Harmony Goldberg interviewed Cindy Wiesner for Organizing Upgrade in February 2010.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another World is Possible!

Another US is Necessary!

Another Detroit is Happening!

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

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

After receiving an incredibly warm welcome, Organizing Upgrade is excited to continue bringing you thoughtful opinions and strategic essays for left organizers. We also want to stir the pot!  We want new ideas and new voices to take a stab at the freshest challenges facing our community.

What can left organizers learn from the fight over healthcare?

We have incredible contributions from: Jonathan Kissam, Vermont Workers Center;  Michael Leon Guerrero, Grassroots Global Justice; Terry Marshall, Healthcare Education Project (SEIU); Jennifer Flynn, Health GAP; Trishul Siddharthan, Medical Student and Community Activist with Power U and Miami Workers Center; and Randy Jackson, consultant with movement-based organizations.

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

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TAKING ON THE RIGHT OVER HEALTHCARE REFORM IN VERMONT

Jonathan Kissam is a rank-and-file member of UE Local 203 in Burlington, Vermont, and a member of the Vermont Workers’ Center/Jobs with Justice. More information about the Healthcare Is a Human Right campaign can be found here.

Well-organized right-wing crowds disrupted most of the healthcare town halls that took place across the country in recent months. But the August 15^th healthcare town hall in Rutland, Vermont was different. The red placards and t-shirts of the “Healthcare Is a Human Right” campaign of the Vermont Workers’ Center/Jobs with Justice (VWC/JwJ) dominated the audience and the media coverage of this town hall. Anti-reform speakers got their share of time at the microphone, but they were unable to be disruptive because of the large VWC mobilization. Independent Senator Bernie Sanders – a long-time supporter of a single-payer healthcare – remained in control of the room and was able to challenge the lies that came from some of the right-wing speakers.  Media reports attributed the lack of disruption to Vermont’s tradition of civil debate, but the real reason was good old-fashioned grassroots organizing: dozens of volunteers making hundreds of calls to a base built over more than a year of our Healthcare Is a Human Right campaign.  The VWC/JwJ believes that there are important lessons to be learned from our success in turning back the right wing:

Putting policy reforms in the context of a values-based campaign: We built our campaign based on the idea that health care is a human right. Basing our campaign on a commitment to this basic value allowed us to build a larger and more engaged base than a narrow policy-based campaign could have. While many of the people we turned out to the town hall meetings may not have understood the ins-and-outs of health care policy, they were committed to the notion that healthcare is a human right.

Understanding that this is a struggle over power, not a debate over policy: Throughout our campaign, we have been clear that only serious struggle from the grassroots can win real healthcare reform.  While our campaign is focused on state heath care legislation, we mobilized our base for these town halls because we saw the federal debate as a critical battle in which our opposition has access to friendly media and unlimited resources from the insurance companies.

Placing the voices of people most affected front and center: At hearings that we held around the state, a wide spectrum of Vermonters shared their stories about the broken healthcare system, from union members with “good” health insurance who had been denied care to uninsured loggers who live with daily fear of accidents to women who stayed with abusive husbands out of fear of losing health insurance to the nurses who see needless suffering everyday. In the town hall meetings, this kind of powerful personal testimony stood in sharp contrast to the shrill rhetoric of the right wing.

Leadership development: Too often, campaigns are so focused on winning policy goals that we neglect to develop the skills and leadership potential of the people who we are organizing.  During the course of this campaign, the VWC held organizer trainings around the state. As a result, campaign leaders were prepared to speak up at the town hall meetings and to represent the powerful voices of the people who have suffered under the current system.

Taking on right-wing beliefs about government: VWC/JwJ chose healthcare as our major campaign not only because it is an issue that affects all sectors of the working class, but also because it offered an opportunity to engage people in a discussion about social values and a vision for a different society.  We don’t believe that progressive forces can win policy debates if we accept the values framework of neoliberal capitalism, that markets are inherently more efficient than government and that individuals are on their own to provide for their own welfare.  By challenging these values with a vision of a caring society, in which communities take collective responsibility for the general welfare, we hope to contribute to building a movement than can win universal healthcare and a just society.

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SHIFTING THE TERRAIN

Michael Leon Guerrero is coordinator of the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance (GGJ) and a member of the National Planning Committee for the US Social Forum .

