Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care

by Kelly Hayes

The centrality of relationship building to organizing means that, within an organization, everyone should be doing it. It shouldn’t be one person’s job, Dixon said; everyone should see it as part of their organizing role to bring in more people.

It is not saviorism, but collectivity and solidarity, that will fuel our best efforts. One of the greatest struggles of our time will be to cultivate a life-affirming political culture that can be enacted in the everyday, a counterculture of rebellious care.

Our goal should be interdependence: to be part of a community where rescue is viewed not as exceptional but as something that we owe each other.

Acts of rescue and assistance are part of the natural rhythm of solidarity, love, and action that can take hold in the streets when people choose to hold their ground collectively.

Protest, like catastrophe, can enliven our connectivity as human beings.

By not abandoning people, we contribute to a culture where we, ourselves, are less likely to be abandoned. By defending one another, or even rescuing each other, in times of danger, we are reclaiming our capacity to help each other survive.

solidarity with one another is their best hope.

Like an electrical current that reactivates a stopped heart, crisis can create a social defibrillation that re-enlivens our connectedness to other human beings and allows our compassion, imaginations, and political will to flow more freely.

We believe in caring for each other as a form of cultural rebellion. We believe in the need to foster a counterculture of care—a politics larger than any siloed issue, one that can challenge dehumanization and the erasure of atrocity while allowing us to hold on to each other and our humanity amid disasters daily and acute.

The group is all-volunteer and community funded, with no plans to join the “nonprofit-industrial complex.”

The creative power of the oppressed will always exceed that of the oppressor, because it is the oppressed who must exercise creativity to navigate and survive a world that is set against them. It is the oppressed who create art and poetry and revolutionary ideas to cultivate hope in bleak places, so that people might galvanize and make change. It is the oppressed who, upon experiencing the defibrillation of disaster, have demonstrated what the bonds of solidarity can accomplish for the common good.

To take dynamic action against a system, we must have a dynamic understanding of how it functions. To create something new, we must likewise understand how the people of a place relate to the land and to each other and what developments have driven their current condition.

Histories of the oppressions our communities have faced, as well as the struggles they have waged, have been largely suppressed in the mainstream. Learning and reclaiming those histories and ideas are essential to our movements.

desire to “engage in activism outside of going to protests.”

Some of these changes have been groundbreaking, making activism more accessible and creating opportunities for collaboration and public exposure of the work, which had been extremely difficult or impossible under previous constraints.

Activists who experience success using online tools sometimes undervalue or neglect the kind of on-the-ground work organizers practiced before social media, and which many still practice today. But online mobilization born out of interest in event pages or the hot political topic of the moment can be fleeting, and organizers who rely on their ability to summon large numbers of people for protests and actions via social media, without developing any fabric of community between participants, often find themselves adrift as high-intensity political moments ebb. The bonded energy of protesters in the streets can help sustain the momentum of a protest, but it does not, in and of itself, create a sustained capacity for organized political action.

We need to practice a diverse spectrum of outreach methods in digital spaces and in physical spaces, and we need to do skill-building work in our movements around those methods.

What would we do in the case of a major political event if social media were no longer at our disposal? And what about all the people we’re not connecting with in our own communities due to some people’s lack of social media use or the invisible constraints of corporate algorithms?

Today’s organizers need to use new and old methods to motivate people toward spaces where work is happening and where relationships are being built.

When we believe in each other, we are more likely to take risks and to invest ourselves in possibility, even when our own hopes are not fully formed. In this way, our relationships and the work of relationship building can change our sense of what’s possible.

It is important to understand the distinction between activists, organizers, and political hobbyists. Hobbyists often have very strict political standards around respectability or radicalism, to which few activists ever seem to rise. If you organize anything political, you are likely to attract the criticism of hobbyists, since for some people, critique is a pastime. Of course, organizers make genuine mistakes that political hobbyists may react to, but the fact is, making mistakes is a consequence of trying.

The more you take action, the more errors and missteps you will make along the way. A person who has attempted nothing can easily point to the fact that they have never failed, but what have they built? What have they healed? As Barbara Ransby says of some vocal political hobbyists, “You’re not making any mistakes because you’re not doing anything.”

