Intersectional Or It's BS: Rolling Activism/Organizing/Social Movements Thread

here we go! thank u v v v much jj
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"Intersectionality is a term that was coined by American law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe the idea that all social ills are connected on a deeper level. Meaningful resistance demands that we identify the systems that work together to promote injustice, exploitation, and oppression." -- bell hooks

Since a lot of chatter about social change work happens whenever there are flareups around individual issues I thought it would be worthwhile to collect that chatter in one place so we could help keep other threads to their nominal topics. This birthed particularly by a great discussion about how different kinds of viewpoints are formed w/in activist circles in the Michael Brown thread. If you've never gotten into work for social change before, downthread IO beautifully laid out a place to start:

It can be as simple as, 1: Do you want to help people, reduce their suffering, fight injustice? 2: Do you have some free time? 3: If you answered "Yes" to both, you can be a volunteer!

If that means something as general as New York Cares, a giant charitable org that places people on simple projects all over the city, that's cool! It's more about the habit of volunteering, and seeing yourself as a member of many communities, with a responsibility to help those communities stay healthy.

Don't be gulled into idleness by the size of the project! Tackle something manageable, something close to home. Clean up a park, or get funding to fix a crosswalk, or help some working women get a childcare center off the ground, or support a zoning revision that allows building apartments as well as single-family homes so there are lower-cost rental options for more ppl. I dunno. What does your community need? You live there, look around or ask someone!

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Friday, December 19, 2014 4:56 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

A glossary, just in case
La Lechera pointed out that this stuff can get a little jargon-y from time to time--GirlSpeak, a Chicago feminist art group, put together this awesome glossary of terms that might come up a lot ITT. If you see a word you don't know, check out here!

Recommended Resources for Dipping Your Toe Into Organizing Work

New Organizing Institute's Organizing & Leadership Toolbox--Free, short YouTube vids on how to build volunteer teams for a cause, how to motivate people to take collective action, how to build & encourage leadership within the most affected communities, etc.

Training for Change--Exercises & workshop guides for everything from anti-oppression awareness, to meeting facilitation, to Big Picture organizing strategy etc

Beautiful Trouble--an amazing book, and website, that lays out the relationships between tactics, principles, and the egghead theoretical foundations for making change happen. also case studies!

I think, from listening to ppl, that what they want is enviro justice work that is LED by a community's own residents who are directly affected--not "activists" bringing the knowledge & solutions to the table already. And that when white people join in, if they do, that they don't use their speaking privilege to overwhelm other voices just because they can--that leaders of the org have structure & power-sharing plan already in place to redistribute power, and keep doing so, to the least powerful.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Thursday, December 18, 2014 8:44 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

very true in my experience that eco movements are sort of subsumed by white people who view their world as post-race but have simply "escaped" black people in more radical and difficult-to-trace ways, the colonists who escaped the slaves or erased them from their local view, who then also erased and recolonized the indigenous population. lots of the western u.s. barring l.a., oakland, maybe seattle, maybe las vegas is like this imo. maybe the rural northeast too, idk. subaru states. you get righteous returning through eco-activism or mediated kony-style philanthropy (at the most extreme example admittedly). n.b. i have issues with eco-activism as it seems to be predominantly modeled by liberal whites in the west and think it's much more productively addressed (but not as popularly i think?) as native peoples' rights. xps also all of these books look very interesting and thank you as always io for the great info and posts.

― languagelessness (mattresslessness), Thursday, December 18, 2014 8:48 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this isn't the thread for it, i suppose, but there's a lot to talk about RE: communities, environmental justice (EJ) issues, and who leads protests. environmental issues are very tricky because there are often multiple barriers for local people to fully understand the environmental problem in the first place, and also what their options are if they want to seek legal recourse.

on the information side, a lot of official environmental data (and the tools you can use to access them) are a complete fucking mess. i experience this pain acutely and frequently as i have to analyze data from many databases and it is a living nightmare - and i'm lucky to have direct access to the people who run the systems! even just locating where the data are supposed to be is often difficult, let alone making sense of what's in the dataset.

environmental laws and regulations are notoriously complicated. i was reading a book on the law of hazardous waste recently, and a judge was quoted as saying that he doubted that there were even 5 EPA employees who could attempt to define "hazardous waste". often a company that's clearly negatively effecting the health of a neighborhood is operating in a perfectly legal fashion. a factory that's emitting piles of thick smelly clouds of smoke on a daily basis might be untouchable if they have the proper permits, while a nearby facility that appears harmless from the outside could be illegally shipping tons of hazardous waste to an unpermitted handler that dumps it into a river.

i mention all of this because i think that the complexity of the underlying environmental issues and how they can be redressed are part of what creates tension in terms of who leads the local movement. it's often difficult for people to make much progress without at least consulting lawyers, state officials, community/ward boards, etc.

― ya'll are the ones who don't know things (Karl Malone), Thursday, December 18, 2014 9:25 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Heeeeeey.

i think that the complexity of the underlying environmental issues and how they can be redressed are part of what creates tension in terms of who leads the local movement. it's often difficult for people to make much progress without at least consulting lawyers, state officials, community/ward boards, etc.

― ya'll are the ones who don't know things (Karl Malone), Thursday, December 18, 2014 9:25 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This to me, though, indicates that one of the roles of ~organizers~ per se is developing leaders from within the most affected communities who can then become knowledge bases for their communities on these issues. That transforms the question of who leads into a conversation the affected community has with itself.

xp heeeeeeeey

oh hai, thanks for starting this.

Yeah, thanks, HOOS--I'll be following this thread with interest even if I don't often post here.

Like here in DC, one of the key things local org Empower DC has done is get leaders who live in public housing first sitting through, then leading teach-ins on the decline in public & affordable housing in the city in their own buildings. Or the People for Fairness Coalition, which started when a lefty at a soup kitchen for the homeless started asking what they wanted the city to do differently for them--now it's an entirely homeless-led homeless advocacy organization. The organizer's job is organize herself out of a job as fast as she can.

xp np yall i hope folks find it useful

Thank you for this thread

josh russell of the ruckus society posted these guidelines that came out of a solidarity workshop non-black organizers had with black lives matter leaders in the bay area, trying to figure out what solidarity with an affected community looks like an in effort to build power to change things:

https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/s720x720/10857762_10100239500271429_3661199256591667393_n.jpg?oh=5e68b7cfc811f97bf99751e0d4dc1521&oe=55076F05

I really appreciate "long haul relationships" as part of that list--speaks to the idea that organizers shouldn't be parachuting into communities to offer their whiteboarded (uh) solutions and expect them to be picked up with hosannas.

Here's what may sound like a dumb question: how can people who want to support activism but are limited in how much time they can dedicate help out?

^^^same

No org is ever gonna (or should ever) turn volunteers away. I think it's totally valid to say, these are my skills/what m down for, and this is about how much time I have. See what they say they need? If they don't know how to use you, learn abt what the org does and make up a project and pitch it, see if it can be symbiotic w the org.

$$$$$

Back to the original point - I've mainly been an environmentalist in my adult life. I could leave a group or affiliation, or stop participating / donating etc., but I felt that my own community needed representation in those things.

There's a lot of pressure to lead a particular lifestyle, but I chose to do it because there might be something of value to "bring home" if I learned about organic food.

A lot of urban issues ARE environmental issues - kids not having enough green space, safety for commuters, people need clean and healthy homes and schools, healthy food. Schools can encourage poorer children to learn about nature, learn the ecosystem in hands-on ways.

I just wish some people would realize this and not just make it about land use conflicts far from where we urbanites live.

tried to find a thread to post this to last night but none quite fit and suddenly this thread appears

https://edgecitycollective.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/some-notes-on-the-recent-east-bay-protests/

Kate OTM

thanks for this thread, I'll probably write more later

yes, $$$, but also check to see if there are hard numbers for how much of every dollar gets "put into the field", so to speak.

i.e Red Cross has fairly high admin costs, Doctors W/o Borders does not, so your contribution does more direct good w/the latter

Agree with IO 1000%--a great first step is finding an organization in your area that's hooked up with something you really care about. Googling your city and "organize community" is actually how I got connected with a lot of organiziations in the city. Find an action to go to, and introduce yourself to the organizers after its over, get on their email lists. Once you know what's up next, you've got more opportunities to plug in.

Thanks all!

A lot of urban issues ARE environmental issues - kids not having enough green space, safety for commuters, people need clean and healthy homes and schools, healthy food. Schools can encourage poorer children to learn about nature, learn the ecosystem in hands-on ways.

I just wish some people would realize this and not just make it about land use conflicts far from where we urbanites live.

