Interviewed by Sushma Sheth

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

I think that the most significant shift is the intersection between the new media and Obama. I do not mean his election itself, but his campaign that became a symbol for a changing terrain.

Obama’s campaign surfaced what was already in play.  It uncovered race relations in the United States and the status of leadership within black communities.  The campaign symbolized the changing of the guard from the old civil rights establishment in the black community to a generation of black people who benefited from the civil rights revolution in the US. Obama represents this new black middle class that came up from the achievements of the civil rights establishment, but with a different worldview.

His campaign also symbolized a growing coalition. It brought together different segments of society suffering under the Bush Regime and the stolen election. There has always been talk of the “net-roots”, mostly the white middle class who had careers in silicon valley and became politically active through both the Bush’s stolen election and the falling economy. The anti-Bush stuff was their reaction to it.  Obama’s campaign brought those folks, black people and young communities of color a new leadership.

His leadership brought a lot of things to the surface: it’s not the 60s anymore. People from the 60s took for granted that post-WWII, all the imperialist nations economies were weakened.  That opened space for communist and revolutionary forces to start having liberation.  We have gone through a process now where a lot of people who thought that this was the solution are now stale. We are coming up in the world now, where we have to deal with this.  We do not have revolutions jumping off in front of us everyday.  The socialist project, in the eyes of many worldwide, has been discredited.  The old model does not work.

We are coming out asking what are the new solutions?  We are in a stage of experimentation.

There is all this rave about new media, but the key thing about it is its democratic nature.  Old media was built for “from one to many” and in new media its about “from many to many”.  A large scale or numbers of people can communicate with each other much more easily than in the post. We think about in Karl Marx’s time, it took weeks or months to get the word about something from one country to the next (Us to Europe).  Now, no matter where you are there are so many communications devices so that is instantaneous.  Time has effectively shrunk. What does that mean for us?  How does this change human beings? I think we are just in the middle of this.   The new media was produced by capitalism, the main mode of production.  The left has not comprehended how to change society and use new media as a liberatory project and not something that just seeks to make a profit.

During the immigrant marches that re-sparked May Day in the US a few years ago, a lot of young Latino folks were using MySpace.com to organize spontaneous walkouts on mass scales.  People find difficulty in organizing people in this day and age and yet you have all these examples of people self-organizing.  People are using new media technology but in a very organic way because new media has become such a part of their life.

Can we communicate our stories effectively to people? Which of youtube, myspace, Facebook all these social networking and peer to peer networks can we use to communicate more effectively our reasoning and our thoughts and make it a priority to expand the left as we know it.

New communication and new media allow us to share stories and deliver our narrative and which challenges the current hegemonic order and create counter-hegemony, as discussed by Antonio Gramsci.

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

The key interventions right now should be:

FOLLOW OBAMA. What is the most progressive out of what he is doing, even if its limited. What are the loopholes where we can intervene?  Personally, I’ve been following Obama’s approach to service.  In the US, we do not have a clear national identity.  In just about every other country there is a full national identity. In what Obama refers to in his speeches, he seems to think that service is one way we can start to develop that national identity.  In a lot of ways, this is like nation-building.  (And people can argue with me on this!)  Service is an easy way to get people involved in organizing. They are one step away.  A person involved in service obviously cares about an issue or cause and is willing to do service around it. This is not that far from connecting them to Mao’s line on mass line and “serve the people” and connect that sentiment to organizing projects. Obama has set up a government site for service to connect service projects nationwide.  I am trying to get people to connect into this as a means of recruiting new, young people. We can connect them to organizing in general, as well as to the Left.  Its an open opportunity, an experiment.

