One significant aspect of the relationship between community organizing and Occupy movement in New York City is the synergy between Occupy Wall Street and several community organizations that have been organizing around revenue issues for the past year.   This piece is a dialogue between organizers from two of the organizations – Community Voices Heard and VOCAL New York (formerly known as New York City AIDS Housing Network / NYCAHN) – that have been active in that revenue organizing. This organizing around revenue issues – which included a civil disobedience action at the Capitol on March 1, 2011, a Wisconsin-inspired overnight occupation of the New York State Capitol in late March and the May 12^th Mobilization on Wall Street – has put CVH and VOCAL in closer relationship with larger community organizations and labor unions on the one hand and, on the other,  with many of the direct action activists who helped to initiate Occupy Wall Street.  Since the occupation began in September, VOCAL and CVH have related to it in several different ways.  In this interview, CVH and VOCAL organizers reflect on those experiences and discuss their vision for how those relationships should unfold.

SONDRA YOUDELMAN: Sondra is the Executive Director of Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York State, a membership organization of low-income New Yorkers fighting to influence policy change around issues that affect low-income families.  She serves on the Boards of the Pushback Network and Grassroots Global Justice, and she is active in National People’s Action and the Right to the City Alliance.

HENRY SERRANO: Henry is the Lead Organizer of Community Voices Heard (CVH) in New York State.  He is also on the Boards of both the North Star Fund and the Progressive Technology Project.

JEREMY SAUNDERS:  Jeremy Saunders has been organizing in New York since 2001. He has worked at ACORN, Community Voices Heard and the North West Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition. He is currently the lead organizer for VOCAL New York, formerly the NYC AIDS Housing Network (NYCAHN), which organizes low-income New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS, the formerly incarcerated as well as active and former drug users.

CHRIS KEELEY: Chris is the Coordinator of the New Deal for New York Campaign, a collaboration of community organizations across the state of New York that are working collaboratively to lift up the need for new revenue raising and increased investment in job creation and critical social services.

JEREMY: VOCAL got involved in the revenue fight when our flagship AIDS housing bill – which would have ensured that 10,000 low-income New Yorkers who are living with HIV/AIDS would not have to pay more than 30 percent of their income towards rent – was vetoed by Governor Paterson. Paterson had been supportive of the bill, but he said he couldn’t approve it because it would cost too much, and the state couldn’t afford it during a crisis.  So then, we found ourselves stuck in these reactive fights to defend AIDS services in New York City. It was clear that these dynamics were only going to get worse – that we were going to end up focusing on defending a smaller and smaller pool of services – unless we fought on revenue issues.  So, on March 1^st of this year, VOCAL New York and CVH organized a big action in the hallways of the Capitol building to protest the fact that the government was cutting services for poor people at the same time as it was giving tax breaks to New York’s wealthiest.  Seventeen people were arrested that day, and it got a lot of attention. Everyone – from the media to the police to elected officials – said that they hadn’t seen anything like it in a long time.  That action put us on the map. It was what got us working with these larger community organizations, unions, and direct action activists. It helped to build towards the overnight occupation of the Capitol in late March and the May 12^th actions on Wall Street.  As we started to plan more and more actions together over time, we’ve built up good working relationships.

SONDRA: Community Voices Heard started getting involved in organizing around revenue and the big banks about a year ago.  Recovery funds were dying out very rapidly. Everything that we were demanding was based on a proactive plan that would require more money, but instead we were having to fight against budget cutbacks. We felt like we needed to move into working on revenue issues and to really think about proactive revenue fights and alternative taxation campaigns if we were ever going to be able to win and fund any of the stuff our members wanted.  At first, it was this weird wonky set of issues around taxes that seemed too disconnected.  It didn’t resonate well with our members.  Then, when the recession started to get talked about in the media, and there were tons of stories about inequality, our members began to react. “Recession?  It’s a depression!  And we’ve been experiencing this for years.  But at least people are talking about it now.” The fact that government needed to be forced to invest back in people and communities if we were going to turn things around was pretty clear to our members.  And, when government kept saying there was no money, that’s when the need to get it from the institutions and people that have more to give started making sense as something to work on. This recession put us in a moment where everyone needs the safety net, so we have a chance to build broader alliances around safety net fights.  However, our members had hesitancy about what it means to build that broader front: will our issues get lost?  When we fight for the broader safety net, our constituencies – like African American and Latino workfare workers – are not the main-ticket items that are going to get the press. But we knew we needed to build this broader fight around revenue if our issues were going to have any chance of winning.  So we started working on the revenue campaign, which made it clear that we needed to do statewide work, perhaps with some new partners.  It was during the May 12^th actions that our organizations met some of the people who helped to initiate Occupy Wall Street.  There were working relationships across our organizations and the activists, which has made it easier to integrate our work since it all exploded.

HENRY: There has also been a realignment of some of the other political forces that we’ve been working with: labor and some of the other community organizing alliances. Some of those   broader forces have been humbled over the last several years, and – at the same time – we’ve been growing, so we’re more powerful than we were in the past.  That doesn’t at all mean we have more people than they do, not even close.  But there’s a perception that we have power.  What was happening with some of those broader forces?  The former ACORN forces have been in a period of transition because they were attacked organizationally and shut down; they have been rebuilding.  The unions were humbled through the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA) fight.  They tried to pass EFCA proactively and instead they had their collective bargaining rights shot down across the country.  Even Wisconsin – which is an important part of the inspirational narrative over the last year – was a reactive fight to defend collective bargaining.  Labor has had to reconsider what they have been doing.  At this point, union members have had to fight to defend basic quality of life issues, so it’s still a “self-interest” fight.  But what’s changing is that it can’t just be a fight for a narrow self-interest. Even a fight around self-interest has to engage broader issues because of the crisis.

At the same time, things started shifting internally. Our members’ sentiments started changing after Egypt.  We started to get calls from our leaders around these kinds of actions.  I’ve been organizing at CVH for ten years, and this was the first time that our members started talking openly about being willing to take arrests.  During a statewide strategy meeting, we talked about this spectrum of actions that went all the way out to more militant actions including civil disobedience. When we got to the point in the spectrum that talked about civil disobedience, at first everyone was silent.  And then one woman stood up and said, “We just need to go Egypt on their ass.” I saw a real change in the sentiment in the leadership during that meeting. They had been going through these long, slow struggles, and now they were ready to get more aggressive.  That was around the same time that we connected with VOCAL to start this statewide work around revenue.

SONDRA: So our work was shifting externally around our issues and we were shifting internally in terms of tactics. And there was a realignment of the groups that we were working with.  All of that positioned us to be players at a state level in a way that we weren’t before.  And then the Occupy moment happened, which opened a whole new amount of space. We were on this trajectory of building statewide power, and then suddenly there’s this massive shift in public consciousness that we could take advantage of.

HENRY: We have been working on issues related to revenue and the big banks for about a year now. In that work, we have been working on parallel tracks with the activists who initiated Occupy Wall Street, and our work intersects.  About six weeks ago, we started planning a week of action around the banks that was largely driven by labor, and then Occupy Wall Street pops up.  We’ve continued to work with them, and what they have been adding is scale and media attention.  For example, we had been planning this “Millionaires Tour,” and we expected to have about 150 people participate.  We got 700 people.   And, for the first time that I’ve ever seen, our action became a joke on Saturday Night Live: this guy who was playing Bloomberg started giving addresses to other rich peoples’ houses so they’d leave him alone. That kind of attention impacts our members.  Our membership has always felt isolated in their fights.  They feel solid in directing the actions and doing some incredible work, but they have always felt isolated and like no one pays attention to them.  And now suddenly the media is paying attention to us.  We have gotten more media hits than we’ve ever gotten.  That came under the banner of “Occupy Wall Street” but – when that banner comes together with our organizing – it can have a more tangible policy impact.  Occupy Wall Street…they aren’t trying to have a concrete policy impact, and I think that’s fine.  They bring general frustration about the bigger issues. I wouldn’t actually want them to put more structure on that or develop more concrete demands.  I would discourage them from taking on a specific issue or a structure.  What they bring is a different level of scale and media attention to a wide range of issues.