― Threat Assessment Division (I M Losted), Friday, December 19, 2014 2:03 AM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I agree with this in principle 100%--but to me it's a question of how you choose to frame of the problem, and who you're trying to move to action. Sure, environmentalists may not see these as urban issues--what if instead we tried to bring sustainability issues, and making sure we FRAME them that way, to urban community organizing groups?

DC's Field to Farm Network, for ex, is a coalition that links up community gardens, kitchens for the homeless, cafeteria labor unions, and other service orgs as part of a cohesive vision to build a fairer, healthier and more sustainable city. I think *that's* how you connect and make these questions relevant no matter where people come from.

Yes, cosign all that! Plus also clean air, water, public use of park and/or waterfront space, not siting waste facilities in resource-poor neighborhoods, neighborhood resilience from natural disaster, are all urban eco issues too.

If your community has a bunch of unused post-industrial waterfront property--before it goes to developers, start to demand that the city set aside park land. Demand playgrounds. Bring in experts to do workshops/teach-ins about resilience in case of flooding, set up quick response teams for disasters, have a group that can coordinate and/or deliver disaster relief because they know what ppl there need more than the distant agencies do. Reach out to universities with ecologically oriented science departments and see if they have a class that can do a study on your air quality...just some quick ideas. Initiate partnerships with orgs that can fill in the skill sets you can't meet w/in the community.

If you have a community that's mixed middle-class (or higher) whites and economically less advantaged non-white longer term residents, get them together and guide the better resourced ppl to provide what the less resourced say they need.

In NYC, local community boards have some say in how the city budget is spent, can recommend/request funds to pursue local improvement projects. Find out what your CB is doing, and if you can help direct $$ to your community. It might mean joining a subcommittee. Do that. Give one or two nights a month to meetings, and volunteer to do legwork associated with their projects. Call your local representatives--a mere 50 phone calls can be a DELUGE to a local politicians, whereas a state-level pol wouldn't consider that a big number. Take it down to as local as you need to, in order for the capacity of members that you have to make a difference. And to win some victories that will encourage members and build on that success.

Damn, someone should fucking hire me to do this. I mean, I'm not trying to get rich here, I'm just trying to live indoors.

Plus also clean air, water, public use of park and/or waterfront space, not siting waste facilities in resource-poor neighborhoods, neighborhood resilience from natural disaster, are all urban eco issues too.

"Energy justice"! We need to be talking about equitable access to clean air imo

a mere 50 phone calls can be a DELUGE to a local politician

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Here in NYC right now, Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), which is a coalition of A LOT of local level orgs, is pushing for two new reforms in 2015. One of them is an ID bill, in which police who stop you have to inform you of their name, badge number, superior officer, precinct, etc, without you even asking. (Because if you get stopped right now and you ask for that info, it can escalate the confrontation and result in the officer giving you a higher level summons for pissing them off.)

Whether this bill becomes policy will depend on city council members' votes--we need 34 votes for a veto-proof supermajority. Right now there are about 30 dependable votes. Find out if your council member is one of them! You can find at http://changethenypd.org/community-safety-act the list of council members (CMs) who are signed on as co-sponsors (guaranteed YES votes). Pressure YOUR CM to join if they haven't already.

IO do you know about slottr? it's a perfect little tool to get people to sign up to make a call to an official at a specific time during the day, so you can make sure they're overwhelmed throughout the day while still making sure the max # of calls get through. you can include scripts too--here's one we used last fall to hit council members on getting paid sick days for restaurant workers: http://www.slottr.com/sheets/3280

NNOOO! I'll check it out--no one has mentioned it yet but I'm working w very very grassroots orgs.

anyone can use it! super super useful

lol I mean you're catching me here coming off many days of demonstrations plus a 3-hour workshop tonight on different methods of resistance and anti-racist organizing around the #ThisStopsToday/#BlackLivesMatter campaigns so I'm kinda fired up.

i feel you! do big things!

Some people don't fuck with politics, they think everything should be done from the grassroots upward by building parallel structures that take the place of state intervention wherever possible. Like alternate food supplies, alternate local governance, alternate educational resources. But we need ALL approaches because the state is going to continue to interfere whether communities like it or not...so hit all fronts!

Tonight, a couple of people who are school teachers tossed out the idea of having their classes write messages/letters to local electeds around police brutality issues. Can you even imagine the optics of a community-level pol getting 100 letters from 4th graders saying, "I hope my daddy lives"??? DAMN.

yeah like "we support a diversity of tactics" has become such a tiresome shorthand activist code phrase for "we'll defend property destruction" when really diversity of tactics used to/ought to mean GO ON ALL FRONTS to get shit done. we need a way to talk about that approach! i like "hit all fronts" a lot.

cool beans, all of this

in this here thread

tried to find a thread to post this to last night but none quite fit and suddenly this thread appears

https://edgecitycollective.wordpress.com/2014/12/14/some-notes-on-the-recent-east-bay-protests/

― Milton Parker, Friday, December 19, 2014 2:04 AM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

boy oh boy do i have feelings on this

commenter gets at my biggest problem: talking about "following the lead of the black working class" is problematic as fuck, acting like ~the black working class~ is some unified monolith with a single opinion you can fall in line behind.

i get what they're suggesting--find and cultivate radicalism in the most affected communities--and i think its otm strategically, but the language is showing the gaps in the thought imo.

in one of the other threads i talked about a friend who i thought was ~projecting radicalism~ onto people by insisting that "if only there were fewer white people here, the POC crowd would be more confrontational," which i thought was a frustrating kind of white-radical-wish-fulfillment? this essay sort of plays into that to some degree, imo, even though of course there are lots of young radical people of color being confrontational on the west coast in the last few weeks.

hey yall, i'm trying to get first post ITT edited to include links to sorta first-steps guides to activist & organizing work so folks don't necc have to jump in with the discussion up top or wherever we wind up if they're looking to get started.

would love any suggestions yall have!

Isn't the first step kind of just...volunteering?

A glossary would be helpful if you're looking to be inclusive.

I was in an environmental group once that was just a reading / study / discussion group. I've learned that it's really important to study, it may not feel like activism, but it is empowering and works against this bad idea that you have to have a pedigree to participate in something. It's a good way to network, too, and you can progress from that to having teach-ins, film screening, conference etc.

The thing with the environment, it's like being a born-again Christian with the amount of study and preparation you need. I took time from graduate studies to take an environmental ethics course in the Philosophy Department, that was fortunate for me. The enviro fights are fascinating and wearying, but those ethical conflicts are applicable to any issue.

I was also in a democracy / voting study group, where we did things like read the Patriot Act, you do it over coffee or dinner, makes the whole thing less tedious and more attractive.

Hm. I know Lechera loves glossaries but I might not be the person to write them bc I've learned everything from usage/immersion and not from books, so I could tell you what something means to me but that's it.

The thing with the environment, it's like being a born-again Christian with the amount of study and preparation you need.

see i feel this way about labor/marxist/anarchist stuff --- i got into a conversation with a friend of mine re this and it v quickly went down a theoretical rabbit hole that i was ill-equipped to handle with just a few undergraduate courses in anthro, philosophy, and lit theory

being able to explain it to others is part of the challenge imo -- esp if you want to include more people in the movement. give people tools to teach themselves. not everyone learns like you do!

i love glossaries because language is one of the first levels of exclusion
maybe you want some non-native speakers to join your movement? help them talk the talk!

I don't have a background in any of the theory and tbh I don't work with any groups that go too deep into that. All of my 3 primary affiliations are grassroots/community-led so our work is pretty much in whatever vocab people bring to it. I'm sure I do use terms I've picked up that have specialized meanings in this environment but I'm not even sure what they are.

Movement
Justice
Capacity
Coalition
Grassroots
Resistance
Tactic
Radicalism

?

yeah like it just hit me after starting the thread that like putting "intersectional" as the first word in the thread title is an immediate barrier?

and yeah i do think showing up is step one, but sometimes from the outside that can seem forbidding? cf folks asking where to start upthread

I don't know if thinking of it as "activism" is, like, the best place to start tho? It can be as simple as, 1: Do you want to help people, reduce their suffering, fight injustice? 2: Do you have some free time? 3: If you answered "Yes" to both, you can be a volunteer!

If that means something as general as New York Cares, a giant charitable org that places people on simple projects all over the city, that's cool! It's more about the habit of volunteering, and seeing yourself as a member of many communities, with a responsibility to help those communities stay healthy.

I think a lot of ppl are like, "I'm a good person" and maybe even "And I vote!" and feel like they're done, that's their total involvement in the world outside their door except as it pertains to their personal life. When I thought like that, it just made me DESPAIR over how impossibly broken the world was and any chance of ever getting it right. A real "nuke the planet" moment.