WE NEED TO CREATE NEW MAJORITIES. There is no Left in this country.  When I say there is no Left is this country, there is no phenomenon or force that has impact on a societal scale and identifies with principles we call “left”.  There is nothing like that exists like that here, much less a large section of society that abide by these principles. There are only a few scattered individuals in reality. There maybe more people who can benefit from this, but are not aware or are caught up in their lives. We need to grow our forces in general as well as grow the left.  We need to think about how to do this in the US context.  We need to build new majorities. We can learn some things from the Obama campaign.  Obama created a new “we” – a new force, call it a coalition or alliance.  He created a new foundation of people, who in many cases were not active. My mother is from Barbados and recently got her citizenship.  She’s been in the country since 1968. She voted for the first time, not just because he was black. It obviously excited her, but there was an excitement to vote.  His campaign made people feel they were part of something bigger, part of a movement.  We talk about this, but he did it on such a massive scale.  What can we learn from this? How can we build a left? How can we build new majority? In what ways to storytelling, new media, and technology intersect with that?

USE NEW MEDIA TO AMPLIFY WHAT WE ALREADY HAVE MOVING.  What are the key projects we are engaging in? What are the political projects we are engaging in? Organizing projects? How can we see these media tools and technologies as amplifying or adding to what we are already doing? In my studies, I find that these technologies do not create social networks.  They only amplify connections that are real or networks that already exist.  Offline, we should learn how to build day-to-day connections to everyday working people. How do we build social networks with people?  I am not saying anything new. Churches, mosques, etc already do this. They are deeply entrenched in people’s lives. How do we translate this in a secular sense of the left.  Also, there is a religious left and (how do we) translate this into a emanicipatory project. These tools are only helpful if they are amplifying something that is already real.  How does developing relationships affect people’s connection to ideas?  There is a quote from Amilcar Cabral – people do not fight for ideas in the sky, they fight for real things. They fight for real, material things.  It does not matter if you come talking about “revolution etc. etc.” but the question is “how will I feed my family? Find work? Life a sustainable life?”

RE-ENGINEER DIRECT ACTION. There are actions around the world where people use GPS and Google Maps that helps decentralize the power that the state has. So many of these things, funny enough, that capitalism developed we can now leverage to use again elite power.

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

A lot of stuff is old now.  First of all, there is something about Left culture where we are quick to polarize; where in some cases, it may not be the case.  You definitely want to polarize you and your allies from the elite powers that be.   The Left has taken this to be cannibalistic towards itself.  One small difference within different sects of the Left is polarized – we set a pole, only one of us can be right, and we battle to the death. It has helped kick-in sectarianism. We need to relook at how to have serious political debates and disagreements and not be at war with each other.  We can co-exist with different ideologies within the left. The truth will come out in practice. In my organizing work, it was not a concern to me what someone’s ideology to me.  At least it was not my primary concerns (we are progressive, revolutionary, etc.) , but when we finally put stuff in practice and we see what works and what does not.  Ideology cannot be primary.  I am not saying it is not important.  But that cannot be the only factor – how can we negotiate, debate and struggle together?

Second, we cannot continue newspaper selling. A lot of sectarian groups call themselves Left but do not represent Left forces.  They are very alienating to everyday people.  They develop a culture of talking down to people.  We are “above and away from the masses.”  “We come down and bring you the truth.”  This needs to stop.

There is outside knowledge as well as people’s knowledge from their everyday experience (Paolo Friere approach).  We need to combine the two.  Instead, I think you see one or the other.  That there is only people’s everyday experiencial knowledge and you cannot go beyond that or there is only this outside knowledge and we need to bring them the truth.  There has to be a combination, a dialectic, and come to a real emancipatory project.

Third, a lot of the tactics we use have gotten old, like marching and so on. We need understand the current conditions and which tactics and strategies need to flow from our analysis of current conditions.  We have a lazy period of non-studying or non-analysis studying and we are relying on a lot of tactics from the past. We are stuck in the 60s. The civil rights establishment is stuck in the 60s and the left is stuck in the 60s in this country.  We are not recognizing in front of our face what is new, what is different. How do we move forward, study it, move on, and make an assessment and concretize some gains? We rely on a march or a protest, and people do not come out to that. What will pull people out? What do people connect to?  At one point, marching was new and came out of new conditions.  It was part of the Industrial Revolution where people were coming into cities. There could be a debate now – should we leverage gains from the state or build alternatives? Or a combination of both?  This depends on the objective conditions.

Finally, we need some serious study. The left is lazy and does not engage in study. There are pockets of people trying to do that now. This project itself is an attempt to do that.

