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

"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