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Posts tagged “Organizing”

Reflections on Care Work

Posted on April 21, 2013

The following piece offers notes on the place of care work in revolutionary organizing, compiled after a brief group study on care work, reproductive labor and prefigurative politics. 

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Reflections on Care Work
By Ba Jin

When militants talk about “care work,” the term is often left broad, vague, or undefined. It can mean many different things: talking about emotional stress with comrades, preparing meals for hundreds of people at a demonstration, changing a someone’s bedpan, taking your kid to the park, or taking someone else’s kid there for ten bucks an hour. I would define “care work” as labor that serves other human beings, and helps them survive and sustain themselves physically and emotionally. It can be done in private or in public, paid or unpaid. This piece offers a few thoughts on the role of care work in revolutionary organizing.

Part of a strategy, but not a substitute for one

Activists usually affirm the importance of care work in social movements. Without care work, they say, people burn out, and only the people with the resources/ability to get care elsewhere will join the movement. This is true. But if we stop the conversation there, we simply affirm the importance of care work in a general, moral sense. We still need to evaluate how care work can be performed within specific types of groups, and how caring can be best integrated with the other tactics a group does in the course of its activity. We need to go beyond asserting that “care work is revolutionary,” and start outlining how it can be revolutionary.

Take the example of food preparation: do small groups of activists cooking at their meetings help bring revolution about? How, concretely? If the answer is that it allows activists to sustain themselves and keep doing other work, then what is their other work? If it provides a model of new social relations that others can replicate, then how will the group judge if the model is spreading, and evaluate why it is or isn’t? And so on. In my experience, when groups don’t have clear answers to questions like these, it means they don’t have a strategy, and they’re substituting care work in place of one.

By “strategy” I mean the group’s best guess about its goal, what it will do to get there, and how it will evaluate its work along the way. As with any set of tactics, carrying out particular kinds of care work does not amount to a strategy. Simply feeding people every week can be just as aimless as smashing windows every time there is a demonstration. Groups that substitute care work for strategy can end up spinning their wheels, creating welcoming spaces and taking care of each other very compassionately, but with little effect in broader society. Because of this, I don’t think care work is inherently revolutionary by its very nature. Instead, I think it’s only revolutionary inasmuch as it contributes to a profound transformation of society (one aspect of which, for sure, is establishing new caring social institutions).

If we agree on this, then we are provided two different ways to think about, and implement, care work in revolutionary groups. First, care work is part of a group’s internal political culture, the manner in which it develops strategies and cooperates to carry them out. Care is part of how the group makes decisions, handles interpersonal conflicts, and keeps its members in good physical and emotional shape to keep doing political activity. Second, care work is also part of the group’s external political work, a component of the strategy that the group is testing in practice. Here care is integrated with other tactics, as part of the agitation, actions and events the group organizes in broader society. These two realms are closely related, but distinguishable.

Care within groups 

Care is an integral part of how any group sustains itself. When you check in with another member emotionally after contentious discussions, or help a member overcome his/her insecurities about writing or public speaking, you’re doing care work that sustains and develops the group. Without basic practices such as these, no revolutionary group would be able to survive. However, internal care work always takes place with certain limitations and challenges.

First, there are always concrete limits to what kinds of care a given group can provide. Most revolutionary groups in the U.S. today are pretty small, and revolutionaries must have a realistic assessment of the capacity of their group to care for its members. In some cases, members will have to accept sacrifices, like eating crappy snacks at meetings because nobody has time to cook or money to buy good stuff. In other cases, the group may have to send its members to outside resources that the group can’t provide itself, like connecting a member with a work injury to a cheap physical therapist. This doesn’t mean the group is discounting care work. It just means the group is providing care within the scope of its size and resources. Revolutionary groups should regularly evaluate what kinds of care are needed in order for the group to serve its purpose, compare this with the group’s capacity, and provide as much as possible to its members.

Second, much internal care work is part of intangible group “culture,” and is difficult to implement mechanically. When a member is absent for a while, is there another member who has a personal relationship with him/her, who can check in with him/her by phone or in person? Are all members developing a relationship with members’ kids, so everyone can take turns entertaining them when they get restless at meetings? These qualitative relationships can be nudged forward by group decisions, but they can’t be imposed by fiat. Sometimes specialized groups are appropriate for implementing care work—say, forming a committee to cook for meetings—but sometimes this can be awkward or bureaucratic. It can even be cultish, if it devolves into collectively managing member’s personal lives and emotions. A light-handed approach, such as pairing new members with a “mentor,” or making time for social hangouts after meetings, may help important relationships develop organically.

