.

The problems of poverty today are not those of scarcity and limited productivity. They are the problems of increasing abandonment in the midst of increasing abundance. Today no one in the world has to be hungry. Today no one has to be homeless. No one should have to die from curable diseases. The tremendous economic and social wealth and tremendous production capacity we have today makes poverty and death from poverty immoral, unjust and insane. Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane FEMA (the U.S. government’s disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina that continues to this day throughout the U.S. Gulf Coast) revealed the social fact that this poverty, immorality, injustice, and insanity exist here in the land of the free and the home of brave, here in the United States of America.

There are many people today who are beginning to awaken and to take up honestly with a strong sense of not simply charity but justice, the expanding problem of poverty in the midst of plenty. However, there are those who either out of ignorance or out of a real lack of true compassion despite their crocodile tears and rhetoric to the contrary are moving quickly and loudly to “save the poor before the poor save themselves”. They are presenting, or what we call “pimping” the plight of the poor, in such a way as to prevent or preempt the fight of the poor.

On August 11, 1965 some 60,000 to 100,000 people took to the streets of Watts, California in violent protest against inhuman conditions of poverty and police injustice. I was 17 years old then and I was one of the so called “looters” and “rioters” in that uprising. The 1965 Watts Rebellion of poor blacks unleashed the most violent social upheaval in this country since the Civil War, engulfing in flames over 300 major cities during the last half of the 1960s. These events shook everyone, including Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. One summary he gave of these events was that these “riots were the voice of the unheard.” Indeed through the “riots” this desperate voice of the poor black masses was heard around the world. However, Martin Luther King was concerned that this voice and the anger behind it needed to be more constructively and nonviolently channeled and that its message about the injustice of poverty in the midst of plenty needed to be made more clear and effective. This is what his 1968 Poor People’s Campaign was all about. And this is what got him killed. As opposed to the representatives of the Powers That Be, Martin Luther King did not see poor people as a threat. He saw them as “the least of these”, “Gods Children”. He saw them as a potentially powerful and positive force. He stated in December of 1967,

“There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life…”

The Powers That Be have done a great disservice with regards to curriculum and the philosophy of education in the US. 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.

King’s recognition was 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 had begun 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 1999 MLK assassination trial in Memphis, Tennessee – an event for which there was a virtual media black-out.

King recognized that for the load of poverty to be lifted, the thinking and behavior of a critical mass of the American people would have to be changed. To accomplish this change a “new and unsettling force” had to be formed. In late 1967, he described this force as a multi-racial “nonviolent army of the poor, a freedom church of the poor.” In other words, the poor would have to be organized to take action together around their immediate and basic needs, thereby becoming a powerful social and political force capable of changing the terms of how poverty is understood, dispelling the myths and stereotypes upholding the mass complacency that leaves the root causes of poverty intact. King proceeded to translate this analysis into activity. He got from behind the pulpit and hit the pavement, launching the organizing drive of the Poor People’s Campaign. He brought people together, across racial and regional lines to plan for a new march to Washington. He aligned with the struggle of the poor and black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Their struggle for dignity, King suggested, was a dramatization of the issues taken up by the Poor People’s Campaign—a fight by capable, hard workers against dehumanization, discrimination and poverty wages in the richest country in the world.

In a number of respects the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968 anticipated the challenges of our times. We are in a time of acute economic crisis, both in the United States and globally. The acuteness of the crisis has revealed its unique chronic aspects as expressed in the impoverishment of increasing segments of the middle income strata, the so-called “middle class.” Alongside rising hunger, homelessness and economic inequality we find hints of a growing protest movement at the grassroots level. At the same time, the current economic crisis has seriously questioned the prevailing ideological and theological orthodoxies, which have defined the limits of the “realistically” possible for at least the last forty years.

I agree with David Harvey’s assessment that the global financial collapse has shown that economic arrangements are contingent and fallible, and that we can and must legitimately imagine new and different ways to structure economic institutions. I would add however that without a movement issuing specifically from the bottom demanding a more just set of arrangements, it is unlikely that the current crisis will be resolved in a direction qualitatively different than that of the past two decades, which saw a historically unprecedented redistribution of wealth upward. An accounting of the lessons of King’s Poor People’s Campaign and a study of their application to the contemporary struggles of the dislocated and dispossessed is thus both timely and necessary.

