Joseph Phelan of Organizing Upgrade sat down with Purvi Shah and Chuck Elsesser of the Community Justice Project based at Florida Legal Services in Miami in early April to discuss the role of lawyers in grassroots organizing, social movements, and building another world.

What is the relationship between lawyering and social justice?

Historically, while not always clearly articulated, different legal models have developed as to how to use the law to create social justice. The civil legal-aid model, believes that the major problem with the legal system is a lack of lawyers.  It argued that if there were just enough lawyers to represent every single poor person, the courts would be able to administer a just result. The test-case or impact litigation model, believes that systemic social change can result from carefully targeted class action litigation.   The social-rescue model believes that poverty is the result of failure of  social and other support services, including, legal services.

The first two of these models believe in the underlying justness of the legal system – if you can simply have a lawyer to enforce the law, or have the right case argued to the right judge justice will result.  The third model assumes that poor people are poor largely because of their own failings. They are simply “broken people” who need comprehensive services to be “fixed.” Not one of these models takes into account the long standing systems of class and racial discrimination and oppression, which have resulted in systemic powerlessness of whole communities.  Many of the classic conflicts between organizers and traditional legal services lawyers can be attributed to this disconnect between their differing theories of social change. Traditionally, lawyers and organizers have vastly differently analyses on why our world is the way it is.

We believe that the poverty of our clients is simply a symptom of the larger disease of systemic oppression and conscious inequality.  We use legal advocacy to build the power of communities to challenge and eradicate these systems of inequality.  In this model, rather than saviors or gatekeepers, lawyers are tacticians in the struggle for change.  We call it community lawyering.

Can you break down your model a little more?

Similar to the different schools of thought in organizing (community vs. union, Alinksy vs. ideological), community lawyering has many different strains. What sets community lawyers apart from each other boils down to their answers to the following three questions: Who do you work with? What do you do for them? And how do you work together?  Similar to organizing, the answers to these questions vary depending on the political orientation of the lawyer and the theory of social change they ascribe to.

Our particular brand of community lawyering believes in supporting community organizations and other organized groups of people (i.e. worker/tenant associations, community coalitions, and unions) that shift power through collective action and strategic campaigns. Like many organizers, we believe sustainable change comes through building large-scale, democratic organizations focused on building the power and conscious leadership of poor and working people. By using legal advocacy to support organizing, community education, and leadership development, community lawyering allows lawyers to have a much larger impact that any one lawsuit.

That brings us to the “what.” This is the area of our work that is least regimented. Pretty much anything is fair game. Depending on the campaign goals and our relationship with a particular organizer/organization, we will support a campaign with a variety of tactics including litigation, policy advocacy, research, community education, and infrastructure/institution building. In the past we have: conducted know-your-rights trainings; presented at public forums to advance campaign demands; worked with members to develop their public-speaking and writing skills; litigated individual cases on behalf of workers and residents; litigated actions on behalf of classes of workers, tenant associations or the base-building organizations itself; drafted policies or legislation; researched and provided technical assistance to develop a campaign strategy; and provided transactional and corporate advice to new and existing organizations. Our goal is to increases our clients’ participation and control over complicated and time-consuming legal processes that can otherwise be alienating. But perhaps more important than what we do, is what we aim not to do. We aim to transfer knowledge and skills to organizers and clients so that we are not relied on all the time. Through every case, we hope to be expanding the collective knowledge base within the organization.

For us, the “how” comes down to accountability. We believe that our clients (whether organizational or individual) are partners—not just in name—but in leadership, control and decision-making. The lawyer-client relationship is rife with power dynamics that do not evaporate simply because the long-term goals of the lawyer are aligned with that of the organizer or client. Therefore, we also believe that community lawyers must be engaged in a regular practice of self-scrutiny and self-reflection. If lawyers want to practice law in respectful, responsible and accountable manner, we believe you have to be constantly evaluating your work to determine if it perpetuates racism, sexism, homophobia, classism and elitism. To that end, we believe that community lawyers should be engaged in a process of political study and growth collectively with organizers.  Poor communities of color face multiple and intersecting injustices and good lawyering requires a deep understanding of race, class, and power.

How are you as lawyers able to encourage collective power building?

The legal system in the Unites States is very individualistic. It tends to atomize disputes, which works against an organizing model. The legal system is designed to address disputes between a single plaintiff and a single defendant. Because of this, many ethical and procedural rules make it incredibly difficult to use litigation to achieve collective goals. For example,  when you settle a lawsuit, attorney-client privilege only applies if you don’t involve a third-party in the discussion–which means organizers cannot be in the room when you discuss settlement with you client. The obvious solution would be to try to represent a group rather than individuals. But sometimes the rigorous procedural rules of litigation force disputes to remain individualized, because for whatever reasons we don’t have standing to represent the worker association nor tenant union as a whole. These rules and many others are serious obstacles to utilizing a collective approach to grievances.

Lawyers that are battling these obstacles have to constantly be thinking of mechanisms to both obtain positive results for their individual clients while furthering the goals of the client’s organization. We struggle with this challenge constantly and work with clients to reinforce their understanding of both their dispute as a collective grievance and the legal strategy as simply a tool in a collective response. Hopefully, the clients themselves will want to share their learning experiences and their increased understanding of the problem by continuing to participate in the organizational campaign.  But poor clients and their families are burdened with enormous pressures so it doesn’t always work that way. However, we are constantly working in an educational way to foster that collective understanding of the problem.

Another common experience is that clients will be offered a settlement agreement that, while of marginal benefit to the collective, offers substantial benefit for the individual. We’ve seen this tactic used time and time again to split off individuals from the collective. Many lawyers handle these situations by simply communicating the offer to the client without any conversation about its benefits/detriments to the collective goals. Though we agree that ethical rules require lawyers to allow the client to make all settlement decisions, the rules do not prohibit honest and frank discussions between lawyers and clients about the individual and collective benefits of any possible settlement. We are not shy about reminding clients about the collective goals they had at the beginning of the case and that the individual settlement being offered to them doesn’t reflect their original goals. In this way, lawyers can work refocus clients back towards their initial collective vision.