Third, groups must somehow strike a balance between rigorous and principled debate, and consideration for members’ emotional wellbeing. To evaluate and decide on strategies is an emotionally-charged, high stakes process. This is unavoidable. In order to develop a coherent analysis and strategy as a group, it’s necessary for members to challenge the holes in each other’s arguments, and highlight disagreements in order to resolve them. This process can be very challenging interpersonally—say, if two members have a romantic history with one another, or if a new member feels smacked down in the course of discussion by more experienced members.

Finding a way to manage this dynamic is one of the major challenges social movements face today. The left typically swings between the revolutionary party tradition, exemplified by Mao’s “Combat Liberalism,” and the consensus practices inherited from the 1980s. The former is an excellent guide to principled debate, but has almost nothing to say about feelings. The latter provides great ways to manage group dynamics, but often brushes over political differences for the sake of shallow consensus, and blurs together feelings and arguments in the course of discussion. Somewhere between these poles lies a new form of group praxis, which revolutionaries today must discover.

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Reflecting on #F23 – Time to Break with Routine

Posted on March 1, 2013

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Below is a critique of a recent anti-police march held in the South Bronx and Harlem; written by FNT members Madeleine and Nat Winn.

 

By Madeleine and Nat Winn

 

Last Sunday just over 100 activists gathered in the South Bronx to participate in an anti-police brutality march that eventually crossed over into Manhattan and later ended on 125th street in Harlem. We were told that this march, which was organized mainly by the The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), was supposed to be a more militant alternative to Al Sharpton’s “silent march” through Manhattan’s East Side last fall.

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Debates on Consciouness

Posted on January 31, 2013

The following series of writings were sparked by Mike Ely’s critique of an FNT flyer. The flyer, “Wildcats, Worker’s Power, and Lesson for Today,” is being distributed to striking bus drivers in NYC. The debates deal with questions of how to engage in popular struggles and what is the nature of revolutionary consciousness.

 

ISH:

Thanks Mike for a challenging piece. This gets to something that has been at the core of my own questions since re-engaging with the left in the wake of Occupy. I go to FNT meetings, and while I didn’t contribute to this leaflet, I thought it did I good job of trying to inspire workers toward more militant action than they might actually be conceiving by referring back to something that actually happened, was actually done by a previous generation of school bus drivers. And yet, I see your point, and I completely love the Kasama leaflet you refer to. So obviously the presumption here is that intersecting with workers engaged in actual struggle is a way to build solidarity, class identity, build toward a victory that inspires generalizing the struggle. I hear you saying that is a fundamentally flawed approach. To me passing out a flyer talking about revolution and communism makes a lot of sense in something like Occupy, given the issues and the people involved. I’m trying to imagine how that would work here, in a struggle that is much less politicized. I don’t mean this to sound flip, but are you suggesting something like “You Might Think You’re Just Trying to Save Your Job but You’re Really Starting on the Road to Revolution”? Or are you suggesting that intervening in these kind of workers struggles is poorly conceived?

………………………………………………

 

NPC:

I think this is an important question, and a very immediate, very pressing one for those of us who are doing workplace organizing. In most cities it also seems like much of the fresher, more vital workplace organizing is actually being done by groups that might also be categorized as “left communist” or syndicalist — with the rest mostly eaten up by the labor bureaucracy. With these political trends, I think it is a claim often leveled against them that they see workplace struggle as the be-all-end-all of organizing. This is somewhat enhanced by these trends themselves as they write about their own histories — syndicalists writing histories of revolutionary Spain, for example, emphasize the CNT but sort of ignore the immense number of affinity groups, community assemblies, social centers, libraries, free hospitals, peasants’ collectives/communes, independent armed brigades, etc. etc. that contributed to the revolutionary break — and most of whom were engaged in decidedly non-‘economist’ forms of agitation. Still, it’s something that is always a risk when you’re doing ANY kind of worplace organizing.But I want to problematize one of the claims made above:”Just to be clear: FNT is making a strong statement against the idea that we (as communists) have a central task to bring key revolutionary elements from outside people’s everyday experience.”I think this is unfair. Now, I admit, being from the west coast I don’t know as much about their organization or organizing styles, though I have read their website. From reading their materials, it does not at all seem like they fit into this category or that the statement above (from them, cited in the article) stands AGAINST the idea that one of our central tasks ought to be to bring revolutionary elements from outside people’s everyday experience.The issue here is twofold:

1. Saying that people DO often come to revolutionary or semi-revolutionary (or at the very least anti-capitalist) attitudes through workplace struggle and “everyday experience” is certainly correct. It’s clear that there is a latent rejection of the system, especially among the younger generations today. On the west coast, it literally seems like everyone under 30 who you talk to holds either SOME sort of “revolutionarY” view (though often a reactionary one) or a collapsist one. Either way, there is no real conception that the system as such can continue — there is a general understanding that another world is not possible, but INEVITABLE.

