Mann opened by presenting transformative organizing as a left model model of organizing which is “characterized by a militant opposition to racism, war, and the abuses of the U.S. Empire, strategized by a broad array of people who self-identify as revolutionary, radical, liberal, and progressive.” He argued that transformative organizing (1)  transforms the system itself and is in revolutionary opposition to the power structures of colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism in its current form, which is imperialism; (2) transforms the consciousness of people who participate in the process of building organizations, struggles, and movements; and (3)  transforms the organizers themselves as they stand up to the Right, reach out to the people, and take on the system.  Some of the panelists responses included:

AI-JEN POO (National Domestic Workers Alliance) in response to the idea that “Transformative Organizing becomes truly transformative in the heat of battle:” When I think about transformative organizing I think about change on multiple levels. There’s the change that you’re trying to make in the system, the way that it works. And you’re also trying to transform the movement to be more dynamic. And you’re trying to transform your own organization to be stronger, and then to transform yourself, to learn, grow, be better in the world, be better at what you do. And to me the best container and vehicle for these types of transformation to happen all at once in different ways is through campaigns, through fights.

PATRISSE CULLORS (Labor/Community Strategy Center) in response to the idea that “Transformative Organizing requires the leadership of society’s most exploited, oppressed, and strategically placed classes:” I grew up as a working class, queer, Black woman, in a single-parent household. My father was in and out of prison. There was addiction, him and my brother-basically my family’s life is typical of Black working class people. And that positionality in this country is supposed to devastate us. It’s supposed to make us feel like we cannot do anything, debilitate us, and unfortunately, it’s done that successfully to some of us. But what it means to be a transformative organizer is to bring this politic into our communities and explain to them that actually your experience is exactly what we need to fight this thing.

Video clips of the panel are below and on the LCSC site.  Check back over the next several weeks for a written transcript of the panel.

Since there was not enough time for all the questions raised during the workshop, LCSC will be continuing the discussion through an email list, which you can sign up for here.

Transformative Organizing Theory Panel:

PART 1: Eric Mann (Opening Presentation) & Steve Williams (Response)

PART 2: Steve Williams (Response) & Cindy Wiesner Response

PART 3: Ng’ethe Maina (Response) & Ai-Jen Poo (Response)

PARTS 4 & 5: Patrisse Cullors (Response), Eric Mann (Closing Comments) and Q&A coming soon!

But now we want to hear from YOU!

We are experimenting with a new type of forum – a “Reader’s Forum” – designed specifically to draw out the voices of the many left organizers, activists, and thinkers from around the country. We know you are reading.   We also want to know what you are thinking!

Consider the following question:

Reflecting on recent events -  the US Social Forum,  the enduring recession, the enforcement of SB 1070,  the Tea Party’s race politics  and the recent overturning of Proposition 8 in California – what should be our prime takeaways and new approaches to organizing strategy?

Use the “Comments” function below to tell us what you took away from the US Social Forum or how you think left organizers should respond to SB 1070 in Arizona and similar measures moving across other states today.  The recession is not ending and may dip once again, what should we be doing? Who should we be organizing?

Don’t worry about your thoughts being perfectly formed or argued.  This is not a test, but a conversation, and something to inspire and encourage the rest of us.  Click “Comments” below, and start typing!

What are your reflections on the state of the LGBT movement as a whole?

The LGBT movement is in a similar place as many other social movements in this period.  We’ve gone through a series of ebbs and flows over the past several years.  And our ebbs and flows can’t be understood in isolation; they are a reflection of the broader political and economic moment.  There have been a number of important events that have taken place over the past several years that have shaped the context in which we are working. The most well known, of course, was the legalization of same-sex marriage in some states and then the subsequent rollbacks of that legalization in places such as California and Maine. In 2008 alone, Barack Obama was elected as our first Black President, gay marriage was legalized in California and then it was quickly taken away through the passage of Proposition 8.

The significant losses that happened in 2008 were huge blows to the long-standing strategy of the mainstream LGBT movement.  Like many other social movements over the past few decades, the most well resourced elements of the LGBT movement have largely abandoned organizing as a core strategy for change. Instead, it has shifted its primary focus to public education, legal and legislative strategies.  The LGBT movement has also moved away from an intersectional approach to a political approach that focuses narrowly on single issues. The state-by-state struggles around same-sex marriage revealed the limitations of those strategies and of that kind of narrow focus. So now, a wider range of people are questioning what the absence of a long-term organizing means for our work.  Many of the big LGBT movement players are now back at the strategy drawing board, and a lot is up for grabs. This moment presents an important opportunity for more progressive forces to weigh in on the strategic direction of the LGBT movement.

How is the LGBT movement different from other social movements?

The LGBT movement is different from many other social movements because it has a very small centralized and consolidated group of people who lead many of the largest national LGBT organizations and who are in regular communication about strategy. They actually sit down and decide which issues are going to be prioritized and well-resourced. That can make it challenging for smaller and more progressive LGBT organizations to impact the strategic direction of our movement.  But, because so many of these strategic questions are up for grabs at this point, we now have an opportunity to impact that debate.

Relatedly, the HIV/AIDS crisis that came to national attention in the 80s and still exists today, resulted in the loss of a large layer of our movement’s leadership and therefore our history. This huge loss of leadership from the more militant era of our movement is something that is widely felt in a moment where HIV/AIDS and LGBT organizations continue to de-politicize and mainstream themselves.

What significance does California’s Prop 8 have on the state of the LGBT movement?

A great deal of this debate centers on reflections from the struggle for same-sex marriage in California and – in particular – on the absence of grassroots organizing as a core strategy in that struggle. California was the most crucial battleground state for gay marriage, and the defeat of same-sex marriage in California was a huge blow for the LGBT movement.  The movement in support of same-sex marriage was based on a state-by-state strategy, and California was seen as an essential anchor state that could help to sustain the battle for same-sex marriage in other states.

For people who aren’t familiar with that fight in California, same-sex marriage was initially won in the courts, but then it was overturned through a state-wide ballot initiative: Proposition 8. That turn-around demonstrated that we need a mass base to move a progressive agenda. Even if we can win progressive policy changes through the courts or through legislative processes, we run the risk of having our progressive victories overturned if they are not won by a variety of tactics with organizing as the fundamental strategy.  If we don’t engage in the hard work of sustained grassroots organizing, we won’t have the base that we need to get people to vote the right way or to defend our legal victories.

Progressive forces in the LGBT movement have reflected that the campaign for same-sex marriage in California didn’t have a sustained organizing approach.  Instead, the campaign organizers parachuted in and expected to win same-sex marriage by running more convincing TV ads than the proponents of Prop 8. They didn’t have a good ground game.  And the people that attempted to execute a good ground game didn’t have a strong base in communities of color. Initially, the media reported that Proposition 8 passed because of communities of color had turned out in larger numbers to vote for Obama and simultaneously voted against gay marriage. That assumption has since been refuted.  It is true that communities of color had high percentages of support Proposition 8, and that is a troubling reality that the racial justice movement needs to confront more directly. But – even though California’s population is majority people of color – its electorate is majority white.  Proposition 8’s passage was primarily due to voting patterns of straight white families with children, acccording to a recently released report about the failures of the No on 8 campaign.

On August 4, Judge Vaughn Walker overturned Proposition 8 in California courts. Appeals of this ruling are expected to eventually land in the Supreme Court. LGBT people across the country are celebrating this victory.  It is sparking momentum for similar fights in other states.  They are forcing the federal government to once again  engage in a debate that they have largely conceded to state-level politics. One of the lead lawyers making the case that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional, Theodore Olson, is a well-known powerhouse lawyer on a range of major conservative issues, including fighting to overturn affirmative action laws and the court battle that eventually put George W. Bush in office in 2000. It’s worth noting that established national LGBT organizations were largely excluded from weighing in on this court battle, demonstrating more fissures in the mainstream movement’s leadership and strategy. In fact, many of the most powerful national LGBT organizations cautioned against taking this case to the courts so quickly after the passage of Proposition 8, but it moved forward regardless.

How can the left impact the future direction of the LGBT movement?

We need a conversation that brings together the left and progressives forces in the LGBT movement with the more liberal forces. We need to talk about the fact that public education, legal strategies and high-level advocacy aren’t enough to win and that we need to promote grassroots organizing as a primary strategy to win and defend policy changes. It’s a good thing that a wider range of forces are now agreeing that we need to engage in organizing, but we need to remember that people have different entry points to that conversation.  Left and progressive people see organizing as a question of both strategy and values; we believe that we need the participation of a massive number of people in our change efforts, both to win on our immediate issues and to lay the groundwork for a broader progressive agenda.  Mainstream forces, on the other hand, approach the need for organizing as a strictly tactical question in the electoral arena; they think that we need to organize people around one or two issues, such as gay marriage, and then we’re done.  We need to enter that dialogue and we need to promote organizing with those forces, but we should do it with our eyes wide open. We shouldn’t have any illusions that we can easily change the trajectory or issue-focus of the mainstream movement. Essentially, what I’m staying is that our longstanding strategy of non-engagement with the mainstream LGBT movement is not a strategy.

We also need to engage the new forces that came to voice in this fight, specifically the younger people who became active during the fight against Proposition 8.  They wanted to take a more militant tactical approach during that fight, and they raised serious critiques of the mainstream strategy.  They are representative of a broader new set of organized forces nationally – represented, for example, by a new group called Get Equal – that is committed to building more militant fights around relatively mainstream issues such as the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the legalization of gay marriage.  They are attempting to engage in more militant direct actions using language reminiscent of Act UP. Are they fighting on the most left LGBT issues?  No. But the fact that more and more people are becoming politically engaged through these issues and are pushing these kinds of political questions and questioning the mainstream movement’s strategy, that’s great. It represents a real opportunity. We need to think about how to harness that energy.  It’s the right type of energy even if it’s not focused on the issues that we think they should be focused on.  Our role should be to engage with that energy and to redirect that momentum towards more progressive issues and fights. We can’t do that if we’re just standing on the outside.

Why should left LGBT organizations engage with mainstream LGBT issues?

First, we need to keep in mind that – while the LGBT left considers these organizations to be mainstream – they are being viciously attacked by the right-wing because they are promoting same-sex marriage. And even if our long-term vision for change is not about same-sex marriage, we need to remember that the attack on same sex marriage is fundamentally about homophobia. We should maintain our position that same-sex marriage is not the only fight that the LGBT movement should be waging. But we also need to balance that critique with real work to support that fight against institutionalized homophobia.

This kind of dual engagement is important because – in the past – we have mostly decided not to engage with the broader LGBT movement because those forces didn’t align with our political values. We have had a correct critique of the mainstream movement’s over-prioritization of issues like gay marriage and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.  We have criticized the fact that these are the most well-resourced fights while our communities are facing much bigger challenges, including struggling to meet their basic survival needs. That critique is correct, but our strategy of non-engagement has been wrong.  We’re never going to change the politics and strategies of the mainstream LGBT movement if we don’t engage with it.  History has taught us that the only way to move more moderate forces is to engage with them while we are simultaneously increasing the scale and power of our work, therefore making us more relevant. We shouldn’t abandon our left politics, but we also need to be able to engage with and move more moderate forces.  Those two political tasks are not contradictory; they are complementary.

What are some examples of the kinds of issues that left organizers in the LGBT movement should be advancing?

Many left LGBT organizations have done a significant amount of work to push the LGBT movement to look beyond same-sex marriage and to take on a wider range of issues. The political landscape is different today.  There are other LGBT issues – beyond gay marriage – that we can actually win under Obama.

Right now, I would say that the LGBT movement is still in the phase of re-assessing strategy and questioning the “old guard.” That means there’s more space for us to move a new agenda. New strategies and new issues are up for grabs. That doesn’t mean that the gay marriage fight and the struggle over Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell will disappear. But it does create space for left LGBT organizations to advance more progressive issues and strategies, at both local and national levels.  At this point, the ball is up in the air. The question is, can we kick it to the left before it lands in the same place it has been the past decade?

There are pockets of left and progressive LGBT groups that are trying to advance demands outside of the mainstream movement, like the Audre Lorde Project (ALP), Southerners on New Ground (SONG), the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center and FIERCE.  Many of these groups are part of a newly formed national alliance of progressive LGBT organizations – the Roots Coalition – that is trying to figure out how to take advantage of these openings. We are trying to figure out what opportunities exist for more progressive national fights. We are looking at both the mainstream issues that are already on the table that we might be able to win immediately and new issues that will push the LGBT movement to the left.

We are doing that by intentionally choosing issues that have an LGBT lens and that – if won – will also impact many other communities. In particular, we are looking to build a stronger bridge between fights focused on LGBT issues with those that are focused on racial and economic justice.  An example of a fight we could consider taking up is the struggle around the impending reauthorization of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), specifically challenging the expansion of the marriage promotion programs that Obama has been pushing.  The current economic crisis has increased the need for welfare programs, but the marriage promotion requirements and strict definitions of family present structural barriers that limit LGBT families’ abilities to access the resources they need to survive.  The marriage promotion programs don’t only impact LGBT families; they impact all families that don’t have traditional family structures: single-parent households, households with multiple caregivers or extended family structures.  We should fight to eliminate marriage promotion requirements because they hurt all of these different kinds of families. Up until now, it has mainly been welfare rights organizations and a few women’s rights organization that have had these issues on their radar. But if left LGBT organizations can position ourselves as a coherent force on this issue, we could bring more mainstream LGBT forces into the fight. That would allow us to simultaneously advance welfare rights, women’s rights, and LGBT rights.  This would broaden our issues, and it would connect us with other movements in a meaningful way.  We would be working cross-sector on an issue, and we would simultaneously be engaging a broader cross-sector of the LGBT movement. Finally, if we successfully engage mainstream LGBT organizations in this explicitly economic justice fight, they essentially agree that 1) welfare is a good thing, 2) the marriage shouldn’t be an incentive to get more welfare, and 3) forging cross-sector alliances is an essential and should be consistently explored. There are real risks in that kind of engagement, but there are also important lessons that we need to learn from the process even if it doesn’t go as planned.