JEREMY: We had the same experience.  VOCAL went down to Occupy Wall Street with five members, and they had turned that into 300 people within 48 hours.  Our five members worked with a handful of Wall Street organizers to organize somewhere between 300 and 500 people to march to the District Attorney’s office and then to march on Cuomo.  We went down there that day because we had this leader from VOCAL who had participated in the OWS actions when they were trying to evict them. He got the shit knocked out of him by a cop, and his attack became one of the most prominent attacks by the cops because of how blatant and, probably more importantly, because it was widely captured on video. So we organized a march to the DA’s office calling for the investigation of all OWS attacks, an end to all police attacks and to demand the NYPD stop listing our leader, Felix, as wanted. Here was this low-income person living with AIDS who’s homeless and who is  a highly marginalized  person at the protest that day.  Just yesterday, we found out the charges have been dropped. After the DA action we mic-checked to the crowd that Gov 1%, Cuomo was going to get a “Gamechanger” award from HuffPo across town, so we led about 200 to 300 people across town to protest Cuomo as well.  There is just a huge shift in the kind of scale and an energy that you can mobilize quickly right now.

HENRY: That may start to change now that OWS doesn’t just want to be a “mob for hire.”  They don’t just want to show up to action to be there.  They may start organizing their own stuff and stop showing up at ours.  We’ll see.

SONDRA: That’s their strength, not ours. Our strength is not in having thousands of people in the streets or holding one big march. It’s consistent action around the public debate – whether that’s through media or hitting a target strongly or creatively enough to get attention.  You don’t actually need thousands of people to do that.

HENRY:  We should take the relationship between our work and theirs as far as it goes. We shouldn’t try to decide what they’re going to do. It’s a different constituency with different class issues and different racial issues.  I’m not big on critiquing Occupy Wall Street for being a bunch of white people. White people should do these kinds of things. They have specific issues.  They’re 63% of this country. Yes, they are entitled in a way that we will never have among our membership. But that kind of entitlement isn’t bad.  We could use more of it. They are more entitled in their demands and in their approach to confrontation. Right now, white people are the majority while we’ve always represented a strong minority. You’re going to approach politics differently when that’s the situation.

JEREMY: There is a certain level of absurdity to people – including progressive groups – saying things like “Wow. This is amazing. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”  Organizers have always known that if you did crazy shit, you’d get media coverage.  Earlier this year, we did this occupation in Albany, and we got a ton of media. We’ve shut down the Capital. Other organizers have taken over highways and shut down cities. Another part of the absurdity is how much people forget when these kinds of militant actions have happened before.  Like ACT-UP marching down the street with a dead body, or the May 1^st immigrants rights march or the time when Justice for Janitors took over the freeways in Los Angeles. The World Trade Organization demonstrations and the FTAA protest in Miami were also good examples of a moment when there was strong (though usually off the record) labor-activist support and collaboration. There’s such a forgetfulness on our part, to read this moment like nothing like this that has ever happened. There’s been an anger in this country for a long time that we’ve seen explode in a number of ways. It may have been stifled but that doesn’t mean that we should forget about it.

SONDRA: There are some things that are different about this moment though.  I think that occupying a physical space for an extended period of time adds a new element. Of course, not everyone is focused on occupying that space. There are many community organizers and leaders that are going in and out of the physical occupation over time. But it’s significant that they have created a space where people can go and – just by going – they can feel like they are part of a movement, whether they sleep there for a month or go down there for an hour.

HENRY: We’re looked at as part of the political system.  They are looked at as organic.  The fact that they don’t have an issue is an advantage.  We say, “We want money for public housing.”  They are saying, “I’m angry at our government.”  That’s great.  They should do this broad messaging and visioning stuff. We can do the policy stuff. That’s fine. They can take care of organizing on emotion; we’ll organize on policy. We have to keep doing our own very specific policy and campaign work.  No one else will take that on, and the issues of our constituencies will get lost.  The best way to interact with the Occupy movement is that we need to occasionally interact with each other, connect in specific moments around specific actions.

SONDRA: It would be stupid to reorient everything around Occupy Wall Street. And it would be stupid to not realize that we can’t do the same old thing in this moment.  It’s a fluctuating environment. We need to keep our focus on the place where were trying to get to, keep our eye on where we’re headed in terms of building power for low-income families (like we’re focusing on a point far in the distance) and be ready to navigate reality as it changes and shifts.   My hope is that this moment helps us shift that long-term vision to the left.  That’s my hope for Occupy: to shift everything to the left. Occupy Wall Street creates a moment when we can push for more around policy, more in terms of our demands. If we need to do anything with respect to Occupy Wall Street, it’s to push them to make sure to keep pushing. Because even the radical organizing groups have been limited to fighting around crumbs.  We don’t need them to consolidate into a 501c3 and consolidate their issues into specific demands.  They need to do what they’ve been doing: to focus on the public discourse and create a climate where it’s not crazy to call for bigger things.

JEREMY:  My general feeling is that this collaboration is great and needs to continue. When it comes to our organizations’ involvement I do have concerns. I’m worried that this can detract from all ongoing work that has major impact on our membership/constituency. We’re being asked by progressive allies, funders and a few OWS work groups to engage in various ways, like meetings, actions and so on. We want to stay connected. We want to continue to find moments where we can support each other, but we have to realize that the amount of time we dedicate to OWS takes away from other work. There’s just no way around that.

We’ve got to keep doing our work. We can’t let go of the campaigns we’re working on, which are all about addressing specific issues impacting our membership that others aren’t going to take up (and don’t necessarily need to) like the AIDS housing bill or changes to welfare. At the same time, we have to find moments to connect with and support Wall Street with our members when it’s around issues that we both support. This has been happening pretty well. We have to think about building a core team of people from OWS who want to help support and build community organizations that haven’t been able to grow to scale in the past because they lack a broad base of volunteers. There’s a number of OWS protesters who’ve shown that they’re willing to dedicate time and energy and want to support building stronger grassroots organizations.

I’ve heard this continued call by the progressive community, prior to OWS, to get out of our silos, to build collaboratively, to build a broader movement. We at VOCAL feel like we’ve done that in a serious way. We’ve gotten out of our silo, dedicated serious time and resources to fighting for a fair economy. We rarely ask for our agenda to be included, because we realize it’s not the space for that and that there are moments to put that to the side for the larger cause and to accept that we’ll have to fight for our specific campaigns on our own.  We get a small amount of resources to do this work, and it often doesn’t feel mutually beneficial. It often feels like we’re being asked to take action by much larger, better-resourced organizations, without recognition of our ongoing work. I don’t mind joining coalitions, breaking out of silos, and I don’t even mind others not taking on our issues, but it has to come with some acknowledgement of what’s at stake and why some of us may feel hesitant to drop everything to “join the 99%.” I think this is a moment when those dynamics can start to change and – regardless – we know that we need to throw in on the fight around the economy.  So we’ll be down there.  We just hope it will play out differently this time.

HENRY: The next step is that we have to open up the political opportunities for our membership, so our membership can get more engaged in this sense of entitlement that happens at OWS. OWS is hungry to have conversations with the communities that we work with. We haven’t gotten our members down there enough to have interactions so they can engage and help to move what’s going on down there. In some ways, staff may have even acted as a barrier for our members going down there. It could be important to figure out how to engage our members in the organic process down there.  Our members have been fighting in their individual lives forever, and they’ve been fighting collectively with us for a few years. But being down there will give them a sense of being part of a much larger movement.  Our leaders have experience in direct action, in campaigns, in not being intimidated by people in power. The people down at Occupy Wall Street could benefit from that. And our members could benefit from this sense of entitlement.