What are some lessons you have from being lawyers and engaging in that level of consciousness raising, encouraging people to engage in collective action or understanding? What are the limitations that law puts on you in engaging in this type of work?

One of our major observations is that most people, regardless of their personal history, expect the legal system to deliver justice. Our educational system, T.V., pop culture, all reinforce the idea that ultimately if we have the opportunity to tell our story to a judge, justice would result.  Initially, it is also important to remember that very, very few poor people ever get the opportunity to tell their story to a judge (at least on the civil side.)  The number of poor people actually represented in civil disputes, such as landlord-tenant matters, is infinitesimal.  However, so many people believe that if they could just get that “champion” lawyer, they would be able to obtain justice and fairness.

But the reality is that most of the harms experienced by poor and working people in this country simply are not illegal.  Even if represented by the best lawyer, any poor person who goes into court will be outgunned by overwhelming resources. In addition, they face the systemic biases of both the substantive law and the judicial decision makers whether judge or jury. As such, the law quite literally is designed to protect private property and capital investment and not to render justice.

None of this is to say that we do not believe in challenging and pushing the law to change—reform struggles in the law can be incredibly important in highlighting contradictions and challenging the dominant narrative. We often engage in counter-hegemonic conversations with our organizer counterparts and our clients in order to set reasonable expectations around what type of justice is possible to obtain from the legal system. We consistently have to remind people that the law is a tactical tool, not a solution. We often times have shift perspectives from seeing winning the lawsuit as victory to seeing the lawsuit as simply an opportunity in a larger strategy.

In addition, we constantly remind the client and the group that the court is just another political venue. The truth is, sometimes we have to remind ourselves as well. Experience has taught us that when you pack the courtroom with thirty people, you transform that venue back into a political one where success is influenced by collective power. Judges like any other political entity respond to this. As people associate the political struggle with the legal victory it demystifies the whole process of the lawyer winning a case. You get something that is a response to the collective struggle and presence.

This model sounds  like it is directly in line with this model of organizing that is paired with  political education and leadership development of grassroots communities. What is the response to this coming from other lawyers? Is it growing in popularity?

This style of lawyering has been around. It has been present in different movements and different struggles but it remains fairly uncommon due to the challenges and obstacles to institutionalizing this approach. The first of these challenges is that, amongst lawyers (and the public), there is lack of understanding of what organizing is. A lot of lawyers out there simply don’t understand what organizing is. It is this lack of a common language that often perpetuates the divide and disconnect between organizers and service providers. Part of it is that people are speaking different languages and can’t see how to connect the dots. However, historically (and rightfully so), there has been considerable distrust of “community” lawyers. All organizers can recount examples of where lawyering in support of communities or in the name of communities has been done wrong and has created a lot more harm than good. Lawyers can take up a lot of space. Power can gravitate to lawyers. If both lawyers and organizers are not hyper-vigilant about managing and passing along that power, lawyers can be destructive for community organizations or organizers.

An additional challenge is that, unfortunately, young lawyers are not being taught community lawyering in law schools. If you are a progressive or left lawyer, there are not many places to get training to figure out how to lawyer in support of community organizing. There is a dearth of mentors and elders to train the next generation of community lawyers. Many progressives who decide to attend law school end up being frustrated and choose to never practice law. Like anything else, a community-based practice of law is something that has to be taught. Our project is working to bridge this gap by teaching in clinical programs at local law schools and running a summer institute for law students to train the next generation. Also, though there are a number of lawyers across the country engaged in the practice of community lawyering, the theory on community lawyering is, at best, embryonic. Those of us engaged in the practice have simply not been able to effectively distill and document our experiences in a cohesive and clear theory.

Finally, for those lawyers who believe in this type of work, most are housed in institutions that tie their hands because of limitations from funding sources. The vast majority of lawyers that represent low-income people are housed in legal-services/legal-aid organizations many of which are funded by the Legal Services Corporation Grants from the federal government. These LSC grants put specific limitations on the type of legal work grantees can engage in, the most notable being that LSC-funded lawyers cannot bring class actions and cannot engage in lobbying. These limitations, as they were designed to do, have had a stifling effect on community-based legal work. As a result, part of our work at CJP has been to build new partnerships and identify clear opportunities for community lawyering to occur within existing legal-services institutions. We firmly believe that the individual legal representation that traditional legal-services organizations engage in is still really important work. However, there are no funding restrictions that prevent that same work from being done in partnership with sophisticated community organizations.  If just a small part of that resource could be redirected to lawyering support of organized communities that could have a huge impact.

When you go back and look at the history of the various models we have talked about they were all models that were led by people who had a belief they would work to affect social change. They were based on all sorts of ideas about how social change comes about at different points in our history.  While one could argue their efficacy in the past, there is general agreement that they are no longer effective.  Indeed the past decade has seen a dramatic retrenchment in the ability to bring social change cases into court.  Simply getting past procedural challenges has become an almost impossible barrier.  And substantive challenges then confront an increasingly hostile judiciary and legislature. Lawyers who do this type of work are looking for more alternatives, and looking again at some of the ideas that were considered secondary when the appellate courts were more supportive, where the federal courts were much more open, where you used to be able to go into court and obtain a hearing and have an impact. That is not the case now. Models that take this change into account and internalize it and say that lawyers can still effect change become more attractive. This is a clear opportunity for community lawyering.

Can you tell us about some of your most effective collaborations with community organizations or community organizers?

We have worked on a number of different collaborations with local groups. But when you are in a defensive mode success is relative. But certainly we would say our collaboration with the Miami Workers Center around the Scott Homes Campaign was successful. [Scott Homes was a public housing project in Miami that was demolished using federal funds through the HOPE VI program]. Miami Workers Center and Low-Income Families Fighting Together waged an 8 year campaign to defend former residents’ rights, and build back the projects. We worked with LIFFT and MWC throughout that campaign both as litigators and as advisors. We used the courts to: create a forum, a space, to push out a different perspective on HOPE VI; to bolster the political power of the residents; to slow down the project to some extent; and to provide organizers with knowledge of opportunities to insert themselves in the development process.  We see it as a successful collaboration even though the projects have yet to be built back.