Concerned about the lack of careful and systematic study of the Poor People’s Campaign—both its goals and the reasons for its demise—the Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary decided to concentrate much of its energies on study and historical analysis of King’s last years. This project brought together leaders from different poor communities across the U.S. who agreed to join this effort mostly because they felt that networking with other community and religious leaders would greatly strengthen their struggles and organizations. This joint exploration led to the Poverty Initiative’s decision to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Poor People’s Campaign with the development of a Poverty Scholars Program. With these leaders, the Poverty Initiative began by identifying and connecting with local organizing work in impoverished communities and holding strategic dialogues. Learning from the crippling effects of King’s assassination, it becomes clear that there is a need to develop many “Martin Luther Kings.” Such leaders do not develop naturally—they must be systematically educated and trained.

The Poverty Scholars Program is the cornerstone of the Poverty Initiative, reflecting its mission to raise up “generations of religious and community leaders committed to building a movement, led by the poor, to end poverty,” —a mission inspired by the historical and strategic conclusions King arrived at about the poor united across color lines being “a new and unsettling force.” 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 the ability to impact people’s worldviews and 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 movement organizing, and I think the Saul Alinsky community organizing influence and some of the trade union organizing influences have separated those questions for social movements in the U.S. 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 for a broad social movement.

I can give you an example of this need for education and analysis as well as the creativity and ingenuity of the poor from 1993 during the homeless organizing. We had formed a Homeless Union in Houston, Texas, so we had some notoriety because we had done the kinds of things that we needed to do in terms of organizing from service programs like job programs, to protests that brought attention to the issues. We were known for moving families in the dead of winter into empty HUD housing that was deteriorating. It was civil disobedience basically, bringing attention to the conditions and trying to get some kind of response in terms of negotiations. So groups from time to time would ask us to come in to help them organize.

A group in Austin, Texas asked us to come in to deal with a situation where there were no programs to deal with people who had been laid off and then were evicted because they couldn’t pay their rent. Austin had massive numbers of homeless families living in the downtown area in vacant lots, in alleyways, and in structures no bigger than doghouses. We saw it when we walked the streets. They were trying to figure out what to do, so we exchanged experiences, sharing what we had done in other cities to bring attention to the issue and break our isolation. Then we divided up into research groups. Homeless people became researchers, looking at different areas of the city to find out the extent of the problem, the cities priorities, how that found expression, and so on.

One of the research groups went to the city council and got a hold of the budget. They looked at every item on the budget and found that there was nothing being allocated to assist people who were being evicted–no housing programs. What they did find though was a curious item on the budget–monies allocated for the purchase of Canadian Geese to the tune of $800 per goose. The geese that you see downtown that the yuppies and buppies do lunch with and throw bread at, they pay for those bad boys. I didn’t know that. That was one of the reports on Austin’s budget priorities.

Based on that analysis and research we came up with an action plan. Every city has a historic district where someone important did something important– some famous personality came down and used the bathroom or something and they now have a historical marker. We identified this historic district in downtown Austin with these mansions where important people resided, and they have tours where you can come and visit these mansions. Based on our research, we decided to move into one of the mansions. The idea was to bring attention to the issue, so we called the police and the media to tell them about it. The news vans and the police cars raced to the scene. With the news cameras rolling the police jump out of the cars with their guns out, come knock on the door, and yell “come out, we know you’re in there, open the door, come out of there”. For a moment there’s complete silence. Finally the door slowly opens and you see a brother and sister holding one of the geese at knifepoint, and they say “if you come one step closer this goose is cooked”. You know they held the media attention for two weeks discussing what kind of priorities we have when we don’t put human lives and human beings first. Out of that struggle they were able to build connections with the trade union leaders, religious leaders and students. They were able to solve the problem of their isolation and expand their network based on their research, analysis and leadership.