CHRIS: Getting members to go down to Wall Street is an important part of the political opportunity.  Occupy Wall Street is seen as the anchor for the broader Occupy movement around the country.  If we can build relationships and they acknowledge the members and leaders of the community organizations that have been part of this fight for a long time, Occupy Wall Street could serve as a model for other occupations in other cities and help build some important relationships.

Let’s make a toast, but don’t drink yet

Thursday felt like time for a toast for America’s largest social movement, the folks fighting for immigrant rights. With the news that the Obama administration would review many of its pending 300,000 deportation cases and allow some of those with no “criminal” record to stay, you could literally hear the cries of joy jumping out of Facebook updates, twitter feeds, cafecito spots (I live in Miami), college campuses, and even a detention center or two.

After over two years of pressuring the Obama administration to use its executive power to stop tearing apart immigrant families and communities; after hunger strikes, 1000 mile walks, and mass arrests, after multiple insistences from the Administration that it didn’t have that authority, after multiple cover-ups by the administration of how many people they were deporting that had done nothing wrong, it seems like the Administration is finally listening. And while there are tears of joy, and sighs of relief, there is also plenty of healthy skepticism. After all, we have an Administration that has cried (falsely), “we only deport dangerous criminals!” more than that boy who cried wolf.

So the questions remain.

Who is going to be carrying out this new case-by-case review? Is it going to be the ICE agents whose union doesn’t want to use its discretionary power and calls this a  “back door amnesty?” What is their incentive to review cases fairly?

And when the administration says that they will focus on “criminals”, what do they mean? Isn’t immigration policy the same set of laws that famously calls people “aggravated felons” for things that are neither aggravated nor felonies? Isn’t ICE the same agency that deported thousands of suspected “terrorists” after 9/11 that were never really terrorists? And don’t ICE’s “worst of the worst” categories include a Baptist pastor with a 16 year old conviction from when he was homeless, a Gulf War Veteran with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder who was arrested for marijuana possession after his wife died, and a 36-year-old youth community worker who helps young people stay away from the mistakes he made as a 16 year old? If the Administration is really turning over a new leaf, does that mean ICE is turning over a new leaf?

And then there is what the Obama Administration still refuses to do. It still refuses to create enforceable standards for how it treats immigrants in detention so that they don’t die in custody. The administration still refuses to reign in the deputized powers it gives to bad sheriffs with long lists of civil rights complaints like the real-life Boss-Hog, Joe Arpaio. The Administration still refuses to call of its “creepy” Secure Communities program, which is looking more and more like the first step of a science fiction-like national database that may one day include everyone.

But the Administration is also failing to take the lead in pushing common sense legislation that will begin to fix the broken immigration system while everyone waits for the mythical grand compromise. For one, the best way to ensure the case-by-case reviews o f immigration cases is done right is to give immigration judges back the discretion they need (and lost in 1996) instead of pushing ICE employees to exercise the discretion many of them seem to not want (that they gained over a decade ago).

But lets not rain on the parade. This is no doubt a victory. Afterall, it seems like there are only a few constituencies of non-millionaires that have gotten any significant demand from the administration: the LGBT movement, the Tea Party, and the immigrant rights movement to name a few. And the tie that binds these movements together (for better or worse) is that they fought like hell and refused to just “let the President do his job.”

So let there be a toast. A toast to democracy-in-action and the thousands of squeaky wheels that provided the vehicle to demand more oil. A toast that remembers those families that new policies may never help, the ones that have already been separated and torn apart. And a toast to the hope that regular people are pushing the Administration to finally have enough courage to make real change.

Yep, its time for a toast…but don’t drink the juice yet.

Welcome back to Fast Forum!  We pick a hot topic and ask 3 – 6 organizers from across the country to weigh in. Our hope is to draw out new ideas and to encourage new voices to take a stab at the freshest challenges facing our community. This month we asked B Loewe, Communications Director from the National Day Labor Organizing Network, to reach out to organizers in the migrants rights movement to comment ont he state of the movement in light of recent legislative victories and defeats.

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Unite Against Attacks

-Voces de la Frontera – Milwaukee, WI

Where is the fight for migrant justice in your state?

Immigrant rights organizations like ours have united in an unprecedented manner with labor unions, education unions, and other groups in opposition to the recent attacks on all public workers in Wisconsin.

Currently, we are strategizing against an Arizona-style anti-immigrant bill, AB-173, which Wisconsin law enforcement officers to confirm the immigration status of anyone charged with a crime or civil violation (which can include violations as small as jaywalking) if there is “reasonable suspicion”.  Voces and our allies have been mobilizing against this since last fall, when it was first announced.  AB-173 is now headed to the Homeland Security Committee.  We now need national support in continuing to fight it.  For more info on how to help, visit vdlf.org.

In addition, state budget signed by Governor Scott Walker has just eliminated in-state tuition for undocumented students- a victory that had been hard-won in 2009. Although it was claimed to be done as a means to reduce spending, the amount of undocumented students that applied for in-state tuition was so few that its’ financial impact was irrelevant in the budget.

What are the factors that have lead to the situation you are in in your state?

The Republican majority that took over both Wisconsin’s House and Senate has created a political environment which has made it acceptable to make grievous offenses against immigrants and workers across the state.  The economic situation of Wisconsin has provided these officials and lawmakers such as Governor Scott Walker a convenient excuse to use immigrants as scapegoats, as is the case with the elimination of in-state tuition for undocumented students.

What are the next steps for organizing in your state for migrant rights? What strategies and tactics are you excited by and seeing success with?

The recent budget signed by the governor, which targets not only immigrant students, but all of the middle and working class, has brought unprecedented alliances between various groups including immigrants and Latino workers, and students and organized labor.

This collaboration could not be more visible than in this year’s May Day march, which had a theme of “Solidarity for Immigrant and Worker Rights’ which drew nearly 100,000 people and including National AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka.

Prior to the state budget being passed, we organized a non-violent civil disobedience action at the Joint Finance Committee meeting on education, in an effort to stall the vote which would remove in-state tuition for undocumented students.  Community leaders from around the state participated, including members of the school board, the faith community, and public teachers.  The action drew attention to the need for those opposed to the budget to escalate strategies to defend immigrant and worker rights.

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Right to Remain: Congress of Day Laborers fight back in New Orleans

- Congress of Day Laborers

Immigrants in New Orleans are living in a state of siege. On day labor corners, immigration agents are arriving camouflaged as contractors to pick up undocumented immigrants and fill quotas. At worksites, police and immigrants agents are collaborating to resolve labor disputes on behalf of employers, criminalizing the very workers who courageously come forward to report violations of labor law. On the streets, traffic tickets, broken tail-lights and just being Latino lead to detention and deportation. In the apartment complexes, where immigrant families live with the constant precipice of eviction, law enforcement agents have conducted home invasions, pulling residents out of beds and showers in violation of their constitutional rights.

 In all of these ways, the criminal justice system’s anti-immigrant strategy denies the community access to justice, humiliates the community’s efforts to gain dignity, and severely destabilizes all efforts to put down roots and achieve economic and cultural permanence. Incarceration directly removes immigrant community leaders from their communities in the United States and chills actions by threatening retaliatory arrests and deportations against immigrant leadership. The de-humanizing identity assigned by the criminal justice system impedes immigrant communities’ ability to even search for and build power. And as the immigrant community is pushed farther and farther into isolation and hiding, the criminal justice system further compounds their cumulative disadvantage by separating them from democratic institutions which should help build community and power—schools, community organizations, etc. In effect, the immigrant community is sentenced to remain temporary, unstable and in crisis.