Another potential example of this kind of cross-sector fight is the struggle around identity documents that are designed to restrict immigrant rights but that also impact transgender people.  There have been some interesting local examples where immigrant communities and transgender people have come together to fight for access to identity documents that make it easier for people to get jobs, housing and other survival needs. That’s another example of a fight that brings together different communities.  The immigrant rights movement is currently in a major upswing right now because of SB1070 in Arizona, so there is a lot of potential for cross-sector engagement with the immigrant rights movement. Overall, there are many crucial opportunities for change on a national level.  We need to figure out how to mobilize to take advantage of those opportunities.

Are there any challenges you’d like to make to racial and economic justice movements about LGBT issues, and vice versa?

Along with many other racial and economic justice-focused LGBT organizations, FIERCE has played an important role in both the LGBT movement and racial and economic justice movements.  In the LGBT movement, we bring the relationships and perspectives that we have developed in racial and economic justice movements. We have argued that the LGBT movement needs to prioritize racial and economic justice issues. Simultaneously, we have pushed racial and economic justice movements on questions of sexuality and gender identity, so that they aren’t treated as secondary issues.  I have been told that we are creating confusing laundry lists if we incorporate sexuality and gender identity or that race and class are primary while sexuality and gender identity are secondary. We’ve had to struggle against that orientation; we have reminded our allies in those movements that there are historical frameworks that do not force us to prioritize one identity over another.  It’s important to engage in these conversations, and these dynamics are shifting. But it’s sometimes a tiring role to play.

There is a huge gap between the composition of leadership in our movements and the issues that we are prioritizing. We need to recognize that LGBT people – and LGBT people of color in particular – play huge leadership roles in racial and economic justice organizations across the country. But – even though we are playing a leadership role in those movements – gender and sexuality are not seen as priorities for the national movement.

Similarly, many left and progressive leaders in racial and economic justice movements lack a deep understanding of the state of the LGBT movement. Even when they are trying to incorporate LGBT issues into their work, they think that the mainstream issues – like gay marriage – are the primary fights of the LGBT movement. It illustrates a real lack of awareness and analysis of the various forces in the LGBT movement and the work that has been pioneered by LGBT organizations that are engaged in racial and economic justice organizing. I don’t think that every organization needs to situate their work explicitly on LGBT issues, but I do believe all serious left organizers need to have an accurate understanding of what’s happening in a range of social justice movements.

Finally, we need to have an honest conversation about the realities of homophobia and transphobia in many grassroots racial and economic justice organizations. Racial and economic justice organizations need to be more proactive about addressing homophobia and transphobia in their organizations. People are often afraid to talk about homophobia and transphobia because they are afraid of losing members. But, we need to overcome that fear and find ways to engage in education and dialogue about sexuality and gender identity.  Many left and progressive racial and economic organizations have made alliances with forces – like churches and civic organizations – that actively discriminate against LGBT people because those alliances can strengthen their work on racial and economic justice issues. Those alliances may be necessary for tactical reasons, and I am not saying that we should boycott all relationships with those kinds of forces.  But we also need to internally address the dangers that those alliances present to our organizations and to the consciousness of our members.  We need to push ourselves on these questions. Our movement organizations need to come forward with positions that are explicitly against homophobia and transphobia in a way that meets people where they are at in their social or religious beliefs, but also authentically engages in transforming their oppressive beliefs. Otherwise, we are helping to promote homophobic and transphobic beliefs and policies by default.

Rickke Mananzala served as Campaign Coordinator and then Co-Director of FIERCE for almost 4 years until he became Executive Director in January 2008. As a former New Voices Fellow at the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, he worked to develop methods for legal work to increase support for organizing efforts in transgender communities. Rickke also served as a founding Steering Committee member of the National Right to the City Alliance.

Creative Organizing
Jun 24 2010 – 1:00pm Cobo Hall: DO-03D

Cultural Organizing for a Just Society: making art & culture integral to social justice organizing and movement building
Jun 24 2010 – 3:30pm UAW Building: Escort

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Don’t fight the riptide. It’ll wear you down. A riptide occurs when water at high tide gets pooled behind reefs or sand bars so when the sea goes out again, the trapped water has to find a channel through which to escape the pool. It empties through that opening with such force that it can sweep a swimmer out to sea. Our instinct is to start swimming toward shore as hard as we can. The better strategy is to swim parallel to the coast until you are out of the riptide, then ride the regular waves to shore. Left activists know the feeling of being caught in a riptide without knowing the way out. When the political tide runs against us it takes all our effort just to stay in place. Our standards slide until a “victory” just means that we didn’t get screwed as badly as we could have been. Our gains are swept away the moment we turn away.

When conservative activists faced this problem, back in the mid-1960s, they tried something different. Instead of swimming faster they looked into what it would take to turn the tide around. They pulled it off. With the tide behind you, you can achieve all kinds of success even with less that brilliant leadership. It’s a lot easier to slash local school budgets when half the population already believes that government is incompetent, teachers are lazy, taxes are evil and the private sector can do it better. That’s the tide.

One swimmer swims against the rip tide and is steadily pushed out to sea. Another heads out of the current and floats in on the surf. They both faced the same challenge. The difference is what was in their heads. This essay is about what’s in our heads and how it can transform the terms of struggle and therefore the course of history. It is also about butterflies.

When butterflies migrate they don’t just start flapping their wings in the right direction. They don’t want to work that hard and get blown in to bushes and buildings by every gust of wind. They go straight up, sometimes up to twelve thousand feet, find a current headed their way and ride it for a thousand miles.

Their light, fragile wings, a liability among the treacherous ground winds, are now their great asset.

The visible world is defined and determined by an invisible one.  A glance at the landscape won’t tell you the likelihood of earthquakes.  You have to know that invisible pressures accumulate along subterranean fault lines formed in the distant past. The butterfly and the organizer must be attuned to currents that are not apparent unless you look for them. The activists who launched the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 knew that undercurrents of anger at racist indignities were reaching critical levels and were searching for a way to turn them into a force to challenge segregation. The conservative activists who gathered in the wreckage of the Goldwater presidential campaign nine years later sought to harness fears stirred up by the civil rights struggle, the spread of consumerist immorality and the erosion of religious certainty and give them ideological and organizational expression.

In the USA we don’t like to overthink things. We prefer action.  We run off to parties without grabbing the address. If we feel a current we swim against it. We fight oppressive conditions without asking what holds them in place. We swing between wishful thinking and hopelessness without seeing that they both reflect a disconnect between the strategies we repeat and the successes that elude us. But it is not just harsh conditions that confound us. All seeds start in the dark, after all. It’s how we interpret and respond to them. Among Malcolm X’s many abilities, his most remarkable gift was his oratory. He used the magic of language to help traumatized people uncover a new interpretation of their story. This change in perspective exposed new avenues for action and turned what had been dreams into possibilities. The rest is history.

Strategic vision is the precondition for effective strategies. It is the rain that spurs the strategies to growth just as strategies in turn seed to tactics. A strategic vision encapsulates our perspective on the landscape we are challenged to cross and our understandings of who we are and what we dream of becoming. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how strategic vision is the pivot which can turn our defensive struggles into political initiative, unite isolated reform efforts into a movement for change and open up new possibilities for effective action in every field of struggle.

The lay of the land

The transformative promise of the Obama Presidency was not, in the end, derailed by Republicans or sabotaged by conservative Democrats or even betrayed by Obama himself. It never existed. The illusion that it did and the collapse of that illusion result from a structural dilemma which defines both dominant political parties but particularly bedevils the Democrats.

The Republicans are a coalition between the corporate elite and an array of conservative movements and institutions comprised of the Christian right, nativist, gun rights, white supremacist and anti-choice groups, small government Tea Partiers, corporate front groups and others. This conservative base delivers votes, campaign workers, foot soldiers for corporate front groups and an ideological message which galvanizes popular support. In return they get to advance their patriarchal and racist moral agenda and receive ample funding for their cultural warfare apparatus. The reactionary opinion molders (the “perceptioneers”) on talk radio, cable TV, blogs and in legislative offices translate the agenda of the corporate elite (anti-labor, pro-deregulation, privatization, interventionist and anti-democratic) into a populist narrative of personal liberty that resonates with the conservative base. The result is that the demands of the conservative social base are closely aligned with (or at least do not impinge upon) the agenda of the corporate sector.

The Democrats are a coalition between the same corporate elite and a constellation of non-profits, unions, communities of color and environmental and social reform movements. Their demands revolve around basic needs such as access to food, education, livable wages, healthy workplaces and communities, affordable housing, quality education and an end to discrimination.  In other words the satisfaction of the aspirations of the Democratic grassroots would require a massive transfer of resources to the base of the social pyramid and consequently would tilt the balance of power toward labor and organized communities. They have to implement policies that their corporate sponsors require and which hurt their constituents in every respect. To the base they can offer little more than placebos, small measures that don’t cost much or symbolic gestures such as White House dinners, Presidential declarations and seats on advisory panels.

The existence of a corporate elite that pursues its collective interests is the invisible planet of our political system. It is possible to discover the existence of an unknown planet by observing its gravitational tug on the orbits of its neighbors. The discovery of such a body allows us to understand the motion of the rest of the system.

The policies that guide our government are researched and outlined within a network of brain trusts housed in political institutes, policy think tanks, academic institutions, corporate departments, business associations, intelligence agencies, specialized publications and private strategy centers. Their role is to define policy goals, develop the “framing” with which to secure public support and develop candidates to fill top and mid-level government jobs. These broad policy outlines define the parameters of the “accepted wisdom” in the corporate media.

Henry Kissinger’s career provides a window into this world. His trajectory carried through many top corporate and quasi-governmental institutes including The Psychological Strategy Board, the Harvard Center for International Affairs, the Operations Coordinating Board of the National Security Council, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rand Corporation and the Trilateral Commission. He was a protégé of oil magnates David and Nelson Rockefeller whose patronage landed him in the inner circles of government. (Many of Obama’s first and second tier appointees are drawn from these groups.)

By 1974, as Secretary of State, Kissinger had concluded that US allies were a greater threat to its world dominance than were its enemies. The growing clout of Europe and East Asia marked their emergence as worrisome rivals. Kissinger’s doctrine called for establishing undisputed dominance of the world oil and gas supplies on which these economies would depend for growth. This policy became integrated into the elite consensus and remains in place. This fact makes sense of US policies toward West Asia and the Middle East. It explains its behavior in the lead-up to its invasion of Iraq: each time Iraq sought to appease US demands the United States declared that the effort was too little, too late, increased its demands and insisted on escalated international reprisals. The Kissinger policy framework of seeking direct control of the oil fields would not be consummated by a diplomatic resolution. The Obama administration is reading from the same script in relation to Iran. Inevitably there will be a campaign to bring the vast oil and gas reserves of Venezuela and Bolivia back into the corporate fold.

Attention to the invisible world does more than illuminate the workings of the power elitel: it reveals sources of popular power as well. In 1969 the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party established an alliance with the Puerto Rican Young Lords Organization and the white Young Patriots. They called it the “Rainbow Coalition,” a name later appropriated by Jesse Jackson for his 1984 presidential campaign. The Patriots were the kids of recent immigrants from southern, mostly Appalachian, states. They wore confederate flags on their jackets and had family members back home in the Klan. Brining them into alliance with communities of color around common class issues required deliberate and persistent courtship on the part of the Panthers. It meant attending their court hearings, shooting pool in their bars, sleeping on their couches and talking late into the night about police harassment and substandard housing. In the end, as Panther organizer Bobby Lee put it, they would have “stopped a bullet for me.”

Had the Panthers followed today’s practices and looked just at the surface of the political landscape, they’d have written the Patriots off as hopeless racists. Instead they asked why these folks were hurting: was their racism based on vested interest or were they been fooled into it. They concluded that in the big picture they all had more to gain as allies than enemies.

This approach has nothing in common with the Democratic strategy of courting white, suburban swing voters by catering to their prejudices. The Panthers came to the table with an organized political base united around an alternative program. What they offered the Young Patriots and their community was a more promising vision.

Offering an alternative vision, so central to history’s most successful movements, is foreign to today’s left-liberal non-profits whose operating principle is “fight for what’s winnable.” This in a nutshell summarizes the contrast with the right: we fight for winnable “gains” while they fight for power. We go as far as we can without brushing up against the barbed wire. They decide when to move the wire closer, steadily limiting the “winnable” possibilities.

The battle over health care reform lays bare how this plays out. Corporate lobbyists were invited to the White House to draft legislation that would regulate their industry, thus guaranteeing that their core interests would be protected whatever the outcome. They then backed a campaign to defeat it, resulting in the steady removal of what little nutrition was in the package. Desperate to pass a law, the White House continually watered it down in successive attempts to win Republican approval. When finally introduced, the bill came under heavy Republican fire and was compromised further. The President suddenly found his populist voice, touring the land, blasting the evils of corporate greed. This galvanized the unions and non-profits to pull out all the stops to pass what by now was a giant, brightly colored placebo. The final bill incorporated some “gains” that progressive spokespeople could point to even as it entrenched the position of the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations at the heart of the “reformed” system. These corporations not only gained an expanded captive market but are in a comfortable position from which to deploy their vast army of lobbyists and bottomless campaign chests to undermine and erode any progressive gains that irritate them. We measure our progress in “gains,” they measure theirs in power. At the end of the day power it’s power that counts.

In the martial art of Tai Chi, the practitioner enlists the force and direction of motion of her opponent to achieve victory. A similar sensibility can be applied to political struggle. I like to adopt the outlook that our enemies exist for the purpose helping us to defeat them. Our job is to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. The first thing they will do for us is tell us where they are vulnerable. The ways they deploy their resources is a map. The fact that I wear a helmet when I bike to work tells you where I think I need extra protection.

