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

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

City in crisis

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

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

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

Community response

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

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

Grassroots leadership

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategic alliances

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

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

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

Long haul

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As the disaster in Haiti reaches into its second month, what insights can the left offer to influence the mainstream response to Haiti?   What strategies for a just and sovereign Haitian recovery should left organizers in the U.S. take up?

We have incredible contributions from: Louis Herns Marcelin, Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development (Port-au-Prince); Noelle Theard, FotoKonbit (Miami); and Daniel Michaud, Political Organizer and supporter of Batay Ouvriye (Miami)

What should we talk about next time? Got something you think people need to hear? Email us: upgrade@organizingupgrade.com.

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TOWARDS NEGOTIATED SOVEREIGNTY IN HAITI

Louis Herns Marcelin co-founded and is Chancellor of the Interuniversity Institute for Research and Development in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Institute has partners across the hemisphere and is one of the only independent research institutes in Haiti that focusing on policy research and rebuilding the academic system in Haiti. Working with community leaders, residents, students and local government, Dr. Marcelin has helped communities conduct their own research into the effects of international aid, community development, and urban violence in Port-au-Prince. As professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, he directs several large-scale studies on gang violence, HIV risk, and the increasing involvement of the juvenile justice system in the lives of Haitian adolescents and their families. His work has been featured in national publications including the New York Times and many academic conferences.

On January 12th, I was with five of my students in a shantytown community of Port-au-Prince.  We were meeting with youth leaders of Cite Soleil’s Community Forum to launch a new initiative when the ground tore beneath us. As night fell, I struggled to comprehend what was happening as the air filled with cries, chants, and ominous silence. The next morning, I took my students to safety inside the US Embassy, which had suffered little damage. Along the way, there lay the signs of Haiti’s devastation: roads blocked–by debris bodies. Twenty hours into the earthquake, there was no response and no communication. Not from government authorities or international agencies. The absence of the state was oppressive. And when the president finally spoke, his first and only words to the nation were: “Even I am homeless”.

As we pass the one-month mark of the Haitian disaster, we must come to terms with the reality surfaced by the quake. There is a gaping schism between the nation and the state in Haiti. The earthquake unveils a series of long-standing delusions and imperatives that we can no longer avoid, namely: 1) Haitian leaders have not created the conditions for their own sovereignty; 2) international agencies and NGOs need to focus on reinforcing state capacity and public institutions instead of undermining them; and 3) a new paradigm of negotiated sovereignty must be developed to leverage international resources and expertise while building the authority of the state and  the capacity to govern.

An Autopsy of Disaster

Haitian leaders have to come to terms with their own failures. They have failed to create the conditions for their own sovereignty. The immediate aftermath of the earthquake was instructive. For the first three days, there was no response from the state, no sense of who was in charge nor what people should do. When relief efforts began on day 3, they began only in the most accessible places. These represent less than 20% of the affected areas. 80% of the people affected by the earthquake were in places labeled “inaccessible” and “impassable” even before the earthquake due to poor (urban) planning. In the vacuum of sound policy and planning, slums emerged in the riskiest areas in Haiti, where communities live without sewer systems or waste management.  Haitian leaders have neglected the national agricultural system and instead facilitated unsustainable projects and developments. The combination of the state’s lack of investment and persistent negligence amplified rather than prevented the damage wrought by the earthquake.

For decades, NGOs had the dominant role in Haiti’s development. Even now, they play a crucial role in the relief process and provide the only safety net available for millions. For many Haitians, NGOs provide their principal connection to infrastructure, health services, and economic assistance as well as bridge remote communities to ideas, experts, and resources from all over the world. However, NGOs constitute an uneven patchwork of disparate and often competing interests that fragment society and undermine state development. They do this by outsourcing state functions,  opting to hire experts rather than develop indigenous expertise. Further, NGOs pay consultants almost ten times what the government or any local agency can afford. This has drained the state of capable personnel. More fundamentally, NGOs form a shadow state that lacks democratic accountability. The aftermath of the earthquake revealed that NGOs neither have the coordination, authority, nor scale to effectively manage a crisis. These are ultimately the responsibilities of a state.

Away from the Rescue Principle, Towards a Negotiated Sovereignty

It is vital that the path of recovery direct Haiti away from the “rescue principle”. The current state counts on external agents and external agents inevitably come to the rescue.  Unfortunately, we see that the humanitarian paradigm only perpetuates a humanitarian paradigm. It creates a perverse incentive to embrace crisis, both for NGOs who are invested in their own existence and for the state which is able to draw in substantial funds and resources. If this is the model for Haiti’s current recovery, then we will only recreate the status quo.

The promise of a new generation of policy makers and planners is what will help Haiti govern and regain its sovereignty. At this moment, the Haitian Prime Minister cannot take the lead because he lacks structural power to implement anything. His government will need international guidance and accompaniment for some time. Meanwhile, without an engaged, educated, and empowered civic society, the state will not have the support it needs to govern effectively. The development of civic oversight and community capacity will require a framework for a negotiated sovereignty. In the task of imaging a rejuvenated Haiti, I offer the following guidelines:

• Use basic needs to strengthen state capacity: Basic service provision can be a means to reinstate governance and help rebuild state legitimacy
• Incentivize delegation: De-concentrate decision making and resource allocation through a multi-nodal governance structure of the country
• Limit outsourcing of state functions:  Develop indigenous capacity and limit the short-cuts to state governance
• Invest in institution-building: New universities can create civic leaders for nation-building roles (administration, police and safety, urban planning, etc.)
• Avoid elite-gatekeepers and expand leadership: Launch public and transparent initiatives with multi-functions teams that allow for a range of perspectives, skills, and civic priorities.
• Partnership. Partnership. Partnership: By redesigning international relief as local partnerships,   we can begin unraveling dependence and fostering sustainable leadership and governance.

In order to move forward, we need to work within a framework of negotiated sovereignty in Haiti.  International aid can be an enlightened and accompanied process by engaging in a broad-based, dialogue around Haiti’s development. Negotiated sovereignty leverages the skill base and resource pools of the international community to build a sustainable and accountable state. A dual commitment towards negotiated sovereignty from the international community and local residents allows for measurable and enduring impact.

Over the Horizon

Haitians have not given up hope. Even when completely abandoned and uncertain about their fate, survivors put their lives in their countrymen’s hands. In neighborhoods throughout the capital, people dug through the rubble, rescuing one another, tending their wounds, comforting and praying for the aggrieved. We must appreciate and build on this latent capacity. We can redefine how we work with each other, as Haitian residents, emigrated forces, and international agents to create a positive rupture between the past and the future. This will take place when we acknowledge the failures of our past, erect new and true international partnerships, and together craft terms of negotiated sovereignty for Haiti’s future.

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THE LONG ROAD AHEAD

Noelle Theard is a Miami-based photographer, educator, and director of FotoKonbit, a photography initiative that creates partnerships between socially conscious photographers and local grassroots organizations in Haiti.  She holds an MA in African Diaspora Studies from Florida International University, a BA in Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin, and a certificate of advanced studies from the Spéos photography institute in Paris.  She was born to a Haitian dad and French mom in the border town of El Paso, Texas in 1979.  Her work can be viewed on her website: http://www.noelletheard.com.

Immediate Demands: In the short-term, we should continue to raise funds and get it into the hands of the Haitian people, and that means side-stepping the tax deductible contributions to massive relief organizations and researching and supporting established Haitian foundations and grassroots organizations.  These include: the Lambi Fund of Haiti, ORE, Fondation le Mabouya, Hope for Haiti, Fondation Seguin, Bassin Zim Foundation, and the Fondation Fondam.

While at the start of the crisis, dollars were needed more than material goods, now those who can should make efforts to bring or send needed supplies to Haiti – quality clothing, shoes, non-prescription drugs, condoms, feminine hygiene products, and most of all tents are needed now.  An international organization that has been doing great work in Haiti since the earthquake is Shelterbox, which provides essential equipment including temporary housing, cooking supplies, and tools to displaced families.

The Long Recovery: In the mid-to-long term, we need to keep an eye on how the billion dollars raised for Haiti is being spent.  US educated Haitians, especially Haiti’s elite, will have disproportionate access development funds.  Every effort must be made to ensure that peasant groups and those outside the Port-au-Prince have access to money for sustainable development projects, especially those in agriculture.  Haiti must grow its own food, and every effort should be made to prevent the dumping of artificially cheap imports from the US, which are supported by farm subsidies here in the States.