In New Orleans, Louisiana, the fight against the criminal justice system is the Congress of Day Laborer’s fight for the Right to Remain in a city they now call home. As a membership organization, in deep alliance with the African American community, the Congress of Day Laborers is organizing for “the right to remain” in New Orleans, the right to hold control over their political future in Louisiana, and their right not to be defined by their relationship to the criminal justice system. In a state where the criminal justice system has historically driven the political economy of race and the politics of marginalization, the Congress of Day Laborers is a vehicle for the immigrant community to turn the tide on immigration enforcement so that it can expand democracy and live out its dreams.

In order to do this, the Congress of Day Laborers has built grassroots immigrant leadership, strong campaigns, a social movement around the issues of anti-immigrant enforcement and the attacks of the criminal justice system. In the future we hope to create permanent progressive infrastructure for immigrants, so that immigrants can build the institutional power necessary to change the political conditions that allow the criminal justice system to flourish.

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Tod@s Somos Arizona y Georgia:

Rebuilding the Social Movement, Turning the Tide

- Cesar Lopez, Tierra y Libertad Organization

The passage of SB1070 in Arizona 2010 was a jolt to many in the migrant and social justice movements. In Arizona we see SB1070 as a mass statewide institutionalization of the already existing local/federal laws and culture of hate and greed that has led us to 1070. This legislation has led to mass mobilizations and deep organizing strategy evaluation state and nationwide. This evaluation has led to tough truths on what effective organizing is and has recharged the grassroots to work on rebuilding the social justice movement through deep sustained base-building work in Arizona and throughout the country. The last decades focus of the Migrant Rights movement on solutions coming from Washington, DC have have not only been ineffective, they have moved the people’s movement further from justice and taken away the voice of the grassroots migrants fighting for dignity and equality.

In 2011, Arizona has seen a large flow of continuing hate legislation. Every year and legislative session we see our communities come under attack by a higher intensity war of attrition. Attacks to further restrict the movement of migrants and make life impossible to live. This year we saw bills targeting the prohibition of emergency services for migrants by hospitals and clinic staff, bills that would require teachers and school principals to report migrant children and their families and the building hate in 2011 around another 2010 law HB2287 that aims to shut out cultural and ethnic education for Arizona children in all schools. Also, for more than a decade the Southern Arizona desert has been a graveyard for our migrant brothers and sisters walking into this country in harsh summer and winter climates. Their is a continued build up of militarization through checkpoints, 287G and local related laws, greedy privatized prisons for migrants, a massive border patrol and military presence, a rebuilding by the Obama administration of the border wall, and the existence of paramilitary organizations/anti-migrant militias all of which threaten the peace and fragile social fabric of border communities as well the violation of the sovereignty of the Tohono O’odham Nation people. On the border we see as a result of programs like the federal Secure Communities the mass deportation of migrants from around the country. Here we see the next phase of family separation that leaves our communities in desperation.

How does this culture of hate and destructful legislation exist. The polarization of Arizona communities has been building for decades. There are many factors that have led us to where we are. Over the past several decades conservative voters and activists from other parts of the country have migrated to Arizona in droves. This has led to a voting base that is active and makes and environment where hate and this type of legislation are a part of everyday life. As a result of this we see that Arizona is the first state to ban drivers licenses for migrants in the nineties. Another factor is the federal government’s continued focus on the criminalization of migrants. This has been a strong factor that has led to the culture of hate to build in Arizona. The criminalization of migrants at the federal level is has given permission for this to exist in Arizona.

Arizona 2011 is not all hate bad policy. We have also been called into action to rebuild our social justice movement using effective grassroots organizing. The community resistance to HB2281 from teachers, youth and elders has been strong and inspiring in Arizona and the country. The statewide We Will Not Comply with SB1070 July and August actions are still talked about and evaluated in our communities. Many groups have strengthened their focus to organizing that empowers migrants to raise their voice and be the leaders of this movement. To empower migrants to be go beyond mobilization and into deep organizing of the Barrios to build power from the ground up. This organizing has looked like deep organizing in the Barrio to build Barrio Defense Comites. Their is lots of beautiful organizing work continuing and being born all over Arizona. TYLO in Southside Tucson is working on building two sustained Barrio Comites as well as incorporating youth, education, organizing capacity building and food and economic sustainability as part of our Comite work. Through grassroots organizing we empower migrants to recognize their role and responsibility as leaders and we are rebuilding not only the migrant and social justice movement, but weaving stronger together the fragile social fabric that keeps our Barrios together.

Many sectors are seen working together, figuring our growing pains and collaborations and building to launch effective campaigns. The strength of the migrant justice movement has propelled many other sectors into action, rebuilding and reorganization. The diferent secotrs of the social justice movement realize that we are in together in the same fight and that we must be realistic about where our movement is at and where it can be. All of us together can build a social justice movement that will fight and dare to win!

Come visit us and other organizations in Tucson, AZ. Share with us your skills and capacity and learn about our work. Keep your hearts, ears and eyes open for news from organizing for justice in Geogia and the kickoff of Georgia Human Rights Summer.

Check out this article: http://altopolimigra.com/2011/07/01/being-part-of-this-movement-is-something-beautiful-georgia-summer-of-human-rights/

Nos vemos en los Barrios! cesar lopez is a community organizer with Tierra Y Libertad Organization in the Southside hoods of Tucson, AZ.

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Taking the Dream Home

- Casa de Maryland

The fight for us in MD within the migrant rights movement is similar to that of the entire nation… we are pushing back on hostile enforcement policies that are separating countless families and threatening to devastate our communities.  In the face of this, our organization in partnership with our community and local other organizations decided to push forward with a piece of pro-immigration legislation in the shape of an in-state tuition bill (SB167) or the “MD DREAM Act”.

After having experienced the disappointing failure of the Federal DREAM Act, due to political games and lack of courage on the part of elected officials, we continued the fight to provide better access to higher education to students regardless of immigration status in Maryland. We recognized that through local tangible victories we can to strengthen our communities and mobilize countless youth in our state for any future revolutionary movements.

The factors that led to the need for such a laws are blatantly obvious. This can be seen in the disparity in the quality of primary education (K-12) and the available access to higher education among communities of color, immigrant communities in particular, from county to county. This was caused by the increasing attacks on precious resources for students from non-English speaking communities in our public schools and an prevalence of anti-immigrant rhetoric and lawsuits against institutions that support the higher education of low income immigrant students.

Recognizing that the national dialogue on immigration related issues have turned so sour, our youth needed and wanted to prove that not all states are like Arizona and Georgia. We wanted to prove that there is still hope and that this country is still a place where people can dream. We knew that if Maryland became the 10^th state to stand up for fair access to higher education, we would show the country and the world that equality is not something that you beg for it is something that is deserved and demanded. Here in Maryland we are proving that Arizona and Georgia are wrong; our communities are hardworking, intelligent, and that deserve and demand equality and justice.

We WON! Maryland indeed became the 10th state to pass an in-state tuition law and send a clear message across the nation that we embrace equality for our immigrant families and their children.

It was a hard fight that lasted over 10 years!

Our victory was described by political analysts and journalists as an amazing combination and balance of legislative strategy and grassroots organizing (first time students had such a visible presence and involvement which directly affected legislators).

Undocumented students from across Maryland took the risk and spoke about their stories and became protagonists of their own struggle!

Through this process students not only empowered themselves, but also politically transformed themselves into a strong united voice. This gives them the chance to begin identifying other areas in their lives they wanted to change; like fighting “Secure Communities” which in our state, under the guise of gang prevention is targeting our youth.

