OUR FUTURE IS NOT YOURS TO LEVERAGE
AS I SIT DOWN TO DRAFT THE CONCLUSION TO THIS BOOK IN November 2015, the Fight for $15 is on what is reported to be its largest strike yet, with actions in what the spokespeople at Service Employees International Union say is five hundred cities. On Twitter, I am watching people I’ve met through my reporting joining together in solidarity. Rasheen Aldridge is on the picket line in St. Louis holding a Black Lives Matter sign, as activists proclaim, “Our struggles are connected, we must love and support each other!” In North Carolina, protesters join hands and hold up signs that connect the Fight for $15 to the movement for black lives and to the immigration reform movement. In Minneapolis, strikers and Black Lives Matter activists flood into City Hall, demanding $15 an hour, paid sick days, and fair scheduling.
The day before, young people from Million Hoodies, 350.org, and United We Dream came together in Washington, DC, under the banner of “Our Generation, Our Choice,” blocking traffic outside of the White House and demanding attention from Congress to their movements. The organizers of the march wrote, of their reasons for acting, “Too often, both parties put the demands of big money over the hopes of real people. Despite the campaign rhetoric and the noise of the 24-hour news cycle, most Americans will tell you that they think our political system is broken.” They noted, “Now our movements are starting to come together to begin to speak with one voice.”1
In Columbia, Missouri, Diamond Latchison has joined black students at the University of Missouri as their protests against racist actions at their university succeed, through a strike by the football team, in forcing out its president, Tim Wolfe. On 110 college campuses around the country, a Million Students March has kicked off, calling for free college, the forgiveness of existing student debt, and better-paying jobs on campus. On different campuses, students are also calling for justice for adjunct professors, who are paid by the class rather than a full-time salary, and tying their march to the demands of the Missouri students. And then there are the Walmart workers, who are beginning a fifteen-day “Fast for $15” in the run-up to their now annual Black Friday protests. Tyfani Faulkner plans to take her fast to Alice Walton’s Manhattan doorstep and to Hillary Clinton’s campaign office.2
All of this is happening almost exactly a year before the 2016 presidential election, which has already been shaken up by the “troublemakers”—those who “get in trouble, good trouble, necessary trouble,” as Representative John Lewis (D-GA) put it, inspiring the title for this book. Bernie Sanders’s very viability as a presidential candidate is largely due to successive movements making his issues mainstream and making “socialism” a less scary word. Although he stumbled at first when he was interrupted by Black Lives Matter protesters, including Ciara Taylor, at a Netroots Nation presidential forum, he has since incorporated the movement’s demands into his platform. He has introduced a bill that would eliminate private prisons—an issue on which the Dream Defenders have spent a lot of time since their founding. Hillary Clinton, once a cheerleader of “tough-on-crime” policies and a Walmart board member, has called for reversing the tide of mass incarceration and pursuing a $12 national minimum wage; according to an SEIU spokesperson, she reached out to them about speaking to the Fight for $15 national conference.
The troublemakers on all these fronts are making their influence felt in every aspect of American politics. The very first question at the Republican primary debate that took place on November 10 acknowledged the fast-food workers outside of the Wisconsin theater where the candidates stood, and asked them if they supported a $15 minimum wage.
When even billionaire Donald Trump, riding a wave of fervor for his “outsider” candidacy and delivering speeches peppered with racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric, must answer to minimum-wage workers, something is shifting. Trump still held the power in that equation—he rejected the workers’ demands for a raise—but the voices clamoring outside would not be silent, and as the campaign progresses, more and more protesters are beginning to disrupt Trump’s events. In Chicago in March 2016, students at the University of Illinois at Chicago, organizers with Black Lives Matter, Assata’s Daughters, and other movements for black lives groups, union members, most of them black or Latino, planned a protest that led Trump to cancel his rally. The movements have resisted lining up behind one candidate or another, instead choosing the outsider strategy of making so much noise that their demands are impossible to ignore.3
But during an election season in which pricey political ads blaring negativity dominate the airwaves, it’s not enough to try to make more noise than the presidential candidates and the cable news pundits. The activists who recognize that American democracy has failed them are trying to change the conversation altogether. They are disrupting business as usual to make it clear that we are facing critical, even existential issues, and that capitalism is no longer the future.