Willie Baptist is a formerly homeless father who came out of the Watts uprisings, the Black Student Movement, and working as a lead organizer with the United Steelworkers. He has 40 years of experience organizing amongst the poor including with the National Union of the Homeless, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union, the National Welfare Rights Union, the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign, and many other networks. Willie currently serves as the Poverty Initiative Scholar-in-Residence and is the Coordinator of the Poverty Scholars Program.

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.

Organizing Upgrade is honored to offer a preview of this insightful reflection on organizing – Engaging the Crisis: Organizing Against Budget Cuts and Building Community Power in Philadelphia – which will appear in Left Turn magazine #36 (April/May 2010).  You can subscribe to Left Turn online at www.leftturn.org or become a monthly sustainer at www.leftturn.org/donate.

On November 6, 2008, just days after Philadelphians poured onto the streets to celebrate the Phillies winning the World Series championship and Barack Obama the US presidency, Mayor Michael Nutter announced a drastic plan to deal with the cities $108 million budget gap. Severe budget cuts were announced, including the closure of 11 public libraries, 62 public swimming pools, 3 public ice skating rinks, and several fire engines. Nutter also stated that 220 city workers would be laid off and that 600 unfilled positions would be eliminated entirely, amounting to the loss of nearly 1,000 precious city jobs. In classic neo-liberal style, the public sector was to sacrifice, while taxpayer money would bail out the private banking institutions.

City in crisis

Well before the economic crises of 2008, a decades-long process of economic restructuring and deindustrialization had left Philadelphia, with a population just over 1.4 million, an incredibly under-resourced city. Philadelphia has the highest poverty rate out of the ten largest cities in the US, an eleven percent unemployment rate and a high-school dropout rate that hovers dangerously around 50 percent.

The proposed budget cuts sparked waves of popular outrage especially concerning the closure of the libraries, many of which are located in low-income communities of color and serve as bedrock institutions for many basic resources. Eleanor Childs, a principal of a school that heavily relies on West Philadelphia’s Durham library, and later a member of the Coalition to Save the Libraries, recalls “a groundswell of concern about the closing of the libraries… people rose up. We had our pitchforks. We were ready to fight to keep our libraries open.”

Nutter’s administration set up eight townhall meetings across Philadelphia, designed to calm the citywide uproar. Thousands of people filled the townhall meetings poised to question how such drastic decisions were made without any public input. Under the banner “Tight Times, Tough Choices,” Mayor Nutter and senior city officials attempted to explain the necessity of such deep service cuts. They explained that the impact of the economic crisis on the city had only become apparent in recent weeks, and because the city could not raise significant revenue to offset its financial loses in the timeframe that was needed, rapid cuts were mandatory and effective January 1, 2009.

Community response

In the following days and weeks, Philadelphians quickly mobilized against the decision that their public services and city workers pay for the fallout of a economic system that had already left so many of them struggling. Neighborhood leaders organized impromptu rallies at the eleven branch libraries. Along with organizing people to turn out at the Mayor’s townhall meetings, these rallies gained media attention on both the nightly news and in the major newspapers, demonstrating widespread opposition to the budget cuts. Sherrie Cohen, member of the Coalition to Save the Libraries and long-time resident of the Ogontz neighborhood of North Philly remembers her neighbors coming together to say, “We are not going to let this library close. It’s not gonna happen. We fought for 36 years for a library in our neighborhood.”

In mid-December 2008, Sherrie Cohen and attorney Irv Ackelsberg, along with plaintiffs from the eleven branches and three City Council members, filed suit against the City citing a 1988 ordinance that says that no city-owned facility may close, be abandoned, or go into disuse without City Council approval. After two days of court hearings packed with library supporters and just hours before the mandated closure, Judge Idee Fox ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and council members by granting an injunction against the closures. In her ruling Judge Fox said, “The decision to close these eleven library branches is more than a response to a financial crisis; it changes the very foundation of our City.”  Commenting on the major victory, Sheila Washington, who lives just a few doors down from the Haddington branch library in West Philadelphia recalls: “I’ve never been so proud in my life to sit in that courtroom and see justice get served. The Coalition out-maneuvered the Mayor and I don’t think he’s gotten over it yet!”