Manufacturing is being touted as an answer to Haiti’s chronic unemployment, but fair labor practices must be part of any new factory initiatives, and the important work of the Haitian labor unions like Batay Ouvriye cannot be erased in a quick fix push to make Haiti a bastion of cheap labor.

We also need to keep the story alive in the media, and we should support all efforts to tell this story from the Haitian perspective – not from behind the lenses of journalists who swoop in to Haiti at every disaster yet never during times of relative peace.  We must defend the right of Haitians to decide their own future, and we should listen carefully to what they ask of us and respond to their actual needs rather than asserting our own agendas.  Most of all, we need to remain optimistic and energized, because there is a long road ahead.

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AID DOES NOT EQUAL SOLIDARITY

Daniel Michaud is a long time political organizer and supporter of Batay Ouvriye. Originally from Haiti he now makes his home in Miami here continues to support workers organizing in Haiti, Miami, and beyond.

The earthquake in Haiti has shaken the conscience of the world. Current estimates of Haiti disaster relief funds range from more than $2 billion of current pledges to the more than $13.5 billion estimated reconstruction costs.  Lost in these figures are the conflicting class interests in struggle.

The January 12^th earthquake was not just a natural disaster, but also one that was exponentially worsened by manmade destructive forces. These same forces are now engaged in a struggle to determine what kind of Haiti will emerge from the rubble. Clearly, there are two different agendas in motion. Our task is to contribute to shaping the perspective of the exploited and dominated classes, the real victims of the disaster, and also to unmask the inhumanity of the dominant, mainstream, already bankrupt plan for so-called reconstruction.

Indeed, the aftershocks still rumbling, Hilary Clinton was saying “we already have a plan”, Bill’s plan is to establish Free Trade Zones and low-wage highly profitable assembly manufacturing sweatshops throughout Haiti, as per HOPE 2, the Free Trade legislation guaranteeing higher profits for US sweatshop entrepreneurs and slave like subsistence wages for Haitian sweatshop workers.

The imperialist high hopes are now stuck in the minutiae of massive relocations, legal land holdings with limited or lost records, 10,000 competing NGOs, an utterly incompetent undermined puppet regime, imperialist powers competing over their spheres of influence, and the coming rainy season.

Unmasked are the paper tiger, the useless MINUSTAH occupation force, the US Army stuck in its inherent, if not deliberate, incompetence to effectively deliver aid, and their puppet Haitian regime.

But on our side, the stakes are even higher.  We can forecast the failure of imperialist plans, but we cannot yet forecast our own success, although we know very well that the popular camp holds the only way out of this crisis. That is precisely why international solidarity with the autonomous organized struggles of the popular camp is so crucial today. We are at a crossroads.

The popular camp is engaged in a struggle to take over the distribution of the aid, the organization of the disaster encampments, the organized popular resistance to corruption, malfeasance, insecurity, unsanitary conditions, forced relocations, and to build from this struggle a network of popular organizations, engaged in a determined and uncompromising process to deepen the struggle to its very root. There is an ongoing process of building unity in struggle and through struggle. With all these issues at a boiling point, the need for a new state, a people’s state, structurally beholden to the interests of the popular masses, and guided by the liberating ideology of the working class is becoming more self-evident.

Progressives of conscience must recognize that “aid” does not equal solidarity. Mainstream aid, today, is reinforcing the imperialist agenda, well meaning as it may be. 33% of US relief aid goes to fund US armed forces, less than 10% for food and medicine. Our task today must be to build international proletarian solidarity. We must seek out sister and brother unions, workers movements, peasant and student movements, and neighborhood committees, and lend them our support. But even more, we must join together with them in struggle, because at the end of the day, we are Haiti: One Struggle!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another World is Possible!

Another US is Necessary!

Another Detroit is Happening!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are dramatic times politically, socially, and economically. What do you think are the most significant shifts happening right now, and how do they change the context of our work?

Some important dynamics at play are the housing crisis, the financial meltdown and the rising unemployment rate. Working people – the working class, the poor and the working poor – are facing the brunt of this crisis. They are feeling the impact of neoliberalism more sharply than ever, even if they aren’t articulating it as “neoliberalism.” The response is manifested as a resentment of corporate greed. There’s a growing anti-corporate sentiment in society today, which could mean that conditions are much riper for mobilizing than they have been in the past.

There are also important shifts under the Obama administration. People in the social justice movement can now have access people within the administration much more easily than we could have in the past. The Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, is a good example of someone to work with within the Obama administration. She came in with a strong record of working in collaboration with community groups as a legislator. She is very serious about enforcing the rights of workers, and she seems to be dedicated to using Department of Labor resources to do that. So we can expect that workers rights will be enforced in ways that have not even been considered for the last eight years. We need to see that as an opportunity. It’s not an answer, we still need a strategy for change, but it is an opportunity.

There are also new opportunities to work in collaboration with the administration to try to create new policy and new social infrastructure and to move legislation that can benefit the working class and poor communities, particularly measures that do not have huge fiscal implications. But we need powerful social forces on the ground to move that type of an agenda, and we don’t have that kind of motion right now. Even with the growing momentum of the Right and the powerful corporate lobby, a good organizing strategy and a solid, organized social force could contend. There are these opportunities for access and potential for real change, but we don’t have the level of on-the-ground organization and mobilization capacity that could serve as the social force that can drive an agenda to the left of the Democratic Party. I think the health care reform fight is a good indication of that dynamic. There may be a good advocacy infrastructure in DC, but – in the absence of a social force that can drive an independent agenda locally in communities on the ground with a level of national coordination- these reforms that our communities need so badly won’t get realized.

To me, the biggest lesson of this moment is that – in order for us to move a real progressive agenda – we’re going to have to ratchet up our ability to organize. We need to actually get our work to a different level of scale and depth in our organizing. That’s true across issue areas and across communities. We need to build a base that has the power to drive a real progressive agenda that’s to the left of what the Democratic Party is willing to settle for.

What are the key struggles where left organizers should be focusing that work to build real scale and depth in their organizing?

There are some key issues that resonate strongly with peoples’ difficult experiences during this crisis and where their consciousness is attuned with our vision, issues like housing, unemployment and jobs. With unemployment rates as high as they are, there are a huge number of unemployed people who are sharply aware of the importance of job creation. And people who are employed have huge fears that they’re going to lose their jobs. So we should be incorporating that into our work more strongly.

We also need to pay attention to the high degree of anger that people have towards the banks and corporate greed. The general public has a real sense frustration around the bail-outs, resentment at economic inequality and anger at the way in which the corporate lobby runs Washington. The health care reform fight and the debates over financial regulation have made the impact that corporations have on government policy more and more clear to people. There’s real popular resentment that could manifest in a serious fight to rein in corporations and the corporate agenda.

What do we need to do to build the kind of independent social force that you were talking about?

We need to build stronger connections between the social movements and the labor movement. Whether it’s the nonprofit social justice organizations or the organizing networks that have taken generally progressive positions, we all need more connections with the labor movement. At the moment, the labor movement is the strongest organized force behind any progressive policy agenda in Washington. It has real resources and a serious organizing infrastructure. That means that we need to understand and engage with labor’s agenda, and we also need to push labor to take on social justice issues from the various vantage-points that the working class experiences them. And, we need to craft campaigns that allow for those kind of connections to develop effectively.

The 2010 Social Forum in Detroit will be an important opportunity for that connection-building work. The Social Forum will bring together some really important social forces: the labor movement (certainly the more progressive unions and hopefully a broader cross-section as well), the non-profit social justice organizations who are organizing locally and moving policy in a range of areas, students and young people who were behind electoral organizing on campuses. The Social Forum will provide us with the opportunity to start distilling a comprehensive progressive agenda that cuts across our many issues and that reflect the core values that we all share: workers’ rights, immigrant rights, internationalism, women’s and LGBT rights and equality, universal health care, environmentalism and sustainable economic development. Even though we have debates about the specifics of strategy and implementation, we generally agree on these core values. Until we’re able to coordinate our work around that shared basis of unity, our energy will be diffused. We won’t be able to mount a real challenge or to be a real social force to move a real progressive agenda. The Social Forum is a place where we can start to see the synergy between our different struggles and to distill out our shared values. The Inter-Alliance Dialogue is another site where this kind of unity-building and collaborative work is starting to take shape.