But that suits the forces in power PERFECTLY. If you feel helpless, you are helpless. Don't be gulled into idleness by the size of the project! Tackle something manageable, something close to home. Clean up a park, or get funding to fix a crosswalk, or help some working women get a childcare center off the ground, or support a zoning revision that allows building apartments as well as single-family homes so there are lower-cost rental options for more ppl. I dunno. What does your community need? You live there, look around or ask someone!

yeah like it just hit me after starting the thread that like putting "intersectional" as the first word in the thread title is an immediate barrier?

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Friday, December 19, 2014 10:35 AM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark

esp since the rest of the phrase is "or it's bs"
just sayin

i think the vocab of activism is actually rather dense and the people who use it sometimes pair it with complicated sentence structure that is intended to be inclusive but winds up being kinda dense in itself.
do you guys know about plain language? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_language
it's just one of many options, but i think it's important to remember that you are trying to reach and help people -- many different kinds of people -- whose educational backgrounds may not have prepared them with the same skills you have to learn (and use) new vocab, think about theoretical concepts, or sift through text for required information. those are just three examples.

i have never directly been involved with an org but i have been taught from birth to present that helping people is important and i've dedicated my professional life to it. there are lots of ways to help people. this is part of why i notice the jargon -- because i don't understand it!

IO you're right--I think the word 'activism' is a little too loaded down with stereotypes of all sorts, where volunteering doesn't have those same weights when you're often doing the same work.

I'm also trying to think of larger scale stuff as well though--like how you *get* people to volunteer for a campaign *you're* working on, or how you start a tenant group to put pressure on the landlord, or how you get people to show up for a direct action, etc. I'm thinking of the (creaky but useful) old saying that "activists come to the protest, organizers organize the protest."

Here's the story if Lois Gibbs, an ordinary woman who started an environmental clearinghouse after the Love Canal tragedy:

http://chej.org/about/our-story/

Of course it's sad that she only had this opportunity after her community was poisoned, but I find her story inspirational. It just shows you can reach beyond activist circles to everyday folks.

"Intersectionalism 101":

http://www.nerdyfeminist.com/2012/11/intersectionalism-101.html

I'm not as good at the larger scale stuff bc on some level the head of your org is always going to pressure you to insert yourself more in front of ppl for the good of your employer, possibly more than than the decentralized "movement." I'm not completely naive about that.

So...I get that organizers have to attract ppl...but people also organize themselves just by talking about things they care about. So...who cares about your issue? Go find them and see what it takes to get them on board! It might take giving them leadership power & control of the message, for instance--if you can't agree to that, who do you really represent?

on some level the head of your org is always going to pressure you to insert yourself more in front of ppl for the good of your employer

I should prob clarify that I'm not talking about organizations at all--all the anti-eviction work I've done in the last couple of years, for ex, was done by an all-volunteer anarchist direct action group we started in a tent. Grassroots organizing is exactly the kinda stuff I'm getting at--groups of people who know the ropes of generating change so that when people need help they can find an empowered & knowledgeable group of people to ask for resources.

Oh yeah I just heard a state-level leader recently encouraging a local organizer to "insert yourself" more into the forefront of something. And, like, I support their goals and I know both are great people but that pressure is real bc that's how orgs get funded & survive.

hay i have passed modifications to the first post ITT over the mod req thread, incorporating IO's suggests for first steps, links to training resources for organizing, aaaaaaand a glossary per LL's suggestion. hope new version is more useful!

If the fixity in space of Occupy Wall Street was its greatest strength, it also was its greatest weakness, because maintaining momentum after the eviction was so difficult. The protests now occurring, which are focused on racist policing and state violence, are intentionally unmoored. Momentum is everything. Consciously or not, these protests recognize that long-occupied public space can become an albatross. Instead, they aim to control public space temporarily, to short-circuit the smooth circulation of goods and people that is the lifeblood of the economic system.

Whereas Occupy sometimes struggled to make connections between racist police violence and economic inequities, the protests now occurring have no such difficulty. In their inspiration, their targets, and their outcome, they aim to draw attention to, but also actually interfere with, the thorough-going racial inequality that is, as the late social theorist Stuart Hall once put it, “the modality in which class is ‘lived,’ the medium through which class relations are experienced.” In other words, the protests of autumn 2014 understand that at its heart, racial inequality, including the horrific frequency of the murder of Black people by police, is secured through economic inequality, and vice versa.

http://www.defendingdissent.org/now/news/vulnerability-and-disruption-in-nyc/

Hoos and IO, thanks so much, this is tremendous.

I want to kinda return to the discussion that started the thread cause I think it's a really really crucial one both specifically and more broadly applied: I take ZS's point that sometimes the People On The Ground don't have the knowledge or ability to make their problems understood. I think, too, that if you want informed collective solutions there's a really important role for subject matter expertise. Thanks to the historical legacies of different categories of oppression, that expertise just hasn't been made available for a lot of frontline communities across the board. Often deliberately! I think what that means, though, is that outsiders with the skills and knowledge have a responsibility to bring it to the table and find out what frontline people want to do with that knowledge.

Doing anti-eviction work here in DC, the most important step once we get a potential evictee sitting down with us is saying "here are the different routes we could help you take with your case. Based on our experience, here's our guess at the chances of winning on each of those routes. If you don't like any of these options, here are some other people we could direct you to that might be able to help. What do *you* want to do?"

And it's important to do it that way not because it keeps the organizer off camera at the direct action, or because it ~creates the impression~ that an oppressed population is fighting back--it *creates the reality* that the most affected communities are fighting back, and they've been in part empowered to do it by the capabilities of the organizers supporting them. The people whose homes we fought for, almost across the board, went on to continue doing organizing work with us to help others hang onto their homes even after their cases had concluded. And in turn, their involvement got others connected with our work who might have otherwise ignored, frankly, a bunch of young white-looking people trying to hand them fliers.

("creates the reality that oppressed communities are fighting back," of course, in the restricted sense I mean it there--by no means to erase ongoing communities work that's never needed paratroopers coming in with petitions and direct action)

I live in an area with a lot of poor or working- class Hispanic people, and they are clearly intimidated by government and institutions. Young activists of any color, not so much.

ya i mean they're meant to alienate and intimidate unless you either learn to speak the magic words or try to learn where the soft spots are

imo

I've stumbled into being a core organizer with a brand new trans rights group in DC--we had a memorial march for Leelah Alcorn last week, and this Friday we're having a debrief & discussion about what kind of organizing work we want to do from here forward.

It's fascinating to me to watch the dynamic because so far, other than me and one other person, everyone in the core group is coming out of the world of student/university organizing work--people's ideas of what constitutes things like media outreach and direct action are very different from one another.

Ugh it feels weird just typing 'core organizer' with regard to this group. I'm trying to just show up, shut up, and provide whatever help I can based on my past experience, but the person who started the group keeps saying I'm core, so I guess I am.

After we got a few complaints that it was too unwieldy to try to have discussion via a FB group--and it was unwieldy as hell--I did something I swore I'd never do again: I started us a RiseUp listserv. Amazingly, to me, none of the students had ever heard of a listserv before; they had always done their coordination through Facebook.

even RiseUp is better than FB imo

yeah one of them pulled up RiseUp and said "this looks like the internet from before i was born"

the person who started the group keeps saying I'm core, so I guess I am.

fuck yeah you're core!

t's fascinating to me to watch the dynamic because so far, other than me and one other person, everyone in the core group is coming out of the world of student/university organizing work--people's ideas of what constitutes things like media outreach and direct action are very different from one another.

i'd be interested to hear more about this

nothing to add really, just that i cheerleaded for a group here (utah against police brutality) in a fb comment that started off a little bit "no you're wrong" and i wish i had left off the "no you're wrong" part. thinking about opinions / confrontation / "actually" vs. asking to do / directing to another node for more information and when to do them. in this instance the person i was responding to probably was not positively engaged by the "actually", which is an ego move i think, some people who are ego people might respond to that? like is conflict and then resolution ever productive even if some (me) are interested in that and get a kind of subconscious conditioned kick out of it or is it "actually" part of the problem

also there is a white male and self-aware-about-it activist here i've noticed sort of trolls for visibility, thinking about if and when that is ok.

i still get emails from the riseup listserv for an anarchist group in the neighborhood/city i used to live in, can't bring myself to unsubscribe for some reason even thought it's 95% 'i dumpstered too much food come take some off my hands' and 'pigs at the metro' + the occasional flameout

everyone in the core group is coming out of the world of student/university organizing work--people's ideas of what constitutes things like media outreach and direct action are very different from one another.

i'd be interested to hear more about this

― ♪♫_\o/_♫♪ (Karl Malone), Wednesday, January 14, 2015 7:12 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh I guess I just mean that their idea of direct action sort of ~isn't~ direct action--it's just become the term they use for any kind of protest, as opposed to the more specific "lay your bodies on the gears/literally stopping The Bad Stuff from happening" meaning direct action is really supposed to convey. In initial drafts of our outreach stuff they kept referring to the march we were planning as 'taking direct action,' so I tried to narrow their sense of it a little bit.