Grassroots leadership

Initially a non-profit advocacy organization, the Friends of the Free Library (FFL)—itself largely funded by the city—coordinated the opposition to the mayor and positioned itself as the leader of the struggle by attempting to negotiate with the City. Without community input, FFL proceeded to put forth a series of low-level demands calling for “shared sacrifice” and a three day-a-week schedule for the entire library system. Having established itself as a mediating force, FFL’s centered its efforts around media attention and backroom negotiation, shying away from any community organizing or alternative legal and civil disobedience strategies.

Community leaders, rooted in the neighborhoods where libraries were about to close, decided they could not afford to settle with the FFL’s “shared sacrifice” strategy. People who organized the very first rallies to defend their neighborhood branches came together with a broader layer of organizers and activists who wanted to support the fight against the budget cuts and the Coalition to Save the Libraries (CSL) was formed.

The CSL quickly set up a working group structure, loosely based on a spokes-council model that allowed for a multiplicity of work to happen simultaneously. We divided into working groups representing our tactical focuses; media, action, outreach, and influencing decision-makers.  Each working group included a mix of people, some experienced in a particular area and others who were coming to the work for the first time. Members taught each other how to draft media talking points and phone scripts for outreach calls, prep meeting agendas and media spokespeople and write press releases for actions at City Hall. With the intention of structuring the leadership of those most affected by the budget cuts at the center of the organization, CSL formed a coordinating committee where multi-racial and cross-neighborhood membership was prioritized.  Weekly meetings featured rotating co-facilitators, usually paired across difference as way to underline the importance and power in multiracial and intergenerational organizing in Philadelphia.

The CSL was born just weeks before the libraries were mandated to close, which left us with a very short timeline and very high stakes. Organizing in the midst of the economic crisis was fast-paced, anxiety-ridden and offered little time to think about long-term vision and strategy. Nonetheless, CSL’s campaign to keep the libraries open and fully functional consistently attempted to combine short-term demands with a long-term vision for educational and economic justice. The Coalition argued that defending community access to public educational resources—computers, books, librarians—becomes even more important in times of economic crisis, especially in light of how many low-income neighborhoods in Philadelphia have been systematically stripped of these resources over the last few decades.

CSL developed a collective analysis that saw libraries as much more than mere buildings with books, but rather, as powerful organizing bases across the city. As Sherrie Cohen put it: “Libraries are one of the few government sponsored institutions left in our communities. They are a beacon of light in our communities, a sanctuary, a community center, a hub of information and resources.” Closing the 11 libraries would be an attack on poor and working people throughout our City, because as Carolyn Morgan, Coalition leader and Southwest Philly resident put it unequivocally, “Taking away these materials would be a form of murder because the mind is not being fed. Just as the physical body needs to be fed in order to be healthy, the mind needs to be fed in order to grow in wisdom and knowledge.”

While the Mayor was proposing stark neoliberal solutions—including a proposal to sell the eleven library buildings and turn them into privately managed “knowledge centers”—we were demanding that public services be considered common, neighborhood-owned institutions. A common refrain of the CSL has been, “You can’t close these libraries because they are not yours to take!” Looking for more action oriented strategies to involve people outraged by the Mayors proposal, the CSL began to create a community budgeting process for Philadelphia by establishing a ‘People’s Court’—a series of actions outside of City Hall coinciding with the opening day of legal hearings, which stated that it was ‘illegal’ to close down the 11 libraries.

Strategic alliances

Building a strong cross-neighborhood alliance to fight the library cuts became central to CSL’s strategy and was successful for a few reasons. Connecting structurally segregated neighborhoods in Philadelphia meant that we were inevitably building a multi-racial, cross-class, intergenerational organization, which we learned holds tremendous power and potential. Gregory Benjamin, Coalition leader and Southwest Philly block captain remarked, “The citywide coalition was dynamite. It gave us an opportunity to connect with other people, communities and  ethnic groups that really had the same concerns that we had.”