One of the enormous benefits of working with organizers is that they focus on a set of clear and specific demands. Those clear and specific demands in the Scott campaign were one-for-one replacement and the right to return. These demands dramatized and underlined what was wrong with HUD’s existing program and highlighted the need to fix it. That, over time, is what allows for a change in the political climate. It is not individualized responses in different places it is a clear and cohesive response that makes change. That is an organizing approach and not a lawyer approach.

One of the other reasons that this was, and continues to be, a successful collaboration is because we [CJP and MWC] have been able to shift the debate in the policy world.  The demands that came out of this campaign (and others like it) have infiltrated the U.S. Department of HUD. We recently attended a conference where the Secretary of HUD highlighted the right to return and one-for-one replacement as the crown jewel of a new HUD program. Whether HUD will truly honor and enforce these demands is up in the air (and probably unlikely), however, it is undeniable that the Scott fight and other similar fights like it across the country significantly shifted the debate and dialogue at the federal level. Rather than arguing about whether public housing residents should have the right to return when their homes are demolished, the conversation with HUD now is about how to truly ensure that public housing residents have the right to return.

That ability to shift the debate, and shift the conversation around policy really is the opportunity for lawyers and organizers. Whether we win our concrete campaign demands or not, the collaboration between lawyers and organizers creates real opportunities. Lawyers can pull organizers into spaces we have access to where these discussions are happening. Over time, these on-the-ground fights shift the general understanding of what true wealth and strength is in low-income communities, and change common sense to be that there is plenty worth preserving in low-income communities.

One of the challenges with campaigns like Scott and others we have been involved (such as Power U’s Crosswinds campaign) is that victory is the absence of destruction.  Even if we get one–for-one replacement, Scott will still never be back, that community will never be back and what we end up with is the least worst of the alternatives.  Many organizing struggles in recent history have been strictly oppositional struggles focused on stopping the destruction of a community by unrestrained development and capital. One of the real challenges for organizers and lawyers and everybody that are fighting these campaigns is figuring out how to shift from these defensive battles where all we are trying to do is get the least worse result to battles that look at the creation of positive alternatives. This is something we all have a great deal to learn about.

What role can lawyers play in putting forward an alternative progressive vision?

Community organizers looking to build progressive social movements need to have a fairly sophisticated understanding of how the government works. This role is one that lawyers can play since lawyers, unfortunately, are the priests and priestesses of power. Our daily work involves engaging within systems of power. We can thus contribute to social movements a different perspective and analysis from within  “the system.”

Ultimately, it all depends on the relationship between the organizers and the lawyers. As relationships grow and as trust develops lawyers can be very important to have in the room as you are doing campaign planning and campaign development. We can see opportunities; we speak in the language of power. We can identify forums for the political dialogue. There is a real shared dialogue that can happen in a fruitful way.  There are certain things that only lawyers can do. But there is also a whole bunch of thing that lawyers can do in support of communities that communities can do for themselves as well. The way we see our role if we know how to do something we try to pass that on, to allow people to be in more control of information. As individuals deal with different situations they have an expanded vision of how to tackle what is going on in front of them.

In addition, when folks come up with alternative solutions, lawyers can figure out how to craft and implement solutions in a manner that truly changes people’s lives. Is there something unlawful or illegal that’s happening? Is there some way to advocate that the system function differently? Are there rights that are being trampled on? That is the main role lawyers can play. One thing we can do is break down the legal rule in a way that helps groups to facilitate their own power. We can say in particular project that there needs to be a hearing because the law says there needs to be a hearing, and we can help draft the language to the hearing. This has little substantive relevance but it does create a forum for political power and interface with whoever the government power is. We can interpret the rules in a way that allows the expression of the power and the will of the community to better impact the government.

While lawyers certainly are not central to change, lawyers have skills that throughout history have been useful for progressive and revolutionary movements for change. Gandhi and Mandela were both lawyers. And while being a lawyer is not what made each of these individuals most helpful or insightful, their legal training and legal skills were no doubt assets to the movements for a free India and a free South Africa.

Are there any legal openings or shifts in policy that ground organizing groups are not taking advantage of?

We could propose a couple from our experience. Our analysis is that most community organizations have been in a very defensive mode, they have been using all of their resources just to give up as little as possible. That leads to a certain type of organizing which is oppositional.  There is a particular type of lawyering that goes a long with that, which blocks projects that tries to maintain the status quo. That has grown out of the objective reality of the past decade.

We think that the political conditions and the political moment have changed. The economic recession has stemmed the tide of the gentrification and the gobbling up of land, temporarily easing the pressures that were leading to the outright destruction of our communities. In addition, many organizers have played out the limits of that oppositional approach. We have seen the extent of which how much power that position can build. The trick now is to figure out how to take the next step that can affirmatively build power and institutions. We don’t have a lot of examples because our clients have been so deeply involved in the defensive strategy. But people, at very low-levels, have been trying to build affirmative institutions and governing institutions.  People are trying to figure out how to build successes that don’t just maintain the status quo but that quantifiably improve the material conditions. That is a shift in the mode of organizing and lawyering.

We think this is the time for organizers and lawyers to develop solutions. To think deeply about how to design policies and programs that would work differently, to engage the hard practice of figuring what does work. Coming up with solutions is hard work. It requires all of us to engage in levels of conversation that we are not used to. We are used to protesting. We are used to bite-sized slogans and critique. But if we breakthrough our habits and beginning coming up with true alternatives, there are opportunities right now to implement these ideas.  There are opportunities to amass more power and a larger base through providing services and tangibly changing the landscape of communities.

How to get in the game, when you have been shut out of it for so long, is the difficult thing. Therefore, we think it is still critical for organizers to engage in some bread and butter organizing. We still need political power to move ideas and capitalize on the opportunities out there right now. But overall, there is an increasing sense that opposition to gentrifying projects, destructive projects, destruction of communities is not enough in and of itself to build a significant movement. There has to be more than that to excite people, to build the kind of power that people need. Lawyers and organizers need to work together to inspire people to take action from their heart and souls.