In this book, we have followed the growth of a new movement, one that began with opposition to the banks but then ignited the sparks of a different labor movement and made uncompromising demands for racial justice. We have seen the potential for new radical ideas in mainstream circles, and understood that change is not going to come through violence, but through the growth and spread of ideas from movement to movement, person to person, among those who are willing to take risks in an effort to make those ideas come true. It is easy to think that all of the movements in this book are just oppositional, but many of them are putting forward transformational ideas that are beginning to point the way toward a new economy and a more equal country.
In the public spaces that became home to the various occupations, in the homes held against the sheriffs, in the People’s Assembly in Ferguson, in the You Are Never Alone medical clinic after Superstorm Sandy, we saw a movement that was simultaneously against and for: that named an enemy, a corrupt political system run by and for the “one percent,” and also demonstrated in a very real way what it wanted. The spaces themselves became the first demand—but it wasn’t just about occupying a space for the sake of it. Instead, these occupied spaces offered opportunities to try out a better future. The movements sought to address people’s immediate needs, but in the cracks left by the failure of the financial system and electoral politics, they began to consider bigger goals, to envision what real democracy might look like.
Historian Michael Kazin argued that the tragedy of the 1960s New Left was that it “discredited the old order without laying the political foundation for a new one.” If that is true, then it is more important than ever that today’s movements have a vision for the society that they want to see. George Goehl of National People’s Action suggested that the failure of activism in the early days after the financial crisis was that there were few people publicly putting forth an idea of what an alternative to “banks-got-bailed-out-we-got-sold-out” might look like. There were exceptions—the workers at Republic Windows and Doors, on their victory tour, began to think about running the factory themselves, and now, years later, they are the owners of New Era Windows, a worker cooperative in which they are all the bosses. In early 2016, they finally got a settlement that would bring them the back pay they’ve been waiting on for seven years.4
New Era Windows is just one business, employing just seventeen people, but it is an instructive example of the power shift that the troublemakers are imagining. Rather than asking benevolent leaders for a gift, they are envisioning a world in which power—political and economic power, but also the relatively private power of the workplace—is democratically distributed. To really address inequality requires nothing less.
In response, there is already backlash. Elected officials continue to hack away at budgets, and pundits wag their fingers about impolite protesters, but there will also be attempts to silence the movements with small gifts: Hillary Clinton’s proposed $12 an hour minimum wage, perhaps, or Walmart’s even smaller raise for its full-time workers; Obama’s decision to cut back the handouts of military gear to police departments, or cities requiring police to wear body cameras. At best, Democrats promise a return to the New Deal social order, where incomes were relatively equal, and where détente in the form of the forty-hour workweek reigned. Why aren’t you satisfied? the pundits will ask. But as the Occupy Sandy activists knew, charity maintains power relations as they are; a world based on solidarity demands that something change, and yes, it will mean that those at the top must give something up.
National People’s Action is planning for big changes. Over the fall and winter of 2012, around 5,000 members of its affiliate organizations contributed to the process of creating a “long-term agenda.” They took a page from the long-term agenda of businessmen who opposed the New Deal, and who spent decades building institutions in opposition to it that bore fruit in the inequality to which we have returned—which some call the “New Gilded Age.” NPA, says director George Goehl, did a kind of deep political analysis, something that community organizations like theirs had not really done before. It was a process, he says, of “moving from checkers to chess,” from the short-term victories that wealthy philanthropists are willing to support to “next generation fights” that will advance the NPA’s long-term goals: democratic control of the economy, racial justice, ecological sustainability, and real democracy. “Everybody knows that is not in our near future,” he says, but the big ideas, the utopian end goals, are what make the smaller fights feel worth it.