Political hobbyists have the luxury of pontificating about what organizers should do without any knowledge of the moving parts of a campaign or what actually moves people to act. In a moment of crisis or public outrage, hobbyists will frequently insist that “something” be done but often aren’t terribly parti...

Getting into heated debates with people who do not understand the work you are doing or the context in which you are doing it, or who do not share your values, is wasted energy and can create distractions that take you off message and disrupt your efforts. Remember whose opinions matter most and direct your energies accordingly.

As organizers, when we find ourselves correcting people’s ignorance, we should ask ourselves what we are inviting those people to do. What are we directing them toward? What do we ultimately want from them? And are our words in line with those goals?

Making people aware that an atrocity is in keeping with the character of their country is not an end in itself. In some ways, comparisons that nullify—or reproach—shock can lead to normalization and resignation: the sense that we are experiencing an unchanging and inalterable cycle, so there’s no point in getting riled up about it. For this reason, as organizers we must leverage history lessons as calls to action in the present.

We do not suffer oppressions identical to those of our ancestors, but the struggle against our oppressors has never ceased. Our struggles have shifted in shape, form, and context because our ancestors resisted.

Rather than shaming people for their lack of historical understanding, organizers should distribute the stories and histories we have amassed like shared weapons. Helping people understand the connections between historical events can spur new strategic action, alliances, and growth.

Grief work, healing work, and conflict resolution have always been important to our movements, but in this age of catastrophe they are more crucial than ever. A strong organizing community is more than a labor force for social justice. It is an ecosystem of care, learning, relationship building, and action.

Sometimes becoming “aware” or “bearing witness” is simply an act of consumption. Given the sheer amount of media available to any person with an internet connection, we have no shortage of “witnesses” to atrocity. Forcing people to behold injustice is not enough. Nor is the goal to simply generate a reaction—any reaction—to injustice; such noise can easily become a passing clamor. The goal is to pull people into an active formation and build something. To do that, we have to draw people into conversations about the harms that have been done to our communities, how we can help one another, and how we can thwart the forces that are harming us. Through that work, the generation of new visions born in collectivity becomes possible.

At least seven thousand migrants are believed to have died along the US–Mexico border from 1998 to 2017. More than thirty-three thousand migrants died at sea trying to enter Europe between 2000 and 2017. People who disrupt this cycle of violence are accused of human trafficking and smuggling because they chose to preserve life. This should not surprise us. When laws encode violence and law enforcers maintain it, those who attempt to prevent this violence are indeed breaking the law and challenging its enforcers. Such is the perversion of “violence” under imperial and colonial rule: the maintenance of state-sanctioned violence is considered peaceful, while the disruption of those death-making processes is deemed violent.

It is dehumanizing to pedestal people in this way, for a number of reasons. It erases the wholeness of their being, papering over the truth of their life, work, and beliefs with fantasy and adulation. It also sets people up to be dismissed or widely condemned when they are inevitably wrong about something, because those moments will always come, for all of us. No one’s politics are infallible, and we all have terrible days where we say or do the wrong thing, even if we believe the right things. We all cause harm and experience harm, and doing righteous work in one arena does not purify our politics in all others. We have all waded through the muck of a racist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, misogynist, classist, and otherwise harmful society.

An organizer who wants your allegiance rather than your solidarity and co-investment in struggle is not someone whose leadership you should trust.

In highly energetic moments, young organizers or others whose work is in the spotlight are sometimes fetishized. For example, we will sometimes hear that it is time to “follow the leadership” of women, youth, Black youth, Indigenous people, or some other group, usually because a particular effort has caught the spotlight. People who are understandably impatient for large-scale change often want to believe that there’s a shortcut: that one group, movement, or demographic is the truth and the way and that merely cheering on that contingent will spur a revolution. This places undue pressure on whatever group or demographic is being fetishized as a savior troupe. While there are moments when it makes sense for us to take leadership from particular groups, particularly when the struggle at hand centers on their lives, land, or water, there is no one group—and certainly no one person—who can defeat capitalism, end imperialism, or bring down white supremacy alone.