The Community Justice Project was founded in 2008 to provide legal support to grassroots organizations in Miami’s low-income communities. Rooted in the law and organizing movement, CJP’s lawyering style has many names—community lawyering, political lawyering, movement lawyering—but fundamentally we believe that lawyers are most effective when they assist those most impacted by marginalization and oppression lead their own fights for justice.

For the last eight years, Purvi Shah has worked for economic and racial justice at various organizing, legal, and policy organizations across the country. Purvi joined the staff at Florida Legal Services in 2006 to provide litigation and policy support to community organizations fighting gentrification in Miami’s urban neighborhoods.  In 2008, she co-founded the Community Justice Project, to develop and advance the theory and practice of community lawyering. Over the last four years, Purvi has litigated numerous cases on behalf of community organizations in the areas of affordable housing, racial justice, community development and tenant’s rights.  Purvi is also a law professor at the University of Miami, School of Law, where she co-directs the Community Lawyering Clinic. She serves as corporate attorney to the Miami Workers Center Board of Directors and a resource ally to the Right to the City Alliance. Purvi received her dual degree in Social Policy and Political Science from Northwestern University in 2002 and a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) in 2006.

Charles Elsesser has  almost 40 years of experience in lawyering for the poor. Early in his practice in the he represented poor people in California as a part of California Rural Legal Assistance, doing double duty as a Clinical Instructor of Law at University of Southern California Law Center in Los Angeles. Following this early training  he served as the Director of Litigation at Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, was awarded the Award of Merit by the Legal Assistance Association of California, served as Senior Consultant to the California State Senate Rules Committee, and the Director of the Housing Department of the City of Santa Monica, Ca. In 1992 he relocated to Miami, Florida.   Initially he was employed as an attorney at Legal Services of Greater Miami, Inc. and, since 1997, he has worked at Florida Legal Services, Inc. where he has been involved in civil rights and housing litigation and advocacy, and where he co-founded the Community Justice Project along with Purvi Shah and Jose Rodriguez.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The original article “New Kids on the Historic Bloc”  was written by Jon Liss and David Staples This article  takes off from where that one left off and  is based on an interview between Rishi Awatramani and Jon Liss.

New Kids on the Historic Bloc – Workers’ Centers and Municipal Socialism – A Summary and Postscript

Crisis, Capitalist Refounding and the Reagan Historic Bloc

Over the last 30 years capital has ‘re-founded’ itself by imposing neo-liberal programs (see Theodore/Peck) linked with imperialist expansion.  This refounding was a response to a crisis of accumulation or declining profit rates.  Components of neo-liberalism include: privatization, aggressive attacks on unions, attacks on the ‘social’ wage in general and women of color in particular.  We use a framework of ideas, institutions and program of actions to describe the New Right program for the last thirty years. The dominant ideas of the New Right include concepts that support ‘getting government off the people’s back’, stop taxing and spending, etc. Institutions that propagate and implement neo-liberalism range from the Manhattan Institute (urban policy) to the U.S. Congress, while programs have included efforts to cut taxes on the wealthy or slash welfare as we know it.  Up until the last 18 months their program could largely be classified as a smashing success.  Because of their ideological hegemony, both dominant electoral parties accept some variation of their ideology concerning the role of government in the functioning of the economy.  These politics and policies were made dominant through the forging of an historic bloc that both elects like-minded officials but also serves as a political tail wind that keeps things they way they are. By expertly blending racism with appeals to capitalist mythology, Reagan manufactured an anti-new deal majority that was tied to industrial capital, military and industrial capital, extractive industries/capital, white workers, farm owners and outer suburbanites.  In one form or another this bloc has set the parameters of dominant politics for the last thirty years.  However, the twin jolts of economic collapse and demographic shifts (massive immigration from Latin American and Asia) created the reality of Obama’s election and indicate a conjunctural opportunity to aggressively challenge the dominant ideas, institutions and program of the last 30 years.

Recomposition of the Working Class

These massive changes in the political economy had major effect on the composition of the Working Class in the US. There are a number of factors responsible for this re-composition: 1) Over the last 30-40 years, manufacturing jobs moved overseas. In this period in particular, the US experienced massive de-industrialization of sectors that had been at the heart of the economy and the main provider of stable employment for the dominant white male sector of the working class (and therefore a central site of Working Class organization and struggle). Flexible and unstable employment in the low-wage service sectors, public service  and government jobs, or some form of state welfare dependence emerged as the primary bread-winning opportunities for working-class people. 2) During this same period, there was a significant increase in immigration, due  to both the liberalization of immigration policy in the 60’s and 70’s, as well as the deepening economic crises of working people in the Third World (crises which were caused primarily by the creation of massive national debts through Structural Adjustment policies). 3) The disappearance of well-paid working class jobs and the increase in unstable, low-wage jobs meant that women of color in particular were to, more than ever before, be forced to work double time: in their unpaid labor in domestic work in their own homes and in paid work, typically in low-wage service sector positions (in some cases, doing paid domestic work for other families).

Through these changes, the working class has been recomposed, and is much more populated by immigrants, people of color, and women. Significantly, this recomposition has also created a more unstable, highly flexible, and poorly compensated working class that faces speed-up pressures, contingent work, and limited benefits.

A central task for our period, then, is to figure out which are the key nodes in this reshaped political economy at which we must build strong, fighting mass organizations, and which are the key historical actors that can build unity and lead a movement against capital and exploitation. For example, a part of our project is to develop demands for child care providers, taxi drivers, janitors, and even computer or biotechnology workers (who share the contingency of work and low/no benefits with other members of the new working class).

We face an uphill battle to achieve the key tasks of this period, as we fight against a dominant ideology which is not on our side, labor laws that do more to divide workers and protect the interests of bosses than promote workers’ rights, a historical trajectory that has left us with diminished social movements and organizations, and spatial divisions that isolate our organizations and movements.

Social Reproduction: gender, market integration, and a rising history maker!