By bringing different people from different neighborhoods together the Coalition built a very real feeling of collective power. Sheila Washington recalls: “I was invited to a Coalition meeting and it was wonderful because I was so stressed out. They were removing books and packing up our library. They were moving the after-school program. And I thought, oh my God, what is this neighborhood going to do?” Organizing to defend the libraries helped us cope with the incredibly difficult economic times, together. The budget cuts were coming down in multiple neighborhoods across the city, mostly low-income neighborhoods, and by building alliances among people who were experiencing the affects of these budget cuts our organization replaced feelings of isolation and shock with feelings of strength and a belief that together we could win.

Strategic alliances were built not only across neighborhoods but also across generations. In Philadelphia, a majority of elementary schools rely heavily on their closest public library. With this in mind, a group of third graders led one of our most creative actions—a two-mile book trek from their school to the library. Through the action, young people demonstrated the extremely negative effects of the proposed closings simply by the distance they walked.  Along with strengthening the popular struggle to save the libraries, youth-led actions like these served to build power among the students themselves. Katrina Clark, the students’ teacher, says that whenever they talk about the civil rights movement or other human rights issues the students refer back to the book trek and say, “Like what we did with the libraries?” She added,  “They now have prior knowledge about what it means to fight for their rights…Honestly, that’s what education is about. It’s about empowering students to change the world and giving them the tools they need to do it.”

Long haul

What ultimately stopped the eleven libraries from closing, was the combination of CSL’s short term demands along with its long term vision and popular organizing strategy targeting multiple pressure points. The Coalition accurately assessed the moment and turned widespread anger around the budget cuts into an organized power base; we helped file a lawsuit against the City and organized turnout at legal hearings; and we seriously prepared for a library takeover in the event that the lawsuit failed. Together, the CSL implemented a successful model of crisis-response organizing, by channeling popular outrage into a strong, unified cross-neighborhood force that framed the debate in terms of economic and racial inequity.

Even after winning the court injunction, Philadelphia is still struggling with constant staffing shortages and reduced operation hours due to an $8 million budget cut to the library system. As the library campaign drew to a close, the CSL redirected its efforts to protesting pool closings, attempting to grow and develop into a multi-issue organization.  It was a logical extension of our initial work, as the pool closings affected the same constituencies that were hit hardest by the library closings, poor and working people of Philadelphia.

Because we see this as a long-term struggle, we’ve been working to transition our organization from a crisis-response, single-issue coalition into a multi-issue, long-term grassroots institution in Philadelphia. In order to build for the long haul as an organization, we have continued to tie the budget cuts together and show how they are interconnected, train and develop our leaders, and maintain our cross-neighborhood network. This article is part of our effort to document and reflect on our work as we gear up for the US Social Forum in Detroit this summer.

Our city is in dire need of multi-issue grassroots organizations that are led by poor and working people fighting for social and economic justice and oriented towards organizing to build power in our communities.

Our victory and the relationships we’ve built in the process have given us the inspiration to continue to struggle. Betty Beaufort, Coalition leader and a resident of the Point Breeze neighborhood of South Philadelphia offers powerful advice – “Fight for what you want cause if you don’t fight, you not gonna get nothing. Cause life is a struggle and you wanna turn a struggle into a movement. Don’t get discouraged, cause some days you might say to heck with it, but we need to fight on. Being involved in the Coalition has reminded me of my own strength. We have to be reminded of our own strength because there’s always gonna be something we got to fight for and I’m ready for the fight!”

Kristin Campbell wrote this piece in collaboration with Andalusia Knoll and with additional help from Alia Trindle and Sarah Small. inspired by Eleanor Childs, Sherrie Cohen, Sheila Washington, Carolyn Morgan, Katrina Clark, Gregory Benjamin and Betty Beaufort.

Kristin Campbell grew up in Philadelphia and is a member of the Coalition to Save the Libraries. She has been involved with student, anti-war, global justice, and community organizing efforts over the years. For more information on the CSL please see their blog at: http://coalitiontosavethelibraries.blogspot.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

In April 2009, a round-table of  organizers – all of whom are engaged in both local organizing and national movement-building efforts – came together to talk about big-picture left strategy at the Left Forum in New York City. They talked  about how left organizers and activists need to adapt our work to step up to the demands of our rapidly changing historic moment. This article – composed of the highlights from the roundtable – was originally published in the April / May 2009 issue of Left Turn magazine.  You can access more of the discussion through the  video and audio links below.