Alexis Goldstein agrees, shrugging off the persistent calls for more “reasonable” demands from Occupy and the other movements, the demands that they limit themselves to voting for one of the two major parties. “I just don’t think people are motivated to do something so extreme with such a mediocre platform of change,” she says. To capture the attention of the people, these movements are intentionally thinking big and aiming high.
The next challenge for the movements will be creating organizations that last, that suit the needs of twenty-first-century troublemakers, that can be flexible and still enduring, that can overlap and connect up with one another and create more long-term plans for the future they want to see. “The reality is that we can’t change the world without institutions that are democratically accountable to the movement and that have real power,” Nick Espinosa says. “I think the challenge of our generation is to reinvent what institutions mean, and create new versions of institutions that have failed movements in the past, that are truly democratic, and that stick to our values, that fight for the things we believe in.”
Alicia Garza, in addition to Black Lives Matter, helped found Left-Roots, an organization that she says originated in the realization that philanthropy and single-issue nonprofits were not going to create freedom. It was time, she said, to stop tinkering around the edges and propose something new.
To Espinosa and his Occupy Homes Minnesota collaborator Cat Salonek, the small individual victories—one home at a time, in some cases—serve as a way to bring people together, to expand the reaches of the movement. “Thinking about movement as a tidal wave, and we’re the tidal pool, we hold that water,” Salonek says. “After Occupy Wall Street or after Black Lives Matter, that tidal wave washes the nation and then goes back out and we try to contain as much of that as we can. We train and we develop, and when the next wave comes, we’re that much bigger and that much stronger, and we can push it so much further and capture more as it washes back out.”
It is the building from small demands to transformative demands that has become even more obvious after Occupy, which famously issued no demands. What many people missed was that the occupied spaces—from the Capitol in Wisconsin to Liberty Plaza and Oscar Grant Plaza to the Florida Capitol and beyond—brought people together and helped them to see that their problems were not personal, but political, an echo of the consciousness-raising groups of the feminist movement. Moving from the personal to the structural helped people move from frustration to action. Those spaces permitted the growth of many demands, from an end to stop-and-frisk to stronger bank regulation to stopping a foreclosure to envisioning a future beyond capitalism. The job of these movements going forward, Shabnam Bashiri says, will be to connect those pieces to one another, to make sure that movements that have built off of one another remain in solidarity with one another.
In the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy, Yotam Marom begins to put ideas about building institutions into action. In a moment when the country seems to be rocketing from one crisis to another, the organizations that he sees forming all seem to have certain things in common. “We have a big-picture vision, we want to have a real meaningful social transformation, we want to have an entirely new set of institutions that meet people’s needs, we’re going to move in that direction,” he says. The Wildfire Project, which was founded in January 2013 in the Rockaways, was born out of that understanding and a desire to give these different groups, which were emerging from crisis moments—from Occupy Homes to the Dream Defenders—political and action training that would give them a shared language and understanding and create a network through which they could be in solidarity with one another. The training, he says, is designed to strengthen the groups to be as powerful as they can be, so that they will be able to last long enough to win their fights. But what’s really exciting to him is that when they have meetings that bring different groups together, sparks fly. As he points out, when the energy is there, it doesn’t take that many people to put together a massive action, especially if you’re moving at the speed of social media.
