Conclusion. The Time for Transformative Organizing Is Now!

On May 17, 2010, five students entered the Tucson office of Arizona senator John McCain and began a sit-in, risking deportation to fight for federal legislation known as the Dream Act that would give undocumented high school students the opportunity to attend college and be eligible for citizenship. Declaring, “We are undocumented and unafraid,” immigrants Lizbeth Mateo of Los Angeles; Tania Unzueta of Chicago; Mohammad Abdollahi of Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Yahaira Carillo of Kansas City, along with Arizona native Raul Alcaraz, occupied the office for seven hours before they were arrested. Three of them were held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers, the worst in the country.

Lizbeth explained why the Dream Act is so important. Born in Mexico, she came to the United States when she was fourteen. She had to learn English and adapt to a whole new culture. California law allows undocumented students who attend high school in the state to go to college at in-state tuition rates. Lizbeth was admitted to California State University at Northridge, where she graduated with a major in Chicana/o studies. But then she hit a wall: “So here is the problem,” she says. “I have a degree, but it’s virtually impossible for me to get a job.” The Dream Act would give students like Lizbeth six years of conditional legal status while they go to school or serve in the military, and then put them on a path to permanent citizenship.

The Dream Act 5, as they were known, were booked and released the day after their arrest, but they are still under ICE authority and have to report to the agency every month as they wait for it to decide what action to bring against them. Their militant sit-in has sparked similar actions by immigrant youth all over the country, including a thousand undocumented young people who staged a mock graduation at the White House in July 2010. Theirs are the most militant and widespread reflections of Chicano youth protest today. In Los Angeles alone in 2010, eleven demonstrators are facing charges for nonviolent civil disobedience in support of the Dream Act. Twenty-five additional demonstrators are facing charges for a major demonstration that tied up traffic for hours protesting Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, which has led to mass arrests of undocumented workers. It was time to take action and, for some, to put their bodies on the line.

“I have worked for the Dream Act from the time I was nineteen till today, when I am twenty-six,” says Lizbeth. “Many have lost hope. Many live in fear. This country prides itself on equal rights and being ‘a nation of immigrants,’ but our people are being hunted down.”

I asked Lizbeth if she had any regrets.

“I did what I did consciously,” she says. “There is no room for regrets; the risks were worth it. The community support has been overwhelming and my parents pray for me. We had to be a catalyst to show Congress the courage they didn’t have. We need more of you to march, to write letters, to risk arrest and, if necessary, jail time. Will you join us?!”

I started this book with the story of a young Black man from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee putting his body on the line for the civil rights revolution. I end with a young Latina from the immigrant rights movement putting her body on the line, forty-six years later. The fundamental question remains: “Are you ready to join the social justice revolution?”

Now that you have read this far, let’s look at the world in which we are organizing, the coordinates of hope, and the tasks in front of us. Let’s look at what we can do to strengthen a movement for transformative organizing.

What is the challenge?

Successful organizing begins with a sober analysis of the conditions within which we are working.

We all know that the system that engulfs our lives and our work is in another massive crisis, and a permanent decline. The United States depends on its war economy, as it has to accept a diminished role in a multipolar world, in which Russia, China, Brazil, and India are claiming huge markets. Now we face global economic, environmental, and political crises.

Sixteen million people are now unemployed, and at least 50 million people live below the poverty line—part of the low-wage, no-wage working class. Mass unemployment is becoming permanent. As the stock market rebounds through government subsidy, a “workerless recovery” shrinks the private sector. Housing, food, and water are increasingly costly, and foreclosures, evictions, poverty, and hunger are on the rise. The social welfare state we fought for and have relied upon even as services declined is shredded—aid to families, mental health clinics, county hospitals, trauma centers have disappeared; people are cold, sick, and hungry and left on their own to survive. We are increasingly suffering the undeniable manifestations of the ecological crisis. The recent scorching heat in Russia and the floods in Pakistan have continued the trajectory of Hurricane Katrina’s destructive force. There is a collision course between the greed and rationalizations of the West and the force of nature; science and the planet are the casualties. The United States is involved in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and has a network of 800 military bases.