Could you describe the Inter-Alliance Dialogue?

The Inter-Alliance Dialogue is a process initiated by six key grassroots alliances of social justice organizing groups that developed outside of the traditional organizing networks: the Right to the City Alliance, the Pushback Network, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and Jobs with Justice. Most of our national alliances emerged independently through our sector-based organizing, among domestic workers, day laborers and so on. First, grassroots organizations developed at the local level. As the local organizations gained some capacity, we formed these national alliances that were still very specific to our particular issues and sectors. But we all shared a commitment to grassroots organizing and movement-building, so we wanted to do work that moved beyond the narrow interests of our particular issues and sector to actually build power around a broader progressive agenda for change. We also shared a commitment to internationalism, to being part of a broader movement for social justice around the world. We started talking about coming together because we were seeing both the way that the economy was headed and the opportunities of a new administration. As our alliances were starting to grow, we wanted to combine efforts and share resources instead of reinventing the wheel. And, we wanted to see whether coming together would make us more than the sum of our parts.

The working class, the working poor and the poor haven’t had a strong voice in the national policy debate. The public dialogue about the economic crisis has largely been framed around the impact on the middle class, but the reality is that working people are suffering. There isn’t really a voice to tell that story. So, as this new political moment unfolds, we need to move the voices that have been on the margins to the center of the national policy debates. With the exception of Jobs with Justice and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in their work around immigration reform, none of our organizations have that kind of national experience. We came together so we could take on movement-wide issues, so we can have a voice for our communities at the national level. We wanted to experiment with putting forward a real national progressive agenda that comes from the grassroots because the hopes and dreams of our communities aren’t reflected anywhere on the Beltway.

We wanted to be able to put forward bigger and more transformative visions and policies than any of our alliances could win on our own. To give an example, we have been discussing the possibility of fighting for a “Community Reinvestment Bank.” The idea would be to take over one of the banks that received a bail out by the government (which means it was bailed out using our peoples’ resources) and transform it into a community bank that would reinvest in jobs, schools and local, economic cooperative development efforts. An institution like that could address many of the on-the-ground issues that that our organizations are working on.

It’s going to be challenging. There are fewer resources for organizing, and the local organizations are more strapped than ever. We’ve never done work at a national level before, so it’s very much an experiment.

You’ve been doing organizing for more than 15 years now. What are some lessons that you’ve drawn from your work? Are there any organizing principles or political lessons that you’d want to share?

There are a lot of lessons that I’ve drawn from my experiences and from dialogues with other organizers:

• Build a Core to Build Your Base: First, I want to highlight the importance of base-building; we can never forget that base-building is the most central aspect of organizing and social change generally. We need to build our bases in a really serious and systematic way and make sure that we’re trying to reach more and more people all the time. In order to do that, you need to have a core of leaders who have strong alignment in terms of vision and practice. You can actually accomplish a lot in terms of base building with a core of even just four or five people. That kind of leadership core is a real source of power in organizing.

• Create an Inspiring Environment: We also need to be aware of the environment we’re creating in our work. Maya Angelou once said that, “People don’t remember what you say. They remember how you make them feel.” It’s really important for us to be mindful about the environment that we’re creating, about the feelings that we’re leaving people with. What is the feeling that you’re creating around people as you’re organizing? Is it inspiring? Does it give people hope? Does it encourage people to bring the best of who they are to the work? Does it make them feel like change is possible?

• Time, Place and Conditions: One thing that I learned from the Labor Community Strategy Center in Los Angeles is the importance of being aware of our “time, place and conditions.” We need to constantly assess the political environment that we’re working in and the historic context of our fights. That assessment allows us to be clear about what’s realistic and what’s possible in this historic moment. We often overestimate the power that we have to achieve our demands, and we underestimate what we’re up against. So our demands tend to be way off in terms of timing, and we don’t push ourselves to build the kind of power we need if we’re actually going to win. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t push the envelope as far as it can actually go and keep our long-term vision on the table; it just means that we need to be clear about our real conditions.

• Fight to Win: It’s important that we fight to win. Terry Marshall said here on Organizing Upgrade that, “We’re not going to lose our way to the revolution.” It’s really essential that we win the fights that we’re engaged in if we want to build power in working class communities and to build the broader movement. The working class has taken such a beating over the past several decades, and it’s only getting worse. We have a responsibility to try to make life better for the working class in an immediate sense. But in the longer term, we’re never going to build the confidence of the working class to contend for real power unless we win in our immediate fights. We need to build peoples’ faith in organizing and in using collective power as a path towards social change, but I don’t see how we’re going to do that unless we can show that it works. To build that faith and confidence, we have to be able to change the material conditions of life.

• Unite All Who Can be United: In the past, we haven’t been good at “uniting all who can be united.” We tend to bring together the same cast of characters to fight around our different issues, but almost all of our issues can be framed broadly enough to unite a wide range of social forces. That can increase our power exponentially. We need to learn how to do our work based on the principle “uniting all who can be united” We need to move beyond our cultural, organizational and political comfort zones in order to build power and start to impact politics on a different scale.

• Push Past Your Comfort Zone: I can give an example from my work at Domestic Workers United. In 2007, we organized our first Town Hall meeting for the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights. We had many high-profile speakers who come from very different organizational cultures and had differing positions on other issues but who supported the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. We ended up featuring them as keynote speakers at our event, and I remember that I wasn’t sure if that was the thing to do in that moment. I didn’t know whether we should have put forward those voices instead of having more workers speak. While I was struggling with that discomfort, someone reminded me that you’re supposed to be uncomfortable in this work. We aren’t going to be able to impact change on the scale that we want if we stay within our comfort zone. We may make mistakes, but if we’re not uncomfortable, there’s something wrong. It means that we’re just doing the same things with the same cast of characters and we’re not pushing ourselves to have a broader impact by reaching different communities and changing perspectives. I learned that as an organizer, you’re supposed to be uncomfortable, and it’s important to embrace that.

• Don’t Burn Bridges that Don’t Need to Be Burned: That relates to the importance of building bridges and knowing how to relate to a wide range of people in our work. We need to remember to never burn any bridges unnecessarily. That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t take risks, but it’s very important to be very deliberate about what risks to take. If you’re going to burn a bridge with someone, you should be really clear about why. Things are constantly changing on the ground and forces are constantly shifting. Someone who is your enemy in one fight could be an important ally in another context. And people have very long memories for burned bridges. To give an example from my organizing with domestic workers, I had to train myself not to react negatively when an employer would call the office and ask questions like, “Why should we pay our domestic worker for a sick day? They’re not working.” When you’re organizing with domestic workers and dealing with those issues on a daily basis, a question like that is very upsetting. But we always need to keep our end goal in mind. Ultimately, you want that worker to get paid for that sick day. You want to be able to set the standards for the industry. So you need to be able to act as if you can hold that space, and that means that you need to be able to speak in a way that reflects authority. It’s not helpful to get angry and defensive with people like these employers. You need to learn not to react passionately. You need to be able to articulate why it makes sense for an employer to pay a worker for their sick day, and both speak to their standpoint and help them to see it as part of a broader dynamic. It’s very easy to respond and react from a place of anger and frustration, given how severe the problems are and how much people are up against. But our ultimate goal is to shift power, and our ability to shift power relies on the connections that we’re able to build.

• Transformation of Self: The transformation of self is an important part of social transformation. Joyce and Nelson Johnson from the Beloved Community Center and the staff at Social Justice Leadership have some really good thoughts and practice at this. We’re ultimately trying to transform institutions and structures. But if people aren’t being transformed in the process, that institutional change won’t hold. It won’t be practiced in the way that we need it to be. Institutional change lives through the people that change effects. We need a culture that supports being centered, focused and connected to our sense of purpose. That allows us to stay on track toward our real goals and objectives, rather than getting derailed by ego and exhaustion. People are starting to work on integrating individual transformation into organizing more; I think those efforts are crucial to developing a deeper, more sustainable organizing model. I practice yoga. Yoga’s not for everyone, but there is something out there for every organizer to create a consistent space to quiet their minds, take care of their mental, emotional and physical health and reset their vision toward victory.