Unfortunately, the fight for just laws are never easy, and it has now been made harder through the launching of a referendum initiative lead by some of the most hateful, racist, extremist anti-immigrant (right wing) groups, and legislative leaders of Maryland residents. They are attempting to undermine the democratic legislative process that rightfully expressed the will of our citizens by bringing the law to a ballot vote. It is sad to say that the Maryland Board of Elections recently certified the necessary signatures to move the Maryland DREAM Act ever closer to a ballot.

Thursday, June 30th marked the beginning of our efforts to launch a massive education campaign to dispel the lies and misinformation being spread about the MD DREAM Act.

We are increasing our media communication and our voter registration so we can continue to defend and fight for our students and our community.

I’m excited about new and creative ways we can educate our communities and Maryland’s registered voters about this issue (street theaters, youth PSA’s, etc). I’m excited to see how we make connections between the varieties of issues arising in our state; I’m excited to see students bridging the gap on the immigrants’ rights movement and collectively fight for human rights under a broad umbrella and not as a single issue. I’m excited to witness the breaking of chains of guilt, fear, and shame attached to one’s immigration status that weigh students down and discourage them from reaching their potential.

In summary I’m looking forward to taking it to the streets!

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Building a “Multi-” Movement

-Kentucky Jobs with Justice

Where is the fight for migrant justice in your state?

The fight in Kentucky includes building a movement that is multiethnic, multigenerational, multilingual, multiracial and fully inclusive of the broad spectrum of immigrants in Kentucky.  It is a fight that calls us to bring together the traditional civil rights movements and the new wave of social justice activism that is mutually respectful and beneficial.  Geographically and geopolitically, the fight for migrant justice in our state has to reach across political boundaries, it has to reach across the rural and urban expanse and it has to reach across mountains and rivers.  Hopefully, we can connect to groups in the southeast that are doing some good work around bridging the urban/rural divide.

What are the factors that have lead to the situation you are in your state?

In Kentucky, some of the factors that have gotten us to the point of being much more intentional in our work around comprehensive and progressive immigration reform are the changing demographics in our state, the legislative attacks on immigrants and the economic impact of the migrant population.  Louisville, Kentucky has been a federal destination city for immigrants and refugees for nearly 40 years.  With both the 2000 and 2010 Census, our entire state has seen a growth (in some places more than 100%) in immigrant populations in our state which means that there is a visible change in the political and social fabric of Kentucky.

And like many states in the South, Kentucky succumbed to the growing tide of legislative attacks against immigrants by introducing an Arizona copycat bill during our general assembly in January.  The bill passed the Senate, but because we responded quickly and have a strong history of community organizing in some of our larger cities, we were able to defeat the legislation in our house of representatives.  We defeated the bill because we were able to highlight the economic impact from the fiscal note to the fact that many of the employees in our horse industry are migrants – an industry that would crumble if we were not able to host the Kentucky Derby.

What are the next steps for organizing in your state for migrant rights?

Our next steps include continuing to build a strong state network that is ready to halt attempts to legislate hate against immigrants when our general assembly reconvenes in January 2012, supporting the Kentucky DREAM Coalition and being in solidarity with other states in the southeast so that the organizing moves beyond our state borders and becomes a coordinated and strategic regional fight.

Besides creating a toolkit on building strong statewide immigration movements, we are partnering with SEIRN to support direct action in our region as it relates to immigrant rights, being more intentional in engaging with young people in this work, lifting up the work of the “People, Not Profiles” campaign to push back against Secure Communities (Lexington has already signed an agreement) and we are researching and assessing curriculum of “Freedom Institute” models already in place in KY to use as a way to develop the next generation of social justice activists.

We are helping to get the word out about the candlelight vigils in Alabama to oppose HB56 and we are sending a crew to Georgia to fight back against HB87.  At Kentucky Jobs with Justice we believe in being there for someone else’s fight as well as our own – it’s about solidarity.

What strategies and tactics are you excited by and seeing success with?

It is exciting to see traditional civil rights groups in Alabama speaking with such strength in opposition to that states Arizona copycat.  We are excited that the South East Immigrant Rights Network is rebuilding and reengaging groups in the region.  And we are moved by the undocumented youth across the country who are undocumented and unafraid and who are leading their own efforts to pass the DREAM Act.

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Awakened and Activated

- Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights

What are the factors that have lead to the situation you are in your state?

The newest phase of the immigrant community began arriving in 1996 when the boosters of the Olympics sent a call out for workers to complete construction of all the facilities.  Word was passed along that those who arrived to build would have no worries about immigration enforcement during the construction period. Thousands arrived and after the Olympics were completed moved into agriculture, textile, poultry, and residential construction industries.

However in 2001, the attack on the twin towers transformed the image of immigrants into a national threat once again.  With that as a pretext we began witnessing a new right-wing anti-immigrant movement that quickly moved legislation. In 2002, one couldn’t get a driver’s license without a social security number any more. But Georgia’s immigrant history can be divided before and after 2006 when SB 529 and other bills passed barring students from in-state tuition, introducing e-verify, ending access to English language programs for the undocumented and more.

Yet that same year, the national immigration debate gave new life to the immigrant rights movement that we see today.

What are the next steps for organizing in your state for migrant rights? What strategies and tactics are you excited by and seeing success with?

The passage of HB 87 has created a window where every day people are awakened and activated.  Therefore reinforcing base-level organizing so that the comites populares are self-sufficient with consciousness, skills, and strategy is the highest priority.  25,000 people attended the July 2^nd march in downtown Atlanta from all over Georgia and the region.  We are running community leadership skills to support those people in continuing the work in their own neighborhoods and becoming their own leaders.

We will continue mobilizing and creating public demonstrations of our strength and our vision for an inclusive Georgia instead of one that criminalizes.

Finally, we’re organizing the business community into “buyspots” or tiendas del pueblo that pledge to visibly oppose HB 87, refuse to donate to those who voted for it, and pledge to support the movement.  More than 200 of those stores closed on our Day Without Immigrants the first day HB 87 went into effect.

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The Politics of Coming Out

Where is the fight for migrant justice in your state?

We are also focusing on local legislation that can help improve the lives of immigrant communities. The IL Dream Act, for example, passed both houses and is to be signed by the Governor at the end of July. The bill makes institutional changes that open up opportunities for undocumented students in the state, but it will also be important to watch how the legislation is enacted. Issues to watch will include whether undocumented students are included in the ‘Dream Commission’, and some of the specific qualifications for who gets access to the resources this bill provides.

Additionally, we know that many of our peers and our family members continue to be deported. At a national level undocumented youth are well organized, and have been able to pressure the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) into deferring dozens of deportation cases through public campaigns. But just last week my sister was talking about visiting a young person in deportation proceedings, who having a criminal background had little chance of a pardon from an immigration judge, and whose case would have been hard to fight publicly. Even after the IL governor Patt Quinn has refused to collaborate with Secure Communities programs, our work in the immigrant community tells us that undocumented families, workers, and students are still finding their way to the deportation lists. Every time we win the case of an undocumented young person, our community knows that there are hundreds of others being deported and criminalized. So we continue to organize small, individual campaigns with limited resources (most of us are volunteers and undocumented), while advocating for a repeal of Secure Communities and an end to deportations by the Obama administration.

What are the factors that have lead to the situation you are in in your state?

The lack of immigrant rights legislation at a federal level has led local communities and legislators attempting to address the issue through policy and mobilization. In Illinois, specifically Chicago, we are approaching this with a long history of immigrant rights activism, both at the grassroots and at the grass-tops. In experience, Illinois began to distinguish itself from the rest of the country in 2006, when we held one of the first mass immigrant rights marches on March 10th. The work that IYJL has done over the last year and a half, from organizing the “National Coming Out of the Shadows” to our participation in various civil disobediences, stands on the shoulders this kind of local and national social justice organizing.