Ai-jen Poo is the Lead Organizer at Domestic Workers United in New York City. DWU is a founding member of the National Domestic Workers Alliance and a member of Grassroots Global Justice.

Gihan Perera is the Executive Director of the Miami Workers Center. MWC is a founding member of the Right to the City Alliance and a member of Grassroots Global Justice.

Harmony Goldberg convened this roundtable. One of the founders of SOUL (School Of Unity & Liberation), she is a long-time movement educator and facilitator.  She is currently a student at the CUNY Graduate Center and one of the editors of Organizing Upgrade.

Marisa Franco is the Lead Organizer with the Right to the City Alliance, a national alliance of grassroots organizations working for urban justice.

Steve Williams is a Co-Director at POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) in San Francisco. POWER is a member of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the Right to the City Alliance and Grassroots Global Justice.

Willie Baptist is the coordinator of the Poverty Scholars program at Union Theological Seminary. He has extensive experience with poor peoples’ organizations, including the Kensington Welfare Right Union and the National Homeless Union.

Why do you think that community organizing in working class communities of color is some of the most important work that leftists can be doing today?

Ai-jen: If we’re going to create conditions for a revolutionary movement in this country, then two key things need to happen. The first is that we need to build the capacity of the grassroots movement to really have an impact on the conditions of the working class.  I think that happens through having a strong base in the communities that are at the frontlines of exploitation and the economic crisis.  We also need to transform the labor movement in the United States to truly act in the interests of the working class. The grassroots movement has been evolving, and now we’re in a moment where we can start to bring these two areas of work together in a way that helps to create the conditions for a revolutionary movement in this country.

Steve: When POWER started organizing welfare recipients in 1997, it was our intuition that we were organizing in working class communities of color who were not a traditional “working class in the factories” for a reason, that there were changes happening in the economy that made these communities a strategic sector. In the circuit of capital that Marx talked about, there’s extraction, production and consumption. We don’t think that production is the only place you can jam that circuit up; you can actually jam up the system at any of those points. Because people in the United States were getting displaced from factories, we felt that jamming up the site of consumption – and particularly in the cities – was a strategic venture, and we felt that working class communities of color were particularly well-placed to meet that struggle. The intuition that these particular communities can actually be the revolutionary subject, and not just a charitable group to organize, is critical.

Gihan: Before we started the Miami Workers Center, we had been union organizers with a clothing and textile workers union in the South. Even though we were organizing when all the textile factories were shutting down, there was very little room in the union model to talk with the workers about how their issues and their experiences were connected to the dynamics of global capitalism. The line was, “Keep your factory open.  Get ten more cents.” When we left the union and started the Workers Center, we were looking to do two things.  The first was to speak to peoples’ experiences outside of their relationship to employment, including their relationship to race and to their communities. The second was to create an organizing model that actually took their day-to-day struggles and raised deeper consciousness out of them. Much of the community organizing work that’s taken place over the last twenty years in the United States has been anti-left. It was started out of antagonism to left movements in the 1960s and ‘70s. It had a very pragmatic orientation that said, “We are just about bread-and-butter issues. We are not about ideology, and we don’t touch the system.” That has really been the dominant form of community organizing in the United States. We’re coming from a different perspective that is trying to figure out to refound a left grassroots movement and a left organizing model in the United States.

What are the opportunities and the challenges that the economic crisis and the Obama administration are presenting to the left and to grassroots movements?

Marisa: There is a real opportunity for us to collectively learn a different level of engagement.  For a long time, the approach of the left and the grassroots has been “No! Stop that! We don’t want that.” We’ve been very clear about who our targets are; there were no qualms that Bush was the enemy and that his door was closed. With the Obama administration, it’s not that way; it’s actually very complicated.  He’s going to do a lot of things that we favor, and he’s also going to do things that we don’t agree with, as we’ve seen already seen. I would argue that we have to be able to engage with the administration on a different level, on a more sophisticated level politically. There are actually a lot of opportunities for folks to access this administration. We don’t necessarily have influence because, to have influence, we need to get up to the point where they have to listen to us. But I do think that we can access some people in this administration. That gives us an opportunity to impact the responses to the economic crisis, from the TARP to the stimulus and the housing crisis. In that, I think we need to emphasize our solutions and our alternatives. I think there’s real opportunity to be able to learn from jumping out and trying some new things. There’s a balance between analyzing the situation carefully and taking risks, but in this period we have to make choices and move.  In making those choices, we have to be prepared to lose and learn lessons from that, but we also have to be prepared to win and to know what will come out of that too. We have to dare to experiment with intention.