• Campaigns Can Transform Us: There’s an incredibly transformative potential in campaigns. Good campaigns aren’t only about material change; they also offer opportunities for the kind of personal transformation I was talking about earlier. A compelling demand can give people a vision of what’s possible; it can help people to believe that what was once impossible can become possible. We need to bring together a broad cross-section of unlikely allies, knowing that when people come together to fight for things, they begin to see their connections more clearly. They can start to recognize and practice from the place of interconnectedness. We need to identify some key campaigns that bring together a broad cross-section of the working class to actually engage in social change at their points of connection and to feel what’s possible in a way that they haven’t in a past. Those kinds of campaigns will bring us to different scale of political impact, with a broader vision and more transformative demands.

• Organize With Love and Hope: It’s important for organizers to assume the best in people. We shouldn’t be naïve, but we should assume that people generally want to do what’s right: they want to be good people; they want to be good neighbors; they want to do unto others as they would have done unto them. That desire to be good and right is an untapped reserve of energy that organizers can draw on if we are open to it, if we look for the good in people and try to find ways to bring out that goodness. You can always look at things as “glass-half-empty” or “glass-half-full.” We need to choose the fullness. We need to choose the good in people and remember that everybody has that potential to connect with what’s right. We need to try to build connection and relationship from that place. We need to organize with love, and that will allow us to build an infinitely stronger force.

The authors draw on their shared experience in a hetero-sexual marriage. In this society marriage is a privileged institution from which gay and lesbian couples are excluded. There is a vibrant struggle to reform this institution, as well as a debate among radical queers as to if the fight for marriage rights is really the right fight. In future issues of Organizing Upgrade we will be examining more of this debate, as well as bring much needed queer perspectives on organizing, revolutionary politics, and yes, even that mystical thing called love (which for queers is simply an act of resistance and asserting our own humanity).  Now on with it….

Rooted in Love

Tiffany’s story

I never wanted to fall in love. In my home, love made you weak. It made you a victim. Love was conditional, unpredictable, and came with a price. Most of all, love caused pain and suffering. At night, my brother and I would hear the beatings, sometimes even witness it. And, in the morning, mommy got flowers because my step-father “loved” her.

As I grew older, developed politically, and cultivated my feminist consciousness, I realized that patriarchy was imprinted on every conception I had about intimate relationships.  As a bi-sexual woman I learned that this was true for me whether I was with men or women.  I couldn’t fall in love with a man because to do so was to be dependent and abused.  I couldn’t love a woman because that would mean loving the weak.  So I swore off love all together.  I was going to be a strong, independent, smart and capable woman; and from what I could see “loving” anyone was a liability.

Hashim’s story

When I first started getting politicized in my late teens, I pictured meeting this beautiful woman who shared my passion for righting the wrongs of the world and was as committed to justice as I was.  As I matured, though, it seemed more and more like politics was strangely at odds with my notions of love.  I found that getting political with people I really cared about usually resulted in conflict because I couldn’t turn off the “analyze and question everything” switch in my head.  And when it came to my political and intellectual relationships, I had a hard time letting my guard down and showing people who I truly was.

For me, politics was all about theory and analysis – heady intellectual stuff.  Love and relationships was all about trust and vulnerability – scary emotional stuff.  I could handle either one isolated from the other, but I could never do both at the same time.  So I resigned myself to the likelihood that I would have to choose one over the other and would probably not find the revolutionary love of my life.

These are the places we started from.  Now here we are together writing about love and revolution.

If there are any human universals, love would certainly be chief among them.  Yet, when we take a look around the world sometimes it feels like love, for holding such a high place in our imaginations and creative expression, is the least actualized of our ideals.  Instead, fear and alienation maintain a stranglehold on humanity as they manifest in various forms of oppression – patriarchy, white supremacy, poverty, heterosexism, imperialism.  What’s worse, the very notion of love is often distorted and associated with everything from unhealthy and destructive interpersonal relationships to violent reactionary movements of religious extremism.  Not to mention that for our LGBTQ comrades, society has claimed that our expressions of love are immoral, wrong, and even evil.  So what then do we, as revolutionaries, make of this thing called love?  Do we really have time to be bothered with the trappings of the heart?  How does love fit into the picture of that better world we are all imagining and fighting for?  More importantly, how does love factor into the fight itself?

A Revolutionary definition of Love

It can be tricky to grab a hold on what love really is.  It is easy to get fixated on romanticizations of love and end up missing the boat on the real deal.  And it is not uncommon to cling to people or ideas out of fear – fear of being alone, being wrong, or being unimportant – and call it love.  But it is important to distinguish love from the emotional highs and lows that we often associate it with.  Love itself is not a feeling – it is a way of being and acting and, most importantly, it is a choice.  When we choose to come from a place of honesty and humility, we are choosing love.  When we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and trust that it will not be used against us, we are choosing love.  It is choosing to be present for ourselves and others and expecting to be held accountable for our actions.  It is choosing to have compassion for those who are unable or unwilling to offer us love in return.   Love is the choice to walk through our fears and insecurities so that we may reveal our true selves to those around us and be open to receive the true selves of others. From this perspective, love is a framework from which every decision we make is either based in love, or is not.

It is important to establish a definition of love that is action oriented so that we can use it to shape the practice of a revolutionary politic.  While we all have visions of a world built on the principles of democracy, equity, and justice, the society around us seldom shows us what these values actually look like.  Choosing love allows us to respond to oppression in a way that uplifts our vision of the future and brings forward our own humanity.

Systems of oppression intersect in complex ways and are felt at the individual and community level through various forms of physical, emotional, and psychological pain.  Take, for example, the process of gentrification.  Capital – in the form of real estate speculation  – targets working class and low-income communities in the urban core, removes the existing population, and builds up so called New-Urban “communities” that are consumer driven and designed for the middle class.  Working class communities of color are particularly vulnerable both because they lack economic and political power to resist while contending with racialized stereotyping that is used to justify their destruction.  The resulting displacement of families and disruption of people’s lives is destructive: psychologically, economically, and politically.

How does one respond to this type of injustice?  As conscious organizers we would like our first response to be to organize the community and build power to stop gentrification. From our analysis we understand the need to expand our fight and build the power of the left globally, so that we can replace this racist capitalist system with one that is more just.  Easy, right?

The truth is that building class unity and organizing collective power is not often our first reaction to oppression.  When we come under attack, it is both common and natural to wall up and protect ourselves. This walling up, or defensiveness does not stagnate action, but it does shape the action we take, it impacts how we build relationships, and can limit the scope and depth of those relationships. Limiting our ability to build healthy relationships in the fight for a better world is like tying one hand behind our back and getting in the ring with heavy weight boxing champ.

Love as a basis for a revolutionary practice and movement is necessary. Because oppression is felt at the individual level, our personal responses to oppression can be a form of individual resistance.  As we engage in the broader fight for whole scale societal transformation, we also fight the everyday battles that define our personal transformation.  When we base our interactions with comrades, friends, partners, and lovers on love, we are doing more than building healthy interpersonal relationships; we are making the work of movement building possible.  In order to come together and stay together to win, we need more than common material interest and political unity.  We need loving relationships that are both founded on and help us build trust. Understanding the critical role of love in building movement, it is the responsibility of revolutionaries to model what love looks like.  This is especially true when others around us fail to do so.  Just as oppression is internalized, reproduced, and enacted by the oppressed, so must we internalize our politics to the extent that the very act of our being becomes revolutionary.    

Intimate Liberation

If we accept that we must learn how to build relationships based on vulnerability and shared trust in order to transform society, then it is our most intimate relationships – i.e. with our partners, lovers, and closest friends – that are central to developing a revolutionary practice of love.  Because they are closest to us, the ones we love most are also the best positioned to cause us pain.  For this reason it can be especially hard to let our guard down and allow ourselves to be open and available.  Moreover, if we take the ones  we love for granted, our intimate relationships are particularly vulnerable to being turned into places where dynamics of oppression are played out. But when we practice love in a transformative way in our deepest relationships, we both learn more about who we are and are also better able to bring love into relationships that are more strictly political.  More importantly, we are also able to build relationships that free us from the oppressive bonds that reinforce this inequitable society.  Loving in this way is something we call “Intimate Liberation.”

