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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big charge.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Me: What do we want?

Chanters: Free Mumia!

Me: When do we want it?

Chanters: Now!

[reprise.]

Me: What else do we want?

Chanters: [silence.]

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

Chanters: [silence.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harmony Goldberg interviewed James Mumm for Organizing Upgrade in March 2010.

What do you think are the most significant political and economic dynamics at play  right now, and what do they mean for our work?

By means of introduction, let me tell you a bit about National People’s Action.  In addition to our training and consulting work to build a strong affiliate network, policy analysis and big ideas work, we run three national campaigns, though our affiliates are active in others as well.  Our three national campaigns are the Housing Justice Movement which is organizing to preserve and create social housing in America, the Immigrant and Worker Justice Campaign that is active on city, state and national issues of inclusion and equity, and the Showdown in America Campaign that is in a major fight to win accountability and transparency in the financial system.  Together, these campaigns and our affiliates are developing our vision, roadmap, and campaign for a new economy.

I want to start by reflecting on the state of the different mobilization movements such as the right to organize/union movement, immigrant rights movement, health care movement, climate change movement, anti-war/peace movement, and financial reform movement. For each of these issues, there’s a set of organizations that can really mobilize. They each saw an important opportunity to move some important policies forward in 2009: the Employee Free Choice Act, climate change treaties, major health care reform, and so on.  They all ran national issue campaigns over the last year, and they were all disappointed in the outcome of those campaigns.  They either had to give up hope for now that something truly decent was going to pass out of Congress, or they were disappointed that nothing was able to pass last year but had hopes going into 2010. I’m not sure what is going to happen by the end of this year, but by April everyone in these different movements is likely to be seriously disappointed with the pace of reform.

There were a number of reasons why nothing is moving, but I’d say one major reason is that we each waged our campaigns on our own. For example, the health care movement built a big tent, and they brought a lot of people out. But it wasn’t like everybody was “all in” on the health care fight or on any of these other fights.  Of course, there were a lot of organizations and networks and unions that participated in several of these national issue campaigns, but we weren’t doing big coordinated efforts to mobilize together across movements last year.   But now I think we’re at a point where we could actually turn those disappointments around, where we can turn these different issue campaigns into something bigger.

When I travel around the country and meet with the different organizations that are affiliated with National People’s Action (NPA), I see people who have a lot of energy to organize.  These are regular grassroots folks that we’re talking about, and they’re not feeling that disappointment as despair.  They’re taking that disappointment and asking, “So what do we have to do to win?” The soil is rich; it’s not depleted. That’s led us at NPA to think about how can we play a part in creating a frame and a story that would allow some of these seemingly disparate movements to begin to work together.

At NPA, our strategy is to mobilize to and run sustained pressure campaigns and actions that force negotiations with people who have the power to make decisions. We don’t limit ourselves to just pressuring elected officials.  In this day and time, we need to target corporations.  If you had to distill the Right’s message, it’s “Big government is the problem.” It’s a really basic idea (wrong as it turns out) but definitely succinct.  On the left and in the progressive world, we tend to be a little more complicated in how we frame things.  We usually take more than three or four words to describe what’s wrong (more like three or four books).  But if we had to put out our message in equally succinct words, it’d be “Big corporations are the problem.” Those five words capture the idea that because of corporate power and all of the money that they’ve spent in Congress and in cities and states across the country, we really don’t have a functioning democracy. NPA is framing our national conference in May with “Reclaim our Democracy” because we need to reclaim our democracy from the corporations that have stolen our democracy, our money, and our economy from us.  Leading up to that conference, we’re planning a variety of actions based on the “Showdown in Chicago” model to force big banks – in particular Bank of America and Wells Fargo – to negotiate with us. Those actions will be happening at the Bank of America annual meeting in North Carolina, at the Wells Fargo annual meeting in San Francisco, on Wall Street and in other cities.

We think that the different movements can come together to target the big corporations that have gotten us into this mess that we’re in today.  So we’re trying to figure out what movements are in the same place as we are, what other movements are interested in joining forces to mobilize and negotiate. We’re not into symbolic marches; we want to do actions that can actually force negotiations. Our sense is that a lot of other people are coming to a similar conclusion about the need to work together. What if the health care people started marching with the immigrants and the unions started marching with the climate change people?  We’re back in a place that we haven’t seen for more than ten years, since the WTO and anti-globalization protests, where multiple movements were open to working together and were turning out sizable numbers of people.  We need to take advantage of this opportunity.

I know you’ve been thinking about what we can learn from the Populist Movement that took place in the United States in the 1880s.  Can you talk about the lessons you’ve been drawing from that movement?

There are a couple things that I’ve been drawing from the Populist Movement, particularly from a book written by Lawrence Goodwyn. He talks about the conditions for the development of a major social movement.  One of them is he says that you don’t automatically get a big national movement when times are hard. By itself, that’s not a sufficient condition for a movement. Also, having a clear platform (which is what we normally do on the left) is not a sufficient condition.

