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

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.

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