A bit more recently we have also been good at creating alliances across movements. Last year when the national movement was split between supporting Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) and the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act we were able to work with groups on both sides of the issues towards a common goal (for the most part). Today we continue this collaboration, most recently focusing this strength in addressing secure communities and the IL Dream Act. Another important example has been the work done by LGBTQ organizations, which have attempted to address issues of queer immigration at least since 2006. Although there is a lot of work to be done against homophobia and xenophobia in the immigrant and LGBTQ communities respectively we continue to see strong, formal alliances between the groups, and projects that are attempting to address the issue, where none existed before.

Lastly, undocumented youth all over the country have shown amazing strength, intelligence and conviction in the fight for immigrant rights, but I wanted to give a special shout out to those in Illinois. Over the last two years we have organized at least 4 public “Coming Out of the Shadows” rallies in the city and suburbs, where 8-10 young people tell their stories at each event. This year states like Georgia, Indiana, and Oregon are having their first ‘coming out’ events, some modeled after the work we have done here, and others escalating into civil disobedience. On this point, it is worth mentioning that in the last year 11 undocumented youth from Illinois have participated actions of civil disobedience in Arizona, Washington D.C., and Georgia. I think we get bragging rights for the state with the most undocumented youth who have gotten arrested for immigrant rights.

What are the next steps for organizing in your state for migrant rights? What strategies and tactics are you excited by and seeing success with?

I believe that in order for social change to happen we need to have a multiplicity of tactics, all supporting each other, but I want to say a few words about the strategy of ‘coming out’. To ‘come out of the shadows’ has come to mean an organized and targeted strategy of telling our stories as undocumented people and allies, to advance the fight for immigrant rights. Ever since that Spring in 2010 we have attempted to push the boundaries of what it means to belong in the Untied States, and to call this country our home – as a juxtaposition to the way the government criminalizes us and our families. The arrests and civil disobediences are part of that, but it is important to say that ‘coming out’ also has a powerful personal effect (Coming Out: A How To Guide). For me being able to say that I’m undocumented out loud, and being able to chose the risks that I take in regards to my life and my status, has been an incredibly empowering experience. Since I came out, I have seen hundreds of other young people find their voice, and begin to come to terms with their experience. It is important to say that it is a risky tactic to take on, and one that only undocumented people can chose for themselves- informed, supported, and organized, but with no pressure from others either way. And for me the best chance we have to fight for our rights as immigrant youth is when we are out, and are able to say that we are undocumented, unafraid, and unapologetic about the pursuit of our rights.

Kai Barrow,  a long time left organizer, activist, mentor to many and inspiration to more, is leaving her long held staff position at the prison abolition organization, Critical Resistance. As she leaves she has reflected on her time in the movement and her work in CR, producing the “Swan Song Manifesto.” This enlightening piece is over 20 pages long! Here we excerpted two sections from the introduction, which bring very good and clear challenges to left organizers in these times, based in a personal historical analysis of movement work. For everyone who hasn’t met Kai, or learned from Kai, this is a great introduction to one of our unsung movement heros.

Born at the tail end of the fifties and raised in Chicago by activist parents, I cannot recall a time when I was not politically engaged. I was surrounded by influences and energy that (in retrospect) produced a visceral desire for revolutionary change/liberation.  In third grade, I organized a walkout along with a few of my friends against the Vietnam War. We made signs and chanted “Humphrey, Humphrey, he’s our man. Nixon belongs in the garbage can”! (not the most revolutionary message, but hey…we were in third grade).  In fifth grade I refused to stand and recite the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance because I found it to be “hypocritical to Black people.”  My parents supported my analysis and decision, and after meeting with the teacher and the Vice Principal, Mr. Phillips, my parents and I negotiated a victory. I would sit in the VP’s office every morning during the “Pledge.” Sometimes Mr. Phillips and I would spend our time chatting, sometimes I would read or work on my homework. But I always felt good about my decision. Perhaps for the first time I understood the importance of taking power.

My fifth grade school year was also the time of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. As is the tradition, many young people from throughout the country arrived in Chicago to protest the War and other repressive policies and my family and other residents of the co-op apartment we lived in, agreed to house several of these protestors, among them David Dellinger.  After Mayor Richard J. Daley gave the order for the Chicago Police Department to “shoot first, ask questions later,” my new out of town “friends” arrived back at our house broken, bloodied, and angry at the police, the mayor, and a system that shoots and kills its children.  I was heartbroken to see people in pain and I too became angry. Later that night, I was awakened by gunshots as the police surrounded our apartment and forced Dellinger out of the building. That day I experienced grief, anger and terror—all directly linked to the violence and abuse of power by the State.

During this period I also saw the rise of the Blackstone Rangers (a prominent Chicago street gang) who scared my grandmother, my best friend, and me. I saw families loaded with Christmas Day paraphernalia (bags of gifts, leftovers packed in aluminum foil trays) standing on the corner waiting for a bus while snow fell and the kids did the “I’m cold dance” to keep warm. I saw my mother cry for the first time and my father punch a hole in the wall in reaction to Dr. King’s murder. I attended a Saturday “survival school” organized by activists where I learned about the culture and contributions of African diasporic people.  I felt safe and proud when strangers passing me on the street raised a fist, gave me a smile and greeted me with “Black Power, little sister.”  I watched the creation of the Wall of Respect, one of the first murals of the Black Arts Movement, and had the privilege of placing a brush stroke of color on a corner of the Wall. My household was filled with the music of John Coltrane and Sarah Vaughn, West African masks, prints by artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner, and a library of books on the Black experience. Culture and the arts were extremely important to me—both as an educational tool as well as for the deep pleasure it stirred within.  Early on, I knew I wanted to be an artist.

My visceral experiences and the daily snapshots of a people in struggle were facilitated and named by my elders. They offered me a way to make sense of the problems, solutions, contradictions and victories and directed me to become a critical thinker. So, after finishing The Autobiography of Malcolm X, at the age of ten, I proclaimed, “I want to be a revolutionary!

A culture of resistance, protest politics and institution-building by people of color, feminists, queer people, and poor people in the 1960s and ’70s filled me with pleasure and purpose.  It was a period of design and imagination—a period where people re-envisioned and re-structured their lives. Even as a kid, I knew that things were changing. I saw and felt the electricity of change. Nothing was static.  It seemed to me that everything was in question: from diet to living arrangements; interpersonal relationships to altered identities, from the ways that people asserted and responded to power to a new articulation of labor and production.  During this period, people reached beyond national boundaries and re-defined themselves as members of a global community (and in some cases, interplanetary community—see Sun Ra). And though these shifts were taking place on different scales and at a different pace, corresponding to class, race, gender, age, geographic location and sexual orientation, everyone was influenced by this cultural, social, political and economic re-imagining. This was a transformative moment, one that unleashed our imaginations and spurred our actions. We saw what we could be.

We were unprepared for the brutality of the State. As beautiful as this period was, we were also powerful enough to pose a threat so significant to the functioning of the State, that it systematically set out to squash our burgeoning revolution. Individual leaders were discredited, driven into exile, imprisoned, and murdered. Intra-and inter-organizational conflict resulted in a weakened movement that we are still recovering.  Culture was depoliticized and exploited.

Since this period, our movement continues to fight.  However; our electricity is contained. The passion for liberation is muted. Instead, we fight for our survival. And this is not enough.

I am motivated to do this work because at an early age I experienced the possibility of what could be.  Despite the conditions that we struggle with on a daily basis—that belief in our ability to change our lives; to transform ourselves and our environment, has never left me. It is deeply rooted and difficult to pinpoint through a single transformative moment, experience or observation. Instead, I am an outcome of my geography—time, place, and location in both material and imaginative space.