When we step back from our daily struggle to encompass the entire political landscape in our field of vision, one of its most striking features is the exponentially expanding penal system.

Communities of color are subjected to a punitive social management regime that has little apparent connection real crime. This system has quickly emerged to take the place of the segregationist Black Laws, fashioned to keep the African American populace vulnerable and off balance under the guise of being color-neutral. A tremendous immigrant workforce is likewise regulated through a quasi-military system of intimidation and mass punishment. This should tell us that these are powerful constituencies whose hands are being tied precisely because they represent a potential threat to the operation of the system. Freeing them from their legal straightjackets is therefore strategically vital if we hope to loosen the grip of corporate rule.

Republican strategist Karl Rove has taught us that what an opponent assumes to be a major advantage can be transformed into a strategic weakness. The “swift boat” offensive against Democrat John Kerry, for example was directed at his military service, a credential he assumed to be unassailable. The strategic heart of right wing power resides in its unparalleled ideological warfare apparatus. It is able to transform the agendas of corporate managers into the battle cries of the angry masses. Any resistance can be quickly declared to be communistic, fascist or terrorist.

Core vision

The left abandoned any pretense of posing a real alternative in the wake of COINTELPRO repression and the Red Scare that preceded it. Understandable, but it has put us in the awkward position of seeking winnable improvements for specific groups while our opponents proclaim a grand moral mission.

What would it look like if we had the audacity to challenge the moral vision of the right with one of our own? What if we placed the New World that we say is possible on the public menu of choices in clearly understandable terms? It depends on how well that vision resonates with people’s dreams. To take this notion for a test drive I humbly submit a partial list of core values that reflect the world I am fighting for, translated into language that a second grader can understand.

1) No one gets seconds until everyone has had firsts.

2) You don’t make a mess you can’t clean up.

3) Food is for feeding people.

4) Share.

5) Don’t take stuff that isn’t yours.

6) The Earth is a home shared by everyone who lives here.

7) Everyone gets access to clean water, air, food and shelter.

8 ) People should get to make decisions about their lives and share decisions that also affect others.

9) Human habitat can be healthy if natural habitat is healthy.

10) No group of people is inherently better or more deserving than other groups of people.

11) The wellbeing of all children is the responsibility of everyone.

These are not alien values to most folk. If you asked people you know about running our society along the lines of these principles, the most common response would probably be that it would be nice if it were possible but it’s not realistic. In other words if we organized explicitly around such a core vision statement we could expect two sources of opposition: those with a vested interest in defeating it and those who wish they could embrace it but don’t believe it is possible. That is not a bad starting position for an ideological struggle.

Let’s bring this back to the perceptioneers, the Glenn Becks and Rush Limbaughs and others who provide the intellectual soundtrack for the right wing movements. A major part of their effort is devoted to protecting their followers against contagion by such values. More specifically, they want to make it clear that only a deserving few are worthy of such respectful treatment. Outside that small circle of wagons is a big world of jealous, hostile enemies whose very souls cry out to destroy us. A big part of the perceptioneer’s job is to define and police those borders, continually explaining why Muslims, immigrants, dark people and GLBT folk are a threat to all that is civilized and decent. It is worth noting that they are actively engaged in keeping their own base from drifting toward these values even though no voice in the public square is advocating them. Can anybody say “vulnerability”?

When an animal senses danger, its “fight or flight” response is triggered. Its heart rate and blood pressure rise, blood rushes to its motor muscles and bodily systems not relevant to crisis management—digestion, energy storage, reproduction, normal immune function and construction of bone and tissue—shut down or go into low gear. It’s a good emergency reflex but comes with a cost if left activated too long. The right wing sound machine is a perpetual panic generator, continually stimulating the fight or flight response in their followers and triggering memories of past traumas, real or contrived. Fear makes every shadow into a potential threat and makes people easier to manipulate. It also resonates with a carefully cultivated narrative of white victimhood in which US history is remembered as a series of unprovoked ambushes by ruthless enemies. In this memory, all that remains of the genocidal conquest of the continent is Custer’s last stand at the Little Big Horn. The annexation of Texas becomes the siege of the Alamo. The seizure of Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Philippines is the sinking of the battleship Maine. Pearl Harbor summarizes the war in the Pacific and the war against Viet Nam is about MIA/POWs. The struggle for racial equality is merely a backdrop for “reverse discrimination.” The attacks of 9/11 are just the latest assault…

This sense of victimhood is put to work by the perceptioneers in the interests of capital. Restrictions on tobacco sales, pollution limits, assertion of worker’s rights, regulation of food additives, social services for the poor and, in fact, any limits on corporate power, are proclaimed to be assaults on personal liberty. Little 9/11s.

The ideological offensive of the right fills a void created by a crisis of legitimacy. The derivatives meltdown and subsequent economic crisis; the rewarding of the culprits; the slow mo’ military defeats overseas; the deterioration of our basic life support systems such as health care and food; the decimation of the public sector; lack of policy in the face of a growing climate crisis; the devastation from the BP disaster and the inability of government to address the pain caused by all of these has undermined the legitimacy of the status quo to a degree not seen for half a century. Obama’s promise to transform that system is what swept him into office, but all of the candidates in the last election were running against the status quo.

The progressive reforms of past eras were granted against a background of labor militancy, mass protest movements and ideological competition with the soviet bloc. No such pressures exist today and so the top 1% has little incentive to be generous toward poor folk. In fact they are hell bent on eliminating public expenditures and are cutting back on support to the non-profits. The integration of the corporate sector and the state has emboldened the corporados to the point that they have little fear of consequences for even the most brazenly criminal behavior. All this is creating pressure along a fault line that runs through the non-profit sector.

A public health lens can illuminate the nature of this tension. We’`ll compare two basic approaches in public health to guarding against disease outbreak in a population. One strategy is to pursue what is known as vertical immunity: indentify the pathogen for the disease in question and develop a vaccine or anti-biotic that is designed to defeat it. The other is to confer horizontal immunity: support the overall health of the population so that it is better able to resist whatever harmful organisms or other insults it is exposed to. Horizontal immunity is less precise in its response but confers a level of general security by making the human population a less receptive environment for infection.

There’s no great mystery in how to confer horizontal immunity and healthy resilience in a population. It is not very capitalist-friendly, however. It consists of providing what bodies need and removing what causes them harm. Take nutrition: healthy food is as fresh as possible with minimal processing and the absence of pesticides, preservatives and hormones and other junk. It is safest when provided by agriculture on a scale that does not leave us vulnerable to national disease outbreaks from huge processing centers. Other contributing factors include exercise, supportive social networks, safe housing and self-determination (feeling in control of one’s life). Effective care emphasizes supporting the body’s natural healing capacity with minimal intervention. All these measures could be within reach of people without need for corporations to insert themselves in the process.

Capitalism hates horizontal immunity because it undermines the market in significant ways. Profitability in the food market is to be found in over-processed foods, centralized mass production and massive chemical inputs to improve shelf-life, yield and visual appeal. If sales for Burger King, snickers bars or Coca Cola show a decline the corporate response is not to exult in people’s healthier choices but to escalate advertising.

Secondly, the capitalist market depends on people experiencing a myriad of particular, clearly identifiable dissatisfactions that lend themselves to specialized products. It is far better to market a thousand skin and hair products to address a thousand conditions than to face a population of healthy eaters whose skin takes care of itself.

Finally, raising the overall health of a population entails raising the social wage, the combination of social benefits that support the collective quality of life. When people have enough resources in their lives and under their control they are able to make healthier decisions for themselves and their communities. An increased social wage would naturally address a constellation of social problems associated with inequality, lack of control and poverty. It would significantly reduce homelessness, prostitution, chemical abuse, street crime and hunger for example. A greater social wage also leads to greater security among the broad population and therefore undermines the ability of corporations to dictate the conditions of work, environmental protection and land use. Public health surveys indicate that communities place a high value on preventing contamination of their environment, the workplace and the food supply and would protect them if they could. Governments that devote significant resources to the pursuit of horizontal immunity become the targets for destabilization and overthrow by the larger, corporate-friendly powers. Investment flows to places where labor, environmental and human rights advocates are taken care of by repressive regimes. The capitalist market, with its quiver of vertically oriented solutions can only create a market where people’s needs are not being met in other ways.

Tens of millions of people are engaged in activities which they hope contribute to improving people’s lives. Whatever their specific venue, they experience the frustration of having to implement vertical solutions for problems that require horizontal strategies. Teachers, for example, have long complained that they are in an uphill struggle to teach children who come to school suffering from poor nutrition, inadequate health care, toxic exposure, unsafe housing, and violence at home or in the street and have few prospects for employment. Progress in any area of social concern is quickly undermined by the persistence of vast inequality in all other areas. The solution to any of these problems is out of reach absent the solution to all the others. The non-profits are prevented by their structures and funders from addressing their root causes because that would require a horizontal strategy that undermine the conditions for maximizing profit.

The Cat in the suit

All organisms live in our own worlds even when we coexist in the same space. A bacterium in your mouth, for example, might as well be on another planet. It weighs so little that it can float in any direction, indifferent to the force of gravity that governs your every move. At the same time it is buffeted by miniscule bursts of energy, heat and chemicals which you have no awareness of whatsoever. You share one universe—if the sun goes cold you will both freeze—but the ways in which you behave are based on completely different sets of considerations.

A corporation is not an organism (however confused the US Supreme Court may be on this point). It is, however, a self-perpetuating entity that transforms its environment as a byproduct of its existence. It is functionally and legally structured around the goal of generating profit for its owners. It makes sense of the world by processing incoming information through twin organs known as the balance sheet and the profit/loss statement. Anything that does not appear in the window created by those two instruments is not part of the corporation’s functional environment and therefore, as far as it is concerned, does not exist.

A corporation that scrapes the ocean floor for shrimp, for example, will “see” the shrimp as it is harvested and therefore appears as an asset on the balance sheet. The thousands of square miles of destroyed habitat, displaced species, crippled ecological resilience and the cascade of downstream impacts do not appear as costs or liabilities however. These unrecorded costs include the elimination of entire ecosystems and the dumping of millions of tons of “by-catch”, the fish, sea turtles, marine mammals, coral reefs and plant life that are killed in the process (an estimated third of the annual global catch) and ejected back into the water. In short, the marketable wealth of the ocean system is extracted and transformed into profit while the costs of doing business are “externalized.”

These costs do not go away. They are internalized by the inhabitants, human and otherwise, of the natural world. The term “regulation,” which we hear so often in the news, simply refers to attempts by civil society to force some of these costs onto the balance sheets of corporations . The cost of environmental destruction of keeping their workers alive (labor costs) are burdens that corporation go to great lengths to avoid.

This is the dirty little secret of capitalism: it’s based on bad math. If the real costs of doing business had to be accounted for on the balance sheet the capitalist enterprise as a whole would not be profitable.

Exxon Mobil, Chiquita, Coca Cola, Massey Energy, Intel and the rest of their specie are quite right when they claim that too much regulation would kill them. They have to get those costs off the ledger by forcing them down the throats of millions of people—Guatemalan banana workers, Somali fishing villagers and Mexican maquila workers– who do not share in the profits. There is an unlimited supply of bayonets, battleships and unmanned drones to make sure that they swallow. Only in this way can the system reward its “owners” with unlimited riches.

Try convincing your cat to stop hunting birds. It would certainly be in her interest to leave enough birds to reproduce so that there will be birds in the future. You have identified a problem—the decimation of the bird population—which you assume your cat will have an interest in. The cat can immediately see the problem but defines it differently: it’s that you’re bugging her. The solution is obvious to her: she must get you to go away so she can get back to killing birds. In a similar way the destruction of biodiversity, melting of glaciers and increasing infant mortality do not register on the corporate radar because they are not relevant to next quarter’s profit statement. There is no mechanism to account for them. What does register, however, is that people are upset and that could lead to regulation and limits on profit. Chronic hunger only registered as a “crisis” in 2008 when it found expression in the form of riots and demonstrations, a development that threatens the stability that most corporate planners value. Once the unrest was brought under control it disappeared as a “crisis” even though the hunger persisted. The corporate response, therefore, is to do what is necessary to address the threat (the threat being that people are making a fuss). They can increase campaign contributions, deploy lobbyists, invest in public relations, contract amenable scientists, offer funding to environmental groups and paint their corporate jets green.

Corporate decision makers are not driven by a desire to cause harm. It’s just that the world outside of the market—the forests of the Niger Delta, the dreams of coal miners or the nesting grounds of pelicans–is not visible to them. Any undeveloped regions of the earth seen to be wasted until they have been replaced with farmland, resorts or strip mines. The flows of capital, on the other hand, the sudden hot spots of investment, the jostling of exchange rates and shimmering investment instruments made out of thin air and audacity, and ultimately those sweet, sweet cascades of profit, these define the real world to them. It’s a dynamic world. A beautiful world. They will defend their world as fiercely as we defend ours

There is another world. In the marshes of Louisiana, the rain forests of Indonesia and the crevasses of the Mariana Trench there are teaming, interconnected communities of organisms who pursue their own causal paths without concern for trends in the currency markets. Contrary to the pop caricature of Darwinian evolution as a brutal war for dominance, the drama of life consists of millions of species creating themselves in relationship with and dependence on, each other. The undersides of leaves are micro-environments for insects that in turn play host to microorganisms. Cells take in nutrients and excrete waste that serves as the nourishment for other life forms. Multiple ecosystems exist with varying degrees of separation and integration. This is no idyllic state of balance but rather a dynamic one of continual change in which living beings, by the act of living, alter their surroundings in ways which produce multiple pathways of change and feedback. Many non-capitalist cultures view the human species as one society among many in that natural world. In Indigenous South America preserving the integrity of that world is a responsibility which comes with utilizing it. It is seen as necessary to maintain a viable habitat for the animals and plants that are harvested. These creatures are tended as a part of their natural community rather than isolated on farms built on cleared land.