Ai-jen: We need to get involved in fights that are already in motion, like the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA). Capital has formed an incredible united front to stop the Employee Free Choice Act from moving forward. Labor has framed it narrowly, but this is the kind of fight that actually has mass potential. The vast majority of people in the United States are likely to believe in this issue, and they could really throw down for it. The right to organize is a human rights issue, and it’s the role of the left to popularize that and to frame it in a deeper political and historical context. We need to organize and talk about how many groups – like domestic worker and farmworkers – are actually excluded from the right to organize and about how EFCA is a stepping stone towards the expansion of the right to organize to include the people who are currently excluded. We need to take up the fights that are already in motion and to bring what we can as a left to those fights: to strengthen them, to deepen them and to have them be part of a revolutionary strategy.

Willie: This crisis is crossing color lines and even class lines. The so-called middle class is beginning to be affected by this crisis, and the middle class has historically been crucial in terms of power relations in this country. If the power structure can maintain the middle class, then it has a social base of support. But now that middle class is being dismantled. That’s a tremendous opportunity for us, but it’s also a possible danger.  As we saw in the Tea Party process, the Right goes after the poor whites and the middle class whites. Meanwhile the left focuses in the inner cities with people of color. So how do we develop a strategic outlook that allows us to counteract the Right, especially as more and more people in the middle class are having to look around for alternatives in this moment? We could lose in this game. Even though the Religious Right lost, they still have a network of seminaries and organizations in these areas outside of the major cities, in the small cities and towns. We need to reckon with these forces if we are talking about moving this country towards real change. I’m scared about the limits of our understanding. If we don’t broaden our understanding, we’re going to find ourselves pawns of a greater power game.

Steve: If we want to meet the demands of this moment, we need a stronger left. In my opinion, the left isn’t composed of the people it needs to be if we want to win. Working class folks and folks of color should make up the bulk of the left. Many people in our generation represent a bridge between the left and the social movements that are based in these communities. When I started doing the work, I didn’t know a lot of the folks who were doing organizing and who had these kind of politics; today, there are many more of us. The challenge is that we don’t get together; we don’t have regular ways to communicate. We don’t have consistent spaces or organizations where we can have these kinds of strategic conversations. Ultimately, I think that we’ve got to create a new socialist party in the United States to meet that need. I don’t think that we’re there yet, but one of the steps I think we should take to get there is to create an organization or network of leftists who are engaged in organizing so we can begin having more of these kind of strategic conversations.

What are the main fronts of resistance that are going to develop in the next period? What are the key demands and visions that we should be promoting?

Willie: We need to anticipate how this crisis will play itself out. The Depression hit in 1929, but it wasn’t until 1933 until you  had a real mass reaction. How do we position ourselves and anticipate leaps in development so that we can give some kind of direction to this process? Basically, I think Mohammad has got to go to the mountain ‘cause the mountain ain’t ever going to come to Mohammad. And the mountain is the people. The people are beginning to stir because of their conditions. There is often this very abstract discussion that says, “Here’s our analyses of economic and tactical developments, so therefore let’s try this or that.”  It’s good to put it forward as a hypothesis, but ultimately you have to go to the mountain and engage.  Because what we consider as problems might be non-issues to what they are most agitated about, what the people who are out there fighting are immediately prepared to fight over. We have to start where people are at and not where people ain’t at.  In the late ‘80s, homeless people – out of necessity – started to take over abandoned buildings. That didn’t come out of a discussion or a sensitivity session. It was about “We are homeless. What do we do with our families and kids in the dead of winter? Where do we go?”  So people started occupying buildings. Most social movements have come out of that kind of compulsion and not some great idea. That part comes later. At that time, the National Homeless Union pulled off a synchronized movement in 73 cities; we organized takeovers in thirteen cities across the country. It was an organized expression of what the homeless people were already doing. There was a pattern, although the consciousness of that pattern wasn’t there. It was just people doing what they had to do. It’s happening again today with this crisis; people are having to deal with foreclosures. Brothers and sisters in Michigan and Miami are putting people back into housing.  These are patterns we are going to have to look at. We need to relate to that whole process so we can help move it forward. Having analytical tools is important, but it’s critical to use these analytic tools to study these patterns and what the people are actually going to respond to. If we don’t engage the people in these communities, then we aren’t going to be able to determine how to approach these questions People move on their terms, not on our terms.