Part of the dominant class response to the accumulation crisis was to bring fully into market conditions socially reproductive labor, or in other words, to move work that was not traditionally waged into the waged work world.  This is work usually done by  women that is involved in the reproduction (schooling, childcare, housekeeping, elder care, etc.) of the next generation of workers.  Capital continually looks to fill its insatiable need to expand by moving unwaged work to waged work.  The movement of women into the labor force, particularly its most undervalued and super-exploited sectors, expands the labor market and the production of surplus value.

Neo-liberal restructuring drove a polarization of wealth and power and created a new demand for a whole range of domestic service and services.  This emerging stratum of the working class is the lowest paid, works the longest hours and is in perennial crisis.  In addition, immigration laws further segment the labor market creating a gray market for undocumented workers who have little legal productions under the law.  At this intersection of race, class and gender has emerged the rising history maker – working women of color – who are largely the social base of the new working class organizations that have arisen in the last two decades.

In Northern Virginia this has meant immigrant women who work in hotels or the service industry who join Tenants and Workers United. Elsewhere – in urban areas throughout the country – it is women of color who have come together to motor the overwhelming majority of  New Working Class Organizaitons that have developed over the last 20 years.  Particularly for the 40 organizations who are members of the Right to the City Alliance our political demands are centered around social reproduction that is around needs and wants associated with sustaining and raising working people.  This includes fights for affordable or public housing, high performing schools and a range of social services.

Organizing During the Neo-Liberal Era: Pragmatism in Unions and Community Organizing

For decades, the old-school Alinsky form of organizing has dominated community- and workplace-based organizing, and it is time to formally declare it’s failure. The Alinsky model of organizing emphasizes a purportedly non-ideological, pragmatic approach to organizing that is ill-equipped to winning power for the oppressed people. It grew in the space created by the decline of the New Left, the rise of progressive or liberal foundations, and the decline of organized labor. The internal crisis of ACORN in some ways flows directly from the political limitations and failures of the Alinskly model, and ACORN is in the beginning of a period of serious decline in which it will lose dominance in it’s two former foundational strengths: electoral organizing and fundraising from private foundations.

At the same time, the labor movement, with few exceptions, is not organizing the most militant and dynamic sectors of the working class, and it has not adapted well to the formation of the new working class referenced above. Over 87% of the workforce in this country are not union members. The Labor Movement on the whole has not broken from a Gomperist (see Fletcher and Gapasin, Solidarity Divided) relation to the dominant class.  That is, it fights to get a slightly better deal for its members vis-à-vis the rest of the class.  It does not fight for the class as a whole, nor does it challenge the fundamental rules of capital.

Organizations for the new class: Emergence, Approach and Self-Analysis/Critique

Over the last 20 years a new urban movement is emerging in the growth of new working class organizations – such as Just Cause Oakland (now Causa Justa/Just Cause), Miami Workers Center, Tenants and Workers United, Domestic Workers United, POWER, and others.  These organizations social base is oppressed nationality women; including African American’s and others forced into the low-wage labor market because of welfare ‘reform’ and globalization-forced immigration.

These groups attempted to organize whole neighborhoods, cities, or sectors of the workforce in campaigns that raised demands against the state. Through direct action, conscious political education and raising counter-hegemonic demands (that is, framing demands in ways that challenge the dominant class’s ‘common sense’), these organizations fought for affordable housing and an end to displacement in the face of intense land privatization, recognition of domestic work as dignified work, the rights of marginal and informal workers, access to quality transportation for these new tiers of workers, and an end to the wanton criminalization of youth of color.

Perhaps most uniquely, there is a conscious effort amongst these New Working Class Organizations to link local base-building work with work against the US empire, by engaging members in struggles and solidarity actions against war, occupation, and financial control of the Third World, but also by developing a tier of leaders from this new working class that is highly conscious of the role the US plays financially, politically and militarily in the world. Whereas an most unions would focus leadership development exclusively on skills to be used for the narrow purpose of workplace organizing, these new organizations prioritized a form of leadership development that developed ‘hard’ leadership skills with ideological development and analytical skills.

This form of organization is relatively new, however, and has many weaknesses. The leadership of NWCO is primarily university educated, ‘middle class’ and oppressed nationality, with relatively few advanced leaders directly from the new class. It is dependent on foundations for its financial base, which has meant that, while most NWCO’s are organizer-centered, they are not typically funded to have a density of organizers moving any one campaign; new funding streams more often lead to more campaigns rather than a larger base organized around larger scale campaigns. As a result, most organizations have expertise in developing a small handful of very sophisticated members and very little success in organizing large organizations with large mass bases. New Working Class Organizations have generally focused narrowly on organizing this new sector of the class and has limited experience with broader formations. The financial crash and the corresponding drop in foundation funding has left many of these groups in financial crisis.

Interestingly, over the last two years an increasing number of these organizations are experimenting in electoral work.  This is creating opportunities to organize more broadly both spatially and also broader strata within the class.

Right to the City: further self defining as a new urban movement

In 2007, 40 community-based organizations – representing many of the most ideological of the New Working Class organzations – allied academics and resource allies (eg, Advancement Project, Florida Legal Services, the Data Center) met in Los Angeles and created the Right to the City Alliance.  This coming together represented a collective jumping of scales for a maturing and r9ising sector of the working class.  Organizations, heretofore, had generally just worked on demands at local and state levels.  Cominmg together we have begun to enunciate a collective vision for our cities – for all, green, feminist – as well as begun the difficult process to make national demands on the federal government and to claim political space at the national level vis a vis unions and other national formations.

The state: a new moment

One can see in the electoral majority that elected Obama the prefigurative possibility of a rising historic bloc – centered on a unified Black nation, with wide layers of immigrants and other people of color, unionists, and broad stratum of the cybertariat and new economy working class (many with self-identified as working class.  New Working Class Organizations broadly share much in our approach to organizing: a historical subject, a broad but common understanding of race, class and gender, and our strategy for change. An area where we have less in common is our analysis of the state.  We believe that our strategic approach should draw from Poulantzas and create political space that neither builds a parallel state that leads to a complete replacement  of the old with the new, nor simply elects new people to fill the existing state. By creating new structures and laws we seek to create fissures that increasingly alter the class, race and gender power disposition of the state. Examples of this may include efforts at democratizing the system – same day voter registration or mail in voting, felon voter registration (still an arduous process in Virginia and elsewhere in the south), others might work to eliminate structural obstacles that systematically disempower people of color such as statewide election of senators, non-proportional elections, or participatory budgeting. Others challenges could seek to democratize the economy through taxes on financial transactions or community control over banks or other flows of capital.