The traits that allow an organism to prosper can also spell its downfall. A parasite that reproduces prolifically can quickly spread throughout its host’s body. If it spreads too quickly, however, it can kill the host before it has had a chance to pass the infection on to others of its species. The parasite can, in its very moment of triumph, destroy the possibility for its own survival. This is the closest analogy to the reality introduced by capitalism to the natural world. With an unstoppable drive to turn everything in its path into profit, it quickly destroys habitats and depletes the resources it consumes. It demonstrates remarkable flexibility: having destroyed one natural community it can quickly adjust its appetites and move on to another. If shrimp become scarce, investment can be redirected to retail, advertising or private prisons. When biofuel promised a higher rate of return than food, the nature of agriculture changed in a flash.  In fact no rate of profit is sufficient if there is a way to get a higher one. Every system has limits beyond which it cannot stretch. A humming bird that loses its capacity to sip nectar will not survive. A corporation exist s as an expression of its hunger for profit. It s flexibility lies in its ability to adapt enough to preserve the profit imperative in a changing environment. Like a lizard after a rain, if the market around it turns green, it will change its color in order to appear in synch.

What we understand about the corporate world will determine how well we come out of our interactions with it. No matter how many organic community gardens we plant on the deck of the Titanic, it will not change the ship’s direction if the people steering it are not on our side. Even more confusing, they are funding the gardens!

The internal logic of the capitalist and natural systems propels them down paths that we can no longer pretend are compatible. The unfolding BP disaster will provide a very public stage on which the corporations, the non-profits and the government will all play their parts. The non-profits will urgently insist that this is a tremendous opportunity to shake or fossil fuel addiction. The government will make angry noises about accountability and corporate greed and a sustainable future. At the end of the day the power of the oil and coal companies get what they want will be intact, undaunted by the theatrics of a mere government. If the Titanic is to change course, it will be up to the crew and passengers.

Fighting for honey

The emergence of a political current that places human and ecological interests, instead of profit, at the heart social life would be both shocking and exhilarating. Such voices are gaining strength on the world stage but remain weak and compromised in the US. Advocates for the rights of children, for example, must resort to describing them as “an investment in the future” or “a natural resource” in order to make them visible to corporate politicians. Community activists fight to have “input” into development projects where they are excluded from real power. There are increasingly restless sectors of the population that would respond with relief (as they did to Obama the campaigner) at the establishment of such a viable alternative project. Crystals in a solution will form around whatever poles are present in the solution. If the only poles are the far right, medium right and soft right, we should not be surprised that the people only choose from among the options that they see. If you don’t build it they won’t come.

Applying an ecological perspective to movement organizing challenges the ways in which we understand our friends, our opponents and the tendencies of motion of our political environment. Let’s tease out some of the implicit assumptions in this view and then consider how they might translate to the street.

1)      People naturally gravitate toward the most hopeful option they can see. Left and right wing movements have in their ranks people who started out on the opposing side. It seems that they did not switch sides due to a change in their fundamental values but rather they changed their minds as to what political current could best fulfill those values. Such basic aspirations as providing safety for our children, being rewarded for our efforts, experiencing pride in our identity and looking toward a future brighter than the past. Political movements provide differing narratives as to who we can share that future with and who stands in the way. Our task is not to change who people are but to change the environment in which some choices make sense to them and others do not.

2)      How we frame our struggle determines how large our circle of solidarity is. I was privileged to work in the 1980s with a Midwestern farmers’ movement that was protesting a high voltage power line being built, without their agreement, across their fields. This movement became the nucleus of a regional alliance with urban environmentalists and the American Indian Movement. That happened because defined their struggle as one of national energy policy rather than local property rights. That meant that federal attempts to exploit uranium on Native land, the shift of coal mining from the unionized east to the non-union west and the erosion of democracy in rural electric coops all became part of their world. White farmers who had shown little sympathy during the civil rights movement were now studying its tactics, blocking roads and driving long distances to support Native American political prisoners.

The trajectory of Malcolm X’s thinking from a street paradigm of “each-for himself” to one of Black self-sufficiency to one of broad solidarity might seem like a wandering route through mutually contradictory visions but actually represents a continually expanding view of what is possible, each opening to a larger circle of solidarity.

3)      What we are fighting for is more important than what we are fighting against. Bees don’t go flying around the countryside looking for animals to sting. They will, however, sting whoever messes with their home hive. The hive is a complex society within which bees fulfill a range of jobs including defense of the village. Enemies come and go but the work of making honey goes on. We must be clear that the honey we are fighting for is more than a dream in our minds. It encompasses the heroic efforts people make every day to experience solidarity in their personal lives and secure the necessities of life for loved ones. Our vision incorporates respect for the needs of other species–known and unknown to us—to pursue their existence in a natural world not under constant threat of demolition.

4)        It’s about power. The last election exposed our hunger for symbolic victories. If they dangle those to us we could be kept entertained for decades arguing about whose turn it is next to run the empire. All they have to do is put a lesbian the ticket next time. Or who could resist the profound symbolism of a Cherokee in the presidential race in the US of A? We are better off learning from the Chicago Panthers. It’s about power, not appearance.

5)      We are poised at a moment in our human story when audacity is called for and timidity can only lead to disaster. You are on a chunk of coastal ice that has broken off from the shore and is drifting away. You know that if you stay put you will float out to sea until the ice melts beneath us. It feels as though leaping across the gap would be the big risk because we could fall into the cold water. If you stay put and float out to sea you will get all kinds of praise for being responsible and level headed. The longer you hesitate, the wider the distance you’ll need to cover. What do you do?

In translation this means that the capitalist feeding frenzy is colliding with the limitations of a planet that can’t sustain it but will not let anyone interfere with the feast. Only a complete social transformation can alter this trajectory. The national and international mechanisms that are supposed to protect us have been corrupted and now only seek to distract and divert us. The cats must kill birds. That’s what they do.

The leap that is called for is for a renewal of radical opposition around the explicit objective of ending corporate rule. History does not support the idea that radicalism in the US is marginal or irrelevant. At least twice in each century it has swept across the country, imposing new conditions and leaving an indelible imprint in our peoples’ consciousness.

6)      We have an opportunity to step into a political vacuum which only the right is attempting to seize. The polarization which now exists is between right and left wing versions of how corporate rule should be normalized. The right calls for the abolition of all regulation and white lefty populists want us to “take America back,” presumably to a time when their constituents, at any rate, got a better deal from the elite. They dream that those days can return.  We live in the time of an empire’s decline, however, when the only thing certain is that the future will not look like anything like the past. A time when people are angry but are aware that they don’t know what to do next. In such a time the operative slogan is “name your dream and fight for it.”

7)      The most powerful arena for struggle is inside people’s heads. The right has long known that every campaign is a story. Every story leads back to your core message, strengthens your base and weakens or divides your enemy. Even if you lose, you can still come out ahead if you have further implanted your story.

If we wished to take control of the national narrative on immigration, a strategy that incorporated blocking barges carrying GMO corn to Mexico would bring small farmers, food advocates, immigrant workers and labor into the same side of a struggle we have redefined to be about neo-liberal trade policies and corporate power. Each campaign can bring the underlying conflict between greed and solidarity into view. This approach can be applied to every struggle.

If the fabric of a new world can be found around us in the form of political movements, social support programs, alternative institutions and reform efforts to improve conditions or protect against abuse, open borders, connect divided constituencies, sustain the marginalized, constrain the military, expand Native sovereignty, protect the natural environment and increase the social wage, then a core vision is the needle we need to sew them together.

How do we apply it? Remember what we said about promoting public health? “Provide what bodies need and remove what causes them harm.” Suppose we applied this in our communities?  We can declare our support for all endeavors that align with the core values and we assert the moral authority to oppose, disrupt and prevent those which violate them. This can provide the basis for blocking toxic waste shipments through poor neighborhoods, defending against anti-immigrant raids, distributing foreclosed housing and appropriating unused plots for urban farming. This does not mean we indiscriminately challenge all bad things. We do not wish to alienate everybody. It provides us with a common language with which to define the issues we choose to take on. It also serves notice that there is now a political center of gravity that is serious about a world in which people matter.

Much as the South African freedom charter was viewed as the nucleus of a future South African constitution, our core vision (whatever we choose to call it) must emerge as the seed of a new stage of human blossoming. The creation of such an instrument would need to be a broadly participatory process that places the most marginalized and targeted sectors at its center. That process itself would be a rich unity-building experience. Converging around core human values would bring us into communion with growing numbers of mobilized people around the world. The Cochabamba climate convergence was a powerful, recent demonstration of the widespread appeal of visionary audacity.

A unifying strategic vision can reward us with the most coveted prize of a social movement: the political initiative. It is what allows you to set the rhythm and pace of unfolding events and define the issues that will be in play. Better yet, it’s what releases the initiative and creativity of people who have been waiting for someone to validate what they believed in private. Strategic vision sets the stage for practical strategies to emerge. It is our way of saying “this is who I am; this is what I want.” Then we can properly get to “this is what I will do.”

We are coming out of a forty year cycle of employing strategies and tactics without a vision. It doesn’t work. There are understandable reasons why we did that. But it still doesn’t work.

Before the arrival of trading ships, Hawaii did not have amphibians, reptiles or small mammals that preyed on insects. Birds were the predators to fear. Therefore the island insects developed the strategy of dropping to the ground at the first sign of danger. Today conditions have changed and the ground crawls with fauna eager to feast on bugs. The insects keep dropping to the ground. It worked for them in the past. They keep getting eaten. Whether they will survive depends on whether they can adapt to a world that has changed.

One more thing. It turns out that the darkest hour is not the one just before the dawn. It’s the one just before we remove the blindfold.

Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist-activist who uses visual art to strengthen and support organizing, movement building and education for social justice. He was born into the Puerto Rican independence movement and came of age in a time of mass movements in the United States. He has been active in the labor movement for thirty years and was a founder of the Northland Poster Collective which produced art and organizing materials for labor struggles. He worked as both an industrial and artistic screen printer for much of his adult life. His writes about strategic organizing and movement building.

To help our readers navigate the overwhelming number of incredible workshops that will be taking place at this year’s Social Forum. Organizing Upgrade pulled together the following list of workshops that we felt reflected our mission: to upgrade strategic conversation among left organizers. We’re looking forward to seeing you all in Detroit!

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23

Excluded Workers’ Congress

Wed, 06/23/2010 – 1:00pm – 5:30pm,  Cobo Hall: D2-15

National Domestic Worker Alliance, National Day Laborers Organizing Network (NDLON) and Jobs with Justice

This PMA focuses on how we can expand workers’ rights to organize. It will bring together workers who are excluded from the right to organize and other labor protections in the United States, for discussion on organizing strategies and the potential for reforms to strengthen workers’ rights and democracy through the expansion of the right to organize to include all workers. We seek to bring leaders from the various sectors, including domestic workers, day laborers, restaurant workers, taxi drivers, farm workers, workers in the right-to-work-for-less states of the South, welfare/workfare workers, formerly incarcerated workers, and guest workers, together, to share conditions in our industries and learn from one anothers experiences organizing. In addition, we seek to identify potential for collaboration, campaigns, and a common agenda for reforms at the federal level (including as they relate to the National Labor Relations Act) that could ultimately address the exclusion of our sectors from the human right to organize and collectively bargain.

Queer People’s Movement Assembly

Wed, 06/23/2010 – 1:00pm – 5:30pm, Cobo Hall: W2-67

Astraea Lesbian Foundation For Justice, FIERCE, Queers for Economic Justice, Affinity Community Services,  Southerners on New Ground

The 12 members of the Astraea Foundation’s Movement Building Program will host a four-hour session to discuss resolutions that have been submitted from LGBTIQ People’s Movement Assemblies that have been held throughout the country leading up to the USSF. The goals of this meeting will be to 1. Identify and discuss the major issues that have arisen from queer-focused PMAs; 2. Work toward a strong resolution (or resolutions) of direction for a national strategy. The meeting will be limited to representatives of those groups who have held queer-focused PMAs and have placed their resolutions on the USSF website. PMA resolutions must be placed on the USSF website by May 15, 2010. Affinity Community Services Allgo: a statewide queer people of color organization Audre Lorde Project Center for Artistic Revolution Esperanza Peace and Justice Center FIERCE National Queer Asian Pacific Alliance Queer Women of Color Media Arts Project Queers for Economic Justice SONG: Southerners on New Ground Sylvia Rivera Law Project The Transgender, Gender Variant and Intersex (TGI) Justice Project The Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice

Transformative Organizing 101

Wed, 06/23/2010 – 1:00pm – 3:00pm  UAW Building: Ford

Social Justice Leadership

Transformative Organizing is an entirely new form of social justice organizing that equally values personal transformation and societal transformation, and sees them both as essential and integrated into a unified theory of change. Transformative Organizing 101 and 201 workshops will emphasize understanding new frameworks that distinguish change from fundamental transformation, and focus on concrete practices that change the organizer as well as the organized. The workshops will be based on the work of the Transformative Organizing Initiative (TOI), a multi-year training program that is currently training 85 staff and 70 grassroots leaders from 17 organizations in New York City. TOI is developing a model for transformative organizing – a model that is based on the belief that transforming ourselves (by aligning our behaviors/actions with our values and beliefs) and the way we do social change work can lay the foundation for the long-term transformation of society. TOI focuses on generating transformative practices that inform organizing strategies, organizational development, political education, and personal transformation.

Transformative Organizing 201

Wed, 06/23/2010 – 3:30pm – 5:30pm  TWW: 5

Social Justice Leadership

Transformative Organizing is an entirely new form of social justice organizing that equally values personal transformation and societal transformation, and sees them both as essential and integrated into a unified theory of change. Transformative Organizing 101 and 201 workshops will emphasize understanding new frameworks that distinguish change from fundamental transformation, and focus on concrete practices that change the organizer as well as the organized. The workshops will be based on the work of the Transformative Organizing Initiative (TOI), a multi-year training program that is currently training 85 staff and 70 grassroots leaders from 17 organizations in New York City. TOI is developing a model for transformative organizing – a model that is based on the belief that transforming ourselves (by aligning our behaviors/actions with our values and beliefs) and the way we do social change work can lay the foundation for the long-term transformation of society. TOI focuses on generating transformative practices that inform organizing strategies, organizational development, political education, and personal transformation.

