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We cannot win by replicating the dynamics of the dominant society. There is no “beating them at their own game.” We are not managers or CEOs. We can only win by building something entirely different that offers people something that the oppressor cannot.
Effective organizing, therefore, does not begin with having the most compelling argument or the most dazzling direct action, but with developing the capacity to bring people into relationship with one another, such that they might begin to overcome alienation and fear.
Radha Agarwal writes that belonging is “a feeling of deep relatedness and acceptance; a feeling of ‘I would rather be here than anywhere else.’”
if we can experience other people as co-strugglers—not as competitors or fearful enemies—we can act on the values of the world we want to build.
People need new, transformative stories to embrace in place of the false narratives they must let go—or that are being ripped out from under them.
Prisons are notoriously fascistic, and women in prison are punished at higher rates than men and for smaller infractions.
“We celebrate every little fucking accomplishment because it’s not a little accomplishment. … It’s the constant celebration of just us. We’re celebrating the fact that we done did some shit. We woke up this morning. We celebrate.”
About women trying ti survive being in prison
We must throw our energy into building active relationships with other people whom we refuse to abandon and who refuse to abandon us.
Political evolution is a lifelong process, and it is messy.
Dixon stresses the importance of learning what people are passionate about and “finding an intersection” between someone’s interests and the work at hand.
Dixon said, “when we build projects where people honestly have a stake in the project, not because we told them they have to, but because we’ve asked them what they need and we are responsive to the needs of multiple people.”
It is not saviorism, but collectivity and solidarity, that will fuel our best efforts.
and we should recognize that, in these tumultuous times, none of us are far from needing saving ourselves.
We do not need heroes. We need people who are committed to one another’s survival, who are willing to act on the basis of that commitment.
Having studied apocalyptic events across the course of human history, as well as the likely disaster scenarios of our time, Begley quashes notions of rugged individualism, insisting that “basic traits like kindness, fairness, and empathy” will be the basis of any sustainable, meaningful effort at collective survival—and as Begley stresses, we cannot survive alone.
While many people fantasize about forming small teams of skilled people who would somehow brave the perils of an apocalypse together, perhaps fighting off zombies or right-wingers, Begley argues that an insular approach cannot facilitate long-term survival. We must instead learn from the failures of this society, including inequities in health care, education, food, and housing.
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.
The state has the capacity to help us all survive—and even thrive—but in its current form, it is actively opposed to doing so.
Contrary to fictitious, popular depictions of people in dire straits, many people coping with the grief, uncertainty, and isolation of the pandemic longed to connect through acts of aid and care, and they did.
“Mutual aid is the story of this century,” Burley said. “We have to be there for each other.”
a study conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research in the summer of 2020 ultimately found “no evidence that urban protests reignited COVID-19 case growth during the more than three weeks following protest onset.” The study further indicated that “cities which had protests saw an increase in social distancing behavior for the overall population relative to cities that did not.”
In 2020, the radicalizing potential of mutual aid collided with the radicalizing potential of mass protest. The resulting moments of care, cooperation, and community defense offered a glimpse of our future in struggle.
This system will continue to fail people en masse and continue its attempts to legitimate itself through violence, which will make further uprisings and mass protest inevitable.
The fragile normalcy people in the United States cling to will continue to fracture, creating more opportunities for people to either retreat or rise to the moment by building new relatio...
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As Rebecca Solnit describes in A Paradise Built in Hell, everyday people and workers in the Twin Towers devised and implemented inspiring rescue and evacuation efforts on 9/11. Without any meaningful direction from authority—and in some cases, in defiance of instructions from 911 operators to shelter in place, which led to more deaths—people organized themselves to navigate dark stairwells, and some devised methods of assistance for disabled coworkers who otherwise would have been stranded as their coworkers fled.
Yet popular narratives about 9/11, as Solnit points out, almost exclusively focus on the heroic actions of official first responders.
Perhaps it’s because a recognition of our collective capacity for care during a moment of chaos does not reinforce state hierarchy. It does not reinforce individualism or what the government ultimately wanted most out of the aftermath of 9/11: a greater allegiance to US militarism.
Care-driven organizing confounds the logics that are deployed to perpetuate wars, whether against a nation-state, against terrorism, or against “crime.”
The creative power of the oppressed will always exceed that of the oppressor,
For this to occur, we will have to break free from the shackles of individualism and commit to building a culture of care, in which everyone’s well-being and survival are significant.
This is not the outcome the powerful are hoping for. They are relying on our cynicism, our divisions, and our despair, in addition to their mass apparatus of repression, to prevent us from cultivating a new way of living in relation to each other. To defy and defeat them, we must cultivate hope, belonging, care, and action.
Care-driven organizing compels us to ask, What would it take to provide for people’s needs and address the root causes of a problem?
because our ultimate goal is not simply to label or identify our oppression, but to upend and dismantle it.
Reading can play an important role in the exploratory work Gilmore describes. For some activists, a regular practice of reading—particularly in discussion groups and book clubs with co-strugglers—helps advance their work.
Capitalism robs us of our time, exhausting our bodies and minds, while pollution, stress, and shifting media patterns shorten our attention spans, and other mediums offer effortless modes of escapism.
As the conservative movement to ban books that discuss anti-Black racism, Indigenous genocide, trans identities, and more builds momentum, organizers must fight the erasure of knowledge with the collective expansion of knowledge.
We urge organizers to spend more time with books
Persistence, says Martinez, is key to the process. “So much of research is just not giving up until you get answers.”
We need to strategize around alternative modes of digital outreach and use in-person outreach methods, such as canvassing, flyering, in-person mutual aid, and other community events.
While utilizing that technology, it’s important to be suspicious and observant of the forces that control and profit from it.
None of us is exempt from the creep of cynicism in our movements, or in our own hearts and minds. But it must be actively fought.
In a moment of crisis or public outrage, hobbyists will frequently insist that “something” be done but often aren’t terribly particular about what “something” consists of—or whom it might actually harm or serve.
One persistent form of cynicism on the “left” comes in the form of the dismissal, “This is nothing new.”
Rather than shaming people for their lack of historical understanding, organizers should distribute the stories and histories we have amassed like shared weapons.
THIS!!
At a visceral level, human beings have fundamental responses to threats: fight, flight, freeze, appease, or dissociate.
Or Fret
The task of understanding the connections between historical harms and the dynamics they have created over time is much more challenging than venting our emotions through debate or even successful “awareness raising.”
Individualism has programmed people to view our fates and histories as divided. Movement education is, in part, a deprogramming process. It is a path toward unlearning mythologies and liberating ourselves from the isolation of individualism and enclosed narratives.
Radicalism that is not successfully co-opted or defanged, that continues to linger within the mainstream, will be met with increasing hostility and, ultimately, condemned as associated with violence.
In moments of unrest, it’s important to remember that, as Martin Luther King Jr. stated, there is no greater purveyor of violence in the world than the US government.
The frequency with which police kill people—both while on the job and in their own homes—also illustrates this connection between domestic violence and more widespread violence, but the United States is not about to disarm its police officers.