The key to understanding how to make change is to understand how power operates. Being able to donate millions to a single candidate is power, but so is shutting down the busiest shopping district in Chicago on the busiest shopping day of the year, as activists did in 2015 to protest the police shooting of Laquan McDonald. The action is estimated to have cost retailers 25 to 50 percent of their sales that day. Refusing, collectively, to pay millions of dollars in debt, is also power, as is closing the schools in Detroit for days in “sick-out” protests in a kind of informal strike against abysmal conditions, as teachers did in early 2016 to force out the emergency manager appointed by the governor. Disruption is power when it is used strategically.5
This kind of power analysis is an awareness that used to be called “class-consciousness.” It has become distinctly unfashionable to say such things, but that does not make it less true; in fact, in the twenty-first century of globalized inequality, it is perhaps more true than ever. Class is not simply one of a list of possible identity categories. It is a relation of power that is shaped in part by race; in part by gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity; and by immigration status, education, and even region. In the 1960s, centrifugal social forces pulled movements apart, largely on the basis of what gets derisively termed “identity politics,” and movements splintered; in response, elites opened up a few spaces for people of color, for women, and for queer and transgender people at the same time as broader inequality spiraled out of control. Having a few representatives at the top was not enough; a few more women CEOs have not changed the fact that the face of poverty in America is largely a woman’s face. We elected the first black president, and got worse material conditions for the majority of black people.6
In this moment, the reverse is happening. Activists are reconnecting their struggles, thinking intersectionally about their problems, and understanding that they have much to learn from one another. BYP 100 puts out an economic justice “Agenda to Build Black Futures”; among other things, it calls for putting greater value on women’s work. The Green Tea Coalition joins with the Sierra Club to fight for solar power. Barbara Smalley-McMahan goes to Ferguson to join a Moral Monday there. Housing activism in Buffalo turns into a challenge to the energy companies’ wealth from fossil fuels.
It will be a struggle to maintain these coalitions. The easiest way to break up the momentum of the new movements will be to turn them against one another, to offer a victory for one group in order to demobilize them. Divide and conquer has worked to divide the labor movement from itself for decades, as the fight over the Keystone XL Pipeline reminded us. Some unions may continue to lobby for the short-term goal of jobs in today’s crisis moment, while failing to push for the long-term goal of a livable planet for all. It is not surprising that the divide-and-conquer strategy often works, since short-term thinking has been the ruling ideology for so long, from “drill, baby, drill” to the logic of the credit default swap.
There will be a struggle, too, to avoid negative solidarity, the dark side of populism presented by Donald Trump, Scott Walker, and others who offer scapegoats to blame rather than real solutions. The backlash to Black Lives Matter has been instructive: pro-Confederate flag rallies, church burnings, and racist epithets abound, as does the more insidious murmur of “all lives matter,” a quiet rebuke to the idea that any group of Americans might have anything in particular to be angry about.
The way to fight these inevitable divisions is twofold. First, it is important for activists to maintain that larger vision of a better world, one that is worth fighting for. Second, it is important to continue to point the finger at those who are responsible—the titans of finance and oil, and the budget-slashing politicians from both parties. Movements need not, as Stephen Lerner notes, worry about making themselves universally beloved—asking nicely is not the way to bring about change. There will inevitably be disagreements over tactics, but they should not be confused with disputes over goals. The diversity of what Yotam Marom and others simply call “the movement” is its strength. Its horizontal structures allow many people to be moving at once, in different directions—but all of their targets wind up being the same political and economic system that has disempowered them all for so long. There will be, inevitably, compromises, but they should be compromises that advance the movement rather than disband it. Perfection is not possible, although disingenuous critics will always demand it, but a clear vision is essential.
Horizontalism is itself a response to inequality: from Occupy’s “leaderlessness” to what Alicia Garza calls the “leader-full” style of Black Lives Matter, the refusal to have a “movement elite” is a response to the deep desire for real democracy that so many Americans feel has been denied them. But those horizontal structures can mask power differentials and allow individuals to speak for a movement to which they are not accountable. The challenge for the troublemakers, as they create new institutions, will be to make sure they find ways to be accountable to one another, while preserving the flexibility and openness that have made their movement so big and so strong.
To Nick Espinosa, it is not a choice. “For people like me, people who are directly impacted by this financial crisis, whose families are one check away from foreclosure, maybe one check away from homelessness, there’s a sense of urgency that hasn’t gone away,” he says. “And so to me the future of the hopes that were thrust onto our shoulders, whether or not we wanted them, is in those communities fighting for their basic human needs and being politicized around those needs. We can’t afford to be cynical.”