THURSDAY, JUNE 24

The Fight for Jobs and Economic Recovery

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 10:00am – 12:00pm, Cobo Hall: DO-01A

AFL-CIO, Jobs with Justice, National People’s Action

The jobs and economic crisis is so deep and broad that no one could remember any parallel since the Great Depression. No one has all the answers to solve the problems nor the capacity to do it alone. This session will discuss the different approaches and activities that are being put into motion by national networks and organizations to fight for an economy that works for all working people, including those who have always been marginalized.

Eco-Justice 101: Ecological Crises, Impacts on Communities of Color, and Strategies for the Future

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 10:00am – 12:00pm, WSU Cohn: 224

Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project

Communities of color stand to be first and worst impacted by the multiple ecological crises that are developing today. These crises: of water scarcity and pollution, climate change, waste and toxic pollution, food and agriculture, and the loss of biological and cultural diversity, are a result of the same systems that have driven exploitation and oppression in our communities. They demand the urgent attention of our leaders and organizers as we build our resistance and fight for a better tomorrow. This workshop, which will feature audiovisual presentation, small group discussion, and interactive exercises, will explore: 1. What are these developing crises? 2. How will they impact low-income communities of color in the US and globally? 3. What are examples of community resistance that we can learn from? and 4. How can understanding these struggles create opportunities to advance our work on other issues like housing, jobs, immigration, community development, education, etc? This workshop is also offered in Spanish.

The Young & The Restless: Celebrating Contributions of Youth in the Fight for Liberation

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 10:00am – 12:00pm, Cobo Hall: DO-5A

SOUL School of Unity and Liberation

Communication for Liberation: Communications in the Social Justice Movement

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 10:00am – 12:00pm, Cobo Hall: W1-53

Design Action Collective

Urban Congress 2010

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 1:00pm – 5:30pm, Cobo Hall: W2-66

Right To The City Alliance

The recent economic crisis has unmasked the vast racial and economic inequality in the U.S., once hidden under the veil of the “middle class”. While many are just beginning to feel the impact of this crisis, urban America – poor and low-income families, women, immigrants, communities of color and other city dwellers -have felt it for decades. Urban Congress 2010 will serve as an opportunity for those living and working in grassroots communities to reflect on the state of urban America since the start of the recession; to reevaluate the notion of the ‘right to the city’ in light of the current political climate; to get inspired by local efforts to combat gentrification and displacement; and to learn about Right To The City’s national campaign for housing, jobs, and sustainable communities.

Immigrant Rights from Below Movement Assembly

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 1:00pm – 5:30pm, Cobo Hall: M3-31

Puente Movement, Immigrant Youth Justice League, Southwest Workers Union, Centro Obrero.

How do we make an immigrant rights movement from the bottom up? How do we act effectively & win the max for our communities? How do we relate to the beltway and capital hill? How do we consolidate our presence within the broader immigrant rights movement? We are in a special moment of opportunity & crisis & the stakes are high. We know conditions are worsening. If CIR passes, what will we do? If it doesn’t what is our plan? What is our strategy in this new reality? This is the time and the place. Come to Detroit to envision an immigrant rights movement from below.

Justice in Palestine

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 1:00pm – 5:30pm, Cobo Hall: Riverview Ballroom (W1-52)

US Palestinian Community Network, IJAN,  American Muslims for Palestine

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict touches on all Americans as it has figured centrally in U.S. foreign policy at least since 1968 when the Johnson Administration provided Israel with its first supersonic aircraft in order to achieve a military edge over its Arab neighbors. While this history makes it incumbent upon all Americans to participate in finding a solution to the conflict today–the major stakeholders in the struggle for Palestinian self-determination are Palestinians themselves. Since the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the consequent displacement and dispossession of Palestinians, the Palestinian national body has been fragmented several times over. Today Palestinian identity is bantustanized into those who are citizens of Israel vs. those who are residents of East Jerusalem vs. those who are under occupation in the West Bank vs. those who are under occupation and siege in Gaza vs. those who live in refugee camps throughout the Arab world vs. those who exist in a global diaspora. Such fragmentation limits the potential for organizing among Palestinians to decide on a collective future and its concomitant strategy. Moreover, external involvement both imperial (i.e., the US) as well as regional (i.e., Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon) has divided Palestinians into broad categories of “good” and “bad” in relation to the U.S. and European political establishment. In order to transcend these divisions and engage in a process of self-represented self-determination, Palestinians in the U.S. seek to coalesce themselves into a cohesive body that can join other parts the world over from South America, Canada, Europe, the Arab world, the Occupied Territories, and Israel. The PMA seeks to begin this conversation, agree in theory on its value, encourage its attendees to join the USPCN and participate in its Second Popular Conference, and to introduce a resolution to the general Forum body.

Please note that Organizing Upgrade & SOUL”s “Left Strategies from the Grassroots” panel has been cancelled because of conflicts with other relevant sessions in this time block.

Transformative Organizing Theory: Conscious Organizers Seek to Build Anti-racist, Anti-imperialist Politics Rooted in Working Class Communities of Color

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 1:00pm – 3:00pm,  Cobo Hall: W2-63

Labor/Community Strategy Center

As the “Tea Party” Right rises in U.S. politics and the U.S. Empire continues to reach around the globe, there is an urgent need to build a new left that roots a creative, explicit, anti-racist, anti-imperialist politics inside working-class communities of color. In this session, Ai-jen Poo (National Domestic Workers Alliance), Steve Williams (POWER), Cindy Weisner (Grassroots Global Justice), Patrisse Cullors (Labor/Community Strategy Center) and other prominent organizers will discuss with Eric Mann how his Transformative Organizing Theory, as outlined in a new pamphlet, can help guide and strengthen our work toward this goal. Drawing from Mann’s experience as a veteran of CORE, SDS, the UAW, organizer of the Bus Riders Union and director of the Labor/Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles, Transformative Organizing Theory identifies 7 core elements of social movement building that have powered grassroots organizations on their way to winning historic struggles against slavery, war, apartheid and empire. The 7 Components of Transformative Organizing Theory is a companion to Mann’s forthcoming book, The 21 Qualities of the Successful Organizing: A Journey in Transformative Organizing (2011).

Glenn Beck’s Nightmare: What it Will take to Build a Movement for 21st Century Socialism

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 3:30pm – 5:30pm, Cobo Hall: W2-63

People Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER)

Glenn Beck and other right-wing pundits have drummed up the fear of a socialist takeover of U.S. society. At a time when capitalism is throwing millions of people deeper into poverty and continuing to poison Mother Earth while engorging a few financial speculators, this is sadly more rhetoric than reality. Not only don’t we yet have a strong movement that can challenge capitalism, white supremacy and patriarchy, we also don’t have a vision that can unite our different struggles and we don’t have a movement that can play different roles at different times. But we have built organizations and institutions that could bring such a movement into being if we act in a coordinated way. And the times are on our side. It is the time for bold action for those of us who see the need to move beyond the capitalist system and who are building the capacity of oppressed and marginalized communities to fight for this change to take seriously the challenges of building a multi-issue, grassroots movement that can win liberation for all people and the planet. This workshop will bring together activists, organizers and leaders to explore a vision of a 21st century socialism that can unite our movements and to sketch out a plan to make this vision a reality— and to make the right’s worst nightmares come true.

Presente! Left Movement Veterans Discuss the Path to Power and the Role of the Left in the US.

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 3:30pm – 5:30pm, Cobo Hall: W1-51

Freedom Road Socialist Organization/OSCL

Long-time activists Bill Fletcher, Lian Hurst Mann, and Chokwe Lumumba join other Leftists that have plied their trade for over 30 years in an urgent discussion on the role of the left in today’s social movements. These Movement Veterans have seen the Left transform significantly from a period of widespread, frantic left activity to the period of decline the left has found itself in recently. Today, both the Left and social movements in this country are faced with immense opportunity to play a role in changing the oppressive conditions in this country and striking a blow against US-led Imperialism. What role will or should it play? What must the organized Left do to help create real and profound change in the US and the World? How will it transform itself to be ready to take on these challenges? Our panelists will tackle these and other critical questions. Join these veterans as they put their decades of experience to use in discussing these critical questions with you! Other invited panelists include: Grace Lee Boggs, General Baker, and Jane Slaughter.

FRIDAY, JUNE 25

Converging Crises: Economy, Ecology & Empire. What is the grassroots internationalist response? Converging Movements!

Fri, 06/25/2010 – 10:00am – 12:00pm, Cobo Hall: M3-31

Grassroots Global Justice Alliance members along with International Allies will speak to the need for a global response from below to the converging crises of the financial collapse, ecological destruction, and ongoing promotion of empire. Speakers will discuss what movement convergence means for grassroots organizing and how we build a conscious, internationalist powerbase to challenge capitalism and begin to build the alternative economic, political, cultural models.

New Majority Organizing

Fri, 06/25/2010 – 10:00am – 12:00pm, Cobo Hall: W2-61

Right To The City Alliance

Right To The City members San Francisco New Majority, Virginia New Majority, Florida New Majority will present an emerging approach to voter mobilization, building the united front through civic engagement, and leadership development within the context of elections. They will also discuss the cycle of broad electoral work and more narrow consciousness development, campaign building, and impediments to democracy. Lastly the will discuss voter mobilizations strategies targeting new and traditionally marginalized demographics including African Americans, and immigrants.

Developing Radical & Revolutionary Approaches to Reform Struggles

Fri, 06/25/2010 – 10:00am – 12:00pm, WSU Cohn: 220

New York Study Group

In the past year New York Study Group has been trying to tackle the tough questions about the relationship between contemporary reform struggles and the long-term revolutionary process here in the United States. Through our observation of and participation in local struggles in New York City and through our collective study and reflection, we learned hard lessons from defeats but also gained inspirations through victories. Our reform struggles open up exciting new possibilities, but we also know that old tactics are not enough to effectively win struggles in this day and age and that we need to change the way we do our work if we want to lay the groundwork for a more radical movement in the long run. In this workshop, the New York Study Group will be convening radical organizers from around the country to reflect on their reform struggles and to dialogue about how we need to do our work differently if we are serious about building a more relevant left and stronger mass movements.

Inter-Alliance Dialogue Convention – Grassroots Responses to the Economic Crisis and Critical Issues of our Time

Fri, 06/25/2010 – 1:00pm – 5:30pm, Cobo Hall: O3-45

Inter-Alliance Dialogue, Grassroots Global Justice, Jobs with Justice, National Day Laborers Organizing Network, National Domestic Workers Alliance, Pushback Network, Right to the City Alliance

Enough is Enough / Basta Ya! – A Peoples’ Movement Assembly Forging Alternatives to the Economic and Ecological Crises of Our Times. We are living in uncertain and momentous times. The current economic crisis, a global ecological crisis brought on by global capitalism, and a shifting landscape of political power on global scale, have created a historical moment marked by volatility and change. The impacts of these interpenetrating crises are widespread and inclusive. All of us, including Mother Earth are affected. Amidst this uncertainty, this is also a moment of opportunity. Around the world and at home, we are witnessing the convergence of social movements that are not only battling against the devastating impacts of global capitalism and climate change, but also posing sweeping agendas for change that include how we organize the economy, how we interact with one another as human beings and how we create a sustainable future for the planet. The Inter-Alliance Dialogue invites you to participate in movement assembly to hear the testimonies of those impacted by the current crises, gain inspiration from the joint struggles that we and movement allies are doing to address current realities, and build a common platform for action this year to strengthen a movement for long-term change for a democratic and sustainable economy in the US and around the world.

Seizing Opportunity: Plotting for a New Majority Future

Fri, 06/25/2010 – 1:00pm – 3:00pm,  UAW Building: 1032

Center for Social Inclusion

People of color are estimated to be the new majority in the US by 2042. This can either entrench the role of race as a wedge that divides or transform it into a force for progress. The difference depends on our ability to think and act now on key questions of policy, power and identity. Through a presentation and group dialogue, we will explore how shifting demographics calls us to proactively redefine concepts of race and ethnicity to forge a united front for equity. We will also address the following: how do we seize opportunities for alliance building across race and ethnicity, especially in regions experiencing new and dramatic shifts? What issues and policies can unite communities of color and bridge an increasingly non-white younger generation and a white senior population? How do we guard against attempts to wedge communities of color and anticipate backlash from those with something to lose? The Center for Social Inclusion will provide an analysis on what the changing demographics could mean and grassroots leaders from the field, including Adrienne Maree Brown Executive Director of The Ruckus Society, Angelica Salas Executive Director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), and Gihan Perera co-founder and Executive Director of The Miami Workers Center will share their experiences and expertise on challenges and strategic opportunities.