Where is the hope?

The tradition of transformative organizing always finds the paths of hope. In dark times, what do we do? We organize.

Radical organizing grows in times of despair. The union movement grew during the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement grew during the height of segregation, the anti–Vietnam War movement grew at a time when the United States was bombing civilian populations, and the African National Congress grew at the height of apartheid. In our recent history, we saw massive antiwar marches in the millions all over the world against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. In 2006, millions of people marched for immigrant rights. In 2007, thirty thousand people marched in Louisiana in support of the Jena 6—six high school youth accused of beating up a white student in the midst of intense racial harassment. Through mass public support from all over the country, it became one of the largest civil rights marches about a single incident since the 1960s.

And then in 2008, hundreds of thousands of activists came forward and were transformed into organizers who in turn moved some 2 million people to campaign for and elect a Black president they believed would stand up to and reverse the legacy of Bush and Cheney. The campaign to elect Barack Obama was a watershed in U.S. history and reflected a revolution of on-the-ground organizing. Obama’s army of 2 million—which exploded into systematic phone banking and people holding house meetings with their neighbors and going door-to-door in swing states to talk to voters they had never met—ended up changing many minds. The Obama electoral movement was one of the great political alliances in U.S. history and led to the election of the first Black president of the United States—who ran on a progressive platform.

Many of us joined the campaign to fight for civil rights and against the war in Iraq; for universal, single-payer health care; and for the expansion of social programs. In a heartening turn of events, 96 percent of Black voters, 80 percent of Native American voters, 67 percent of Latino voters, 62 percent of Asian American voters, and 46 percent of white voters supported Obama for president. Even more encouraging as a trend is that 56 percent of white voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine voted for a Black man with an African name against a white man who wrapped himself in the flag.

Significant numbers of the best and brightest who worked for Obama are seeking out transformative organizations that are building an independent political base to pressure the president from the left and face the Tea Party on the right. The victory of the Obama electoral campaign is a permanent victory for the social movement Left and proves that it is possible to build a progressive mass movement in the United States today. It is from this undeniable historical phenomenon that future hope can be built.

In this context, it is the urgent and unique role of a democratic Left to build a movement independent of and to the left of the Democratic Party; to push both parties from that grassroots base, to find opportunity to unite with the Obama administration when possible, and to challenge the administration when necessary; to protect the president from racist attack, to unite with Democratic progressives, to ally with the center and moderates in a united front against the Right, and to focus on “demand development” for an independent political program that places the interests of working people and communities of color at the center.

Progressives also draw great hope from social movements that have multiplied around the world, with campaigns for arable land, clean and free water, clean air, food security, and self-determination from U.S. transnational corporations and the U.S. military. While global capitalism declines, many countries are rejecting the neoliberal economy that has forced them over the decades into debt and chaos. A vibrant twenty-first-century movement for self-determination and ecological sustainability is rising in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, encouraged by Brazil, which is developing new forms of economic and political cooperation to demonstrate an alternative to the U.S. model of exploitation.

The international focus of U.S. organizing has been on the rise. Forums around the globe and within the United States are gathering large numbers of organizers, rooted in real struggles, building international ties, coalescing to build their strength. In Detroit in June 2010, eighteen thousand organizers attended the U.S. Social Forum, where workshops on transformative organizing had standing-room-only attendance. There were also many international forums at the USSF initiated by Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and various Third World groups. And groups asking for the removal of U.S. bases from their territories, such as Colombia and Guahan (Guam), were pleased to find many of USSF participants supportive of their demands. As international alliances have grown, movement organizers have invited more international guests to the United States to become familiar with our movements in support of self-determination for nations all around the world. Progressive organizers gather at United Nations events, NGO (nongovernmental organizations) gatherings, World Social Forum encuentros, hemispheric alliances, and actions led by groups such as the World March of Women. These nascent international alliances provide the seeds of a winning strategy.

