At a time when states and cities are fighting back austerity measures, organizers in Chicago are flipping the script! Instead of asking policy makers to stop making cuts, they are exclaiming ‘Show me the Money’!  Taking up the #Occupy moment, Grassroots Collaborative Executive Director Amisha Patel sits with OrgUp editor Sushma to discuss a recent victory: an agreement with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel to return $60 million in social services for the People.

Q: This year marks historic outburst and outcries by the American public against budget cut backs and austerity measures. From February’s uprising in Madison, Wisconsin to #OccupyWallSt mobilizations last week, people are coming out of the woodwork.  Why now?

A. The housing collapse in 2008 finally signaled to the mainstream that something is wrong with this system, though people of color and poor communities have known this for some time.  The Right took hold of the narrative and used the moment to connect with the squeezed white middle class, and moved them with anti-government rhetoric that built on resentment and frustrations that had finally boiled over.

Progressives, however, have increasingly broken through.  And what’s done it has been bold direct action grounded in long-term grassroots organizing that captured the sentiment of the majority.  The 2008 winter occupation of Republic Windows by UE rank and file workers did just this.  So did Mohamed Bouazizi in Jan 2011.  The takeover of the Madison statehouse continued this work.  Occupy Wall Street, and the birth of hundreds of acts of resistance, is yet another continuation.  This isn’t to say that the conditions for each of these efforts are the same, but they all point to the sparking power of direct action that directly confronts the corporate agenda, particularly when organizations and movements of people are ready to sustain the momentum with clear demands that speak to majorities of people.

In Chicago, we have been strategic about how to move direct actions around our organizing campaigns.  We have effectively built upon the national attention of Occupy Wall Street, and the effort is grounded in local organizing.  Through a broad community and labor coalition, we organized a march of 7000 people in October to protest two conventions of the financial elite.  We followed the mass action with days of planned actions and civil disobedience, generating tremendous coverage and effectively changing the narrative.

Q. While many movements are criticizing the cutbacks and spending cuts, some Chicago organizations tried another tack.  You flipped the script. Instead asking to end cutbacks, you called for increasing revenue generation. Where did this idea come from and how did Chicago’s decision makers respond? 

A.Grassroots Collaborative groups and our allies have been fighting for more revenue at the state and local levels for years.  This stems from a shift in strategy as the economic crisis became justification for the right to slash the public sector and services to low-income communities.  If we continued to have a reactive fight against cuts, we would be pitting ourselves against many other equally critical programs and services.  For us all to win, we need to expand the pie.

In 2008, we spearheaded a coalition called the Campaign for Illinois’ Future that brought together over 130 groups to fight for an income tax increase.  By launching a hunger strike that included an 87-year old neighborhood leader, we wrested attention away from the corruption-focused media circus surrounding ex-Governor Rod Blagojevich, to the dangerous state of Illinois’ budget and its impact on women and communities of color.

Our work addressing revenue in Chicago came from a power analysis we led with 20 key labor and community organizations immediately following the election of Mayor Rahm Emanuel in Spring 2011.  Consensus emerged that the ultimate power of the Mayor lies in the corporate power that elected him.  We realized that we could no longer keep running issue campaigns that did not reframe the corporate agenda.  So, we developed a strategy to move campaigns for revenue that targets city subsidies (Tax Increment Financing dollars) meant for blighted communities.

On the eve of the Mayor’s inauguration in May, the Grassroots Collaborative held our first action on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), who received $15 million in our TIF dollars to renovate their bathrooms.  Last year, the CME posted a profit of nearly $1 billion dollars, yet took our tax dollars away from our classrooms and our libraries so they could install golden toilets.  It’s a message that resonated powerfully with the broader public.

On Oct 16, 2011, one week after introducing the RBO, Mayor Emanuel agreed to declare a 20% TIF surplus, sending $60 million back to our public services.

From the beginning, Mayor Emanuel repeatedly rejected the idea of declaring a TIF surplus.  The Collaborative’s strategy was to do a series of creative, public actions that captured our message powerfully and shifted public support against corporate welfare.  We held a Bake Sale for Billionaires, we held class on the sidewalk outside the CME, and conducted a Corporate Welfare Tour via trolley through the streets of downtown.

Meanwhile, we introduced legislation that directly challenged Mayor Emanuel on the TIF Surplus.  Called the Responsible Budget Ordinance, our legislation calls for a 50% TIF surplus declared, and would return hundreds of millions of corporate slush money back to our struggling schools, parks, libraries, and City.

On Oct 16, 2011, one week after introducing the RBO, Mayor Emanuel agreed to declare a 20% TIF surplus, sending $60 million back to our public services.