Movement Lawyering: How Legal Advocacy Can and Should Connect with Grassroots Organizing

Revolutionary on the Daily: Visions for New Societies, Revolutionaries Organizing Ourselves

Fri, 06/25/2010 – 1:00pm – 5:30pm, Cobo Hall: M2-30

RWIOT Revolutionary Work In Our Times

In the past year New York Study Group has been trying to tackle the tough questions about the relationship between contemporary reform struggles and the long-term revolutionary process here in the United States. Through our observation of and participation in local struggles in New York City and through our collective study and reflection, we learned hard lessons from defeats but also gained inspirations through victories. Our reform struggles open up exciting new possibilities, but we also know that old tactics are not enough to effectively win struggles in this day and age and that we need to change the way we do our work if we want to lay the groundwork for a more radical movement in the long run. In this workshop, the New York Study Group will be convening radical organizers from around the country to reflect on their reform struggles and to dialogue about how we need to do our work differently if we are serious about building a more relevant left and stronger mass movements. For this year’s Social Forum, our collaborators are: Left Turn http://www.leftturn.org, League of Revolutionaries for a New America http://www.lrna.org/, Solidarity http://www.solidarity-us.org/, Freedom Road Socialist Organization/ Organización Socialista del Camino para la Libertad, http://freedomroad.org/, LA COiL (Communities Organizing Liberation), New York Study Group, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement http://mxgm.org/, Labor Community Strategy Center http://www.thestrategycenter.org/, and Bring the Ruckus http://www.bringtheruckus.org/

Transformative Organizing Theory: Conscious Organizers Seek to Build Anti-racist, Anti-Imperialist Politics Rooted in Working Class Communities of Color

Thu, 06/24/2010 – 1:00pm – 3:00pm, Cobo Hall: W2-63

Developing the theory and practice of transformative organizing is a critical task before our movements as we fight to change the country, change the world. We are excited that transformative organizing is on the agenda at the US Social Forum and we invite everyone to join us for a rich, reflective discussion at our workshop with Ai-jen Poo (National Domestic Workers Alliance), Steve Williams (POWER), Cindy Weisner (Grassroots Global Justice), Ng’ethe Maina (Social Justice Leadership), Patrisse Cullors (Labor/Community Strategy Center) and Eric Mann

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THE 7 COMPONENTS OF TRANSFORMATIVE ORGANIZING THEORY

Eric Mann

The following is excerpted from The 7 Components of Transformative Organizing Theory, which is a companion to The 21 Qualities of the Successful Organizer: A Journey In Transformative Organizing, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2011.

The history of organizing in the United States has always mirrored the politics of the country, with three major approaches to organizing driving social change.

Right-wing organizing is reflected in the Klan, White Citizens Councils, Christian Conservatives, and today, the Vigilantes and the Tea Party reactionaries.

Pragmatic organizing has fought for specific reforms in the interest of working people that have often been limited in scope, characterized by antileft ideology, and, at times, an implicit deal with the U.S. Empire.

Left-wing organizing is characterized by a militant opposition to racism, war, and the abuses of the U.S. Empire, strategized by a broad array of people who self-identify as revolutionary, radical, liberal, and progressive. I call this approach “transformative organizing.”

I am writing this essay to reach out to organizers of all progressive philosophies who are contributing to the 2010 U.S. Social Forum. As the “Tea Party” Right rises in U.S. politics and the Obama/ Clinton administration continues to pursue the Empire’s objectives around the globe, there is an urgent need for us to organize. To recruit new members and build our base. To strengthen our organizations. To coalesce into whole new movements and generate a new Left that is rooted in a creative, anti-racist, anti-imperialist politics that is growing inside working-class communities of color.

Transformative organizing is a powerful framework to ground and guide our work.

•  Transformative organizing transforms the system itself and is in revolutionary opposition to the power structures of colonialism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism in its current form, which is imperialism.

•  Transformative organizing transforms the consciousness of people who participate in the process of building organizations, struggles, and movements.

•  Transformative organizing transforms the organizers themselves as they stand up to the Right, reach out to the people, and take on the system.

The great tradition of transformative organizing

The tradition of transformative organizing in the United States began with the Indigenous resistance to European genocidal conquest, the slave rebellions from early Gloucester, Virginia to the Nat Turner Revolt, the Abolitionists and the Radical Republicans who constitutionally outlawed slavery and built the Reconstruction government after the civil war. It continued in the early 20th century with the Industrial Workers of the World, the Anti-Imperialist League, the radical wing of the suffragettes, the Niagara Movement, the Back to Africa Movement, and the exemplary work of the U.S. Communist Party in the Black and labor movements and the world anti-fascist front during the 1930s and 1940s.

An anti-left backlash after World War II (often called the McCarthy period and associated with the House Un-American Activities Committee) carried out red-baiting, broke up communist-led unions, and led witch-hunts against radicals and revolutionaries such as W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson. But at the height of this reactionary period in the 1950s there was a resurgence of transformative organizing that would later be understood as The Two Decades of the Sixties—beginning with the defeat of the French by the Vietnamese at Dien-Bien Phu in 1954, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955, and the Congress of Non-Aligned Nations at Bandung in 1954-1955, and ending with the defeat of the United States in Vietnam in 1975.

During the height of the multi-racial New Left movement, the word “organizer” was synonymous with Black militant, anti-war, and soon, prosocialist, anti-imperialist politics. The use of “liberation” by the women’s liberation and gay liberation movements was inspired by the world revolutionary spirit embodied by the Vietnamese National Liberation Front.

As Clayborne Carson explains in In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s, the young civil rights workers began referring to themselves as “revolutionaries” to distinguish themselves from the less militant, more accommodationist forces who were tied to gradualism, the civil rights establishment, and the Democratic Party. This distinction evolved into solidarity with African revolutions, opposition to the U.S. war in Vietnam, and a variety of urban rebellions, mass strikes of Black workers.

By the time of the U.S. invasion of Cambodia and the killing of students at Kent State and Jackson State, millions of students were closing down the universities in opposition to the war in Vietnam. Organizationally, it meant building the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Third World Women’s Alliance, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the Black Panther Party, Brown Berets, American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican Young Lords, La Raza Unida Party, Red Guards, the National Welfare Rights Organization, and the Indochina Peace Campaign. By the early 1970s and 1980s the struggles and then mergers of these and other organizations led to a movement for Third World communism in the United States, to ally with national liberation movements around the world.

These left initiatives had large mass followings and created a significant threat to the system itself; they were followed by a ferocious counterrevolution and white backlash against the organizations and the social movements they embodied. This took the form of intense government repression through an explicit counter-insurgency program, COINTELPRO. Four decades of reactionary governance by Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush aggressively dismantled the social welfare state, attacking the environment, workers, unions, Black people, Latino immigrants, women, the Left, and people all over the world.

Where is transformative organizing today?

By 1980 the movement was spent and exhausted—a product of its victories in civil rights and ending the war in Vietnam, the exhaustion of many young people who had been in struggle, and the imprisonment and assassination of revolutionary leadership. This decline of left power was deepened by the self-inflicted wounds of sectarian attacks on fellow movement members. The crisis of socialism in China and the Soviet Union accelerated political disorientation.

In this left vacuum the fervor of transformative organizing waned as its fundamental premises were attacked. Sparked by the “rules for radicals” of Saul Alinsky, there emerged a self-proclaimed “pragmatic,” “realistic” approach to organizing. This approach led to work that was militant and often effective in winning important immediate reforms for working people but that often, by its own ideology, set unnecessarily narrow objectives. Some of its advocates were explicitly anti-left, caricaturing the Left and re-writing history. The advocates of “pragmatic” organizing justified their narrow economic fights against the system in the name of “non-ideological” organizing for “the community.” They rarely acknowledged that all organizing is ideological and that “pragmatic” organizing often relied upon close ideological ties to the Democratic Party, the Trade Union bureaucracies, and powerful church hierarchies.

Both approaches of transformative organizing and pragmatic organizing fight for just and immediate demands that all organizers support, such as more low-income housing, more funding for schools, higher wages for public sector workers. But when pragmatic organizers choose not to frame their campaigns for immediate demands within fundamental structural challenges to racism, police brutality, and imperialist wars, or battles for LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, or basic democratic rights, they can isolate themselves from their community’s need for deep social transformation. In many cases, pragmatic organizing, whether by its silence or its aggressive anti-Left ideology, conciliates with Empire-building.

Yet, it is important that we understand that this debate between pragmatic and transformative approaches to organizing is about strategy, not morality. In Los Angeles, where we work, we are on good terms with many organizers who frame their work as pragmatic. They don’t red-bait us; we don’t “right bait” them. Instead, we get together and often have similar assessments of a situation. Sometimes, their constraints make it difficult for them to take a stand; other times they don’t think our tactics are the best. But we respect each other because we both have a strong base in the Black and Latino working class and can be of real help to each other against more powerful adversaries. We also line up on many issues together, fight together on ballot initiatives that attack immigrants and communities of color, and build relationships based on a mutual capacity to put troops on the ground. Still, in the interest of building a movement for long-term structural change in the U.S., the differences of strategy need to be addressed.

Impressively, in the 1980s and 1990s, and the first decade of the 21st Century, many young people and movement veterans resisted this “pragmatic” move to the right and have worked to carry out effective radical, left, and revolutionary politics as they organize in low-income communities and college campuses.

Today, the pendulum among organizers continues to swing left. Many dedicated organizers are questioning the limits of the pragmatic approach. The U.S. Social Forum is a reflection of the re10 assertion of anti-racist, anti-imperialist politics. With its slogan of “Another World Is Possible; Another U.S. Is Necessary,” the first U.S. Social Forum in 2007 and the upcoming second USSF in Detroit reflect tens of thousands of people who are organizing across the country in working class communities, in communities of color, among immigrants and G.I.s, and among high school and college students. They are rejecting the trap of pragmatism, and are already carrying out some version of transformative organizing.

At the Labor/Community Strategy Center, Transformative Organizing Theory has been a map to guide our path and a model we try to live up to in our daily organizing since the Center was founded in 1989. We have organized domestic workers, hotel workers, garment workers, security guards, high school students in low-income, working class communities of color, and bus riders on the buses of L.A. in order to transform the power structures and policies of racism, patriarchy, and capitalism which constitute the U.S. Empire.

In our flagship project, Bus Riders Union organizers have engaged tens of thousands of L.A.’s 500,000 bus riders—predominantly immigrants and people of color, majority women, with an average annual income of $12,000—through on-the-bus organizing. Their conversations are grounded in the most immediate demands for low fares and a first-class clean-fuel bus system but always within an anti-racist, anti-imperialist framework. BRU members, leaders and organizers are dedicated to transforming “bus consciousness” in order to build a larger movement that fights for immigrant, queer and women’s rights, organizes against the police/prison state and to stop global warming, and stands against U.S. wars and attacks on the sovereignty and self-determination of oppressed peoples, from Cuba to Tuvalu, from South Africa to Venezuela.

Grassroots Global Justice Alliance/La Alianza Popular para la Justicia Global (GGJ), of which the Strategy Center is a part, is another contemporary example of bringing transformative organizing into the political life of low-income, working class communities of color. An alliance of more than 60 organizations, GGJ emphasizes the inter-relationship between U.S.-based grassroots organizing and an international movement for global justice. At a time when the menace of a mass-based neo-fascist movement is in front of us, GGJ is helping to generate a broader theoretical and strategic framework for movement-building, strengthening left forces, and encouraging those who want to challenge racism, ecological disaster, wars, and the U.S. Empire itself.

Class consciousness, political leadership, and revolutionary organization are the foundations of transformative organizing. They are embodied in the following seven components of Transformative Organizing Theory.

1. Transformative organizing seeks radical social change through the strategy of building an international united front to challenge the U.S. Empire.

Transformative organizing is based on an analysis that the United States is a structurally racist, imperialist power. Driven by the need to relentlessly expand that is characteristic of advanced capitalism, the U.S. operates domestically and internationally to control the economies and governments of every nation in the world-especially the nations and peoples of the Third World in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. That is why it calls itself “the superpower.” Transformative organizing, therefore, is situated in a worldwide movement with a strategy to challenge the U.S. Empire.

2. The transformative organizer is a conscious agent of change, a revolutionary educator with a plan to intervene in and make history.

One critical goal of the ruling classes—those who own and control the means of production, consumption, education, and armed force–is to achieve political loyalty and voluntary obedience from the classes and peoples they dominate. Their political system puts on an ideological full court press that is carried out through government, the corporations and employers, the family, schools, media, trade unions, and churches. When it succeeds, many exploited and oppressed peoples come to accept the established relationships of class, race, and gender domination. They believe these power relations are natural, part of some moral master plan, or just inevitable. When they do seek social change, they tacitly agree to limit their demands to reforms within the ground rules of the dominant system. Transformative organizers challenge the moral legitimacy and ideological hegemony of the capitalist system and its historical master narrative of empire building.

3. Transformative organizing requires the leadership of society’s most exploited, oppressed, and strategically placed classes and races.

Transformative organizing generates social movements that involve members from all classes of society–from the most privileged to the most oppressed. Yet a winning strategy is based on analyzing the forces most capable of leading that movement. Given the specific history of the United States as a settler state built on genocide, slavery, stolen lands and stolen peoples, certain radical organized forces have led historic struggles against U.S. atrocities and have proven to be the most successful leaders of the resistance.

4. Transformative organizing is produced by transformative organizations.

From the first days of Spanish, French, British, and later U.S. colonization of the Americas and the first moments of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, there have been spontaneous and organized forms of resistance. Throughout U.S. history, many transformative organizations have fought for radical objectives against the U.S. Empire.  What are some of the key characteristics from which we can evaluate and build organizations today?

5. Transformative organizing becomes truly transformative in the course of battle.

The true assessment of the effectiveness of an organization and its organizers can only be measured in practice–in the actual struggle for power. An organization’s success is ultimately judged by its capacity to take on powerful corporate and government forces, put forth radical demands, and wage long-term battles. Transformative organizers and organizations build their reputation in high visibility campaigns that fight for and often win important structural changes and improvements in the lives of real people.

6. Transformative organizing transforms the organizers.

A fundamental premise of transformative organizing is that social being creates social consciousness; that is, the consciousness of organizers is shaped by their location and their experiences in the social system. At first a garment worker, a bus rider, a farm worker may decide to “just get a little involved” in a social movement. But as they change from observer to activist to organizer, their consciousness changes. As they fight the company that has not paid their wages, defend neighbors who are being deported, organize co-workers in the sweatshops to demand better pay for their piece work, ask for longer breaks from their employer as they pick avocados in the brutal heat, fight off sexual harassment in the workplace and police harassment in the school yard, they experience changes, often monumental changes, in their consciousness.