As revolutionaries we make sacrifices in so many areas of our lives; we must be equally willing to sacrifice the security of our comfort zones.  We must be ready to examine how we work and how we relate to each other. We must ask ourselves, “Is the way I treat my loved ones liberating for them? Is it liberating for me?”  And then we must ask the same questions directly to our loved ones themselves.  If at any point the answer is “no”, then we must be willing to change our behavior.  For if we are not committed to Intimate Liberation, then any commitment to societal transformation is empty and hypocritical. 

Love for the long haul

The road to victory is long, winding, and unpredictable.  If we are to successfully traverse the path of revolution we will have to rely on a whole lot of leaning on each other.   None of us has all of the solutions we’re looking for, but together we certainly have some.  It takes trust and humility to build the type of unity needed to implement those solutions.  Finding the courage to have trust and humility begins with choosing love.  The world is a scary place and the reality is that the odds are stacked up against us.  But as long as we choose love we will have more than a fighting chance.   Our victories may be far and few between, but our defeats will never be permanent and the sparks of our movement will never be suffocated.

Sushma: These are dramatic times, politically, socially and economically.  What do you think are the most significant shifts happening right now and how do you think they change the context of our work.  Clearly, your knowledge and skills base is broad.  So please draw from whatever is relevant, especially from your experiences organizing within the black community as well as your media work.

Makani: The first thing is that we are in a period of extreme contradictions.   On one hand, our people are celebrating an important racial benchmark — Obama’s election.  On the other, we are fighting to counter the narrative that his election is a sign that we’re now in a post-racial context while we are in the midst of this highly racialized context as evidenced by the rise of hate crimes, hate media and speech and increased media stereotyping in news and entertainment media.

When you consider what might be indicators of a society that is dealing fairly and justly with communities regardless of race and ethnicity, you think of educational attainment, income, equal protection before the law, equitable access to services, to the vote, etc.  We are at an all-time low in this indicators since the early 1970s and yet we have a Black president. In many ways, it is reminiscent of Black political discourse in the 1930s where we were engaged in this debate about whether we as a people should be fighting for  “hiring Black” or “buying Black.” The “hire Black” camp was about what is going to be the best way for the masses of Black people, the vast majority of whom are working class, poor and not college educated, to improve their lives?Buy Black focused on creating a Black middle class and owner class as a primary strategy.  Through Black buying power, Black providers would replace the mostly Jewish retailers in Black communities and this new class of entrepreneurs would reinvest its wealth into building our communities.  Essentially, we are faced with a similar question: is having a Black man at the “top” going to result in a trickle down of power and access to the rest of us?,

“Well, what does it mean to have a Black president when so many Black people and other people of color,immigrants, etc., are under incredible criminalization.  We have raids and  families being torn apart.  There’s a rainbow of people who are affected, not just Latinos. It’s people from almost every continent who are being exposed to this kind of hatred and militarization and trauma and terror in the midst of this election that  people believe is a huge victory.  Organizers are having a hard time figuring out how to negotiate it without being “downers.”.

It seems as though we have opportunities. Progressives are being invited to the White House.  Many of our ideas are getting a hearing for the first time.  So we’re not quite sure how to protest, what to do or what to say.  We’re in a place where we are stuttering politically – both figuratively and actually – about what it is that we do next.   And this is really very different. I don’t think anyone can remember a time like this where the left has been so paralyzed by division around what to do next. That in itself is just profound.  We need to reflect on what this means and what is our understanding of the state.  We need to rethink completely our sense of the state and step away from Marx for a minute and think about, “What is our theory of the state? How do we interact with it? What does it mean?  How do we build real change and make sure our people don’t suffer even more during these hard times? How do we let go of this Western paradigm that dichotomizes direct service and organizing as if organizing is some kind of profession?”  All of these contradictions are way up a front right now because our people are suffering   Too many of our folk are hungry, unemployed, abused at work and home, homeless and we will not be relevant if our work ignores this  These are  critical pillars of the contradictions that we have to navigate for the rest of the work to make sense.

S: What opportunities do you think are coming up through the Obama administration and the economic crisis? In the midst of these opportunities, what do you think is the role of the community organizing sector and particularly the role of left-leaning organizers within that?

M: I think that the first thing that we need to do is step back and draw a much broader map about who’s “left”.  And we have to abandon the idea that being left means that you’ve read some left stuff or had certain conversations. We have to step back and say there are people who have analysis drawn from their lived experience.  They may not have read the books or use the terminology but, they’re a part of the left.

The left needs to be able to navigate the opportunities of the current moment. We have to be able to embrace the researchers and folks who have been imagining solutions that are outside of the market paradigm. That means we also have to rethink our division of labor in this left, that this left is not just about the people who knock on doors or build base organizations – which is critical – but we also have to fully embrace the whole division of labor and the whole range of people who are thinking about policies and imagining our lives and our institutions beyond the current system and its oppression; the people who are dreaming and painting that work and singing about that work, the artists.  All of that is part of the tapestry of what the left is.

Having said that, therein lies the opportunities. One part is: how do we move people to a place of concrete hope or belief in the  possibility of  a real alternative? Because people know that things are messed up; they are living it. But there are so many people who just don’t believe that there is another way. And so we have to build relationships with folks who have thought about the alternatives, the other way. It’s about us translating those policies and those visions into concrete fights and into concrete changes in conditions.  It’s about working with with progressive academics and artists to help tell a story that allows people see themselves in the narrative; see themselves in the picture  of what the world can look like without this madness.  This is an amazing opportunity.

Clarifying this vision will help us more effectively leverage the openings in the Obama Administration   It will give us an opportunity to experiment with some of these ideas – within limits – both at the local level and at the national level.  We can actually work the system to provide glimpses of the next world, glimpses of how to be engaged in the governance of our lives, because people do not take anything that they do not believe belongs to them. If you look at any major change in any country, there was  first a point where people engaged the system and understood the way things worked – or didn’t work for them. Then, they made a decision that it needed to work better for them.  Why?  Because they began to understand it as theirs.  And the gift of this election is that there is a new set of people who believe that this society belongs to them. Now, the question is, what do we do as organizers, broadly speaking to help people see:

1. Yes, this does belong to us.

2. Yes we  can run it.

3. Together, we have what it takes to make it run better and make it work for more of us.

That is the opportunity.

We also have to respect the division of labor. There are people who can put on a suit and go up to the White House and make that work. They can figure out how to move these ideas and open up more space for more  to step into that place of co-governance.  They can push the envelope, push the rhetoric. But we also have to understand that  protest in still very necessary.  There are things  we have to do to call attention to the terror.  Raids – they need to be protested, not negotiated. The need for real health care for people, not just a privatized health insurance system.  There needs to be an outside strategy, not everybody in suits having polite conversations. And it goes on.  And so we need to have a strategy that is about power. A strategy that has this vision of the next phase of this work but does not abandon the outside strategy and the need for people to express rage; a way to confront wrong things directly so that folks understand that they’re not crazy.  But we also need to be there with clear solutions like what should the banking system look like? How should people deal with capital and their own personal money? Why is that we have all these check cashing places? Many tools and solutions that – as organizers – we haven’t really explored. Maybe this is because we think, “We’re organizers. We knock on doors. We help people think about the fight.”  But the fight and the policy and the solution and the framing and the story telling, they’re all a tight braid. We can’t abandon any of that.

S: You’ve been getting at the need to expand our division of labor but not letting go of the outside strategy, the protesting and the agitation.  But I want to push you on that a little more. At some point, we’re going to have to make choices. And, at some point, priorities have to be set.  That gets to our next question. What are old strategies that may not work in this new climate, that we need to let go of?  Are there particular analyses or particular methods that you think may not be as relevant now?  And can you talk more about what you are finding innovative or exciting?  Anything you are experimenting with?

M: One thing that we should never abandon is building personal relationships.  There’s this rush towards certain kinds of technology without the understanding that what makes the technology great is the ability to find new opportunities to build relationships with people.  So there’s a lot of folks who are not knocking on doors and they’re not meeting new people directly; they’re not having direct, physical ties with their base.  Yet, these are times when we really have to expand our relationship-building.