The Battle of Ideas: The Right engaged in the battle of ideas in the health care fight. They utilized basic military strategic principles: set the stage for where your battles take place, and you will win. They are trying to shift the battlefield about the role of government by framing government as an enemy that will control our lives.  We need to fight on this terrain as well: take on right-wing beliefs about government and put forward our own visions.  If we focus only on narrow policy issues, we are missing the broader struggle. Winning ground at the ideological level can create space for us to win more concessions on policy and implementation.  We should not focus on pressuring the Obama administration. Instead we should work to open political space for the administration to win its more progressive reforms and position ourselves to push for more progressive policy later.  Our messages should target our real adversaries, including (1) the people who benefit from regressive policies, like health insurance companies and bankers, (2) figureheads in the Right, like Dick Armey and Rush Limbaugh, who are promoting the regressive agenda and (3) conservative policy-makers.

Provocative Tactics: The Right has succeeded by using a provocative agitational and direct action strategy, including carrying automatic weapons to Obama town hall meetings and drawing on Saul Alinsky’s tactics. Even though the people who disrupted the healthcare town halls acted crazy, polls showed that their strategy worked. The Obama administration went on the defensive and is prepared to cave in on key aspects of healthcare reform.  Recently, a confidential memo from the American Petroleum Institute (API) surfaced which called for a similar strategy in the upcoming climate policy debates.  The memo called on “member companies to ‘move aggressively’ to stage public meetings, similar to the recent protests against [Obama's] healthcare plans.”  Although this plan backfired and caused a split within the API, it suggests that we have not seen the last of the disruptive tactics of the Right.  We need to plan ahead and develop our own agitational strategies to sharpen the debate about the role of government and the economy.  Our strategies should focus on direct action – including rallies, town hall meetings, days of action and civil disobedience – and be coupled with an aggressive communications plan to promote our values to a wide audience.

Take Advantage of the Moment: There are key political moments – like the 2006 immigrants rights mobilizations and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – when we need to carve out time and take on issues that are not currently part of our work-plans.  This is one of those moments.  If the most progressive aspects of the healthcare reform are gutted and we lose more ground on energy policy, then the window of opportunity for progressive policy may close soon.  We need to act decisively and aggressively this year. What happens in the next six months will set the political tone for the next decade of our work.

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DON’T WAIT ON THE SIDELINES!

Terry Marshall has been involved in youth and social justice struggles for the past 13 years.  In 2005 he founded the Hip-Hop Media Lab, an intermediary that uses culture and new media to organize social networks. Today Terry is the Lead Youth Organizer for the Healthcare Education Project (1199SEIU), a Blogger for octavianprinciple.wordpress.com and enjoys being a heretic of the Left

The left has largely been absent from the fight over healthcare. There have been many important political developments that evolved out of this fight, and we need to understand and analyze them if we are going to develop an effective left strategy for our current moment.  One of the most important developments has been the resurgence of the grassroots Right and the return of red-baiting.

Obama’s election victory has revitalized the mostly Christian and white grassroots base of the Right in this country. Where did this resurgence come from? These people have seen the privileges they gained from being white within the American Empire wither away. They see the election of the first Black president as the final closing of the door on the America they imagine and love. Talking heads, such as Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh, speak to the fears of white middle class and working class people. They have played on those fears to go on the attack and push back the possibility for progressive gains that came with Obama’s election.

The fight around healthcare is the first major policy battle where these groups came into play. These forces became the shock-troops of the resistance to healthcare reform. The funding for that resistance came from the big health insurance companies, but the interests of the grassroots base and big corporations do not actually always align.  We need to be clear where their interests actually diverge. Even with all of their red baiting, their confused rants and their racist attacks, we have to remember that these social forces are actually “up for grabs” by the Left. We need to learn how to win some of these forces over to a Left progressive agenda. We need to develop mechanisms that can speak to their issues and clear up the confusion promoted by the Right.  It won’t be easy, but it is absolutely necessary.

There are other valuable lessons that the Left can draw from this fight.

First, we need to move beyond critique. The Obama administration did blind side the single payer movement with his “public option.” But we were reeling from that for far too long.  Most of the left stayed stuck in critiquing Obama and didn’t move to develop a plan on what to do about it. The Left needs to move through our critiques and concentrate on laying out a plan for how to actually move our agendas through the Obama administration.

Second, we need to move faster. The Left jumped in the game far too late. Many of our organizations move at a glacial pace, even in the face of major crises and significant political shifts. We get caught up in our “three-year strategic plans” and such. We need a more flexible strategic orientation that can allow us to make fast decisions without losing our long-term focus.