The theory of transformative organizing is based on the premise that the kinds of progressive demands discussed throughout this book are in the interests of working people and of much of the middle class in the United States, and in the ethical interests of all of us. Practice shows us that when organizers take these demands into their workplaces, communities, schools, and houses of worship, we can successfully organize around them. This approach is based on the belief in the intelligence and capacity of working people, people of color, and students to listen to new ideas contrary to the dominant U.S. master narrative. Organizers need to study, practice, and learn to make the case to end the U.S. blockade of Cuba, or for the United States to close down its military bases, or for the U.S. government to demand the most drastic reductions in greenhouse gases.

Of course it takes good agitation, good political education, performance art, e-organizing, masterful leaflets, and great and persuasive one-on-one conversations to accomplish this too. When the war in Vietnam first came to popular attention, the vast majority of people in the United States were initially for it. But as antiwar organizers, we found that support for the war was a mile wide and an inch deep—when presented with facts, political, and moral arguments, masses of people joined the antiwar movement.

The demands raised by the organizers profiled in this book give a framework for a comprehensive politics. There is a gaping political hole in the U.S. body politic to the left of the Tea Party that the official leadership of the Democratic Party does not want to take up. A powerful social movement, including many Democratic voters, must be willing and able to fill that vacuum. These demands provide a counter-hegemonic challenge to the system, a coherent program that we can take out on the block, out on the bus, worker to worker, and door to door.

How will you answer the call?

The exciting thing about being an organizer is there is little room or time for despair. There is always room for optimism; there is always something to do that is historically important, choices in one’s life that matter, a challenge against more powerful foes, great people to work with, and a real chance for victory. Here are some concrete steps every reader can take.

Join an organization and become involved. Move from being a person who attends a march to someone who joins an organization and is in the office working on the logistics and making the march happen, from handing out leaflets to helping write them, from making donations to raising funds from your networks, and from attending a monthly meeting to protecting at least eight hours a week to make your social commitment qualitatively more effective. Build your progressive organization. Social movements cannot grow or merge with others unless we as organizers understand the critical importance of building the peoples’ institutions.

Make a move to be more strategically positioned in society. Some people cannot change cities or jobs to join the organization they think best. Some can. If you want to be the most effective organizer, think about where you want to work and live. Wherever you are, make strategic life choices to keep you close to society’s most oppressed and energetic. Are you working in the same factory where your mom or dad worked? Join the union or help organize one. Are you seeking a socially responsible job? Become a public school teacher, nurse’s aide, nurse, or doctor in a low-income clinic, county hospital, or AIDS center, where you can make contacts with workers and patients to fight for better medical services. If you are a teacher, administrator, maintenance worker, student, or parent, you are strategically situated to fight against privatized education and for antiracist, progressive public school education. If your organization is focusing on a particular constituency or there is a neighborhood that you want to impact, consider changing your job or moving to be closer to the base you organize. Only a few people can make a living as a full-time organizer, but millions of people can devote their lives to organizing within the contours of work, family, health, and politicizing the daily experiences of their lives.

Understand your life from an organizer’s perspective. Are your friends or family trapped by the criminal justice system? Given that there are more than 2 million people in U.S. prisons, 1 million of whom are Black and 500,000 Latino, and estimating that each prisoner has five or more family members directly impacted, that means there are 10 million people at least who are directly impacted by criminal justice campaigns. Do you drive or ride the bus? In Los Angeles alone there are 500,000 bus riders who have become an organized political force. Buses and mass transportation have been the sites of many historic confrontations—the Montgomery bus boycott (United States, 1955), the Alexandra bus boycott over fare increases (South Africa, 1957), the massive demonstrations in Tehran against the increase in bus fares (Iran, 1983), and the Caracaso rebellion (Venezuela, 1989). The last was a mass revolt over plans to double the bus fares that led to brutal government repression but also set the terms for the Chavez revolution a decade later.

Do you work for a large corporation? If you are in a large factory or big-box chain store, or at a key university or part of the public school system, you are strategically placed and can stay there for a long time organizing and building an organization or a social movement. We know the ebb and flow of rebellion may change, but when it does erupt, you are in a powerful position to impact historical events.