Again, I think that we also have to let go of the false dichotomy between direct service and organizing. People are suffering.  If we are not doing anything to deal with their suffering, then we will become irrelevant. We’ve tended to thumb our nose at the idea that direct services are a part of organizing, but they are. Service provision can be both a base-building strategy and a condition-changing strategy. In this climate, good organizing groups need to think about either providing their own services – like food banks – or about having good relationships with service organizations.  I’m not saying that every base-building group has to expand into direct services, but I am saying that everyone needs to let go of the idea that the two don’t go together. To criticize groups that  engage in service provision totally misses the point.   I’m excited about the organizations that are bringing the two aspects of the work together and are really stepping fully into this experiment. I’ve seen some exciting examples in the Northwest like the Idaho Community Action Network.  They have this low-income base. Their people are hungry; they don’t have enough food.  So ICAN asked, “What are we going to do about that? How can we talk about you coming to a meeting and engaging in the organizing work if you haven’t eaten?” But also,  “How do we politicize those services?”  Mississippi Workers Center is trying a similar thing: providing direct services toto improve  their work conditions and then building off those services to develop a base that engages in work that is highly political. Many workers centers do the same thing.  I’m glad to see more groups paying attention to the needs of the base and not just seeing the process of organizing as moving people through meetings and into actions.  I think this idea of organizing as some narrow arena of work is passé.  It’s not going to survive  during this period of incredible social dislocation.

The other practice that I love is Web 2.0 stuff, all of the interesting things that groups are doing with websites and blogs and so on.  You’re able to tell stories; you’re able to bypass the mainstream media, or what’s left of the mainstream media because the mainstream media is in incredible flux right now.  Our understanding of how we tell our stories is dramatically changing. The traditional newspapers are becoming somewhat obsolete. Some people think that doesn’t matter because newspapers never really did a good job of telling our story. That’s true in a lot of ways.  But when we lose these newspapers and these news outlets, we lose the ability to capture an official story about what is happening in the world.  There is no paper record; there is no clear official story based on the principles of journalism.  That means that the people with the most money will get to dominate the narrative more easily.  In the past, when we were able to capture the daily newspaper or the New York Times or 60 Minutes even when we didn’t have money, we got the credibility of being a part of the official story. We’re losing some of that leverage today.  In response to these changes, progressive people are trying to create mega-websites to put out our stories.  They’re trying to brand their institutions as a credible source of information for the media and for the broader public. These big organizations and websites are asking smaller organizations to join in and to merge their credibility with them as a way to fill the vacuum that mainstream media used to fill: legitimate sources, credible stories, a following of people who will read this information and learn from it.  That’s good in some ways, but there’s also some dangers to it. When smaller organizations pool our credibility under these mega-organizations, they suck resources away from local groups. Then they frame our stories using their own political frames, and they often water our stories and our analyses down. So then there’s fewerclear left messages out there.  As a result, we have seen the same kind of concentration of power and voice that we were fighting with the corporate media.  I’m not sure what a better answer is. We do need to have these high-traffic sites that tell our stories, but we also have to be aware of what these sites are saying about our work.  We need to strategize about how they can actually help us to build our work. But at this point, I think the jury’s still out on whether we can do that well.

I think that the other important trend in this period is the development of national-level formations like the Right to the City Alliance, the Pushback Network and Grassroots Global Justice. By developing these formations, people are saying, “There is clearly a vacuum.  We are doing great work locally.  But we need to figure out how to link up, how to have a national or an international frame for our work.” In other contexts, that vacuum would be filled by a political party. But given the absence of political parties in this country, it is primarily non-profit organizations that are building power. They are forming these networks that mirror some of the functions of political parties, specifically the function of building power on a national scale.

Of course, people are still working out what national work should look like.  There is a push for people to come together and examine how to work collaboratively, how to build power together, and how to magnify their local work.  But one of the inherent contradictions in these networks is that people have ambiguity about the kind of power that they want to build, about whether they want to build that power together or whether they want to just learn from each other and build that power wherever they are.  In that case, a national network is a space where they can hang out and be cool with each other; it’s more of a learning community. And if they decide they do want to build concrete power together, then people struggle to figure out how to do that work together without losing their organizational self-determination.  This is especially complicated when the relationships are new and people are still building trust.

We need more collective spaces to get clear on this question of building power.  The Social Forum might be that space, but it isn’t really designed for large-scale discussion.  Hopefully someday, a forum will emerge that will allow larger and larger groups of people to think about how the left can build power. Again, in other contexts, that discussion would have happened inside of a political party. Today, people are afraid of parties, and I understand that.  So that forum may not need to look like a party.  We could be imagining some new amazing and different kind of formation. For the last 150 years, when people talk about the “left,” they’re usually talking about certain kinds of formations like left political parties. But that definition has really shifted since the 1970s.  Right now, when we talk about the left, we’re talking about a completely different set of networks.  The left today is much more like “swarms,” as they say in community psychology, groups of people who come together and then come apart but not in formal institutional ways. We have to learn more from anarchist work and other political models that help us understand how people can work together and have networks and connection with each other but also maintain self-determination.

S: It’s helpful to have someone with experience like you remind us about similar points in history where some of these questions have come up, and provide some bookmarks from history that people should be going back and looking to so we don’t have to re-imagine or rethink everything today in isolation.

M: I’ve been watching these kinds of national formations come and go for years.  In the 1980s, in the face of Reaganomics, there was another period where these national formations were in vogue.  I don’t think that people doing this work today have sufficiently studied what happened with those earlier formations. There are important lessons to be learned, like how to understand the needs of the individual members and the relationships between groups, that networks should remain actual networks and shouldn’t devolve into becoming their own organizations, that it’s crucial to think about power and to have clear strategies, etc.

Actually, I think we need a serious conversation about what organizing was like in general during the 1980s.  For example, there was this amazing Family Farm Alliance (though I might be getting the name wrong).  It was this amazing left formation that came directly out of thoughtful organizing in response to a political moment when the savings and loan crisis became a family farm crisis.  The campaigns were phenomenal, and their analysis was really clear and nuanced. Once in a while when I’m traveling around the country, I run into people  that were part of that formation. Those folks are still doing great  work. They have this deep analysis of the economy, and they have strong race politics. We’re talking about places in Nebraska or Idaho or Montana. So these are mostly white folks surrounded by white folks and maybe some Native folk.  And their work is still holding in the hearts and minds of a wide range of people in their communities.  Iowa is a great example; a lot of people don’t realize how much of Obama’s victory in Iowa was directly related to that organizing from twenty years ago.   It’s invisible now; other people on the left don’t know about it or don’t understand it.  But there was a point in the late 1970s and the 1980s where there was a commitment to organizing white people in a  profoundly anti racist, left way. I often  wonder what would have happened if that work had taken off at a different level of scale.

S: Any other kinds of closing thoughts?

M: I think that one challenge we have – particularly in racial justice work – is people’s ambiguity about Black liberation.  There are ways in which Obama’s presidency heightens those contradictions.  We have an administration that is basically afraid to deal with anything “Black” because they’re afraid of what it will mean politically because many people are Afrophobic.  There’s a great deal of fear and hatred of Black people that we  just don’t want to confront openly.  Now, I’m not talking about white people liking hip-hop music or saying “Whassup” or whatever. People think that’s the same thing as liking Black people.  But it’s not. And it often seems like people doing racial justice work feel like Black people had their day in the sun in 1960s, that because other communities of color were rendered mostly invisible during that time, that Blacks should take a step back because other communities  need to be seen, too. It is true that other communities  need greater  visibility,support and solidarity for their work.  We need to be clear about the way in which white supremacy makes it seem like we have to pick one group to be the special one, like, “Let’s pick the colored people who are going to be in the sunshine because we can’t really concentrate on more than one.”  That idea – that there just isn’t enough space for all of us to be seen and heard and fought for – is at the root of these challenges.

But the people who are engaged in the work of Black liberation are having some really important conversations that I think would interest  lots of organizers outside of these communities.  There are concrete benefits to be gained through building alliances in our community beyond the sheer numbers.  And we as a community need the solidarity ourselves.  The Obama administration is not addressing the incrediblevulnerability of Black people in this economy  Of course, we’re not the only folks dealing with these challenges. I’ve mentioned the immigrations raids — lots of different folks are under the gun.  But there are ways in which some of these targeted communities are  avoiding solidarity with the African American community.  They want support from  African American communities but they are not building genuine alliances. Some of this is driven by funding.  For example, there are dollars moving to non Black groups to do outreach  in African American communities to increase their support on a whole range of issues, from marriage equality to immigration. That’s good, but it’s being done without any sense of quid pro quo.  Black groups rarely receive support from these pools and it sets up an uneven dynamic that essentially conveys a lack of commitment to Black self determination and institution building.  We are not going to have a viable base of progressive power in this country until we figure out how to develop a multi-racial cross-community work that is deep and principled and that explicitly addresses the general Afrophobia and Islamaphobia in this country.