New organizing approaches with this in mind

Along with the above-mentioned aggressive, innovative forms of campaign work and organizing, many NWCO’s are engaged more and more in electoral work. For New Working Class Organizations (Right to the City organizations, for example), electoral work presents the opportunity to push our strengths in organizing to a scale we have been unable to reach up until now.

Often confused with social democracy, this work, when led by NWCO’s can allow us to:

1) Develop counter-hegemonic demands, or at the very least counter-hegemonic framing that we advance through issue-based or even candidate campaigns. While these campaigns are in some way assessed by a simple measure of success (i.e. winning the election), NWCO organizations must use their electoral efforts to challenge the underpinnings of neo-liberalism and empire.

2) Win concrete material demands that improve life for our social base, build a sense of movement for our social base and force resources to be moved from the war economy to the social wage (increasing the social wage, albeit on a smaller scale, is essentially the hallmark campaign form of most NWCO’s).

3) Advance our practice and theory through engaging broader mass forces in, what is for the most part, their principal form of political involvement (elections).  Thus we (and our allies) will be actively engaged in strategizing that will force us to continue building our base but also actively constructing a historic bloc – or ensemble of race and class forces – necessary for a new order no dominated by Capital.  This provides an opportunity for different organized sectors – unionists, teachers and students, NWCM activists and others to work together in a coordinated manner.

4) Practice limited forms of governance and power. NWCO, Alinsky organizations, and Unions have experience fighting targets and powerbrokers. We don’t have experience with even limited forms of power at his scale, and for a budding movement, it is crucial practice for different epoch in history when questions of revolutionary democracy, working class power, and organized accountability will be staring us in the face.

Finally, the scale at which our organizations must fight are always changing. While it is important to not necessarily concede political space to the ruling class, some scales of power might present opportunities at various moments in history that beckon us to action. This moment in history, due to the convergence of the economic, ecological, and political crises (the latter represents the crisis in which the ruling political classes find the legitimacy of their system of power waning) presents opportunities for struggles at the national scale which are essential to moving our base, and oppressed people broadly, into action and towards victories against exploitation. We would do well to seize these opportunities.

Jon Liss has been organizing in Virginia for almost 30 years. He was a founding member and is currently the Executive Director of Tenants and Workers United and Virginia New Majority and a founder and steering committee member of the Right to the City Alliance.   Prior to his time at Tenants and Workers United, Jon was involved in a number of grassroots organizations in Virgina, including: Proceso de Educación Popular, the Rainbow Coalition/Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign,  Northern Virginians Against Apartheid  and the Fairfax County Taxi-drivers Association.

Rishi Awatramani is Lead Organizer at Virginia New Majority (VNM). VNM is a member of the Right to the City Alliance. Rishi is on the US Social Forum National Planning Committee representing Leftist Lounge, has previously worked as a union and community organizer, and is a long-time activist with several organizations.

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.

Let’s start with a reflection on the last US Social Forum (USSF).  What were the major accomplishments of the last forum in 2007?

First, it was important that we imported, integrated and adapted the Social Forum model from the global movement to the United States.  Sometimes, movements in the United States work in a chauvinistic way and try to tell the rest of the world what to do.  In this case, however, we were able to learn from the World Social Forum process that was developed by social movements since 2001 in the Global South to strengthen our movement building work here in the United States.  More than twelve thousand people came to the first US Social Forum in Atlanta in 2007 which was organized around the theme that not only is another world was possible, but that another US is necessary.  In our generation, the USSF was an incredibly diverse 5-day gathering in terms of representation of people who are often marginalized both in society and in the left.  We also had a breadth of political ideologies present and most sectors of the progressive and left movement.  And overall everyone brought their best selves forward.  That does not mean that there was not struggle, difference or opportunism. But the way the National Planning Committee of the USSF modeled different ways to deal with movement contradictions was impressive. We collectivized problem solving in the way that we dealt with the multiple flares and fallouts: we self-reflected publicly when we were wrong; we challenged people gently but clearly; and most importantly we held the importance and integrity of the whole event at the forefront of our actions.

The Social Forum is introducing a new methodology on why and how people need to come together. It invites us to unite under key principles of diversity, inclusion, democracy, plurality, transversal integration of issues and thematics to name a few. It is a 5-day event that encourages convergence of social movements to deeply engage with each other and to cross-fertilize our work.  The organizations and individuals that participated in the first USSF were incredibly transformed by the experience of that gathering; it began to break us out of the silos that we had been stuck in for the past twenty years.

A number of alliances were either launched or formed at the first US Social Forum.  People often talk about the inspiring launches of the Right to the City Alliance and the National Domestic Workers Alliance that took place at the 2007 Forum, but there is a whole laundry list of other formations and collaborations that were born or took a leap there. For example, the Solidarity Economy Network utilized the last Forum as an opportunity to start a dialogue on alternative economic models in the US, and they convened the first Solidarity Economy forum a year later.  The organizing process towards the last Social Forum also helped to cultivate a stronger relationship-building process among organizations in the Southeast; from the Southeast Social Forum process  (which happened in North Carolina one year prior to the USSF) that laid the groundwork for ongoing Southern Strategy meetings hosted at the Highlander Center. There were also important dialogues that started at the last Social Forum among the queer left and the Black left, dialogues where organizers strategized about bringing a more radical lens to the work and developing stronger organizing in their communities. We also had the largest Family Reunion of former prisoners and their families at the USSF. There are countless examples of movement building processes that occurred: the Freedom caravans from the Southwest to Georgia; having International companer@s present and participating in the debates about what’s next; and countless tents and spaces that were created for people to attend and learn about different issues and communities.