The differences in how to do media outreach I think mostly just stem from that they're used to working in the closed-world of the campus--they call their friend at the school paper, a reporter shows up. They're less used to having to compete for the assignment desk's attention, or trying to build relationships with reporters over a longer timeline.

like is conflict and then resolution ever productive even if some (me) are interested in that and get a kind of subconscious conditioned kick out of it or is it "actually" part of the problem

― languagelessness (mattresslessness), Wednesday, January 14, 2015 7:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean i sorta think "allies" or cheerleaders or what have you are the people most needed for these kinds of moments--like its sort of our responsibility to show up and Actually someone. i heard an anarcho slogan a while back that stuck with me--"solidarity means attack." by extension i think solidarity also means stepping up and engaging people who are attacking our side.

Perversely that can be hard to do, bc as a non-member of an affected population, it's delicate to defend the rights of marginalized ppl that you aren't one of. It means being a really good listener, I think, and knowing that you won't please everyone but you also can't get comfortable with your position--it should feel worrisome all the time, I think!

But I do aggree that in power analysis, like "Who has the strength and can be effective?", it makes sense for allies to engage w attacks. It also spares the energy of the marginalized group that is under attack all the time--it's just the humane thing to do.

Last night the core group was having a meeting to plan the agenda for our Next Steps meeting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, and more than once from the group founder expressed a real reluctance to use words like "working group," explicitly said "I don't want this to be a Process meeting," and eventually it came out that they wanted to avoid all the trappings that have been associated with Occupy because "that was 4 years ago, and a lot of people our age and younger think of that as the failed movement of the past that got bogged down in endless meetings."

It also spares the energy of the marginalized group that is under attack all the time--it's just the humane thing to do.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Thursday, January 15, 2015 4:45 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right, like, every now and again i'll get this sense of like "wow defending against this nonsense all the time is EXHAUSTING" and then another voice in my head says "you're exhausted? try having to do this every day for life"

This is a from Bill Moyer's "Movement Action Plan," which I was reading on the train this morning. It's a framework he came up with in the mid-80s to identify the 8 stages social movements go through on their way to victory, with examples from around the world throughout the late 20th century.

The connections it made to what I saw going through OWS kept giving me goosebumps ("Stage 4 begins with a highly publicized, shocking incident, a "trigger event", followed by a nonviolent action campaign that includes large rallies and dramatic civil disobedience. Soon these are repeated in local communities around the country.")

This is a long quote from his section on Stage 5 that I wish I'd read 3 years ago:

After a year or two, the high hopes of movement take-off seems inevitably to turn into despair. Most activists lose their faith that success is just around the corner and come to believe that it is never going to happen. They perceive that the powerholders are too strong, their movement has failed, and their own efforts have been futile. Most surprising is the fact that this identity crisis of powerlessness and failure happens when the movement is outrageously successful—when the movement has just achieved all of the goals of the take-off stage within two years. This stage of feelings of self-identity crisis and powerlessness occurs simultaneously with Stage Six because the movement as a whole has progressed to the majority stage.

Many activists conclude that their movement is failing because they believe that:
- The movement has not achieved its goals. After two years of hard effort, which included big demonstrations, dramatic civil disobedience, arrests, court scenes and even time in jail, media attention, and even winning a majority of public opinion against the powerholders' policies, the movement has not achieved any of its goals. The problem, however, is not that the movement has failed to achieve its goals, but that expectations that its goal could possibly be achieved in such a short time were unrealistic. Achieving changes in public policies in the face of determined opposition of the powerholders takes time, often decades. The movement, therefore should be judged not by whether it has won yet, but by how well it is progressing along the road of success.

- The movement has not had any "real" victories. This view is unable to accept the progress that the movement has made along the road of success, such as creating a massive grassroots-based social movement, putting the issue on society's agenda, or winning a majority of public opinion. Ironically, involvement in the movement tends to reduce activists' ability to identify short-term successes. Through the movement, activists learn about the enormity of the problem, the agonizing suffering of the victims, and the complicity of powerholders. The intensity of this experience tends to increase despair and the unwillingness to accept any short-term success short of achieving ultimate goals.

- The movement no longer looks like the Take-Off stage. The image that most people have of successful social movement is that of the take-off stage—giant demonstrations, civil disobedience, media hype, crisis, and constant political theater—but this is always short-lived. Movements that are successful in take-off soon progress to the much more powerful but more sedate-appearing majority stage, as described in the next section. Although movements in the majority stage appear to be smaller and less effective as they move from a national to local focus, and from mass actions to less visible grassroots organizing, they actually undergo enormous growth in size and power. The power of the invisible grassroots provide the power of national social movements.

- The powerholders and mass media report that the movement is dead, irrelevant, or non-existent. The powerholders and mass media not only report that the movement is failing, but they also refuse to acknowledge that a massive popular movement exists. Large demonstrations and majority public opposition are dismissed as "vaguely reminiscent of the Sixties", rather than recognized as social movements at least as big and relevant as those 20 years ago. And when movements do succeed, they are not given credit. The demise of nuclear energy is said to be caused by cost overruns, high lending rates, lack of safety, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, rather than from the political and public opposition created by the people power.

Battle Fatigue
By the end of take-off, many activists suffer from "battle fatigue". After two years of virtual 'round-the-clock activity in a crisis atmosphere, at great personal sacrifice, many activists find themselves mentally and physically exhausted and don't see anything to show for it. Out of quilt or an extreme sense of urgency, many are unable to pace themselves with adequate rest, fun, leisure, and attendance to personal business. Eventually, large numbers of activists who were part of movement take-off lose hope and a sense of purpose; they become depressed, burn out, and drop out.

Stuck in Protest
Another reason why many activists become depressed at this time is that they are unable to switch from protesting against authority in a crisis atmosphere to waging long-term struggle to achieve positive changes. Many activists are unable to switch their view of the process of success from one of mass demonstrations to that of winning the majority of public through long-term grassroots organizing. Consequently, being active in Stage Six feels like they are abandoning the movement. Another reason why many activists are unable to switch to Stage Six is that they do not have the knowledge or skills required to understand or participate in the majority stage. For example, nonviolence trainers play a critical leadership and teaching role during the take-off stage, but virtually disappear in the majority stage because they lack the understanding and skills to train activists to participate in this stage.

Rebelliousness, machismo, and more "militant" action and violence are some of the negative effects of feelings of despair and powerlessness. These efforts are often reckless and defiant acts of despair, frustration and rage, which stem from the collapse of unrealistic expectations that the movement should have achieved its goals within the first two years. The feelings of failure and exhaustion, the organizational crisis, the calls for militant actions, confusion, hopelessness, and powerlessness all contribute to widespread burnout among activists.

The movement needs to make deliberate effort to undercut this problem. First, it needs to reduce the feelings of despair and disempowerment by providing activists with a long term strategic framework which helps them realize that they are powerful and winning, not losing.

Organizational Crisis
The loose organizational model of the new wave local organizations begins to become a liability after six months. The loose structure promoted the flexibility, creativity, participatory democracy, independence, and solidarity needed for quick decisions and nonviolent actions during take-off. But after six months, the loose organizational structures tend to cause excessive inefficiency, participant burnout, and an informal hierarchy.

Some ways in which activists can overcome their identity crisis of disempowerment are the following:

- Use an analytic framework of successful social movements, such as MAP, to evaluate their movement, identify successes, and set strategy and tactics.
- Form personal/political support groups that enable activists to participate in movements as holistic human beings, take care of their personal needs, reduce guilt, have fun, and provide support (and challenge) in doing political analysis and work.

- Help activists evolve from protestors to long-term social change agents. Provide social change agent training, which includes not only nonviolence but all the skills for understanding and organizing successful social change movements.

Highly recommend the whole thing.

like just the frame he provides there for like, a militancy of despair, makes soooo much sense to me

"we haven't won yet and this problem is too big lets just fuck shit up"

yeah, been there, seen that

I mean the whole Green Scare thing can (also) be framed in those terms and make sense

exactly

thats what makes the sweep of this essay he wrote so impressive to me, that i'm getting all these resonances in stuff i've experienced and then he's like "just like the anti-nuke movement in 1979/the anti-Marcos protests in the Phillipines/the Vietnam anti-war movement" and i'm like oh right he wrote this 30 years ago

I'm going to run for office on a platform of not allowing elected officials to speak at ANY EVENT unless they're officially on the panel and taking questions. This thing where they come in late, get to speak right away, and then leave early and don't stay to hear people's questions or concerns (or any of the other speakers) is BULLSHIT.