We continue to push for our 50%, but this victory is significant for several reasons:

- We forced the City to move significant dollars from what has become a downtown corporate slush fund to our neighborhood schools, parks and libraries, bringing revenue into public services at a time when most cities are cutting back

- We changed the narrative.  Even Crain’s Chicago, our right-leaning business journal, wrote articles in support of our position against the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and reader comments overwhelmingly supported our position as well.  This resulted from a key columnist taking interest in our Bake Sale for Billionaires action at the CME – it was a clever message that resonated with him and readers and put us on the radar

- In a time of regular defeats, it is critical that we claim this victory to grow momentum, acknowledge the reform achieved, and continue building.  Our low-income, majority Black and Latino leaders are energized around this work, are constantly developing their skills and knowledge around taking on the corporate agenda, and are forceful advocates for taking on corporate power and winning a people’s budget.

Q. We are rumored to be on the precipice of a double-dip recession.What new strategies do you see union and community organizers taking on in the face of such possibilities? 

We’re at an interesting moment with the national and international attention that Occupy efforts have brought to what’s not working with capitalism, but the conversations still must be deepened.  We do this by looking at 1) history, 2) participation, 3) collaboration, and 4) theory/imagination.

History. I was at a gathering a few weeks back to mark the release of a new book on Gale Cincotta.  The room was full of movement leaders active in that era.  Some remarked with dismay how little things have changed from the 70s to present time – that the signs protestors carried back then could be carried at an Occupy march today.

A different perspective is that we must know what we’ve done before to understand how we have arrived at the moment we are in.  Cincotta’s march on the American Banker’s Association preceded Take Back Chicago’s march on the ABA by 30 years.  It failed to ignite the movement she had hoped for, yet 3 decades later, Occupy Wall Street exists.  Its worth considering how many of our “failures” are actually instead sparks with the potential to ultimately shift the paradigm.  Maybe if we knew that, we would never stop trying.

Participation. As organizers, we must continually deepen our leadership development work – and get to the place where people of color and working class leaders are deeply connected with one another, because we cannot take on the oppressions we’re up against if we’re in silos, or tokens at press conferences.  The Collaborative has worked steadily to move beyond superficial engagement with our leaders, as we have tired of waging great multi-year campaigns that don’t lead to greater capacity or connection at our base.

We must be in connection and in deep community so that we can undo the internalized effects of the classism, racism, sexism, homophobia, colonization, genocide, and every other form of oppression.  We must sustain and grow spaces of learning and engagement that create real space for grassroots leaders to grow themselves as they grow the work.  We must recognize that getting our minds back is just as key as creating good policies and transforming structural inequities.

Collaboration.  Labor and community efforts could lead to work that is both deep and at scale, but only if both are open to learning from each other and innovating new strategies.  We must continue to articulate what we are for, and not simply what we’re against.

The current structures and frameworks for most labor unions and community organizations do not support this work.  It requires us to go beyond the union contract, and the measurable objective of the policy win.   Community Unionism sees that the decriminalization of youth of color, the defense of public housing, and the end to sexual violence are economic justice issues.

In Chicago, issues of turf remain strong 40 years after the death of Saul Alinsky.  Recent work though has pushed against the traditional barriers to movement building, creating shared platforms, analysis, and strategies for change.  The Grassroots Collaborative has played a useful role in this effort.  We organized 2600 people from 25 community organizations to create a citywide push for a people’s agenda during the muni elections.   We followed this with a People’s City Council meeting that brought together 19 aldermen and 1600 energized community leaders and rank and file workers taking on the corporate agenda.

Theory. Imagination. As the economy continues to worsen, the question emerges: what are we doing now to prepare to rebuild society, and how will we create a world that supports the liberation of all people?  What are we doing to make sure that low-income people and people of color not only survive the collapse, but are the center of building anew?

We must work with our leaders on their early experiences of poverty, racism, sexism etc, because as the economy worsens, feelings of discouragement and hopelessness will continue to get kicked up.  We must do this work ourselves as well.  We are still figuring it out ourselves at the Collaborative, but it seems that if we want to imagine another world is possible, let alone build it, we must undo the effects on us of the current one.

The power of telling our stories grounded in smart analysis has shifted the sense of what is possible in this city.  There is more work to be done.  But taking on the corporate agenda to win revenue for our communities has grown our power significantly, and has helped to finally begin to shift the narrative.

Amisha Patel serves as the Executive Director of the Grassroots Collaborative, a community-labor coalition working to win racial and economic justice in Chicago and Statewide.  This follows six years of work at Service Employees International Union Local 73, where she organized hospital employees and Head Start workers, as well as worked in coalition with community organizations to fight against school closings and to win more resources for parks in communities of color.  She worked for five years doing arts-based violence against women prevention programming in communities of color in the Bay Area.  The documentary that her youth created, Young Azns Rising! Breaking Down Violence Against Women, screened in numerous film festivals and won the Asian Emmy for best documentary.  

Harmony Goldberg interviewed Ai-jen Poo for Organizing Upgrade in January 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could you describe the Inter-Alliance Dialogue?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Joseph Phelan of Organizing Upgrade interviewed Bill Fletcher Jr. by phone in early June 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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