Can you give a brief update on the state of the organizing towards the next social forum?

We are nearing 100 days from the start of the second US Social Forum, which will be held in Detroit, Michigan. Detroit is the perfect site for the next Social Forum. Like New Orleans, Detroit represents the impact of government abandonment of our communities.  In Detroit, we see more than thirty years of deindustrialization and more than thirty years of government abandonment and complete disregard of a city that is more than 90% African American. It is ground zero of the economic crisis and corporate collusion with the auto-industry bailout.  But Detroit is also a site of true resilience; there are so many inspiring examples of how communities have responded to exploitation and abandonment by creating alternatives.  For example, there are no major supermarkets in Detroit. Knowing that their communities needed healthy food and fresh vegetables, community organizations and food justice movement in Detroit have built more than 300 community gardens.  They’ve taken a “dual power” approach, understanding that we need to more than just fight the government and the corporations, but that we also need to begin to create alternatives. Detroiters have a deep and long history of workplace organizing: militant strikes; a strong dissident UAW rank-and-file movement; the very inspirational history of black workers in DRUM (Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement) challenging not only the auto factories but also the white led unions. It is also the home of Grace Lee Boggs and the incredible work Detroit Summer has been doing with youth leadership and organizing. It is going to be very powerful for people to come to Detroit and see that legacy and the current work on alternative models.

The National Planning Committee of the USSF is working to make some key advances in the organizing model of the Forum. The strength of the social forum model has been that it is an “open space,” that it’s a big tent where you can encourage self-organized participation and leadership from different sectors of the movement. But there has also been self-reflection about the limits of the model both internationally and nationally. People have been saying that we need more than just open space, that we need to come together to have a real conversation about where our movements are at and to figure out a way to work more strategically against neoliberal policies and practices.  We need to ask ourselves: Have we been able to interrupt privatization?  Have we been able to stop these trade agreements?  Have we been able to protect workers rights and increase environmental rights? We’ve seen global capital act very smart and adapt to changing conditions; we also need to be flexible and strategic in our work. The hemispheric movement against the Free Trade Area of the Americas won, but the US created new strategies around pushing their agenda through regional and bi-lateral agreements between countries in Latin America and the U.S.  In this USSF, we are trying to figure out how to respect the diversity of the movement and how to uphold that concept of the open space but also to find a way to have movement take a sober look at where we at in terms of relevance and power in this country. We need to ask ourselves:  What are our visions for moving forward? What alternatives do we need to create, and what campaigns do we need to build to be clearer around the failures of capitalism?  Clearly, that vision can’t be dictated by the Social Forum’s National Planning Committee.  So that’s where the different veins of the movements, the organizations and collectives have to come together and be prepared for that kind of conversation this summer in Detroit. What we’ve been encouraging people to figure out is, “How can your movement come to the Social Forum with a plan? How can you come to the Social Forum with some self-reflection about where you need to grow, what are our limitations as a movement? How can you use the Social Forum to gain new insights and new political alignments?”  That’s the opportunity. People shouldn’t just come to the Social Forum to showcase their own work; people should utilize the space to do that strategic alignment work with each other. We may never get full unity on strategy or even on tactics, but can the US movement act with a little bit more cohesion? Can the movement come to see itself as moving in generally the same direction? Can we increase our militancy on the streets to fight the state and the right? Can we practice not only the language of what we are for, but continue to grapple what it means to create alternative models in a capitalist country?

Organizations and movements should come prepared with some clear political interventions that they want to make.  For example, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance – an alliance of grassroots organizations rooted in working class and communities of color around the United States – will be promoting the idea that we need a stronger internationalist approach to our work.  Our member organizations have been deeply transformed by participating in past World Social Forums where we have learned so much from our compañeras and compañeros from the Global South – from the landless peoples movements in Brazil and international feminist organizations to the experiments with democratic governance in Bolivia and Venezuela.  So we’re working to make sure that the US Social Forum is not U.S.-centric and that we can push ourselves to think on a global level while simultaneously working locally.  We’ll be doing that by organizing discussions and debates with grassroots leaders from the US along with our International allies representing social movements, we want to have discussions about building power and creating alternatives, articulating demands with a global vision and practice that is grounded in our mass work.

We also want to promote the voices and leadership of the people who are directly impacted by neoliberalism here in the United States: low income tenants, excluded workers, working class youth, immigrants, queers and communities impacted by gentrification and so on. It is important to keep shifting the paradigm on who are the experts; frontline leaders not only have the lived experience but also are critical and conscious forces that bring forward the vision.  We feel like we really succeeded in promoting those voices and actual presence at the last Social Forum, and that’s something that we want to be very intentional about continuing to bring to the social forum process. This is not to say that left intellectuals are not key; they absolutely are. But we want to expand the notion of who are the visionaries, tacticians and strategists.

Can you describe some of the events that will take place at the Social Forum to give people a sense of what it’s going to be like?

We’re experimenting with some exciting new technologies.   At the World Social Forum in Belem, there was something called “Belem Expanded.”  So we’re doing a process called “Detroit Expanded.” People who can’t actually get to the Social Forum can submit workshops under “Detroit Expanded,” so that there will be Social Forum activities happening all over the US and even internationally. We’re figuring out ways to use technology so that we can have videoconferences with other people in the US and with people around the world.  “Detroit Expanded” will multiply our numbers and the reach of our dialogues and exchange.