7. Transformative organizing requires a transformative political program.

Transformative organizing is best understood by its coherent program of concrete demands that force the system to make radical structural changes. Protestors, organizers, revolutionaries are often asked, “What is it that you people want?” When people consider joining a movement for radical change, their first question is, “What are we fighting for?” Throughout history, transformative demands have motivated the strongest social movements with the greatest mass participation, militancy, and duration. What are some current demands that can shape a political program?

Copies of the full presentation of the 7 Components (60-page pamphlet) will  be available at our table in Cobo Hall at the USSF. To order the 7 Components pamphlet, please contact Frontlines Press at 213-387-2800  info@frontlinespress.com.

Towards Liberation of Self and Society, Part 1

Social Justice Leadership

SJL is organizing two workshops at the 2010 U.S. Social Forum to discuss their transformative organizing model.

Transformative Organizing 101 Wed, 06/23/2010 – 1:00pm – 3:00pm, UAW Building: Ford

Transformative Organizing 201 Wed, 06/23/2010 – 3:30pm – 5:30pm, TWW: 5

An Authentic Reckoning

Incredible shifts have happened over the past few years that will forever change how people in the United States relate to politics, the economy, and the world.  The election of Barack Obama, despite the mainstream character of his policies, undeniably signals a new dawn in American politics that many did not think possible for at least another 50 years.  In addition, the economic crisis that continues to affect the US and the world is having an impact on the well-being of many families generally, and is having a devastating impact on communities already economically and politically marginalized, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the Great Depression 80 years ago.  Finally, the reality of global warming will force the entirety of the planet’s industrialized economy to permanently change its relationship to energy use, one way or another.

Important political battles are raging.  Merely a few months ago there was an opportunity to dramatically change healthcare in this country, something that the majority of Americans is in favor of, yet what we witnessed instead was a surging backlash against change.  And most recently, the battle to redefine immigration policy has taken a turn for the worst, as shown by the passage of SB1070 in Arizona.

The past year has revealed more sharply than ever the glaring deficiencies in the infrastructure and capacity of the social justice sector.  Obviously social justice work, and in particular grassroots organizing, is incredibly important to the building of an authentic democracy.  Historically, major social advances in this country can be traced to the spark of grassroots organizing, whether that be in the South in the 1950s or in Northern and Western urban areas in the 1960s and 1970s.  Yet in the last couple of decades that infrastructure has weakened to the point where much of the sector has been caught off guard and unable to seize incredibly important organizing opportunities, made even more poignant by the healthcare and immigration battles that progressives are losing.

It is time for the social justice movement to have an authentic reckoning with its effectiveness.  The current moment indicates that in many ways history is at a turning point.  This is also a potential turning point in the evolution of social justice organizing – although the environment is changing rapidly, the organizing models that are most prevalent date from 40 years ago or more.  There is a major opportunity for the social justice movement to reassess its approach, envision a new way of organizing, and greatly increase its impact.  The question is:  Will the social justice movement of the 21^st century meet the changing times as they demand, or be swept into the dustbin of history?

Social Justice Leadership is proposing a new framework, Transformative Organizing (TO), with the potential to change the basic approach and assumptions of social justice organizing and to greatly expand its impact.  TO is about creating deep change in how we are as people, how we relate to each other, and how we structure society.  It brings together approaches to transformative change, ideological development, and impactful grassroots organizing to create a new paradigm for organizing. For the past few years, SJL has been working with over a dozen organizations to experiment with and develop a model for Transformative Organizing.

Most social justice organizing in the United States, both current and historical, has had an outward focus on building power and leadership to change local conditions, public policy and resource allocation.  It generally has been pragmatic in its orientation, focusing on short- to medium-term change.  While this approach has won important victories that have affected the lives of millions, its focus on external, short term change has greatly limited its potential.  Transformative Organizing combines an ambitious organizing approach with attention to personal and organizational transformation, and an emphasis on long-term vision, ideology and movement building.  The result is an approach to social change that can be far more powerful than the sum of its parts.

Most importantly, Transformative Organizing demands that organizers and the social justice movement step fully and powerfully into the uncertainty and opportunity of the present historical moment in order to best bring about a societal transformation to true justice and compassion, equality and interdependence.

The Goal:  Liberation from Oppression, Liberation from Suffering

The long-term goal of Transformative Organizing is simple: to help transform society into one that is free from oppression and free from suffering.  The path to get there, on the other hand, will undoubtedly be fraught with difficulties, setbacks, moments of victory, uncertainty, and even downright mystery.  There are no easy or straightforward roads to this vision.  And undoubtedly what is required to get to true social transformation is more than just organizing – there are other components that are required to transform society that must work in tandem with the on-the-ground organizing.

Transformative Organizing, however, is foundational for the social transformation process because it engages the populations most excluded from the workings and benefits of society.  It differs from more traditional notions of social change in at least 2 aspects:  1) TO does not confine itself to systemic or structural change alone, but seeks to integrate personal transformation and transformation of our relationships, and 2) TO, as the name suggests, seeks transformation, not merely change – it seeks a process so deep and thorough that a reversal to previous conditions is impossible.

Transformative Organizing recognizes that people experience oppression and exploitation from the political and economic system, and that people also experience suffering from the situation of their existence.

Oppression, Suffering, and How They Are Related

Oppression generally takes the form of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, able-ism, etc.  wherein the dominant group in society subjugates other groups and extracts their labor, wealth, bodies, identity, dignity, and more, for the benefit of the dominant group.  More specifically it manifests as some form of violence, exploitation and exclusion such as police abuse, poor wages, lack of healthcare, homelessness and substandard housing, domestic violence, racial profiling, deportation, etc.

The current form of social justice organizing is well-oriented to these forms of direct and indirect violence and has for the last 50 years tried to systematically organize people to oppose this system and fight for an alternative that is more just.  Oppression manifests in the lives of individuals, but it is systemic – it is structured through the political system, the economy, and civil society.  Thus, while individual lives can be sheltered from abuse and exploitation, oppression is a system-wide phenomenon and therefore can only be transformed at the systemic level through changing the structures, practices, and culture of the whole society.

Suffering, on the other hand, is simply a way to describe the anxiety, fear, stress, disappointment, self-loathing, and other psychological and emotional conditions that show up in people’s lives.  The social justice movement is in general not particularly well-oriented to dealing with this.  The key distinction is that suffering is an internal response to the external conditions that we face.  Some suffering is a result of oppression, other suffering is not.  In many cases the suffering that poor and working class people, or any exploited group, experience is directly related to the oppression they are subjected to.   Job exploitation, police violence, or other forms of oppression can be physically incapacitating (even deadly) and it can also be psychologically and emotionally paralyzing.  The fear, doubt, self-hatred, and internalized oppression that can come from these experiences is a form of suffering.

Suffering can be related to oppression, but it can also be generated from other life experiences.  For example, a consistent feeling of self-disappointment may be related to having an “over-achieving” older sibling, and always feeling the need to play catch-up.  This can evolve into a paralyzing lack of confidence, particularly if a person’s parents discouraged or ignored their achievements while showing greater support and encouragement for the sibling.  Paralysis, disappointment, and doubt can result from these kinds of conditions and from traumatic experiences, or from other relationships at work or with loved ones (or even people’s relationships to themselves), but these feelings may have little to do with systemic oppression.

In either situation, the internal response can take the form of suffering.  Suffering (whether it is stress rooted in police oppression or stress from being ignored by one’s parents) becomes a barrier to people bringing their best selves, particularly in interpersonal relationships or in their relationship to themselves.

Many people in the world, and many organizers in the social justice movement, are caught in the grips of suffering.  The suffering shows up as non-productive behavior, moods, or mindsets that can hamper effectiveness, be the cause of difficult relationships, and even derail whole organizations.  At its worst, the suffering takes the form of people unconsciously playing out their trauma in the organizational or movement space, with predictable results of broken organizational relationships, isolation from allies, and ultimately stagnation.

Although both oppression and suffering can be isolating, damaging, and imprisoning, and they can even be related, they are not the same thing.  Suffering is internally generated whereas oppression is imposed from the outside.

The experience of Nelson Mandela is instructive.  The South African government imprisoned him for opposing the racist apartheid regime, a clear example of oppression. The political system imposed a condition of oppression on him that he didn’t want and that he was powerless to stop.  The oppression was externally generated.  Still, his 27 years of imprisonment was undoubtedly brutal and dehumanizing, yet he never let the experience take away his own sense of dignity and self.  It was an experience of oppression and pain, but he refused to let it be one of suffering.  He did not allow the experience to generate feelings of suffering that eroded his own internal integrity, his internal wholeness.  At the end, Mandela left prison seemingly more balanced and poised than many of his comrades who were not jailed.  He ultimately led his country into a new era from a place of vision, compassion, and reconciliation.

The difference between oppression and suffering is important because it means that different actions are required to transform them.  Oppression is exerted from the outside, whereas suffering, as the term is being used here, comes from the inside.  Thus oppression requires engaging society’s structures in order to abolish it, whereas suffering requires engaging ourselves in order to end it.

Transformative Organizing sees that both oppression and suffering are impediments to people living whole lives, bringing their best selves, reaching their potential, and finding fulfillment.  True freedom is incomplete without liberation from oppression and liberation from suffering.

Steps on the Path

It is essential to engage external oppression and internal suffering at the same time and through an integrated process because they work together in a vicious cycle to keep each other alive.  When people are oppressed, their reaction can often be to internalize the oppression by taking on the narrative of inferiority that the oppressor promotes.  This internalized oppression is a form of suffering – it is conditioned by external oppression but it is an internally generated response that degrades the wholeness, integrity, and sense of self of the person.  This internal suffering (and actually any suffering) can impede people from taking action to end the external oppression because the stress and self-loathing hinder them from bringing their most effective, confident, clear-thinking and clear-feeling selves to the task of liberating themselves from external oppression.  The inaction caused by the internal suffering then allows the external oppression to continue and become normalized, and even to grow, in turn causing ever more suffering.

Liberation from oppression and liberation from suffering require transformation in at least two spheres: 1) the transformation of society based on the highest form of justice, democracy, and equality and 2) the transformation of ourselves and our relationships based on authenticity, interdependence and compassion.

• Creation of a society based on justice, democracy, and equality

This broader goal of social transformation focuses on the political, social, and economic structural relationships between people and groups (by race, class, gender, sexuality, immigration status, etc) that determine laws, allocation of resources, and decision-making at the societal level.  Structural relationships would be reorganized so that systemic oppression no longer existed.

Social transformation would mean transforming the economy into one that is rooted in guaranteeing that all people get their needs met, rather than one based on individual gain.  It would be an economy where “productivity” is a measure of fulfillment and not a measure of how much product can saturate a market.  It would be an economy that has a fair and just distribution of wealth amongst all people.

It would also require re-imagining and re-creating how people engage with politics, moving it from marking a ballot once every few years, to creating structures that allow real participation in the decision-making of community, city, state and national affairs.

• Transformation of ourselves and our relationships based on interdependence, compassion, and authenticity

The practices and habits of society as a whole are deeply embedded in its people.  And despite the uniqueness of every individual, the practices of individuals help to keep the collective culture alive.  The habits of society are replicated in the behavior of individuals, and how they relate to themselves, others, and society as a whole.  Thus if the goal is true social transformation, it is essential to greatly increase self-awareness of default habits, and to begin embodying intentional practices that reflect the values of a more just society.

Of all people, those who have taken up the challenge of transforming society, be they paid staff or grassroots members, have the responsibility of identifying the ways that they individually replicate and promote practices of the individualistic, competitive, and oppressive society.  And they have the responsibility of demonstrating through lived practice what a renewed and just society can look like – embodying interdependence, compassion, and authenticity in all relationships.

These two spheres are integrally linked.  The shape of society, its systems, and institutions has a profound impact on the experience of individual people’s lives.  As discussed already, oppression can lead to internal suffering, on top of the externally imposed injustice, pain, and misery it can cause for the oppressed.

Alternatively, if society is fundamentally just, if society is structured to help people get their needs met and to find meaning in their lives, then it will help alleviate individual suffering.  It will alleviate it certainly from the abolishment of oppression, but also from reducing conditions that cause people to have stress, fear, anxiety about the future, self-loathing about the inadequacies that society tells them they have, and other forms of degraded sense of self.

The converse is true also.  When people are stressed, anxious, uncertain, or self-hating, then they are more brittle and fragile, and thus more self-protective rather than being more outwardly compassionate.  They are less likely to extend trust to others and be more curious about them, instead becoming pre-occupied with their own well-being and not the well-being of others.  The well-being of others can in turn often be seen as an annoyance, and can even escalate to being seen as a threat.  The scapegoating of immigrants, African Americans, and other disenfranchised groups  — which we have seen happen time and again – comes in part from this place of society-wide stress and suffering, most prevalent during eras of uncertainty or shrinking resources, such as during wars or periods of rising unemployment.

Thus, if people reduce their level of anxiety and doubt, if they have less reason to look for quick fixes to alleviate the background stress in their lives, whether it be through scapegoating other ethnicities, genders, or nationalities, or through alcohol and drugs, sugar, television, or shopping – if people have less suffering in their lives – there is a greater likelihood that they would be able to extend compassion to those who are living harsher lives, to those who are being excluded from the benefits of society.  They would be more able to support long-term solutions for addressing society’s problems, solutions that help to alleviate the overall conditions that contribute to both oppression and suffering.

This raises the question of how much of a democratic, just, and equal society can we have if suffering isn’t ended.  And it raises the converse question of how much can people, all people, be free of internally-generated stress, doubt, and suffering if oppression, exploitation, and exclusion in society as a whole is not abolished. This dilemma is illustrated in the two figures below (see Fig 1 and Fig 2)

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The above figures imply that society cannot reach the highest form of democracy, equality, and justice if the people in that society endure stress, anxiety, and other forms of suffering (regardless of whether or not that suffering is related to oppression).  And that people in society cannot be free from internal suffering if society has external oppression structured into it.  In other words, freedom at the societal level is conditioned by and related to freedom at the internal/individual level, and freedom at the internal/individual level is conditioned by and related to freedom at the societal level.