This does NOT mean that it’s immediately translated into a “good” anti-capitalism. It can just as easily turn into myths of techno-salvation, ecological apocalypse, or even fantasies of fascism. Particularly dangerous are the trends of “national anarchism” developing in certain cities, which argue for a racialized, decentralized form of “stateless” communitarianism, meshing elements of decolonial thought, bookchin-style libertarian municipalism, and national self-determination — but all of course resulting in something that is basically nazism by another name. Now it’s of course not that bad frequently. Many people have a very latent, very lite view of how “socialism would be better,” with socialism basically seen as some sort of social-democracy welfare state, and they think some large non-violent civil society “revolution” will be required to get there. All of these options are still far to the right of communist, revolutionary thinking — but they are still relevant leverages that exist, and which environmental and economic crisis are enhancing in people.

The difference, I guess, is that I do NOT think that groups like FNT are saying that this sort of internal, every-day or workplace-struggle experience is at all SUFFICIENT to make revolution or communist consciousness. It seems instead like they are pointing it out as an apt place to begin engagement with folks in a workplace–and that is honestly correct, it works very well to leverage these things in agitation, even if they are people’s negative “collapsist” views of the future.

At the same time, I of course agree that a lot of “external” elements are necessary — and I think the role of communists in workplace struggle is to act as a sort of enzyme, catalyzing contact between two previously segregated molecules (the workers’ inherent presumptions, often anticapialist of some sort, on one side, and specifically communist, revolutionary thought on the other).

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Friday, Dec. 7: Join Boots Riley from The Coup to Demand Justice for Browny

Posted on December 4, 2012

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JUSTICE FOR BROWNY!

Friday, December 7, 6PM

61st and Market, March to the 19th District

Join FREE THE STREETS, the family of Derrick BROWNY Flynn and Boots Riley from THE COUP to demand JUSTICE FOR BROWNY, executed by the 19th District of the PPD.

UNITE THE BLOCKS! NO MORE COPS! FREE THE STREETS!

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Unite the Blocks, No More Cops!

Posted on November 30, 2012

Unite the Blocks - No More Cops

Fighting Police Oppression In West Philly

On November 11th, 2012, in the late hours of a Sunday night, Philadelphia Police from the 19th District shot to death 35-year-old bicyclist Derrick “Browny” Flynn.

This was at 61st and Market Street, on the corner of a black working-class neighborhood in West Philly. In a newspaper account the next day police claimed that “the suspect” (his name was not given) had brandished a gun after they stopped him for questioning, resulting in a “violent struggle” and 3 shots from the police that ended Flynn’s life. If Flynn hypothetically did have a gun, why would the police engage him in a “violent struggle,” especially since that is against procedure? Why was Flynn stopped in the first place?

Another nameless black man shot dead by the PPD.

Another all too vague narrative to justify it.

As usual, the victim of police violence is painted as the epitome of criminality. Of course he had a long rap sheet, with convictions for “drug possession, robbery, assault, theft.” Of course he was a “violent drug dealer.” In the eyes of ruling class society, Derrick Flynn was of the criminal class, that class condemned on sight.

Two weeks later, during a protest at the 19th District police station, when the District’s commanding officer, Capt. Joseph Bologna, was asked by Flynn’s sister, Tasha, why her brother was killed, Bologna responded with, “things happen.”

It is not enough for the police to take Flynn’s life by force; they also have the power to devalue it. Revolutionary intellectual Frantz Fanon argued that the modern world is a world cut into two categories of people: those who are considered to be of human value and those who are pushed outside its realm. The police help establish the dividing line between these two worlds through their direct and frequent use of violence.  This happens in the context of the most mundane of everyday activities—while walking down the street, while shopping at the store, while driving, while listening to loud music, etc. For Derrick Flynn, it was while riding a bike.

Justice for Browny!

After reading about the police shooting a few days after it happened, I traveled with other members of the Philadelphia-based radical organization Free the Streets (FTS) to the location to see if something more could be learned. We found a small memorial at the site where the still nameless “suspect” was said to have died, and quickly ran into his relatives and friends there, listening to a very different story from the one spread by the police. We learned that “Browny” was widely respected in his community at the time, and that a lot of people were angry at the police for killing him. Over the course of a week of flyering and postering in the neighborhood, we met several witnesses who described the shooting to us not as a “violent struggle,” but as an execution: with a black cop ordering a white cop to shoot Flynn as he lay wounded and handcuffed on the ground.