This leads into the final lesson: we need new organizational forms. A large section of the left today is trapped in non-profit structures, and we suffer from the limits of that organizational form.  Many people have talked about the need to develop cadre structures, but we also need other intermediary forms. Some people have formed volunteer collectives outside of non-profits.  Some progressive staff and members who work at nonprofits have formed volunteer groups to do actions that they could not do within the limitations of non-profit structures. Some examples have been the Community Avengers in Miami and Young Voices Nation in NYC.

The Left needs to learn these lesson fast enough to be able to weigh in on the other upcoming battles: the fights over climate change and energy policy, education and immigration reform.  Training season is coming to an end. It’s time to get off the sidelines and into the game!

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HOW A GOOD IDEA WITHOUT A BASE BECOMES NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE

Jennifer Flynn was the co-founder and director of NYC AIDS Housing Network and is a current board member.  She is the Managing Director for Health GAP (Global Access Project) and writes about organizing, social justice, AIDS and healthcare issues for numerous outlets.

My job at Health GAP, an international AIDS advocacy and organizing group, meant that I spent a lot of time on the campaign trail during the 2008 Presidential campaign.  I heard the stump speech from every candidate at countless town halls and forums.  In every one, an audience member asked about healthcare.  And every candidate felt the pressure to release a policy document outlining how they would creatively restructure the way we deliver healthcare in the United States.  No one could deny that healthcare is an issue that is deeply and widely felt among people living in the United States.  No one could deny that there are creative ways to solve this issue.  Anyone who has been to a training on grassroots organizing could tell you: the fight over healthcare meets all the criteria for a great campaign.

So then why is healthcare reform facing challenges that seem insurmountable?  What seemed like our big chance for real reform and “ change we can all believe in” is becoming an increasingly distant opportunity.  We have been missing a crucial part of the equation: there hasn’t been a serious investment in real organizing around healthcare in years.  In fact, over the years, investment in healthcare organizing has been shrinking dramatically.

I hope that we will see a different outcome in the next big policy battle: immigration reform.  Why would we have a different outcome?  For the past five years, private foundations have consistently invested in progressive grassroots organizing among immigration issues.  This investment was necessary to combat the war on immigrants that escalated after September 11^th.  Because of this investment, I think that progressives will be more vocal and effective and that the broad debate around immigration reform will look different then the debate around healthcare.  At least, I hope so.

One of the reasons that private progressive foundations have cut funding for healthcare reform is because health inequities expose the complicated root causes of inequality in our country.  It is easy to see the reality that healthcare delivery is abysmal in poor communities, both urban and rural. The fight for better healthcare shines a bright light on our nation’s systemic racism and sexism.  By its very nature, working on the issue of healthcare means that we must address the body.  Organizing around other issues, like housing, is simply less complicated. We don’t have to look at ourselves. We can point to the landlord, at the structural damage and ignore our racism and sexism. It is less controversial and safer, and funders like that.

William Smith, the Executive Director of SEICUS (Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States) deftly identified that – in this debate over health care – elected leaders missed an opportunity to move thinking about “constitutional rights” to an acceptance of a broader “human rights” framework.  Because they missed that opportunity, they gave up debating what the “best idea” is. Instead, we are now fighting over the worse of different evils.  I would argue, that like during the Civil Rights Movement, the people who hold power are simply unwilling to create a crack that might let the light in and expose the deep inequality facing our people. What’s worse is that there are few progressive organizations that are positioned to shift this paradigm.  Powerful progressives gave up on the right to protect women’s bodies and on frank talk about sexuality because working on those issues would force us to expand our views about controversial issues around sexuality and gender.  We chose to find common ground and settle rather then change hearts and minds.  We gave up the fight. Now, when we need strong ranks, they are not organized.

The answer is to reinvest in organizing around these issues: support organizing among women, make HIV prevention an issue that is as commonplace as fighting for heat or lead paint removal in housing.  Without a mass of people demanding progressive social justice. change may come but it will not be the change that we seek.

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THE SUMMER OF DISCONTENT

Trishul Siddharthan is a community activist with Power U and Miami Workers Center and third-year medical student at the University of Miami

As a medical student, I witness the casualties of the healthcare fight on a daily basis. A sweltering summer of Washington debates and street protests didn’t produce any consensus on fixing the healthcare system. The political left remains fragmented: some people are working towards a government-run system while others want to maintain a market-based approach and add in a “public option.” As organizers, we should expect Washington to fail in passing effective legislation because three questions remain unanswered:

Who is organizing?

What is the message?

What is the base?

We can’t just watch these policy debates unfold. We need to be out there, organizing the base of people who are affected by these issues.