That event tonight wasted my time when I could have been drinking with fellow activists. I resent that.

Machismo, militant violence etc....well, you wouldn't have that if you started with a real understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and actually studied non-violence and WHAT IT MEANS for change.

I'm floored that people would affiliate with ANY movement without putting some time into learning real NON-VIOLENCE, which is not just physical, it refers to attitudes and a sensitivity toward others.

Mandatory reading, esp. the part about "internal violence of spirit".

People who think there isn't enough work for them to do will find themselves busy once they think about violence of spirit and how much of it occurs every day. Violence of spirit is inescapable on the Internet, for example, and how do we combat that?

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-power-of-non-violence/

well, you wouldn't have that if you started with a real understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and actually studied non-violence and WHAT IT MEANS for change.

Think of how many people don't begin their activism and organizing work with study, as compared to those who do.

I do think we have a responsibility to learn about the history and structure of these movements, especially those of us who self consciously think of ourselves as doing organizing work as opposed to more passively participating--but imagining that everyone will do that, I think, sets the bar unrealistically high.

I'm floored that people would affiliate with ANY movement without putting some time into learning real NON-VIOLENCE, which is not just physical, it refers to attitudes and a sensitivity toward others.

― SCOTTISH PEOPLE ONLY (I M Losted), Friday, January 16, 2015 3:10 PM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And again--following the larger context of long-haul thinking that Moyer is talking about in the excerpt I quoted--I've seen (hell I've *been*) the transformation of someone from 100% studied nonviolence to thirsting for militant confrontation. That transformation didn't come from lack of study--I'd spent months reading Gandhi, King, and others in our tent library--it came from despair.

Like I'm not disagreeing with you by any means, Losted, I'm just saying that an incredulous reaction to despairing militancy seems itself to forget empathy.

I'm going to run for office on a platform of not allowing elected officials to speak at ANY EVENT unless they're officially on the panel and taking questions. This thing where they come in late, get to speak right away, and then leave early and don't stay to hear people's questions or concerns (or any of the other speakers) is BULLSHIT.

That event tonight wasted my time when I could have been drinking with fellow activists. I resent that.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Friday, January 16, 2015 2:51 AM (13 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fuck this

same shit happened last night at a zoning meeting where as soon as the developers were done speaking a bunch of councilmemebers were like COOL PEACE

just a q - have any of you ever considered running for office? i know (believe me, I know) campaigns are deeply awful, but it's a logical next step isn't it?

I started thinking about it this spring after a couple of local radicals made legitimate non-long-shot runs at City Council seats.

I'd only want to run for a local office somewhere I really had organizing roots--I'm still laying those down here, and if I go anywhere else any time soon I'd be starting again.

(i say that to mean, i guess, that if i ever did it it'd still be a couple of decades of work away)

hey, you'd be surprised at what roots you already have -- i think a couple of decades is a long time to wait for public officials/decision-makers whose politics reflect a more inclusive/progressive/intersectional worldview :)

I don't think "despairing militancy" is necessarily spiritual violence, unless it causes you to objectify others or isolate yourself. I've been through "despairing militancy" wrt the environment but I take care not to judge others, I've just been radical about what and how I consume. Some may view that as confrontational, but in my heart It was not about that, it was about not wanting to expend energy and the fruit of my labor in a system that was violent to the earth.

Actually, I saw that word "militant" and knew it was problematic in lumping it with aggression, bullying, negativity. I think you can be militant without a prejudice toward others.

Machismo, militant violence etc....well, you wouldn't have that if you started with a real understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and actually studied non-violence and WHAT IT MEANS for change.

― SCOTTISH PEOPLE ONLY (I M Losted), Friday, January 16, 2015 10:10 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lets not be so glib, any study of the civil rights movement that includes its latter phase would also include a whole lot of people rejecting nonviolence

You misunderstand the Civil Rights Movement proper if you don't wrestle with the pesky concept of non-violence and what it means.

Also wrestling with the issue of armed self-defense is NOT the same thing as rejecting non-violence, nor is it a crucial of the most important and influential rights movement in history.

I'm not being glib, failing to pay regard to Dr. King and others is a serious mistake. This is NOT what the Black Panthers were about, though. They were upset about violent abuse of defenseless, ordinary black people - like youths and the elderly.

"a crucial" = "a criticism". Spellcheck is malfunctioning.

If I ran for office someone would be sure to dig up my bf's criminal past, so no. (I take your point but there are ppl much better qualified that I'd rather support to get my politics into power!)

I am also tooootally not interested in how transactional your relationships have to become in order to run for office--you have to mine the resources of every friend and family member you have, and look them straight in the eye while you do it. Let's say that at least at this point in my life I don't feel compelled to do that in order to work on my issues.

http://brooklynmovementcenter.org/post/art-losing-election/

The best politicians embody ideas, represent the will of many, and walk with humility. At the same time, political campaigns and elected offices are almost by definition narcissistic pursuits. Unlike other public service enterprises, a single personality is ultimately the raison d’être and focus of the apparatus that surrounds them. As a result, people running for office become captives of, as the Working Families Party’s’ Bill Lipton likes to call it, their own “candidate bubble,” an often detached universe in which you can lose touch with outside reality.
...
As you hunt for dollars, institutional support and individual votes, the relationships you develop on the campaign trail grow increasingly transactional. And unless you are the clear favorite, potential allies who have their own political capital at stake will hedge their bets against you. You could be sure of someone’s support one day, and catch a picture of him cuddling up to your opponent on Facebook the next.

I'm not ready for this, and may never be.

That's a great post.

yeah i hear that
i've seen the nature of public office change a lot in my lifetime and i know it's an unappealing prospect. i'm not sure your bf's criminal past would factor in, but i know very well how it can consume one's entire life/self/existence and how that would not be an appealing concept. i was just wondering.

I would be a bad activist bcz I would like to throw shit at 98% of politicians, on sight.

(tangentially, about 4 summers ago i had to suffer thru Chuck Schumer introducing Grizzly Bear)

City Councilman Big Hoos aka the Steendriver would be honored to be tomato'd by the Dr

speaking of militant despair someone reminded me of this dumb photo of me yesterday

http://i.imgur.com/UnOcrGx.png

Also wrestling with the issue of armed self-defense is NOT the same thing as rejecting non-violence, nor is it a crucial of the most important and influential rights movement in history.

I'm not being glib, failing to pay regard to Dr. King and others is a serious mistake. This is NOT what the Black Panthers were about, though. They were upset about violent abuse of defenseless, ordinary black people - like youths and the elderly.

― SCOTTISH PEOPLE ONLY (I M Losted), Friday, January 16, 2015 11:47 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

there are sections of inner cities all across america that they still haven't rebuilt after the riots that burned them down. this isn't just about the panthers. nor is your assessment of "what the black panthers were about" that solid -- you're describing one element of one group of them for one span of time, unless you want to convince me that everyone took "off the pigs" purely as a metaphorical/metaphysical statement. in any case, reconciling "armed self defense" with nonviolence in any sense is more mental gymnastics than i care to follow.

in any case i don't want to argue about violence vs. nonviolence or anything of the like. i'm just stepping up for a more accurate sense of history here.

had a big post-action meeting at my house friday night that went remarkably well--had about 50 people sardine'd into the living room, including some local luminaries in trans & queer activism who basically just showed up to offer us direction, blessings and keys to their offices.

we had an agenda planned out, but one of the elders was like "that's great--i've been doing this for 30 years, here's what i think you can make the biggest impact on: access to shelters for trans people, enforcement of trans employment laws, getting MPD to implement their own recommendations on relations with trans people." we said "ok" and happily threw away our agenda and formed working groups. i'm excited to see where this goes.

!!!!!

Sounds exciting!

lol we're only 5 emails into the life of this listserv and i'm already annoyed

So various updates from me here:

- Momentum around the group I mentioned above has stalled. I think the problem can be traced to leadership that threw a bunch of ideas on the table and then walked away. There was a dynamic of "everyone go ahead and continue work without me, I have to step back...but wait, I don't like the way this is going anymore, let's do it differently." A loosening grip followed by a sudden clench for control that confused, frustrated, and squeezed out a lot of people, I think. The elders that reached out to us before still very much want us involved as, I think, kind of shock troops on their behalf to give their advocacy a little more bite--but I'm not sure that's where this group is going anymore.

- A second group built around concern for the same issues, but with a much more direct approach to addressing them, has sprung up. It's been instructive to compare the politics and approaches of the two groups as they both make claims to anarchist politics, horizontalism, intersectionality, and direct action, but they play out *very* differently in practice. Some of the difference goes back to what I mentioned upthread about the leadership of the former group mainly coming out of undergrad organizing, whereas the core of this group mainly comes out of a kinda traveler-kid/oogle culture that's more directly engaged in the recent lineage & tactics of large scale protests.