Organize where you are. Not everyone can change their life circumstances to find the optimum location to organize. But if you join an organization, almost anywhere is a good place to be. If you go to a college or university, organize there. Work at McDonald’s, Walmart, Apple, or Facebook? Organize there. In a sporting goods store or construction company, organize your friends and coworkers against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Active in your church, synagogue, mosque, or spiritual center? Organize for strong laws that regulate greenhouse gases, for policies that let people out of prisons and reduce the length of sentences, for women’s reproductive rights, for millions of new governmental social services jobs, and an end to the U.S. drone-missile attacks in Pakistan. While many people may be threatened when challenged by close friends, coworkers, or family members, they also are most impacted by this type of organizing. Often, your most solid base of support is the people with whom you live and work.

Build a deep base. Is your organization building a strong grassroots base? The new regional, national, and international movements we need cannot happen unless the organizers coming together have a strong base in communities, churches, synagogues, mosques, workplaces, public schools, and universities. I remember during the height of the anti–Vietnam War movement in the late 1960s, I was one of 500,000 marchers on the Fifth Avenue Peace Parade in New York. Each delegation—Bedford-Stuyvesant, Jamaica, Upper West Side, Harlem, South Bronx, Staten Island—marched proudly against the war. Teamsters, auto workers, doctors, psychiatrists, nurses—against the war. High schools, hospitals, elderly centers—against the war. A movement of this scale cannot happen without organizers going door–to-door, person-to-person, in lunch rooms, at break times to build constituencies. Going deep into one community and generating some level of saturation is critical. For once you are in the high schools, the key neighborhoods, known in the churches and synagogues, in cultural centers and workplaces, and on the media, you begin to make a qualitative leap in the impact of your influence, which sporadic efforts will never achieve.

Seek out national networks of organizations doing great work. If you are in a vital grassroots organization, it’s essential to build alliances to strengthen the campaigns you are organizing, Alliances also enable organizations to work beyond their own projects: groups working on civil rights can align with others focusing on women’s rights; groups working against gentrification can join campaigns designed by others that fight immigrant detention centers; organizations fighting for a civil rights amendment to federal transportation legislation can also join in international delegations to the United Nations. The Grassroots Global Justice Alliance is a network of fifty-three groups doing important work in low-income communities of color and playing a major role in international conferences and movement building. The National Domestic Workers Alliance is reaching out to workers in every state and can use your help. So can other key national networks such as the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Indigenous Environmental Network, Right to the City, Transit Riders for Public Transportation, Transportation Equity Network, National Lawyers Guild, Push Back Network, Jobs with Justice, Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Take Back the Land, Iraq Veterans Against the War (which includes veterans of the war in Afghanistan), and Women Organizing Women. Democrats.com and BoldProgressives.org are doing important e-organizing, raising funds and turning out phone bankers for insurgent Democrats against conservative Democrats in the primaries, and then backing progressive Democrats in the general election against reactionary Republicans. These are just a sample of the excellent groups working at the national level

The exciting breakthrough today is the growing collaboration among regional, national, and international networks where groups must come in with a strong base, can retain some of their autonomy, but sign up for a higher level of cooperation in which agreements are made and implemented. Once you sign up, your energetic participation is expected and our power grows.

Spread an international net. Those of us who are organizing inside the United States need to get outside in order to even begin to grasp what this country looks like to activists in other countries. Many organizations understand this and send delegations to international meetings to lend solidarity to important struggles of resistance to the policies of our government and of U.S. corporations.

While the United Nations is a complex arena under tremendous control of the United States, the Security Council and General Assembly are still important arenas where the stakes are high and some important resolutions have actually changed conditions on the ground in terms of government accountability on trade, toxics, greenhouse gases, and Indigenous rights. The NGOs work tirelessly to eke out progressive language from governments who often have no intention of following it. Perhaps the most instructive experience is to see the way governments all over the world are exclaiming, “What are we going to do about the United States?!” and how much hope they place on U.S. grassroots movements to stand up to the destructive policies of our own government.