Transformative Organizing sees the need to engage both levels, simultaneously and integrated, as essential to bringing about the long-term and sustainable social transformation we all seek.  It puts us on the best footing for transforming our political, social, and economic systems, our relationships to other people, and our collective relationship to the earth.  Not doing so will ultimately limit the kind of social change we are able to bring.  It is only when significant progress in the two arenas happen that we have the possibility of true transformation.  When societal structures and practices irreversibly evolve, and when people’s hearts, minds, values and behavior fundamentally advance, only then can authentic transformation happen.  All else is merely change.

You can download a PDF of this document here.

This is the first of a two-part strategy statement produced by Social Justice Leadership.

For more information, visit www.sojustlead.org

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

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

The Back Story

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pachamama o Muerte!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What does this mean for us?

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

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

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

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

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

2. Same struggle.  Same enemy.  New Vision?

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

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

3. The Road from Cochabamba to Cancún

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

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

Pa’lante Siempre!

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

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

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

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GROWING WINGS: Evolving Out Of the Non Profit Industrial Complex

Jidan Koon, FastForum Guest Editor

THE SILVER LINING: You know that curse which becomes a blessing in disguise?  That’s what faced INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence five years ago when it chose to search for opportunity in what appeared to be a crisis.

Here’s the back story: In February 2004, INCITE! received a letter from the Ford Foundation letting them know that they’d been awarded a $100,000 general support grant.   A short time later, however, a Ford Foundation board member decided to conduct some independent research on INCITE!.  Upon finding a statement supporting the Palestinian Liberation struggle on the organization’s website, the board member challenged Ford’s support of INCITE and the board  voted to pull the grant.

Stunned, INCITE! decided to move forward without Ford’s funding.  They embarked on a grassroots fundraising drive and quickly raised the money that they initially were counting on from Ford.  Not only did INCITE! completely shift its own perceptions of its dependence on foundation money, it embarked on fundamental questioning of the non-profit structure and the ways in which it controls and manages radical dissent.

Recognizing the power of the moment, INCITE invited its colleagues into this conversation, resulting in the first ever The Revolution Will Not Be Funded conference in May 2004.   The conference convened hundreds of organizers and activists nationwide to name the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (NPIC) and explore strategies for maintaining the autonomy and integrity of the social justice movement in America.

Last year, a record number of non-profits have shut their doors.  On the average, non-profits took cuts of one third in government and foundation funding.  This year looks just as bleak.  The issue of the social justice movements’ use of non-profits as a primary vehicle for organization is more pertinent than ever.  In times of economic crisis, when services are needed most and opportunities for fundamental change are the highest, non-profit structures find themselves strapped by funding cuts and fighting for survival.

THE QUESTION OF FORM: Many of us learned in science class that as temperature increases, water moves through different phases: the solid form of ice, the liquid form of water, and the vapor form of steam.  The H2O molecules do not change in composition internally, rather they change in their relationship to each other as the external environment changes.  Similarly, we can see that as the conditions of the world change, so does the form of the social justice movement.  Like the water molecules, the essential make up of what we do and the crux of what we hope for does not change: freedom, love, justice.  However, our form and the relationship between our different forms are changing as we speak.

Its clear that the NPIC is not going away any time soon.  Although record numbers of non-profits are in fact shutting down, within current non-profits people do good work as well as build community, base, and leaders.  Rather than expecting a presto-bingo abandonment of the NPIC, what we will undergo in this next period is an evolution out of the NPIC.  The first birds started off ground bound reptiles and incrementally grew small stubby wings that first allowed them to flap and glide like chickens, and then eventually gained the physical structure to fly and soar like condors.  Our evolution as a movement to forms (old and new) that allow for autonomy and political integrity, and thus a movement capable of real transformation, will be like growing wings – shifting incrementally out of the form we currently have and into forms we intentionally want to move towards.

This Fast Forum seeks to explore further the nuances of the evolving out of the NPIC.  Contributors answer the following questions from their own experimentation and experience in work inside and outside of non-profits as well as project current new thinking into the future.

• What kinds of work are most suited to the non-profit form and what kinds of work are suited to an outside form?
• What should be the relationship of the non-profit forms to the outside forms?
• The Revolution will not be Funded highlighted NGO’s from abroad, but what models exist domestically of alternatives to non-profit forms of organization?
• What is the role of radical leadership development?

….AND CHECK OUT THE USSF WORKSHOP ON THIS TOPIC:

Anak Bayan East Bay, Serve the People, Xicano Moratorium Coalition, and Asian Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership will be sponsoring an interactive youth friendly workshop at the USSF on the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and how their organizations connect grassroots (not-foundation funded) organizing with existing non-profits.  The workshop is called Growing Wings: Evolving Out of the Non-Profit, June 23rd, 1:00 – 3:00 p.m. at the WSU Student Center, Rm 786.

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PUSHING OUR IMAGINATION, SIN FRONTERAS

Katie Joaquin is the Chair of Anakbayan East Bay and an Organizer for Filipino Advocates for Justice and the National Alliance for Filipino Concerns (NAFCON). She organizes Filipino immigrant workers and caregivers to fight for their rights and Filipino youth to join the struggle for National Democracy in the Philippines.

“Making demands too big for any CEO to meet”*

In October 2008, 130 grassroots organizations from 23 countries assembled in Manila, Philippines at the 1^st International Assembly of Migrants and Refugees (IAMR) to oppose the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD), a state-led initiative advancing neoliberal policies. Rejecting the GFMD’s framework of commodifying migrants, the International Migrants Alliance organized the IAMR as an alternative to demand governments address the root causes of migration by nationalizing economies and ending US-led global war on terror.

In contrast, many U.S. non-profits participated in parallel activities, demanding human rights and migrant voices be at the center of GFMD talks.  These reform efforts operate within the forum’s framework while exposing its contradictions.  Both non-profit and grassroots (not foundation funded) approaches to challenge the GFMD are necessary, but only when we combine efforts do we get a demand too big for any CEO to meet.

Non-profit organizations have developed working-class immigrant leadership to wage reform battles and build collective power.  However, our most advanced leaders need to elevate their leadership. Grassroots organizations fill this need; their political direction is determined only by the concrete, ever changing conditions and needs of members – not funding streams.

A GRASSROOTS MODEL FOR ORGANIZING SIN FRONTERAS

Anakbayan (AB) East Bay is a mass-based group that organizes Filipino youth around the collective interests of working class peoples and immigrants, while linking our local struggles with the Philippine movement for national democracy.  AB is a member of International League of People’s Struggle, the mother organization of the aforementioned International Migrants Alliance, and of BAYAN-USA, an alliance of 14 grassroots organizations across the U.S. fighting for national democracy in the Philippines.  BAYAN-USA is an overseas chapter of BAYAN Philippines. We are not a solidarity organization, but part of the same movement addressing the root causes behind the problems of Filipinos internationally: US Imperialism, Landlessness and Corrupt puppet governments. We believe our freedom in the U.S. is dependent on achieving genuine national democracy in the Philippines and all over the world.

One of our main goals is to develop and defend radical working class leadership.  Red baiting is rising as U.S. Imperialists desperately defend their failing system.  Melissa Roxas, a member of a BAYAN-USA affiliate in Los Angeles, was abducted by the Philippine Military while on a medical mission, accused of being New Peoples Army, and tortured for 6 days.  At every turn we must expose the targeting of member-leaders who are fighting for the interest and needs of the people.

GREATER THAN THE SUM OF OUR PARTS

An example of non-profit and grassroots group collaboration is AB’s leadership in the API Movement Building Pipeline.  Grassroots and non-profit organizations are sustaining our members’ leadership by identifying stepping stones to transition to different organizations based on their social and political development needs.  Instead of competing for funding or credit, we have a powerful relationship based on political unities and commitment to dismantling U.S. Imperialism.

Anti-imperialist organizations that want to participate in efforts to address root cause issues internationally should join the 3^rd International Assembly of Migrants and Refugees in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico November 7 – 8, 2010.

* Adapted from line of “Movement Poem” by Maria Poblet

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COMMON FIRE & THE NON-PROFIT STRUCTURE:

A BRIDGE TO TOMORROW

Kavitha Rao is the co-founder of Common Fire which helps to create accessible and sustainable intentional communities as a means of cultural transformation. She is a mother, a yoga teacher, a facilitator, and an organizer.  She has worked with grassroots organizations around the world and is humbled by the immense commitment and vision she has witnessed from people unwilling to accept that the violence, injustice, and poverty that may surround them is the only way things have to be.  Her work and the work of Common Fire are explorations for how we can live the just and sustainable futures we all deserve NOW and in solidarity with all peoples on the planet.

NeEddra James is a writer and graphic designer working towards ecological transformation, social justice, and holistic healing through the development of sustainable and economically cooperative communities. She sits on the Board of Directors of the Common Fire Foundation and Planting Justice, a food justice nonprofit in Oakland, CA.

Common Fire is a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation. It supports the creation of intentional communities created by and for a true diversity of people that are geared toward the transformation of society, from the inside out, and from the ground up. We seek to build a world that is more loving, joyful, just and sustainable, one community at a time.

Like many of our colleagues working toward a more just and sustainable world, we too recognize, not only the shortcomings of the nonprofit structure as a long-term solution to the troubles of our time, but we also believe that the current social, environmental and cultural crises we now face cannot be remedied at the same level of thought that produced said crises. Given this, we are committed to personal transformation, communication that breaks personal and collective silences to forge healthy relationships across lines of difference, and cooperative communities organized around resource sharing and consensus based decision-making. These features are the cornerstone of our work in the area of intentional community building; features that we envision will eventually supplant the “individual” of (neo)liberalism and its attendant “rights,” as well as capitalist notions of individual property ownership over land, food, and other vital resources.

At the same time, we are quite clear that community building at this scale – multi-acre affordable sustainable housing with organic farmland, retreat/learning centers and other buildings – requires considerable amounts of funding and still occurs within the existing legal, economic and political cultures we seek to transform. So, we use the nonprofit structure to negotiate the dominant culture. For us, the non-profit is a tool we harness toward an end for which it was not originally intended: radical social change. Our board is comprised of people who embody the vision and mission of Common Fire. Thus, unlike traditional BODs, which tend to be comprised of big donors, lawyers and the like, our board is full of innovative change-makers.

In our hands, the non-profit structure enables us to support grassroots groups as they organize themselves into shared housing and cooperative economic communities that put the transformative values above into practice. Through the non-profit structure, we are able to provide community groups with training opportunities in areas like nonviolent communication, grassroots fundraising, sustainable building practices, and permaculture. The non-profit entity also enables us to provide concrete support like bank accounts and legal resources to the communities with which we partner. Most importantly, the non-profit helps us secure financing for land acquisition, which is a feat that would be fairly difficult for the groups we are currently partnered with in New York and California, where their individual economic realities keep them rooted in their current class position. In community people are able to experience relief from the economic burdens of living as solitary families and single people.

Our ultimate goal is to shift the underlying culture by creating communities that model what future societies can look like. At Common Fire the nonprofit structure is our bridge to tomorrow.

Check out Common Fire’s workshop at the US Social Forum.

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SERVE THE PEOPLE: THREE LESSONS LEARNED

Jidan Koon is currently a Senior Fellow at the Movement Strategy Center with over 15 years of community organizing and youth development experience.  She is a founding member of Serve the People, artist, and involved Oakland community member.

Mike Tran loves richmond, oakland, youth, tacos, bikes, using e. honda, the art of roasting but cries like a baby, Serving The People!

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Serve the People (STP) was birthed in Winter of 2006 as a grassroots (not 501c3) organization that builds radical leadership of mostly South East Asian adults and young people in the East Bay, CA.  Our relationships with non-profits have been critical and intentional.

Lesson 1: Start with Who You Know, Go Slow

The STP founding core members had long standing relationships with each other and years of youth organizing experience through non-profit work.  Even with this background, our official pace for growth is slow and deliberate.  Tired of the restrictions of our 501c3 work, we began with a 3 – 5 year commitment amongst the core members to build a grassroots organization. Although there was a high level of trust from the start, we needed to know each other deeply to make it over the long haul.  We nurtured our core over months of meetings with home cooked food, games, and visioning.  By the time we figured out what we wanted to do, our alignment in purpose allowed us to adopt a decentralized leadership structure.  We also pay close attention to capacity since all the work is volunteer; we even cut back on frequency of general membership meetings when they got too large for our infrastructure to handle.

Lesson 2: Movement Building = No Organizational Borders

Grassroots groups can cross many of the organizational boundaries that the non-profit system maintains.  From the start, we used our paid positions in youth-serving non-profits to recruit youth to STP and intentionally built relationship with non-profits with South East Asian members.  At first, some felt that STP was duplicative or competing for membership.  We had to be clear about our intention to partner and create a division of labor between grassroots groups and non-profits.  We build partnership into our structure by encouraging all members to participate in other organizations and make it a requirement for our leaders.  Adults also thirst for a method of connecting culturally and politically outside of non-profits. We are building out an adult membership structure to address the increasing requests from adults.  The cross-organization relationship building within STP has led to cross-pollination and increased collaboration amongst all groups involved.  For example, STP joined with eight other (grassroots and non-profit) groups to form the API Movement Building Pipeline to support local, working class API youth and young adults through life transitions in order to maintain a lifelong commitment to movement building.

Lesson 3: Division of Labor

A mutually-supportive division of labor has emerged.  From our vantage point, non-profits meet people’s current needs for employment and services as well as organizing to resist and reform the institutions that impact our communities.  Grassroots organizations have flexibility to acts in ways fundamentally counter to the current system through either taking really confrontation stances (not reform, but dismantling) and/or to build the alternative to the current system.  When non-profits and grassroots groups partner, our communities can work within the framework of the current system as well build our vision of a radical alternative future.

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.