- I got me a job doing digital organizing with workers. I'm stoked as hell.

I'm having ish right now w the non-profit industrial complex, as it's sometimes called. I think I didn't see those effects for a while bc my home organizing place is mercifully ACTUALLY grassroots and doesn't have certain problems that crop up a lot? I think because all the people who formed it were experienced in those things and wanted to get away from them.

Anyway I interviewed for a job with a supposed "grassroots" org that turned out to want a press secretary for the price of a mid-level coordinator, and their greatest concern was that my previous experience was volunteer (instead of paid) and that I didn't have experience writing press releases. Never mind that I'm on the board of their sister organization, so maybe they shouldn't start questioning the value of volunteerism just now. Also, 24yos can write press releases, I'm sure I can learn it somehow.

And while I would like to beef up some of the skills they wanted, I also got the sense that they value style over substance: ie, they're concerned with building a loyal "twitter brigade" that will retweet things at the same time to try to make something trend, but they couldn't (or wouldn't) share their strategies for what constituencies they're focusing on organizing this year.

More and more I wonder if finding a career outside the biz and continuing to do 100 volunteer things would be preferable or at least an equally valid life choice. I mean personally I feel like I bring a lot to an org, and I'd rather give my time to them than to corporate masters, but the more I get passed over for BS reasons the more I wonder if they're more about consolidating power than doing the work. Fine line.

The elders that reached out to us before still very much want us involved as, I think, kind of shock troops on their behalf to give their advocacy a little more bite--but I'm not sure that's where this group is going anymore.

Do you feel okay sharing any feelings about this? Reminds me of Chepe and Alexis Goldstein reviewing Selma on their podcast Criticize After Dinner, and talking about how it left out certain complexities, one of which was it made one guy seem like an adversary of King's instead of what he was, which was a smart organizer who knew that you have to have a far fringe to force power to deal with the less far left as the lesser of two threats, etc.

they couldn't (or wouldn't) share their strategies for what constituencies they're focusing on organizing this year.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Wednesday, February 25, 2015 3:54 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is so, so weird to me

I know! I mean, ASK ME about my organizing goals, I can't shut up about them! But I was like, Can you tell me something about your organizing strategies and who you're focusing on this year?" And their primary advocacy person started explaining the definition of "community outeach" to me instead: "First we go into the community, then we talk to people..."

That is...not what I asked you, so either you think I'm too stupid to understand the real answer, or...????

It's kind of a "top down" environment, I think, so they don't really understand a) what actual grassroots organizing should be like, although I find this hard to believe and overall just confusing, and b) they think volunteering is a vastly different level of performance from employment because in their org, the work that achieves their goals is done by paid staff, not by community members.

More and more I wonder if finding a career outside the biz and continuing to do 100 volunteer things would be preferable or at least an equally valid life choice.

I deeeeeeeefinitely think it's equally valid to go this route--I have friends who say they're happy to do service industry & similar forever because it gives them the bandwidth & freedom to only do organizing on things they really think are worthwhile.

I mean personally I feel like I bring a lot to an org, and I'd rather give my time to them than to corporate masters, but the more I get passed over for BS reasons the more I wonder if they're more about consolidating power than doing the work. Fine line.

― Orson Wellies (in orbit), Wednesday, February 25, 2015 3:58 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I totally hear where you're coming from on this--with the radio stuff I've been doing we found ourselves in a lot of situs where we had to jump through extra hoops to get the attention of purportedly community-focused, community-based orgs, who'd inevitably wind up passing their grants off to orgs they'd historically partnered with anyway.

I think also that frankly a lot of this work can get very insider-y. Yes, it's the skills I learned three and half years of doing this stuff in my free time that made me a worthwhile candidate for this job I just got--but I only knew about the job because a friend in a similar org sent it to me. And I had a friend who already worked there who was able to print out & walk my resume over. Etc etc.

All this stuff is why some people I know even turn their noses up at any talk of new grassroots "organizations" or prematurely-hatched "movements," when so often they wind up being vehicles for careerism.

the work that achieves their goals is done by paid staff, not by community members.

oh well there you go

they're building for instead of with

The elders that reached out to us before still very much want us involved as, I think, kind of shock troops on their behalf to give their advocacy a little more bite--but I'm not sure that's where this group is going anymore.

Do you feel okay sharing any feelings about this?

yeah well like

this was very much the model we tried to adopt doing the anti-eviction work:
- go to existing organizations supporting people facing this problem
- determine the point where their resources *stop* and they're unable to do more
- pick up the ball from there and build campaigns with people at that point on the cliff

it was really effective for us and i wanted to carry that into this new group--figure out where trans advocacy & service groups could no longer push any further forward, take that as the starting point for escalation. so i was really excited when the elders came through and advocated something very similar, it made me feel like we'd been on the right track.

it's just become apparent, though, that as a group mainly composed of students, these aren't people who have the time to devote to the long planning & stuff required for escalation campaigns, let alone get involved in the kind of escalatory direct action that would risk arrest. i totally get that risking arrest is a function of privilege, but with these folks its almost the inverse--"if i get arrested my mom says she will cut me off."

so as much as i think our local elders had the right framework in mind--the same framework you're talking about King making the Villain Organizer (Stokely Carmichael is who that was, btw!) conscious of. i remember watching that scene and for a second being shocked at the clarity of it, then smacking myself in the forehead, like "why the hell are you surprised that martin luther king jr understand the dynamics of organizing, dumbass?"

whoops didn't finish my sentence lol

so as much as i think our local elders had the right framework in mind--

...it doesn't seem like this is the right group to make that framework happen

Work is sending me to "Organizing 2.0" in ny next month

http://www.organizing20.org/2015/03/07/organizing-2-0-conference-april-10-11/

cld be pretty cool

I don't know where to put this so I'm putting it here, warehouse fire at AK Press:

http://boingboing.net/2015/03/25/ak-press-warehouse-fire-crowd.html

Cool, hoos! I've gotten like 11ty invites to that thing but too pricey for me at this date. Still, look fwd to insights!

It's very strange for me to suddenly be involved in this like ~institutional/career activism~ thing, I've always been on the edges of it rather than inside of it--and tbh me and mine held "The Professionals/Careerists" in disdain: "for you it's a job, for me its a way of life."

Even now, a good friend of mine who will probably be at O2.0 with me for his own org keeps talking about how he's dreading having to share oxygen with the yuppie professional progressives who do their 9-5, maybe swing by a picket, then go back to happy hour & Netflix like the rest of their ~bourgeoisie friends~.

Yasmin Nair, with whom I disagree with about a damn long list of things, really kinda turned me on my head on this question though. She initially articulated this position at length talking specifically about writing in an academic context, but her framework has been picked up and run with by a lot of online organizers.

She argues that doing valuable labor for free--this work that lots of organizations *rely on*--essentially devalues and hurts the "bargaining positions" as such of people who *do* get paid for organizing work. Her question from there is "do we want to build a world where organizers are fairly compensated, or a world where organizers are expected to work for free? Which of those two should we be fighting for, and which side are you putting yourself on?"

I'm not sure I completely buy this argument, but I thiiiink I've stated it fairly--and its given me a fresh perspective on doing this stuff as my day job instead of another weeknight passion project.

I buy it. Being explicit about the value of women's and espesh non-white women's work is important to me, and we/they have long been expected to labor for free, for love, or simply been erased from history and from the notice of power while it banks on their minds & bodies.

When I ask someone to volunteer, I feel strongly about acknowledging their labor and presenting them with what they can expect in return--showing value for work. It's not a debasing kind of "transactional," it's just saying that everyone's time and effort is valuable. Not asking anyone to throw their bodies in the gears here. We want to LIVE, and live more fully--not sacrifice people to this struggle on a regular basis.

I've def been at some happy hours where policy directors go around hitting on women and trying to figure out if you're worth their time to talk to, but sometimes leaving work before 7pm is a form of self-preservation.

Also I care about the movement having longevity and succession, and it's hard to offer those things to ppl you want to join up if you can't say, you'll be able to be happy, have babies, love your family, do right by your partner/family/community/and so on, over a lifetime.

Historically the people that got famous for "giving their all" to the movement either had no children or had someone else at home putting clean laundry in their drawer, is what I'm saying.