How does electoral work support or undermine grassroots organizing efforts?

We have incredible contributions from: Mattie Weiss, Wellstone Action and Erik Peterson, Wellstone Action; Rishi Awatramani, Virginia New Majority; Charles Lenchner, Organizing 2.0; and Jessamyn Sabbag, Oakland Rising.

What should we talk about next time? Got something you think people need to hear? Email us: upgrade@organizingupgrade.com

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BUILDING REAL, SUSTAINABLE POWER

Mattie Weiss, the director of Campus Camp Wellstone (a program of Wellstone Action) is a long-time youth movement organizer, writer, and leader. Mattie wrote two chapters of the book, How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office, which she toured around the country, organizing and speaking on behalf of the League of Pissed Off Voters in the 2004 presidential election.

Erik Peterson has 25 years of experience as a community-based educator, trainer, and community and electoral organizer. He has served at all levels of campaign organizing in state and local races, most recently as the lead consultant for Mark Ritchie’s successful 2006 campaign for Minnesota Secretary of State, and as the northern Minnesota Get-Out-the-Vote (GOTV) director for America Votes.

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Building Power

“Electoral politics without community organizing is a politics without a base.  And community organizing without grassroots electoral politics is a marginal politics. And electoral politics and community organizing without good progressive policy is a politics without a head – without a goal.”    - Senator Paul Wellstone

Wellstone Action is focused on building long-term, strategic progressive/Left power and enacting strong, resource-distributive, progressive public policy. We do this work within a framework we call,  “The Wellstone Triangle.”

Grassroots Organizing

In one corner of the triangle we have grassroots organizing (encompassing community, identity-based, and labor organizing), where we grow our organizations and movements. This is the work of building relationships and trust within communities; finding common ground that ties our issues together so our collective efforts magnify each other; building commitment and infrastructure around a compelling vision; and recruiting, training, mentoring, and supporting new leaders.

Electoral Politics

Another corner of the triangle represents electoral campaigns, in which we elect decision-makers committed to our agenda and accountable to our communities. It involves investing in candidate recruitment and development with a long-term strategy for moving good candidates toward higher office; and investing in training a new generation of grassroots political campaign organizers.

Public Policy

The third component of the Wellstone Triangle is about setting an agenda. Ideas inspire us; values ground and center us; public policies are how we enact our ideas and values in the real world. Moving policy is not just about drafting good legislation. This is the place of idea work, where we develop strategies to shift values and debates at the level of mass consciousness. We also develop the new generation of intellectuals and policy writers who are connected to our two other corners of grassroots organizing and electoral politics.

Why?

Historically, progressives and Left organizers within each of these three corners of the triangle have operated in silos, away from and even disdainful of one another. This has seriously weakened us. For example, over this decade young people have gotten more powerful in their capacity to mobilize around elections. We were the heart and many of the limbs of the Obama campaign. But now that our candidate is in office and the battle over health care, war, civil rights and immigration is going down, our voices are noticeably absent. While we were building our capacity to work on elections we developed precious little experience mobilizing around local, state and national policy, such that the man we put in office has no reason to be accountable to us.

Similarly, policy and decision-makers without a grassroots movement of people behind them are frequently either ineffectual or create policy that is damaging to our communities (intentionally or not). At a training we did with prostituted women several months ago, a sympathetic state senator came to talk about the anti-trafficking legislation she had authored. She is a strong supporter of the rights of sex workers and has the capacity to move ideas into law, but she had drafted the legislation without the voices and certainly without the mobilization of those directly impacted by the policy. When the women sat down with the language of the bill, they immediately identified ways it would backfire and increase harassment by law enforcement.

And grassroots organizing and great vision, without a voice at the tables of power, is a stymied power. Paul Wellstone decided to run for office after years of frustrating fights around welfare, farm foreclosures, apartheid and veteran’s benefits—so that the people of MN would have somebody in office on their side when they mobilized their communities around issues that impacted them.

Integrating the Triangle

When all three pieces of the triangle are working in concert, we build long-term movement and institutional power. Of course, at different times during any given cycle, certain actions and pieces of the triangle rise to greater importance.  Last year elections took greater precedence.  Our work on local, state and national races and ballot initiatives was an incredible opportunity for us to expand our base and engage people in conversations about their lives and what matters to them.  These new relationships and conversations are the foundation from which we build our issues and policy campaigns moving forward. And in the next elections, new people we have brought in and leaders we have developed through our issue organizing will be instrumental in winning victories at the ballot box.  That is how we build real, sustainable power.

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BUILDING THE NEW MAJORITY

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

The dual objectives of 1) winning improvements in the lives of oppressed communities and 2) challenging US-led imperialism from within the US find their best chances for success if we are able to organize communities in not just effective and creative campaigns, but also if we’re able to organize in large numbers. Social movements in this country, therefore, have the responsibility of 1) building fighting organizations made up of leaders and members that will struggle in solidarity with oppressed peoples of the world, and 2) organizing the majority of people in their communities, and ultimately in the country to support political change that progressively builds social justice.

Yet, most grassroots organizations struggle to organize more than a few hundred active members, leaving the objective of organizing large numbers of people unrealized. The labor movement, in theory is less interested in organizing politically advanced members and more in growing the sheer numbers of organized workers, continues to lose members instead.

Ground Shifting Beneath Our Feet

There are unprecedented opportunities in this moment to grow our mass-based organizations in the number of people involved, and in the scale of impact we have. For example, in Northern Virginia, where I organize, over 45% of the voting population are People of Color, and that number is growing. Many U.S. cities are majority or near-majority non-White. This is unprecedented in most big metropolitan areas. Additionally, Communities of Color, along with many White (in particular progressive White) people united around the issues of the Barack Obama campaign on a scale not seen since the Jesse Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988. Both of these trends show a budding new majority (based on both demographics and political beliefs) that fundamentally changes our organizing terrain.

These changes are mirrored by the mobilization of right wing consciousness amongst White communities that has cut across class. While many communities were already organized, the virulence of their racist, anti-socialist attacks have recently grown in response to our first Black president and his perceived progressivism.

New Tasks for a New Majority

To effectively transform these conditions into advantages for building social movements in this country, we must make it a priority to converge this growing majority of people into sustained political action through the electoral process. In this moment, electoral work provides us with the opportunity to engage people in a form of political action they are more likely to engage in than any other. We have to build new organizations (like Florida and Virginia New Majority) that can organize communities on a large scale through the electoral process to shape the future of their communities and the country in a way we haven’t before.

The objectives of this work include involving thousands, if not millions of people in conscious political action, winning office for progressive candidates (including those that emerge directly from our base), training communities in direct accountability of elected officials we put into office, and sharpening our skills at running campaigns. The success of this work hinges on 1) using non-election time to organize communities to understand the electoral process as one step towards deeper forms of political change; and 2) involving the leadership from grassroots organizations in providing political leadership to the broad spectrum of people that will be mobilized through this work.

There are several challenges to this work: it requires massive resources; it’s difficult to develop other campaigns because of the frequency and intensity of electoral cycles; voters are less likely to get involved when there are not exciting candidates; many people, including undocumented immigrants and felons can’t vote; and it’s possible to develop false hope in our ability to eradicate exploitation with our votes. We need creative solutions to these challenges.

We must not mistake the political power we might win through this process as analogous to the power people might win through deeper forms of political change. It is equally important that we recognize the potential to create real benefits for oppressed people in the US and beyond through this type of political work. And more than anything, we have to build new organizations for the new emerging majority in this country that can build towards deep, lasting social justice.

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FACING UP TO THE CHALLENGES OF ELECTORAL ORGANIZING

Charles Lenchner is co-founder of Organizing 2.0 and 20 year veteran of electoral and advocacy campaigning.

Systems built around candidates do a poor job of recruiting and training leaders. Most campaigns don’t have the time or resources. Remember that much of what the Obama campaign did is not typical of electoral politics.