In other words, organizers need to develop a vision of who they want to be in relation to their community, their movement, and other people, instead of focusing on self-elevation. What role will they play in the context of the larger group? What are their skills and knowledge base? What will they not do? These are questions that must be answered together with others in the struggle.

The answer is more empathy and connection. The answer is to become an immovable force when we are together and a constellation of power and empathy when we are apart.

We also know this: hope and grief can coexist, and if we wish to transform the world, we must learn to hold and to process both simultaneously. That process will, as ever, involve reaching for community.

When our communities experience disaster, we understand that care and rescue efforts are essential, even if some loss is inevitable. In those moments, we know that care matters and that trying matters, come what may. It may be difficult for some people to imagine extending such sentiments to the larger world we live in, and to all of our relations, but it is possible.

Sometimes we expect the energy and feelings that we need in order to build movements amid crisis to flow naturally, as though they are embedded in our personalities. That is the influence of individualism. Just as patience is a practice, rather than a feeling, hope and grief are not simply things we feel but things we enact in the world.

Active Hope is a practice. Like tai chi or gardening, it is something we do rather than have.

Sometimes the practice of hope takes the form of mutual aid. In her essay “Dust of the Desert,” Lee Sandusky writes of grief, struggle, and mutual aid in the Sonoran Desert, where thousands of migrants have died while attempting to cross the US-Mexico border. Sandusky notes that the dead go uncounted, unidentified, and at least half the time, ungathered. Sandusky organizes with No More Deaths, a group that provides mutual aid to border crossers, many of whom are in distress. She and her co-strugglers also go on search missions for people lost in the desert and leave jugs of water for thirsty migrants to find. “The desert landscape is littered with thousands of black jugs carried from the south and clear gallons graffitied with well wishes brought from the north,” writes Sandusky.

“Border work is predicated on ending the deaths of those crossing—currently an insurmountable task—and much of the action we take is in response to grief, but also anger and hope; the three are inseparable motivations that sustain organizing and action within our community.”

How does your community practice hope and grief in collectivity? Are such efforts planned intentionally? Has your group created any space, physical or otherwise, for people to process their hope or grief about the pandemic? One exercise that might allow for the practice of hope and grief simultaneously might be the creation of a memorial time capsule. Members of your group could write messages, detailing what they think activists one hundred years from now should understand about the moment we are living in, and what losses were being erased. This

Sloganizing is not organizing, and paying righteous lip service to a cause, in the preferred language of the moment, does not empty any cages or transform anyone’s material conditions. Rather than fixating on the grammar of people’s politics, we organizers must ask ourselves what we want people to do.

people who believe they are “good people” often view goodness as a fixed identity, evidenced by their expressed feelings about injustice rather than a set of practices or actions. Goodness, to them, is a designation to be defended rather than something that they seek to generate in the world in concert with other people.

In an organizing space, accountability should not be about policing or punishment, but our punitive impulses can sometimes twist accountability mechanisms into those shapes. It’s easy to forget how imperfectly we have shown up in movement spaces and throughout our lives. Sometimes our aggravation with others is rooted in pain or trauma we have experienced; sometimes it is rooted in our uneasiness about things we may have said or done that were equally upsetting because we did not always know what we know now. And regardless of how much we believe we have learned, as the saying goes, we don’t know what we don’t know. Many of us would not be in this work today if someone along the way had not been patient with us.

We do not all have the same skill sets or capacity for risk, but “getting in the game” to take pressure off of organizers can take many shapes. “To get in the game with me can mean asking, ‘Hey, Ejeris, are you eating? Can I send you food? Hey, how do I take something off your plate?’ Not, ‘You should slow down,’ but, ‘I see what you’re doing and what we’re up against. How do we do that together?’”

We are living in and through calamitous times. We are bombarded twenty-four seven, it seems, by terrible political, public health, economic, and ecological news. We aren’t offered space to process collectively or to grieve all that has been lost.

white supremacy and heteropatriarchy.

strategic and persistent collective action.