What makes Nair's argument contentious though is that she says people who are working for free are *scabs* that should be rhetorically attacked & derided for undermining the market for paid work--not just that 'paying people for work is good' but 'if you work for free, you suck.' And I think that's a more complicated claim to make? idk

The system of free writing has created a caste system, with those who can afford to work for free doing so while those who can’t struggling to pay the bills and often giving up. As with unpaid interns, those who can afford to write for nothing inevitably make it into networks of influence which allow them to continue on to actual paying gigs. This crucial element, of the link between economic privilege and access (and I don’t just mean rich people), is frequently erased by those who insist that it’s their free writing that eventually landed them well-paying assignments. But it’s not their free writing and “exposure” that got them their jobs; it’s their ability to survive without having to depend on writing for a livelihood that guaranteed they could continue to write for nothing.

All of this has long-term effects on the overall tenor of writing from the left. If its writers are mostly those who benefit from the exploitation of free labour, but fail to see how their free writing makes it impossible for the rest of us to actually earn our living from writing, what are the chances that they might actually be able to interrogate the full and insidious force of neoliberalism?

If you're an academic/professional/activist who writes for free, or edits print or online publications which won't pay their writers but prides themselves on having all the bigbigbig names write for nothing: You are part of the problem of neoliberalism. You are making it possible for publishers to refuse to pay professional writers what they’re worth. We are seeing the adjunctification of the writing world, where a false scarcity of funds allows those in power to essentially blackmail their workers: You won’t work for the measly amount we’ve offered you? Fine, I’ll just get BigNameProfessor to do the same work for free.

For those wondering what to do, the solutions are simple. If you’re any kind of a writer, demand pay, and good pay, even and especially because you don’t need it to survive. If you’re a would-be publisher who wants to provide a space for radical-feminist-whatever writing but don’t know how to do it without your pay rate starting in the hundreds, and not the measly tens: Don’t publish. It really is as simple as that. If you don’t have work for people to read, you don’t exist anyway, so what gives you the right to insist that your workers produce labour for free or nearly nothing?

Stop using phrases like “labour of love” to describe your free writing and use “unpaid labour” instead. That way, we might all start thinking about writing as labour, not as a hobby or as “writing for pleasure.” It’s exploitative to think that writing should not be a form of labour that pays well.

Don’t give up your cheque in the hope that the money might go to a freelancer: It rarely does. It’s naive to believe that the publishing world, which is largely for profit, is somehow imbued with the redistributive justice of a grassroots collective.

Think hard about the solutions you come up with.

Hm that does seem more radical than I would probably be. But I can see that there might be an appropriate audience for parts of her argument, I'm just not sure exactly who that audience is or if she's combined several targets in one piece?

It doesn't really leave room for ppl who write for blogs or non-commercial sites like, idk, Feministing? Who used to be all-vol but I guess are now paying? I also think her appeal probably doesn't make sense if directed at actual grassroots organizing which includes ppl sharing their stories in whatever format works for them, which is sometimes written. Although maybe she would say that if you're going to ask people to accumulate their stories in a media format that you can reuse for your cause or publication, you SHOULD pay them! I don't think that's going to find a lot of traction but I don't think it's way off course?

baltimoreuprising.org

ugh http://www.baltimoreuprising.org

http://peterlevine.ws/?p=15335

The Google Civic Innovation Team (Kate Krontiris, John Webb, Chris Chapman, and Charlotte Krontiris) have released an important strategic report based on original research. They argue that 48.9% of American adults are “Interested Bystanders” to civic life. These “people are paying attention to issues around them, but not actively voicing their opinions or taking action on those issues.”

Looking more closely at how the Interested Bystanders think about politics and civic life (and the actual civic actions that they take), the Google Team uncovers some interesting gaps. For instance, “many Interested Bystanders believe they have the most power at the local level, [ yet ] most participants reported voting only at the national level.” They also divide the 48.9% into eight archetypal groups, each of which would respond to different messages and opportunities.

The main implication for civic organizers and innovators: “you don’t have to design for activists or the apathetic. You can design for Interested Bystanders and still reach a huge market of people and have a huge impact.”

…

the first half of this is pretty navel gazey occupy wall street reminiscing, but after that it gets really good:

From there, I went wandering. I bumped straight into the movement’s social media call-out culture, where people demonstrate how radical they are by destroying one another. It felt like walking into a high school locker room. In this universe, we insist on perfect politics and perfect language, to the exclusion of experimentation, learning, or constructive critique. We wear our outsiderness as a badge of pride, knowing that saying the right thing trumps doing anything at all. No one is ever good enough for us — not progressive celebrities who don’t get the whole picture, not your Facebook friend who doesn’t quite get why we say Black Lives Matter instead of All Lives Matter, not your cousin who mourned the deaths in Paris without saying an equal number of words about those in Beirut. Instead of organizing these people, we attack them. We tear down rather than teach each other, and pick apart instead of building on top of what we have.
And of course, the politic of powerlessness doesn’t only live on social media, but in our organizing spaces as well — and it’s in the realm of identity that so much of the battle takes place.

We confuse systems like white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism with individuals we can use as stand-ins for them. We use the inevitable fuck-ups of our potential partners as validation that we should stay in our bunkers with the handful of people who make us feel safe instead of getting dirty in the trenches. We imagine identity as static and permanent, instead of remembering that all of us — to borrow terminology from organizations like Training for Change — have experiences of marginalization that can help us support one another, and experiences of being in the mainstream that can help us understand the people we want to shift. We forget that, while identity gives us clues and reveals patterns, it doesn’t fully explain our behavior, and it certainly doesn’t determine it. We abandon the truth that people can transform, that ultimately we all — oppressed and potential oppressors alike (if such simplistic frames should even be entertained) — can and must choose sides. So we shirk this ultimate responsibility we have as organizers: To support people in making the hard and scary choices to be on the side of freedom. In all of this commotion, we turn inward. We forget the enemy outside, and find enemies in the room instead, make enemies of one another.

https://medium.com/@YotamMarom/undoing-the-politics-of-powerlessness-72931fee5bda#.k8cty7h6k

https://lareviewofbooks.org/review/left-behind-why-marxists-need-anarchists-and-vice-versa

content warning: malcolm harris reviewing book by andrew cornell on history of american anarchism

don;t know these guys but I liked that, except for the last paragraph. also I'm bitter, old, pessimistic, & wary of liberals so I am not as optimistic that "nudging" the Dems will have the effect it did in the 30's (an era that this guy seems to pine for).

as a more or less lifelong anarchist/activist I never met a communist or socialist I didn't like except for those RCP clowns. there should def be less fingerpointing, but never so little as to induce complacency on either "side". blah blah.

definitely gonna check this book out, my favorite anthology of old stuff is still that Mother Earth collection.

malclolm harris

i should probably read that though

i recently got a sheila rowbotham book from 1972 and the back page blurb includes the line "revolutionary thought has been slow to accept the validity of feminism, regarding it as a limiting and reformist movement which can only distract from the main area of struggle". good thing the radical left got over that, huh

so the Oakland fire tragedy has moved into the political advocacy and organizing stage ... and I might get involved? I'm new to this.

if you even just follow along, i'd be curious to see updates on whats happening in this thread

just throwing out an idea here.

what if there was a movement to get companies to effectively ignore Trump's environmental deregulation by voluntarily meeting the regulations that were in place (or scheduled to be implemented) at the end of Obama's term? This would be done by forcing companies to publicly support the obama-era standards and boycotting those that do not.

(one obvious need would be a comprehensive analysis of the effect of trump’s environmental deregulation, quantifying performance goals for companies, and the metrics would differ depending on the statute, the industry, the program that collects the data, etc. The indirect effects of other factors (the economy, trade, non-environmental changes in regulation, etc) would also complicate the analysis.)

is that just idiotically unrealistic? if there was a public list of the companies that refused to do it, would you be willing to boycott them?

i think the idea to pressure colleges and other institutions to disinvest from fossil fuels was a good one. it would be good to put more pressure on the industry itself, i think

In the 80s I was a student at UC Irvine the day the UC system divested from South Africa. I was genuinely surprised that all the hard work did in fact actually work. This almost seems easier.

hey karl idk if you saw but an org called Sunrise has been making a push for exactly what you're talking about--they're playing a long-ish escalation game starting with gummy symbolic stuff like burying "climate time capsules" at statehouses, but those are part of a larger plan to escalate to sustained civil disobedience on the one hand and on the other hand volunteer mobilization for climate champs in the midterms. check em out!

Ban hoos

ah damn had I remembered this thread existed I would not have started the "left-wing drift" thread

nah it's cool, I think of that thread as more about elections/legislation, whereas this is more grassroots/activism.

correcting myself here--Sunrise is pushing state govs, not companies, to hold to paris

hoos that

Intersectional or its BighooS

lol

in no way are those mutually exclusive

fair point

It feels good for me to see this thread again because I've spent the last 18 months getting a real education in what its taken to build popular movements--through my work, but really through undertaking a whole lot of learning and training in something called the Momentum community that's trying to train American organizers in all the most successful methods of the last century. There's a brand new popularly-aimed book, a hefty practitioner's manual by international forebears, regular trainings, and YouTube videos of the earliest dry-runs of momentum trainings.