Meanwhile, local health care policies continue to get worse.  While public attention was directed at partisan politics in the Capital, state governments cut the type of programs that the federal health care legislation is supposed to support. For example, in Miami, two of our ten public health clinics will be closing this year. State funding for public education and housing continues to erode, even though education and housing determine health outcomes far more than access to health insurance does.

There are two principles that we need to remember moving forward from the fight over health care:

1) Health equity will not be achieved with specific health policy prescriptions. Health equity can only result from a full-spectrum investment in community infrastructure: education, housing, access to fresh food, clean and safe environments. We cannot limit our fight strictly to issues of health insurance and health-care access.

2) Dogma does not treat patients. Privileged people have dominated the healthcare debate, and that’s true on both sides of the political aisle. They maintain their political doctrines at the expense of the patients who face the daily realities of health inequity. Although we cannot compromise on people’s human right to health access and care, both sides need to make concessions to ensure the passage of health legislation this year. Although the current legislation does not reflect progressive demands, we need to get something passed this year. If we don’t pass a bill soon, the progressive movement will continue to be distracted from far more pressing issues, and the burden will fall firmly on the shoulders of patients like the ones I see every day.

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EXPOSE THE SYSTEM & BUILD THE FIGHT

Randy Jackson is a 15-year veteran of social justice organizing and activism. Most recently he served as Development Director of the Miami Workers Center, a strategy and organizing center for Miami’s working class African-American, Latina and Caribbean communities fighting for self-determination and power.

Expose the system

Let’s start with the larger forest we often fail to see because we are so pressed up against the tree: the system is broken, and this is not just about healthcare, but the system of advanced global capitalism in which we live. The health care system in the U.S. is emblematic of the failed nature of the broader system.  Capitalism treats human life as a commodity, and it treats the work to care for life as a commodity as well. Medical bills are the #1 reason that people in this country can’t afford to pay their rent or their mortgages and face eviction and foreclosures, and that’s an outrage! We should be a lot angrier than we are! This health care debate is a moment of opportunity to engage in exposing the failures of the status quo on a mass level. But as leftists we must ensure that this exposure is happening among oppressed communities (the unemployed, poor, and working class women and children, immigrants and people of color), the people who make up the lions’ share of the forty million uninsured in this country. For the past ten months the organized voices of the oppressed sectors of society have been absent from the broader healthcare debate; left organizers need to play a role in turning that dynamic around.

Visionary Demands – Towards a Visionary Alternative

In the context of health care, universal healthcare coverage (perhaps best captured in the single payer model in the context of the current debates) is the most visionary response. Period. We have the wealth in this country to cover this; that’s not the problem. Michael Moore in Sicko laid out multiple possible models based on health care system’s from at least half a dozen western industrial countries (and Cuba!). C’mon now, more anger please!  But if it’s the whole system in disarray, then demands around health care should be only a part of our total visionary alternative.  Families in the U.S. are making heart-wrenching and life-changing decisions where they have to choose between their next meal or paying a utility bill. One out of every six children in this country is not sure where her next meal will come from. medical costs force families out of their homes. All of these are daily events under U.S. capitalism. One lesson is clear: U.S. capitalism cannot care for the basic necessities of its people.  Since a leap forward to a new society isn’t on the immediate horizon, we need to develop landscape-shifting demands that move us closer to that leap. As we fight for a better health care system, lets put forward the demand for a total package of social goods: A social wage – guaranteed housing, health care, childcare, basic food, public transportation. In the current economic climate this is something that more and more of us can relate to. And it’s a glimpse of a visionary society, of the way things ought to be. Fighting for it will bring it closer.

Charting the Path – A Strategy

First, we have to continue the work of organizing the unorganized, and building fighting institutions of the most oppressed.

Second, we need sharp assessments of the broader political moment and the nimbleness to mobilize resources when the political moment requires us.

Third, we need to take it to scale. We lack the mechanisms for flexible coordination at a mass scale that can make an impact. There is an emergent trend towards greater coordination. Activists are becoming parts of collectives. Grassroots groups are aligning themselves into networks. Networks are forming alliances among each other. These are positive developments and they should be supported. Beyond these developments, we need a new kind of party: with membership in the hundreds of thousands that can represent the interests of the people most impacted by the system. One that truly represents the Latina family who had their home foreclosed on by the banks; the single black mother who had to chose between feeding or clothing her newborn; the subway conductor who was laid off and is now struggling to make ends meet.

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?

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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

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