Free the streets!

Free the streets!

In this climate of heightened frustration with the police, FTS along with friends and family of Derrick Flynn organized a community rally on Friday, November 23rd, at the site of his death. The rally was very rowdy and energetic, starting off with 25 people and quickly growing to about 60 as protesters decided to take the streets (without a permit), chanting “No Justice, No Peace, Fuck the Police” and “Unite the Blocks, No More Cops.”

We marched in the direction of two patrol cars that were parked at the intersection of 60th and Market. Catching the police off-guard, the large crowd of protesters was quickly able to block off the busy intersection. At this point several community residents from the protest went up to the parked patrol cars and began yelling and taunting the nervous-looking police inside them. This momentary rupture of power relations of about 20 minutes was soon dispersed when around 6 other patrol cars swarmed the intersection, pulled out their extendable steel batons, and very aggressively tried to shove us onto the sidewalk. A substantial number of protesters tried to hold down the intersection, some even threw our flyers at the police. After we were expelled from the intersection, but still on the street, we marched around the block with the police following. We came back to 61st and Market and concluded the night with some fiery speeches and more defiant verbal exchanges with police and now Civil Affairs. Tensions were very high. If the police had tried to brutalize or arrest even one person that night, the protest could have very easily exploded into a riot.

This street protest was not a standard leftist/activist protest. It was for the most part composed of different layers of the working-class neighborhood it took place in. Derrick Flynn’s sisters and cousins in particular led the march and were the most radical and outspoken. There were also young nieces and nephews who got on the bullhorn and let the police know exactly how they felt about their uncle being murdered. Then there was the lumpen-proletariats, mostly men in their late teens and mid to late twenties, who attentively followed the protesters from the sidewalks and kept a stern eye on the police. The handful of white folks and Latinos there came with the FTS crew. If, as we stated earlier, the modern world is characterized by a superstructural division that is imposed and maintained by the police over society as a whole, then the emergence of a revolutionary challenge to the common police enemy unifies the disparate layers of the working-class.

No justice, no peace!

60th and Market Street, the site of Derrick Flynn’s death.

Another rally and march was organized on Sunday Nov. 25th, drawing only about 15 protesters, again overwhelmingly community residents and relatives of Browny. This time the police anticipated us. Civil Affairs officers showed up right away, counseling family members about how to file a police complaint, assuring them that an Internal Affairs investigation is underway. Unconvinced by the prospects of waiting for a legal outcome, Flynn’s relatives questioned why they had not yet been contacted by internal affairs investigators. As our small formation took the streets and marched 6 blocks to the 19th District police station, it became clear that the police had shifted their strategy from two night before. There was not one squad car in sight. Rather than reacting belligerently to a small group, it is much more effective for the police to use Civil Affairs to try to contain the struggle within a legal and bureaucratic framework.

Our Strategy Is in the Streets

After protesters verbally confronted several officers that were waiting for them in front of the police station, FTS presented a list of demands, including a demand to release the forensic and autopsy reports and another to identity all officers involved in the shooting. We don’t expect the police to meet these simple demands. At a mass meeting FTS held after the march, which civil affairs followed us to, some older activists dismissed the protests as little more than hysterical mobs and argued that we should instead wage a struggle in the courts. But Browny’s relatives and FTS contended that our strategy is in the streets, and that the investigation and legal process is the job of the lawyer that Tasha Flynn hired. Frustrated with this rejection of reformism, these older activists left the meeting, giving us the chance to have a much more productive discussion.

The struggle against the police will not go away.  Police violence will only intensify as the economy spirals downward.  In Philadelphia it will also intensify as the government disintegrates its public school system and increasingly cuts other public resources. Schools, community centers, libraries, swimming pools, and after-school programs here are being replaced with repressive policies like stop-and-frisk, the youth curfew, a new youth “study” (detention) center and more prisons. The city government is already planning on spending 200 million to construct a new police headquarters at 46th and Market, in the middle of a black working-class neighborhood. As the people of Philadelphia find themselves with less employment, less community institutions, less public services, and more prisons and police, they will only become  more rebellious.

— by ARTURO
Photos courtesy of FREE THE STREETS

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FIRE NEXT TIME is a revolutionary network on the East Coast of the United States. We believe our central task is to seek out the revolutionary elements of people’s everyday experiences, to support and push this self-activity in ever more radical directions. At the same time, we must ruthlessly critique everything that holds it back: both the racist, sexist, reactionary elements within it, and the liberals and self-appointed leaders who co-opt it, such as politicians, nonprofit staff, and union bureaucrats.

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