They even started letting me train people & pilot my own civil disobedience mobilizations. That's been cool as fuck and has taught me so much. People I helped turn out & train this summer to do civil disobedience vs. Trumpcare, most of them nervous first-timers instead of the typically understood hardcore direct action ELFy types, have become extraordinarily committed people working hard to push their pols every time it matters, up to and including risking arrest again. It's been inspirational to see people step up this year. I'm really grateful for all I've been able to learn about organizing and about people.

stuff on my radar:

Seed Project leading the OurDream Coalition through decentralized action last week & DC all through the next two weeks, civil disobedience demanding Democrats fight for a clean DREAM Act in the spending bill before the EOY:
https://www.facebook.com/seedproject/videos/1753869588248478/?notif_id=1512762840751799¬if_t=live_video_explicit

Housing Works driving the Capitol Hill CD on the tax bill:
https://www.facebook.com/victoria.cook.336/videos/2223212364371275/?hc_ref=ARTmivFYcwO-qfClVfE8x4f4Pkd7I-1AUsT0-SDiO9NlxFeMxwy4j0WILadUU8p3Vl4&pnref=story

IfNotNow out across the US over the proposed movement of the embassy to Jerusalem:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/video/%E2%80%98which-side-are-you-on%E2%80%99-jewish-americans-protest-trump%E2%80%99s-jerusalem-move-in-new-york/vi-BBGnv4W?srcref=rss

Dreamers arrested in NOLA during an OurDream sit-in need bail help:

https://www.gofundme.com/bail-for-2-ourdream-heroes-in-nola

Man reading about all Bob Moses had done to build SNCC by 30 makes me wish I'd quit drinking years earlier

<3 hoos

OurDream coalition running a webinar tonight at 9pm EST on the state of the fight for a DREAM Act this month, what's next, and opportunities to help:

https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mP-LghL0Qd6qDZTilNQVzQ

hoos do you listen to chapo

once, for about 5 minutes

i legitimately couldn't tell the yelling dudes apart and was not that invested in trying

i know that reads like a snide dismissal but i just feel like there's too much actual work of importance to devote myself to for me to spend time learning to tell the chapos apart so i can have an opinion about their opinions

also real talk i was very distracted by how much one of the guys sounds like a guy i know irl who hosts a good/funny brocialist news/analysis/lolz show already so i was like "why do i need 4 more of this guy in my weekly listening life"

i've had this kinda ongoing back-and-forth with my housemate who was a DSA member several years ago, now works a government cubejob, whose primary engagement with his politics these days is through having opinions about "the discourse" and listening to chapo. a lot of times our conversations seemed like they were occurring on different planets--in july i was frantically working overtime to organize action around the health care bill and he wanted to have a languid debate with me about an internecine medium article they'd been talking about on chapo that i hadn't read.

over mint juleps

helpfully, he explained the medium article at length

lol we already have a chapo thread for this, but they've felt the need to clarify once or twice that listening to a podcast is not Doing Politics and I think/hope most listeners get that

also there are some heartening stories on the chapo subreddit of listeners joining DSA and even starting unions

that's happy news.

Women's March throwing their considerable email list behind CPD & Housing Works's last minute CD push on the tax bill: https://www.facebook.com/events/881082792061621/

multiple tax bill sit ins happening now: https://www.facebook.com/pdavisx/videos/10103570263485157/?notif_id=1513187118860950¬if_t=live_video

We reffed this above, but I just want to include links to our other recent related threads

Is the West Experiencing a Left-Wing Drift? (the international left politics activism, news, and strategy thread)

Social Activism in the Age of Trump: What To Do and What We Are Doing

oh hey nice thanks

No problem. I’ve been on this board long enough to feel compelled to link related threads together for when one of them gets revived 5-8 years down the road.

listening to a podcast is not Doing Politics and I think/hope most listeners get that

― Simon H., Tuesday, 12 December 2017 18:33 (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sir, they do not.

hahah

wanted to bump this thread so the fantasists can discuss the "mass party" stuff briefly touched on in the Dem thread - I'd also love to hear more about HOOS' bid to join the DSA's Refoundation caucus

Feel like now would be a good time to take a cue from our American friends and I need to channel this all-consuming dread into some sort of action, so UK ILXors, anyone have ideas of where energies could be focused right now? The more local the better...

Donate to Arts Emergency!

Anyone gripped by a sudden, urgent, "what can I do?" - can I tell you about a (free) app called Foodbank? Once downloaded, you can select your local foodbank & see their shopping list (including what's urgently needed & what NOT to buy) regularly updated in real time.

— Uncanny Ally (@UnheimlichManvr) December 13, 2019

that is both very good advice and also endlessly depressing

it's also an app owned by a Tory MP

i just downloaded it and my local foodbank isn't on there, the one it lists as closest to me doesn't have any information, and when you go to the donate tab it leads to a justgiving page for an organisation called either 'the philadelphia network' or 'network church sheffield' with no further info so yeah while the sentiment is otm the specifics seem... sketchy at best

that's a shame, didn't check it out properly sorry

yikes

AND... I've been updated that this app charges foodbanks to register (!) so not every foodbank will be represented! Please do try to find out what your local foodbank needs (website, phone, donation points), give cash, or support in any way you can. Point is: HELP THEM

— Uncanny Ally (@UnheimlichManvr) December 13, 2019

super-yikes, who the fuck would think do do this? oh yeah, tories

really sorry to bring grim news, but some foodbanks probably aren't registered because they have to pay £360 to do so. to a company owned by the newly elected MP for penistone and stocksbridge. pic.twitter.com/50I9SpcAa5

— Natalie Ashton | vote labour 🌹 vote for hope (@Natalan) December 13, 2019

a tory mp making an app to profiteer from foodbanks is 2019 in a nutshell.

was going to make a joke about workhouses and treadmills here, but don't want to put any more ideas out there.

Yeah, I already donate to my local food bank. Was hoping to find something that goes beyond donating, and possibly something that could at least inconvience the fuckers who got in power now, but that's a pipe dream I know.

Arts Emergency is a good shout Suzy, thanks.

People at the labour campaigners group have been passing this document around: http://docs.google.com/document/d/1OpA5yIHch7V7zD2yTNUJdhlWjL5c0ZkgouNuFvbjUIE/edit?fbclid=IwAR1RazvWFV796QPLFXhOD9EHZku3uq7bKdaJjNib78u1RMUuXOYgfLvMzbs

Also answering my own question, SOAS Detainee Support is a group that visits people being held in detention. I highly recommend joining, especially if you have a second language, or donating.

While my household donates about $800/year to our local food bank, I do not in any way consider that to be effective political activism. It's just trying to keep people alive and less hungry. Good in itself, but politically inert. Not what this thread should be about.

But, speaking of food banks, the Trump administration is changing the requirements for food stamps to drop more than half a million people off the rolls in about a month. Food banks will be more pressed than ever to cope with this new problem.

bump

Def see what Aimless is saying. Re: food banks, what if they are collectively organised by Labour/grassroot movements?

A food bank organized and run by a politically-oriented group might have a secondary effect as a point of disseminating information to those with an interest, but imo no matter what organization runs it, the food bank function should be run as apolitically as possible, or else you start to replicate the Salvation Army model of having to sing hymns and listen to sermons in exchange for your bed and meal. People in need should not be asked to accept anything other than assistance in filling that need.

Lol I know it's just an affiliation. This has been bandied about on twitter by a couple of ppl that are more active than me.

https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/labour-is-changing-the-way-politics-works

This was a good thread:

RT: Feeling miserable? Google your local social centre/dementia cafe/renters union/cop watchers/revolutionary union/whatever else you're interested in and get stuck in. Be prepared for people to be welcoming but reserved; be prepared for it to be hard and boring.

— Femme Fatigue (@CharlotteBHC) December 12, 2019

This looks good sadly I work five days:

if anyone in London is free on fridays and wants to do something which will make a material difference to people who are having to deal with the dwp please come and volunteer for us. This will be needed more than ever now https://t.co/B8eNmhjWes

— Rosa (@marxroadrunner) December 12, 2019

There is no time for hopelessness. Here are some ideas for what we can do – now – to fight back against the attacks we know are coming. https://t.co/Pc6Bg2CfHG

— libcom dot org (@libcomorg) December 13, 2019

Bree Newsome keeps talking about the need for civil society to start considering a mass response to a potential Trump refusal to vacate. I'm as worried about that as I am a capital strike if Bernie takes it or an assassination attempt by the fascists. I think it's right that no matter what happens in November basically any outcome means things get tougher for movements. Gonna be a hell of a year.

Ain’t that the truth