The World Social Forums are important arenas for social movement gatherings. The WSF is not a decision-making body and, in some ways, has restricted the scope of its conversations by the exclusion of political parties and governments. Still, WSF provides organizers with excellent opportunities to hear advanced ideas and to network with other groups to reach real operative agreements—often resulting in delegations visiting each other’s countries and in commitments to read each other’s publications and learn from each other’s practice.

Participation in international gatherings that address specific issues is increasingly possible. In April 2010, Bolivian president Evo Morales initiated the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba to develop a powerful grassroots counter program to bring to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Focusing on enforceable regulations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 50 percent of 1990 levels, this proposal is light years ahead of the United States’ and European Union’s emphasis on voluntary, unverifiable levels.

As you look for a group to join or a direction for the group you are in, ask yourself: “What is our international strategy and what work are we doing to link the struggles of people in the United States to people all over the world?”

Create movement convergences and build movement centers. The U.S. Social Forums held in Atlanta in 2007 and in Detroit in 2010 exemplified the movement-building atmosphere we need to create on a daily basis. And the scale of an 18,000-person gathering of 1,700 organizations gives us a glimpse of what a movement of social movements can look like. In your city, at national events, or during international convenings, introduce a cultural engine for our movement—places to gather: convergence spaces like La Peña Cultural Center in Berkeley, California, training camps, and children’s playgrounds; art-making centers like Self-Help Graphics in Los Angeles; venues like the Leftist Lounge in Detroit and the Brecht Forum in New York; and movement movie theaters, where activists and organizers can attend, encouraging political films and building their audience. We need a collective movement life that is a visible and accessible presence in the cities and rural areas where we organize. We need venues where different races, classes, gender expressions, and languages can come together to discuss strategy and tactics—where cultural performers can build their audience. We need online organizers who are skilled at crossing cultural boundaries so that there is a common set of spaces that the movement occupies and that are attended by all.

It’s time to make history together

The challenge posed throughout this book is to develop the qualities that will make us all successful organizers. Playbook for Progressives is a call for Movement Building—building a Movement of social movements. My hope is that you will integrate these qualities into a strategy for transformative organizing. Transformative organizing works to structurally transform the system, transform the consciousness of the people being organized, and, in the process, transform the consciousness of the organizer. It is the backbone and the model of what we are fighting for and how we can succeed in that battle

The Movement we are seeking is only now coming into being. Though we all share a vision of a world beyond oppression, there are differences and contradictions between different peoples and between social movements—some because of political disagreements; some because of cultural, gender, class, and racial conflicts; and in other cases because the system has set us against each other. Given the class and race stratification and segregation of our society, people doing social justice work often identify with their particular cause and do not know each other or see themselves as part of a common movement. This is to the grave detriment of our organizing work.

In the present period of intensifying government repression, we need to develop relationships where people know each other by name and approach our work in coalitions, networks, alliances, and a united front as a life-and-death issue. If the police round up the most dedicated activists and organizers, it will be essential to have built broad and deep alliances with many forces in the city, region, and nation that can fight to free them from the custody of the police and the courts through mass action and first-rate legal defense. People fight for people they know, and we have to make a systematic effort to support each other’s causes, attend each other’s events, and fight for each other’s interests, as well as those we share in common.

Given the difficult conditions facing us and the vision we all share, I propose that the task for progressive organizers is to coalesce our disparate arenas of work into a broad Movement for Global Justice: an international united front against racism, the police state, ecological destruction, and war led by a strategic alliance of forces building bases on the ground, centered in working-class communities of color, and expanding to all classes and races in society.

We need to continue holding movement convergences and conferences on what to do about global warming, the mass incarceration of Black and Brown people, the growing attacks on women’s rights to control their own bodies, attacks on the very existence of LGBTQ peoples, the breaking of unions, the constant wars of occupation and terrorism against civilians, and the repression against movement building in the United States perpetrated under the “Homeland Security” banner.

Yes, these are difficult days. That is why the time for Transformative Organizing is now. More than ever, you and I and we are needed to organize for a global justice agenda and build a new Movement. We are all needed to answer the call.