It has become a cliché to cite Frederick Douglass’s famed speech—“Power concedes nothing without a demand”—but it remains true all the same. I have focused on the historical context for today’s movements in this book in part to remind us that things were not always this way, and in part to provide a better understanding of just what today’s movements are up against. From the early enslavers to the perpetrators of Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, there has been an incredible amount of power expended in order to consolidate power in a few hands. There is no “golden age” for us to return to, no period of American history to which a few tweaks and regulations will restore us. The wealthy never accepted the New Deal, but started moving to dismantle it nearly as soon as it passed. They have employed a broad range of strategies, from redlining to systematic union-busting to outsourcing to outright violence, to break any collective power that the majority of Americans ever possessed. To challenge them will take a broad range of tactics, which in turn will have to be adjusted and scrapped and revised as they are countered by those in power.7
All of this will have to happen in a changing world, where not only the energy sector, responding to climate change, is shifting, but the nature of work itself. The so-called “sharing economy,” which has offloaded the costs of doing business onto the drivers of Uber cars, the owners of AirBNB homes, and the TaskRabbits who compile a living gig by gig, piece by piece, is one vision for the future. Another is a future where more of even those jobs are done by robots. As Peter Frase argues, the future of technology is not inevitable, but is itself a political question: what our future looks like depends on who has power in the present. It is why many of the troublemakers, from Saket Soni of the National Guestworker Alliance to NPA to BYP 100 to the occupiers, have turned themselves to the question of the future of work, and considered solutions ranging from worker cooperatives to shorter working hours to a universal basic income. The financial crisis moment may have passed, but changing technology affords new opportunities to put forth big ideas.
Instead of waiting for the world to change or being caught and shocked when it does, the troublemakers are hoping to shape that change. They are working not just to raise a minimum wage here, get a better contract there, and ban fracking somewhere else, but working to get at the root of the structures of our society. On the campaign trail in 2015 and 2016, Bernie Sanders called for a “political revolution,” a movement that could take the country back from the billionaire class. But that revolution has been taking place—and will continue to take place, if it is to succeed—outside of a presidential election or any other election. It will take place in the streets and in homes and, yes, even on the Internet, where people are busy trying to figure out what a society that cares about people looks like. We have a world now that is structured around inequality—all different kinds of inequality—and changing it will require that we see each other differently. The best parts of today’s movements, like the best parts of yesterday’s, historian Robin D. G. Kelley notes, “find ways to love each other differently so that we eventually can transform the state into a structure that’s in service of the people.”
What, ask the new radicals, would that look like? If they get their way, there will be more public schools and universities, health care for all and infrastructure designed to withstand climate change, and jobs that pay a real living wage and that allow time off to spend with family and friends, or just relaxing. There will be housing that is accessible and affordable, and no one will lose their home for debts. Financiers, retail titans, and oil barons will no longer dictate policy. There will be no need for police.
It is toward that end that today’s troublemakers are building and organizing. Sometimes they are doing so in front of the cameras—making headlines, shaping the conversation—and other times they are quieter, back in their tide pools, building something stronger, and waiting for the next wave. Over and over, as I interviewed people for this book, they told me, “We can’t go back.” Something had fundamentally changed for them, and it had made it impossible for them to imagine simply returning to their previous lives. And so they continue to build, and prepare, and expand.
Movements do not build in a straight line, climbing inevitably toward success. There are bursts of activity, and there are mistakes and moments when all seems quiet. Sitting in her office in Seattle’s gleaming, modern City Hall last spring, Kshama Sawant told me, with a knowing smile, “If we miss the potential of a moment because we are not consciously recognizing it and building on it, there will be other moments, there’s no question. But why lose the moment that’s in front of us?”
It is up to those of us who have not yet taken action to decide if we want a more equal, a more just country. If we do, we may just have to make some trouble to bring it about.