What is inspiring you these days?

Two things are inspiring me right now. They may not be typical of the left – or at least at first glance, they do not appear to be “left.”

THE ARTIST MIA: If you read her interviews, she talks about how people cannot define her genre. The reality is, she’s produced her own genre. She talks about her experience growing up in a third world country, but more growing up in refugee camps. And then, she talks about moving to the first world and having to live and cope with all this hybridity. Through technology and new media, the world is really connected.  When you are an immigrant or refugee, you are at the intersection of this.  She wanted to find a way through her music, through her art, to connect. The world is not longer in these distinct silos. This fact really comes out in her music. When you are an immigrant kid, she talks about how, “you do not know what is cool.” You might rock a Michael Jackson t-shirt and some stone-washed jeans. You are this mismatch of things, these excesses of the first-world that get dumped on the third-world.  Through mass media, for the most part, the first world used to produce what is “cool”. But with everything as connected as it is now, everyone is sharing. Third world, refugee kids are producing what is up. Her music and message reflect this. Some of her lyrics have revolutionary content.  But often people complain that all of her music is not revolutionary, that sometimes it is just about dancing or sometimes  too difficult to follow what she is saying! But what I have learnt from her is that we have been transfixed on narrow concept of political art. Some of us believe that when there is a revolutionary era, then all songs will have revolutionary lyrics, quoting from the Communist Manifesto. But is this what moves people?  Maybe you can have a song, where they lyrics talk about dancing and partying, but the feeling and effect of the song is more revolutionary. Can a song make people feel something or bring change in people’s lives?  Though her lyrics are often political, her fans concentrate on how she blends sounds from Aborigine people in Australia, to folks in Sri Lanka to folks in Jamaica. The sounds come together and become a way to connect people around the world. The song could be about dancing, but people recognize the sounds and start connecting to one another. It makes me think about how are we, as the Left, connecting people? It makes me question how we think about culture, music and what we think is revolutionary.

THE DANCE CREW CRAZE: Dance crews have popped up in the US as well as internationally.  Sean Paul came up at the same time that new dances came out in Jamaica. These spread across the Caribbean and through the Diaspora spread to the US, UK and around the world. At the same time, there are dances that come up in hip-hop songs. But the hip-hop artists are not making them up. They are going to the hood where kids are doing this organically in LA, Chicago, Atlanta, Detroit and Harlem. This is very self-organized and organic. What’s amazing is that these kids now have jobs. They are now artists, they teach dances, they tour, and they perform in videos. They are part of the industry now. This is happening in an era where people really question the potential of these young kids.  Statistically, the prison population goes up for young black children and unemployment rises for young black men.   And yet, these young black kids are creating jobs for themselves.  Robin D. G. Kelly talks about people creating jobs out of play. Work out of play. All of these groups organize themselves, dance and have created an international network of dancers.  I like looking at the self-organization of the under-class, if you can call them that. The working class is self-organizing through culture.  How can we tap into this as a model and help them reach their full, emancipatory potential?

Any closing thoughts?

A lot of what I have been discussing can be traced back to Gramsci.  It’s all about hegemony.  In the US, we live in an advanced capitalist society. We cannot use pure force to effect change. Therefore, the question becomes: How are we going to have a revolution here? How do we create counter-hegemonic culture?

We need to be more effective in telling our stories and understand how stories affect people. How does the left design a left narrative?  This was the key thing that Obama figure out. After Bush, the country was divided.

Sometimes we are closer to crisis than we realize. Elites in this country have an understanding of how close we are to crisis, more than we. Maybe some feared another civil war given the country is so divided on so many issues.  Obama was concerned about division. To get elected, he needs a 51% majority.  For this to possible, he needed to build unity. He used a story, he retold the narrative of the US to build the unity he needed to win.

His new narrative: The US is an unfinished project.  He asked people to look at the founding fathers, and then the civil war. He marveled at US innovation and reminded us all that we are lucky to be here.  He took some truths of American mythology and created new myths with a more progressive feature.

The question for us is: Can we do this? Can we create a left myth that is more revolutionary?

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.