You have to create a political culture that actually injects spirit, discipline and energy. This political culture plus hard times plus a clear platform are the conditions you need to create the ground for a movement to emerge.  We can look at the Populist movement and the People’s Party as examples of a time when people were able to create this combination of conditions, forge a movement, and have millions of people acting together for serious change.

Goodwyn talks about the process of democratic movement-building that took place in the Populist Movement in four stages.  First, there was the creation of autonomous institutions where new ideas that run counter to the prevailing authority can develop, a development which – for the sake of simplicity – he describes as “the movement forming.”  And we have a lot of that kind of work in this moment. Over the last few decades, we’ve seen the formation of institutions focused on organizing and providing an autonomous space that runs counter to the prevailing political narrative.

The second stage in the movement-building process is the creation of a “tactical means to attract masses of people.” Now, this is a big stumbling block for organizers in this moment.  Haranguing doesn’t attract masses of people. Even our traditional style of disciplined door-to-door and congregation-by-congregation organizing can only bring together a certain critical mass of activists, but – even in the best of cases – we only reach a tiny fraction of the population of a neighborhood or a city.  Of course, the sad truth that we’ve learned over the last couple of decades is that you don’t actually need a majority to influence politics. You only need an organized minority.  But we actually do need to organize masses of people if we want to impact change on a more serious scale.  The development of the Internet and institutions like MoveOn.org have created the possibility of recruiting masses of people. Shifting to that scale of politics is a transformative question in the community organizing field right now.  Small has been beautiful for a long time; now we want figure out how to act on a truly bigger scale while preserving the dynamic political culture that we have carefully nurtured and rooted in the power of grassroots leadership.

If we can make a break-through on this question of scale, we can move toward what Goodywn describes as the next stage in movement-building which is the “achievement of a heretofore culturally unsanctioned level of social analysis,” in other words the movement educating people on a mass scale.  In the Populist movement, they did this by developing economic cooperatives which helped people grow politically.  That education manifested on many levels, from the analysis of why they were necessary to the experiences of building them.  In many places, the cooperatives had a really hard time acquiring credit, and they had to fight with the railroads and the banks.  This was political education in real time for people.  It’s that kind of process – of trying to do something that you should be able to do and not being able to do it because these institutions are holding you back that is the most deeply radicalizing.  That happened in the Civil Rights Movement too, where people were radicalized by being prevented from doing something that they should have been able to do, like sitting at a lunch counter or sitting on a bus.  They tried to do those things, and they got held back. That was the basis for new innovations in the movement, like the Children’s March in Birmingham.  The Civil Rights Movement didn’t start out saying, “Let’s march out all the kids and get them all arrested.” But as all the adults tried to do what they should have been able to do and got arrested, this new strategy emerged.  And it ended up being quite a radicalizing and formative step for the movement, to have children take those risks and be treated the way they were.  So I think we need to take those kinds of actions today.  We have to stop doing symbolic marches, and instead we should start doing what we want to do in the world like trying to build our own neighborhoods.  And when people get stopped from doing what they should be able to do, that’s going to be really radicalizing for masses of people.

The fourth stage that Goodwyn identifies in the movement-building process is the “creation of an institutional means whereby the new ideas shared by the rank-and-file of the mass movement can be expressed in an autonomous political way.”  So this would look like a national campaign with a transformative demand.  In the Populist movement, their transformative demand was for a new basis for the currency of the United States and a new way to distribute credit outside of the Eastern banks. At the time, in 1890, it was radical to demand something like that.  In a way, they achieved their vision because that idea was the foundation for the Federal Reserve system and the elimination of the gold standard. Today, we need to do some more thinking about what our transformative demands could be. What is a fundamental demand that could be very transformative with far-reaching implications for the U.S. economy, like, “Corporations should not be people.”  What we need to avoid is very abstract ideas like, “What we want is a worker’s democracy;” I don’t even know what that means really. We need a concrete demand that is somewhat inconceivable, but at least 1% conceivable.  So we’re asking everybody, “What is your transformative demand?  And what can we do right now that radicalizes people?”  What we’ve settled on for the interim is that we need to fight with the banks.  You don’t have to go through Congress to try to get Bank of America to stop foreclosing on people. You can go to Bank of America to get Bank of America to stop foreclosing on people. We can go to Bank of America and Wells Fargo and say, “Stop financing payday lending. Stop foreclosing on people. Stop breaking the budgets of cities and states with these interest rate swaps. And start doing X, Y and Z.”  We can put some intermediate demands on the table telling the banks what they should do that would help our economy and rebuild our communities.  But in order for it to actually be radicalizing, lots of people have to be involved.  So, therefore, we need lots of people in the streets doing these bank actions next month.