The People’s Movement Assembly (PMA) will also be an important process.  The PMA comes out of the World Social Forum process where different social movements felt the “open space” principle of the Social Forum was not enough but also wanted a process where they could come out more of a clear critique of the dominant economic system and put forward ideas for collective action. So they created the “Social Movement Assembly” as a space where movements – like indigenous peoples movements, youth movements or the women’s movement – could deliberate and actually propose concrete action.  For example, the largest simultaneous global action in history – the protest against the Iraq war in February 2003 – came out of a Social Movement Assembly.  People were able to organize in their own countries and their own communities around the war, but they were united by that shared call to action. So in Detroit, we are “upgrading” the Social Forum model to include a PMA process within the Social Forum before, during and after.  At the USSF, we’re asking groups to have strategic discussions within their sectors and/or regions throughout the four days of the Forum so that we can have that level of concrete output during the People’s Movement Assembly on the last day.  For example, the anti-war movement could think about using that process to gain some collective agreement on a joint action, whether it’s around Afghanistan or Iraq or Palestine. We will not get 100% strategic unity, but at least there can be some level of common action coming out of the USSF. If some sections of the anti-war movement could begin to have conversations now and then use the Social Forum process to gain some level of unity towards a proposal, then they could put out a call to the broader movement during the PMA.  Then people who aren’t always up in the anti-war movement can go home and say, “Hey, there’s going to be a national day of action around the war on this day with these set of demands.” That would be a way to that the anti-war movement could gain a higher level of support and buy-in from other movements.  That’s just one concrete example of what the PMA process is set up to do, but there could be People’s Movement Assembly process where different movements could come forward with resolutions and statements around the economic, environmental, political and cultural crises.

What is the long-term trajectory for the US Social Forum?  Do you think they should continue in their current form, or do you think we need something else?

To be clear, I am now going to speak from my own personal perspective.  I think that the Social Forum process is a very useful tool and vehicle. I think it is the most powerful one we have in the US for now. The organizing process itself has been an important way to learn how other people work, to build trust and unity even though we might come from different political backgrounds and use different political frameworks and different language There is no other space that actually pushes people into interaction with such a broad and diverse grouping of organizations and movement sectors. We sometimes do more colliding that coming together, but this part of the struggle of learning how to work together and build trust (or to be clear you don’t actually want to work together).  It gives us a way to see who is in motion, who is accountable to a base, to hear peoples’ political analyses of the moment, to learn about peoples work.  This year, the USSF is going to be particularly crucial. It will be a year and a half since the economic bubble burst and the global crisis began. It will be a year and half since Obama got elected and the visible resurgence of the right-wing.  Movement forces really need this moment to come together to assess the impact of all those transitions, to talk about where we’re at and where we need to go from here.  We need to honor the value of that kind of space for dialogue and strategic reflection.  We don’t have that on a national level.

But I’m not convinced that we should have permanent Social Forums or that they necessarily have to happen every three years. They take an immense amount of time, energy and resources to plan, and we need to be clear that we’re putting that energy in the right place. Ultimately, the biggest question is that we are in a race against time with the economic crisis and the ecological destruction that the globe is facing.  I don’t know if we can continue having a process for the sake of process.  I think that the future of the Social Forum needs to be dependent on its strategic value to the movement in the US and globally and I think that the movement needs to mandate that this process and space is needed and help support its ongoing development. And, if it is the case that people want to keep the Forum process going, then the movement in this country needs to help resource this process and support the organizations that are taking up the work to maintain and lead it.  But we cannot keep doing this without the explicit investment of the people most impacted by all multi-dimensional crises both here and globally.

The first Social Forum showed us that we could come together, that all of the people who are often marginalized in left and progressive spaces – people of color, working class folks, immigrants, young people, queers, disabled folks – could lead a massive movement-building process.  We need to meet and exceed that qualitative goal, but the challenge for the Detroit Forum is to answer the question of “What’s next? And how do we get there?”  Maybe we need another Social Forum in 3 years, but we need to be mindful that nothing is permanent and that the only reason that we should do another Social Forum is if it has a purpose and helps advance the movement. It’s important for us to keep grounding the lessons and values of Social Forum process with a clear political purpose and meeting our overall objectives. I want to share the NPC’s overall goals for USSF 2010.  These were updated from 2007. These are our benchmarks, the visions that we hold all of our work accountable to:

• Create a space for social movement convergence and strategic discussion
• Advance a social movements agenda for action and transformation
• Build stronger relationships and collaboration between movements
• Deepen our commitment to international solidarity and common struggle
• Strengthen local capacity to improve social conditions, organizing and movement building in Detroit

The Social Forum should not be a carnival of workshops or activities. It can actually become a place where our organizations and movements can come to understand ourselves as having collective power and most importantly, take action. We can see that model so clearly in Latin America and the Caribbean.  Last year, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance was honored to be invited to a discussion with presidents from some of the ALBA countries – Evo Morales, Huge Chavez, Fernando Lugo and Rafael Correa- that had been organized by the social movements at the Belem World Social Forum.  Morales and Chavez said to the audience, “We are nothing without you, the social movements. We are only here because of the work that you have done in this last decade – electing us, pushing your left agendas.  You are the ones making sure that we’re pressing forward and building alternatives to neoliberalism and US imperialism, that we all in our different roles are making that other world possible.”  To see that tide turning in Latin America and the Caribbean has been very inspiring. That’s not to say that there’s not problems or issues in those countries, but people and movements have been able to make significant changes in the economic and political systems that they live. And that didn’t happen because one left leader got elected.  Social movements have been working for decades to make that possible.  And now that work is started to manifest, both at the level of national elections but at the level of really powerful changes in people’s daily living conditions and social relations. Those social movements were clear that they were working to construct that new world and that it does not end with a left leaning elected official. They have fought for that world to come into being, and they are starting to win.  We need to be that audacious at this next US Social Forum.  We need to bring bold questions, but – even more importantly – we need to start putting forward bold solutions.  Our communities, the land, our international companñer@s are demanding it.

Another World is Possible!

Another US is Necessary!

Another Detroit is Happening!

www.ussf2010.org, help build the road to Detroit. June 22-26, 2010

Cindy Wiesner, is a queer working class Latina originally from Hollywood, CA. A community activist and organizer for the last 20 years. She has organized with HERE (Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union) Local 2850 and POWER (People Organized to Win Employment Rights). She worked as a trainer and organizer for GenerationFIVE. Has served on the boards of the Youth Empowerment Center, Women of Color Resource Center and GenerationFIVE. Cindy was also the leadership development director at the Miami Workers Center and currently is the political coordinator for Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ). She represents GGJ on the National Planning Committee of the US Social Forum and also on the Hemispheric Council of the Americas Social Forum and the International Council of the World Social Forum. www.ggjalliance.org

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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