I work to dismantle the violence of the State—particularly the multiple layers of the prison industrial complex (PIC) I work to build a society that neither needs nor relies upon violence—State or interpersonal—as a solution to social, economic or political problems.  I work to re-charge that passion for liberation that was so significant and yet, short-lived. With the privilege of history and analysis and the willingness to boldly assert a liberatory vision, we can redesign our lives and shift our material conditions.  I see this as both an artistic and scientific process. It requires organization and vision beyond the limitations and concessions offered by the State.  It requires us to take the risk of challenging societal normatives in both our values and our actions. Like my ancestors, who took on this fight to end the violence of slavery, I am a prison industrial complex abolitionist.

The PIC is energized by racism, sexism, heteronormativity, and capitalism. It reproduces these systems while simultaneously creating and reinforcing fear, violence, abuse, broken communities, isolation, scarcity, and dependency. In other words, it creates harm as it claims to be about the business of punishing harm.

Our responsibilities are to articulate vision, build organization, and create practices that are PIC abolitionist. We work to “shrink” the system into non-existence using four key strategies: 1) Intervention. Developing strategies of decarceration, disrupting policies and practices that strengthen the PIC (through scope and breadth), and decommissioning structures that currently exist. 2) Prevention. Working to stop the building of more (or “better”) prisons/jails, policing and surveillance methods and strengthening the capacity and resources of a community so that it’s needs are met. 3) Accountability. Developing community-driven holistic models for intervening, preventing and repairing harm and facilitating processes and practices that strengthen a community’s efforts toward self-determination. 4) Transformation. Challenging individual characteristics that reinforce and reflect the intersecting oppressive systems that empower the PIC and other systems of control.  This work is neither linear nor static. Intervention, prevention, accountability and transformation are ongoing and function interdependently.

This work is critical for fomenting fundamental social change. Movement-building, cultural paradigm shifts, education, institution-building, and action (campaigns, projects, mobilizations), all provide opportunities to inspire and support people in recognizing our own power; challenging normatives; and taking responsibility for the well-being of all. This work is a collaborative process that is rooted in history and joins a continuum of freedom struggles. Though it must be ideologically grounded, organizing work itself must also be pliable—this allows for critique and dynamism. During my thirty + years in movement-building I have learned that these are critical elements for creating a liberated society.

In 1978, I became actively involved in grassroots organizing. Since this period I have been a member of, or worked closely with, several national and local organizations such as The Republic of New Africa, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the Spear and Shield Collective, the Coalition Against Jon Burge, the Black Panther Newspaper Committee, the Black Panther Collective, the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM), the Free Mumia Abu-Jamal Coalition, the NY3 Defense Committee, Jericho, the Ruckus Society, the Direct Action Network, Resistance in Brooklyn, Hands off Assata, Sista II Sista, Estacion Libre, FIERCE! INCITE! UBUNTU and Queers for Economic Justice (to name a few). I have lived and worked in Chicago, Atlanta, Jersey City, New Jersey, NYC, Durham, NC and now, New Orleans. I have been embraced by a broad community of activists and organizations throughout the U.S. and traveled to Chiapas, Iraq, Jordan, Buenos Aires, and Porto Allegro, Brazil to work with organizers and activists primarily in skill facilitation, grassroots campaign organizing, capacity-building, or organizing mass mobilizations. Additionally, I am one of the founders of Critical Resistance, a national grassroots organization to end the prison industrial complex, where I am leaving my staff role as the Infrastructure and Training Director.

My work with these organizations has allowed me to develop and assert a vision for social change that requires participatory democracy, agreed upon principles, harm-free methods for accountability and repair, and unleashed imagination.  Though the specific tasks have changed over the years, in essence, my contributions continue to center around stimulating collectivity, fostering abundance and creativity, practicing risk-taking, demanding self-determination, and building organizations with (social, political, physical and intellectual) rigor….

The major challenges facing Critical Resistance are also the most pressing challenges faced by the U.S. Left. In some form or fashion, we are all asking: How do we win?  And though I have problems with the concept of “winning” liberation (as I see this as an ongoing process), I think at the root we are asking “how do we topple a system that is hell-bent on escalating worldwide material and cultural genocide to serve its greed?”

Big charge.

I believe that this core question, leads to another set of questions: What is to be done? How do we build a mass movement? How do we articulate a revolutionary intersectional analysis through our theory and practice? How do we create strategic points of entry that weaken the system? How do we challenge the multiple ways we replicate systemic oppression?  These questions reflect the major challenges we face in our organization and in our movement and are amplified by the howls of our people.

Within capitalism, racism, patriarchy and heteronormativity, our desire for freedom is in constant opposition to condensed, restrictive, and rigid space.  This has been particularly true in the communities where CR operates and where I have lived and worked. Subways, housing projects, courtrooms, the lack of public space and the control of what remains as “public space,”[1] and the lack of money, work, housing, and healthcare, has created a people who are experiencing physical, spiritual, and mental harm. As a member of these communities, I experience this harm. Internalized oppression drives us to inflict self-harm: abusive relationships, substance abuse, deadly eating habits… while simultaneously fighting the harm of the State: homelessness, hunger, toxic environments, the bombardment of images that cast us as inferior, and police violence. Yet within this oppressive space, we still fight to be free.

This contradiction creates a “raw opposition” that is explosive.  It can change the terms of a space.  As organizers, our challenge is to identify the nature of our raw opposition and build/create within the space between oppression and freedom. We are charged with entering the space of raw opposition with clarity, precision, and analysis, passion, energy, and generosity. In Black tradition, this is known as the “Cool.” Think Miles Davis.

We are challenged to develop shared strategy and principles. Power-sharing, confronting privilege, and building trust are central to this work. We are challenged to willingly participate in ongoing critique of our methodologies and outcomes—making adaptations where necessary and continuing to build upon our strengths.

We are also challenged to “reproduce” a future generation of organizers across racial, gender, sexual-orientation, class, physical/mental abilities, geographic location, age, cultural, and political boundaries.  We are challenged to replace ourselves—share leadership in a responsible way, making space for “new” voices while integrating the knowledge and experience of the past. Yet, replication is complex because political, economic, and social contexts constantly shift and we want more than to simply mint newer versions of ourselves.

We are challenged to draw upon collective abundance. Acting from a place of abundance allows us to challenge scarcity. Collective abundance produces flexibility, creative problem-solving, and courage. I am reflecting here on the ways that the Black tradition models a practice of abundance. Without access to and control of resources, we have managed to pay rent, feed our families, send our children to college, and create hip hop.

We are challenged to utilize our agency in the service of our shared goals and charged with a demand for constant creativity, risk-taking, and self-determination. Agency is as empowering as it is messy. It helps us challenge the “cops in our head” or the complex ways we internalize power structures in our daily lives.

Additionally, we are challenged to foster a healthy culture of accountability and repair.  Understanding that contradictions are integral to any process of change, we are challenged to construct a dialectical analysis. We are challenged to be fluid in our work, transparent about our mistakes, seek non-punitive methods of repair for the harms we both cause and survive, and willingly struggle to transform.

This is not the work of a selective “we.”  It is work that must be done by everyone. To willingly and actively take on the challenges above, places one in this working group. This is work that demands a deep commitment to foment transformative revolutionary change within our individual selves and among our families, friends, communities, organizations, coalitions, and allies.

I choose the challenges listed above as our major challenges, because they feed the numerous challenges that we bump up against on an operational basis. Challenges related to membership recruitment and sustainability, policy wins, uneven political development, effective communications, and resource generation (human capacity and material resources), are woven into the fabric of our daily tasks. History dictates that these skill-driven challenges ebb and flow.  We will have a large number of members and supporters and then we will have few. We will have money to keep our doors open, and then we will not. Without cultivating strategies and tactics for our major challenges, these operational challenges are doomed to repeat.