You can tell you’ve achieved the kind of transformative political culture that we need when you have two things.  First, do the people who join the movement because that movement helps them develop individual self-respect?  Having the ability to act, to have a say in your life and to have a say over the institutions that control it, that’s profoundly human. If you don’t have power, you can’t really feel self-respect. Movements should provide people the space to be powerful in a very individual way, and it should help them regain their individual self-respect. I think that’s the reason why people join organizations, because they feel like they’re going to regain some self-respect. The second point is on a more collective side; it’s collective self-confidence.  We need to build organizations that have the possibility of winning and are therefore self-confident. Organizations should feel like they can develop a strategy, execute that strategy with discipline and win – or at least win benchmarks along the longer road.  If an organization doesn’t have self-confidence, people will drop out of it pretty quickly.  We can use those points as litmus tests for the political culture of our organizations: Do people develop individual self-respect through our work?  Do we have collective self-confidence?  Do we have a political culture that will win?

How do you integrate your left politics into the organizing work?  Why do you see organizing as a central method for left people to use?

I’m quite committed to fundamental change in America, change that will allow us to actually realize the unachieved promise of America. This could be a country where people vote and actually have their say about things, where we’re not subject to tyranny. But today we are subject to tyranny. I would call the control that multinational corporations have over the U.S. government a form of tyranny, just like I would call the English government’s colonial control of America tyranny. But I came to understand a while ago that it’s a long road to get to that kind of fundamental change.  My hope is that I will see something pretty positive by the time I pass away, but I’m not sure. I’ve never thought that it was right around the corner.  It’s a long road, and that road goes through organizing.  I don’t know any other way to have radical fundamental change in America other than organizing masses of people.  People develop analysis by having the experience of building with each other and fighting on campaigns together.  I don’t believe in handing analysis to people. I think that radicalization happens through the practice.  Of course, we have to read our history books, and we have to talk and debate.  But I’ve never seen that as something separate from organizing.  We can’t just develop a political line and apply it to everything; instead we need to integrate reading, talking and reflection into the practice of organizing.

What are old strategies that our sector should turn away from? Which new tools and ideas are you now experimenting with?

One of the old strategies we need to turn away from is the orthodoxy about scale. This question of scale challenges orthodoxies about the structure of our organizations. We need new ways to think about how to structure the memberships and leaderships of our organizations so they can be built for speed and built for scale.  One of the orthodoxies that has limited us is that people have to be super active to be members.  What if – instead – you could have members who are basically committed to your work but are not that active? Of course, you need to build a set of super active people to be your leaders, but you could also have another 10,000 or 15,000 people who buy into your work. You could find them through a canvass or internet work or through public events. Then you could actually have 50,000 members in the Bronx, not 5,000.

We also need to move beyond the orthodoxy that the “local” is everything. The local is important, but we need to move beyond the local.  National Peoples’ Action was founded by local groups in 1972 to run a national campaign, so “scale” was in our DNA from the beginning. But I think that people are starting to understand that – even though organizing is local and you need to talk to people where they are at – you can also link up and connect campaigns across a state.  State-level organizing provides a great platform for working on a larger scale.  You can have lots of local organizing projects across a state – individual membership-based organizations in a single city, unions that have memberships across a state, religious denominations and so on.  If we can knit those different organizations together, we can build a permanent grassroots power blocs state-by state. Those power blocs should bring resources and expertise and energy to the local organizing, but they should be able to fight at the state level: to move progressive policies that could lay the groundwork for national fights, to prevent reactionary policies and even to corral a congressional delegation. Building a permanent alliance like that is different from starting new issue coalitions. Every time we start to work on a new issue, we shouldn’t start a new issue coalition.  We should run that issue campaign though a permanent power structure. As long as it has a core set of values and principles of operation, a structure like that can address many different issues and can incorporate many different types of organizing. There are a number of tremendous experiments across the country – in ten or twenty different states – where people are building state-level alliances that are working towards permanent progressive power. The Ohio Organizing Collaborative is one exciting example, and there’s tremendously interesting things happening in Minnesota.  But you can keep going down the list: Florida, Virginia, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, and plenty more. These are important experiments to keep an eye on.

Another orthodoxy that we need to overcome is, “No permanent friends. No permanent enemies.”  Well, guess what? I have permanent friends and permanent enemies. We should actually form permanent alliances with our permanent friends.  And our enemies?  We want them defeated and neutralized.  I don’t want Bank of America to exist as it does. It’s hard for me to conceive of a world where Bank of America is not an enemy of mine. I want to break it up. That’s what we’re doing through our financial reform campaign, trying to break up these big banks that are our permanent enemies. And if this campaign against them doesn’t work, then you know we’ll do? We’ll take the hammer to them again until we succeed in breaking them up.

James Mumm is the Director of Organizing at National People’s Action. James began his organizing career at NPA in 1990, serving as their Chicago organizer, national conference coordinator and newspaper editor.  He subsequently worked in Chicago for the Metropolitan Tenants Organization and Organization of the NorthEast before moving to the Bronx to become the Co-Director of Mothers on the Move and then Executive Director of the Northwest Bronx Community & Clergy Coalition.  James has led successful campaigns for inclusionary zoning, living wage jobs, and community-led development in both Chicago and New York.  He served on the board of the National Organizers Alliance and the Chicago Community Organizing Cooperative, writes periodic articles for progressive media.  After fifteen years away, James rejoined the NPA staff in late 2008 and is excited about building a powerful network and social justice movement.

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