Marisa: I want to pick up on that point. There are massive foreclosures happening, and there are just tremendous opportunities for tactics like occupations and squatting of vacant properties. People are taking that up in different struggles across the country: folks in Boston are doing blockades against the evictions of tenants, Take Back the Land in Miami has been moving people back into foreclosed homes, and ACORN has been doing eviction defense.  So it’s already out there, and it’s happening. I think the question is strategy. Like Willie said, these actions, these movements are compulsory. They’re based out of need and out of circumstance that you can’t necessarily predict. But at a certain point, we need to ask, “What is the critical strategic points where we’re trying to go? What are the opportunities?”  I think we need to connect what the banks have to do with it. The banks are receiving tax-payer dollars, and they’re evicting people from their homes. People have all this outrage around the banks and the CEOs right now. Five years ago, if you asked most people what they thought about CEO’s salaries, their reaction was likely to be something like, “Well, they worked hard for it, and they deserve it.” But now, people are pissed. They’re like, “I lost my job, and I’m getting kicked out of my house. And this fool is flying his own jet and getting paid?” There’s this real frustration with the banks and corporate America that we just haven’t seen in recent times. It’s actually becoming a common opinion. We haven’t been able to seize on that, but I think it’s an opening.

Gihan: None of us are really making democratic demands on all this stimulus money. We should make demand for participatory budgeting at local and state levels for all of that money, including the right for community organizations to have a say in the discretion of that money.  We can make demands on what will be done with that stimulus money that let us start developing and practicing alternatives right now. For example, in Argentina, they have actually started taking over factories and self-producing. We’re far behind that in terms of our struggle, but there is definitely a crisis of production here. Take Back the Land has done an incredible job of starting to take over foreclosed housing in Miami, and one of the things we’re thinking about is: Can we do the same thing around the economy? Can we demand that stimulus money goes into letting us set up a community-run recycling plant that would hire ex-felons? Can we start taking land over, developing productive capacity and start thinking about what a creative self-determined economy could be? if If we can actually join forces and push for a much deeper structural program,  we can push the Obama administration and develop creative ways to practice alternatives.

Steve: The question of the role of the state and corporations in the market is in flux right now. For example, look at the stimulus money for green jobs. Obama thinks that green jobs should be developed in the private sector. His plan is not like the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the 1930s where the government employed people. The assumption is that the government can’t really employ people well.  But that’s something we should fight over. We should say, “You know what? The private sector already messed up the economy. They shouldn’t be in charge of all of this job creation. We think that putting that money in the public sector gives us a level of accountability that we want. We don’t want the private sector to be creating green jobs.”  Another example is the housing crisis. There’s all these luxury condominiums in cities around the country that were built up on speculation. Now, they’re sitting empty. It would be interesting for us to start to take over some of those properties.  We could do it very publicly and say that, “Not only are we taking over this housing because it needs to be used, but ultimately the developers received public subsidies to build them. We are reclaiming that.”

AUDIO:

Much appreciation to Lisa Rudman from the National Radio Project for sharing this recording.

VIDEO:

Part 1: Why Organize in Working Class Communities of Color?

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Part 2: What opportunities and challenges do the economic crisis and Obama’s election present to the left and to grassroots movements?

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Part 3: What should our main fronts of resistance be in this period? What visions and demands should we be promoting?

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Much appreciation to Sumitra Rajkumar for recording the panel and editing the video.

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