Electoral politics are rigged in favor of highly technical, top-down strategies that do not rely on mass participation. This holds true even when a relatively high proportion of money is spent on field work as opposed to advertising.

It’s a consultant and media based culture in which regular citizens and activists are often held in contempt as ‘amateurs.’ In most races, incumbents win with the same combination of money, power players and local grasstops that brought them into office. ‘Citizen empowerment’ often translates into the rise and fall of very specific community groups and sectors, not an ethos in which people simply matter. It’s a mindset that undermines small ‘d’ democracy.

That said, it’s also true that challengers and folks transitioning into electoral politics from other arenas draw on the skills and tools of community organizing. So organizers with a grassroots bent can see some local electoral campaigns as helping to strengthen the progressive movement. The election in New York City of Brad Lander, Margaret Chin and Jumaane Williams are cases in point. But they are the exception.

It’s also true that Presidential elections push a lot of money to specific GOTV efforts working with key demographics. The intersection of money, media attention and focus can be used to expand the circle of politically aware community members. I hope we see more career oriented grassroots organizers gaining experience in electoral politics to bring back some of the tools that work, especially online tools and databases.

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WE DON’T BELIEVE IN STRUGGLE. WE BELIEVE IN WINNING.

Jessamyn Sabbag is a Bay Area native, currently based in Oakland. Jessamyn has been active in progressive social change work for the last decade.  She cut her teeth in organizing through high impact anti-police brutality work in her hometown.  She is currently Field Director of Oakland Rising, an up and coming alliance of social justice organizations employing electoral strategies to move the issues and agendas of low-income communities of color to the center of city government.

Over the last 8 months I have run two electoral field campaigns and a civic engagement program that has collectively impacted over 14,000 Oakland residents. As Field Director for Oakland Rising, I spend a lot of time thinking about the possible marriages between electoral and grassroots organizing. It’s not an easy concept. 500 words is too short. But below I will examine three “marriages” that I have been trying to address in my work. And I’ll show how Oakland Rising is intentionally working to develop integrated grassroots and electoral organizing to build the power we need to win, to move the issues and advance the agendas of low-income communities of color to the center of city government.

1)    Culture Shifting: From Struggle to Winning

2)    Quantity AND Quality: One Hand Washes the Other

3)    Developing Leaders: Cross-Over Skills and Issues

1)  Culture Shifting: From Struggle to Winning

Since coming to Oakland Rising as Field Director, I’ve learned a bunch of quotes to describe our tactics and strategy.  One of my favorites is “We don’t believe in struggle.  We believe in winning.”  Oakland Rising is on the path towards developing a collaborative model that harnesses the scale we need for electoral power and the depth we need for grassroots progressive social change.   But shifting the grassroots base and intermediary organizations from a model and history of struggle to a model and program based on winning at all costs takes time.  We all agree theoretically that electoral organizing is different from grassroots organizing, including the realities of a short lead time for electoral planning, and a fast paced environment to achieve goals of significant scale.  Over the last 9 months, I have had the opportunity to usher in culture shifts by developing models that integrate the science of electoral organizing with the equation to build grassroots power.

2) Quantity AND Quality

Oakland Rising is committed to developing the quantity we need to win at the ballot box and the quality of voters we need to hold elected officials accountable. In our latest campaign, our scale nearly doubled when we contacted over 12,000 Oakland voters about local campaigns like the development of a local transit hub. In our 2-4 minute electoral style conversations we were able to engage in political education and get community feedback (outside of the social justice “base”) that helps redirect grassroots campaign framing and increase follow-up.  And our base-building organizations are currently doing more in-depth outreach with voters who were IDed as “hot contacts.”

3) Developing Leaders

Few things are more satisfying than a good win, right?  Fortunately, electoral organizing offers a couple opportunities a year to get a good win (especially here in California where it seems like we have an election every other month!). While phoners and canvassers can do quick-hit issue education and identify the supporters we need to win on election day, moving that win into a community of leaders takes strategic grassroots organizing.  Oakland Rising hires organizational volunteer leaders and community members to phone and knock as members of the electoral daily team.  Volunteer leaders who work on our Daily Team developed or deepened a new skill set which is continually used to help with grassroots organization-specific campaigns.

Our Window

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we’ll continue to be small and demoralized.

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

Reimagining: Towards a World of Many Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shifting from “Get Mine” to “Share Ours”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Aarti Shahani is a public service fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a writing fellow at Justice Strategies. She talked to Roberto Lovato, businessman, activist and founder of Presente.org, the face of the campaigns to demand Lou Dobbs’ ouster from CNN by Latino and pro-immigration activists. Here’s their conversation (which was originally published on the

A.S.: Why did you go after Dobbs?

R.L.: To be clear, CNN was our target. Lou Dobbs was their 800-pound gorilla. We used him to get to (CNN/US President) Jon Klein. Dobbs was repudiated among colleagues and managers. Peers confirmed that he’s a volatile person. We assessed his vulnerability, and decided it was ripe.

We also looked at the market conditions. His ratings and CNN’s were both falling. Like any media company, CNN has to establish a beachhead in a mission-critical Hispanic market. It’s 50-million strong and growing. If you have a problem in the Latino market, you have a problem with your very future.

CNN’s gotten other threats of boycotts. None had delivered anything resembling a credible threat.

A.S.: What’s a credible threat?

R.L.: We didn’t call for a boycott. We made a strategic choice to tease out a contradiction. CNN was preparing the series “Latinos in America,” a major attempt to court [us]. We produced a YouTube video that contrasted Dobbs with its host Soledad O’Brien. We made it clear that we’re not targeting her.

Our video went viral. We had events in eighteen cities.

In the 2006, millions of immigrants marched for rights with their feet and defeated laws that wanted to put us in jail. We haven’t had wins since then. We went back to where people marched, in Denver, Miami, Oregon. Hundreds signed up via text messages after we talked on Spanish radio. Immigrants are incensed. They marched with their fingers, so to speak. We gathered 100,000 signatures online in just over a month. It stunned even us.

CNN knew what that meant. Klein says that Latinos had nothing to do with Dobbs’ departure. What do you expect? Power concedes nothing without a demand. It conceded our demand. Obviously CNN doesn’t want to encourage other activists.

The funny thing is, Dobbs left at an inopportune time. We began conversations with CNN advertisers and were planning a hemispheric press conference in ten Latin American countries.

A.S.: When I asked Newt Gingrich about your campaign at a public event last month, he said, “If we can get conservatives to petition for MSNBC to dump a couple of people, then I’m pretty happy to look at this petition for Lou Dobbs.” Are you surprised he didn’t run to Dobbs’ defense?

R.L.: A lot of people don’t like Dobbs. Funny thing is, the majority of people adversely impacted by him didn’t even know who he was. Our campaign got the word out to Spanish speakers.

A.S.: Dobbs called you a flea. How do you respond?

R.L.: Dobbs is a mouthpiece for the extreme right’s hate. Our campaign was as an act of love. I don’t care if people think that sounds touchy-feely. Strategy is nothing if not the spirit of one adversary taking on another. The combative spirit of Latinos was central to our calculations. We won’t take verbal violence that results in physical violence. We started and ended with love for ourselves.

A.S.: Didn’t you infringe on Dobbs’ right to free speech?

R.L.: Is it a legitimate business model to make money off hate? Dobbs himself started hiding behind the 1st amendment. Sure he can speak. But the Constitution doesn’t say anything about his right to a show on CNN. Even Ted Turner said in a 2008 interview that he would fire Dobbs immediately. There’s precedent on hate speech. Remember Don Imus?

Media hasn’t done serious coverage of media justice issues. We expected the reception context for our message in liberal editorial rooms to be unfavorable. We assumed we’d be racialized and interpreted not advantageously. Rather than whine and lament, we strategized. We got good, significant press coverage, even in mainstream national media.

A.S.: Nicco Mele, the cyber-organizing guru who ran Howard Dean’s online campaign, says “the internet is very powerful for anti-establishment underdogs and issues.” Now that Presente.org won, what’s next?

R.L.: A whole lot of listening. We’ve amassed a modicum of people power. Our mission is to build on it by hearing our base. We’re consciously celebrating our victory. It’s important for a people to stop and reflect. This is my first day of rest. I turned on CNN at 7 pm and there’s John King. Oh my god. What have we done?