Picture it: A multiracial, multi-gendered, intergenerational group of about 250 people are marching down the middle of the street in a neighborhood of North Philadelphia. The people are a loud bunch, carrying signs that read “Free Mumia Now!” and “Stop the Execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal.”  Community members come out on their porch to wave at the group or raise a fist in solidarity.  There is a pick-up truck with a loud speaker rigged to a megaphone. People are reciting chants that rhyme and have each phrase and pause dedicated to memory. This performance has become ritualized.

There is a lull.  The speaker/chant leader is tired and needs a break.  He hands the megaphone to me. I am known for my energy. I hold the dubious title of “Cheerleader for the Movement.” Holding the megaphone, I wanted to see if we could transform our ritual. Could we inspire spontaneity and surprise within ourselves and each other? Could we share with this Black, working-class community whose neighborhood we entered, an expansive vision—one where Mumia’s freedom was tied in with their own liberation? I placed the megaphone to my lips and faced the crowd.

Me: What do we want?

Chanters: Free Mumia!

Me: When do we want it?

Chanters: Now!

[reprise.]

Me: What else do we want?

Chanters: [silence.]

Me: No really. What else do we want? Shout it out. It doesn’t have to rhyme. It doesn’t have to be scripted. Let’s make a cacophony of sound, shouting out our visions of what we want. [pleading] We don’t even have to do it for more than 60 seconds.

Chanters: [silence.]

Actually, there wasn’t complete silence. A few people attempted to shout out a vision, but it was mumbled and lacked passion. For the most part people were unable, more so than unwilling, to go along with this shift. I began to cry (I do this often—cry) and passed the megaphone back to the lead chanter.  A few people hugged me. The Mumia march served as a catalyst that has prompted me to struggle deeply with questions on the uses of imaginative space in revolutionary/liberatory organizing.  How do we take opportunities to scream our vision—whether through words, sounds, or actions—to the point where our ears are ringing from our own voice—with no regard for propriety, no fear of retribution, no authority reigning us in? How do we make revolution like jazz? I believe it is the artist’s work to stimulate the desire and the organizer’s work to organize the output from this desire. This leads to synchronicity.

Sushma Sheth interviewed  Ng’ethe Maina for Organizing Upgrade in August 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ed. Note –
As we explore the work of movement building and the fight for revolutionary change we need to simultaneously examine the roots of our actions, the roots of ourselves. Hashim and Tiffany Yeomans-Benford are two young organizers from Miami, Florida. Their work is grounded in racial justice and feminist struggles. We asked them to discuss the role interpersonal love plays in their fight for a better world. They brought forward a shared practice and value they have in their relationship called “Intimate Liberation.”

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 Sheth interviewed Makani Themba-Nixon for Organizing Upgrade in mid-2009.

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.

We are living in amazing times.  Between the groundbreaking election of President Obama and the onset of the largest economic crisis that this country has seen in decades, the terrain of politics is rapidly shifting beneath our feet.  The left-progressive movement is currently engaged in a re-evaluation and reorientation (for example, the recent “Reimagining Socialism” discussion in The Nation and the “Reimagining Society” dialogue on ZNet). Within this broader dialogue on the left, community organizers need place to reflect on the particular possibilities and demands facing in this historic moment.

New Questions and Challenges for Community Organizing

It is dizzying to think about the political possibilities of this moment.  There are real opportunities to make significant impact – regionally and nationally – in the context of the Obama administration.  As we fall deeper into the recession, the broader public is beginning to discuss the limits of capitalism, the role of financial institutions, and the parameters of the “free market.”  Obama’s election has given community organizing a new profile and broadened the number of people who might be willing to engage in organizing for social change. The mainstream is up for grabs in a way that we haven’t seen in decades. The possibilities are there, but the left and the community organizing sector need more clarity and intention to take advantage of them.

The challenges are just as vast.  With the economy tanking, our communities are facing a new level of hardship.  At the same time, philanthropic support for our work is shrinking.  We are also seeing a rise in attacks on community organizing and intense red-baiting and race-baiting. From the forced resignation of Van Jones to the smearing of ACORN in the national media, community organizers and the left are seeing the rise of a militant and mobilized right wing.  All the while, day-to-day demands of organizing work are not letting up, even as new crisis and needs surface.  It can be difficult to take a moment to step back and reflect on the shifts in the broader political climate and how we need to reorient our work to meet the new climate.

This Project

Organizing Upgrade is an attempt to engage left leaders and innovators in the field of community organizing in a strategic dialogue.  We hope that this project can bring the kind of inspiration, vision and strategic clarity we need to strengthen our political impact, both in our immediate fight and in our longer-term efforts to build the social justice movement and to revitalize a movement-rooted left in the United States.  We hope that, by encouraging some of the leading innovators and leaders from the sphere of community organizing to put pen to paper and to speak their mind, we can develop unity and clarity about the key demands on left organizers in these times.

This project was initiated by Sushma Sheth and Harmony Goldberg with the support of Joseph Phelan.  Knowing that the day-to-day demands of organizing can make it difficult to step back and get perspective on the bigger picture and that most left thinking is focused on more abstract questions, we wanted to create a space that would push left organizers to articulate our thinking and to get more collective clarity about how we can build a more powerful movement and a left that is more rooted in and accountable to our communities.

Contributors have been asked to respond to the following three questions:

Conditions: 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?

Strategic Priorities: There are a number of new opportunities for organizing presented by the new Obama administration and the economic crisis.  What are the key interventions that the community organizing sector should make in this moment? Are there particular contributions that left organizers should make in this process?

Changing Orientation: What is inspiring you these days?  What are old strategies that our sector should turn away from? Which new tools and ideas are you now experimenting with?

Our Contributors

In an effort to get a wide and sweeping view of community organizing from the Left, a range of organizers have been tapped across the country. Their expertise comes from their hands-on, day-to-day work in the very communities, organizations or national alliances that shape community organizing inside the U.S. today.  Their areas of interest and practice range from gentrification, workers rights, electoral work, immigration and detention, war, and Palestinian self-determination. Contributors include men, women, younger and older folks, straight, queer, white folks, and people of color and they share their thoughts in arrange of formats: essay, interview, panel and transcripted speech.

New “Upgrades” Will Be Released on a Monthly Basis

We plan to post three new pieces on the FIRST WEDNESDAY of each month to keep the conversation going.  So please come back regularly to see what exciting new ideas  are being shared.

The best way to stay updated is by joining our mailing list.  We will send out an email announcement to our mailing list each time we post new pieces, and this will also be how we communicate other timely information about Organizing Upgrade.  You can also keep updated by adding Organizing Upgrade to your RSS feed; the RSS button can be found at the bottom of the website.

The Dialogue & Your Thoughts

We really want to encourage you to participate in this important conversation about how we are going to take our work to the next level. Please use the “comment” function to enter the dialogue. We encourage you to say where you agree and where you disagree and want to suggest other ways forward.  We strongly encourage you to be principled and constructive in your feedback; things like name-calling, politics-baiting and personal accusations do not move our collective conversation forward.  We will be moderating all comments in the interests of promoting a productive dialogue.

You can contact us at upgrade@ organizingupgrade.com if you are interested in submitting a piece, but know that we have a long list of contributors already signed up.

Appreciations

Besides thanking all of our amazing contributors, we also want to thank:

• Chris Caruso and Jed Brandt for help designing the site.
• Sumitra Rajkumar for recording and editing the “Left Strategies from the Grassroots” roundtable video.
• Lisa Rudman (National Radio Project) for sharing her audio recording of the “Left Strategies from the Grassroots” roundtable.
• Left Turn magazine for allowing us to reprint the “Left Strategies from the Grassroots” roundtable article.
• All of the amazing leaders and organizers who are working so hard to build a more powerful liberation movement!

Welcome to Organizing Upgrade!
Sushma, Harmony, and Joseph (The Upgrade Team)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AUDIO:

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

VIDEO:

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

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

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

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

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