Friends,
I am not sure if
the National Campaign for Nonviolent Resistance is an “Institution for Revolt,”
but we do take the risks of peace and speak truth to power. We thank John
Lewis and the others who are boycotting the Inauguration. However, NCNR
will be there to say no to militarism, racism, income inequality and climate
chaos. Join us at 10 AM at the Union Station food court to help organize
a direct action. We hope to convince a police officer to deliver our
petition to the new president.
Kagiso, Max
Monday, January 16, 2017
Building
the Institutions for Revolt
Politics is a game of fear. Those
who do not have the ability to make power elites afraid do not succeed. All of
the movements that opened up the democratic space in America—the abolitionists,
the suffragists, the labor movement, the communists, the socialists, the
anarchists and the civil rights movement—developed a critical mass and
militancy that forced the centers of power to respond. The platitudes about
justice, equality and democracy are just that. Only when power becomes worried
about its survival does it react. Appealing to its better nature is useless. It
doesn’t have one.
We once had within our capitalist
democracy liberal institutions—the press, labor unions, third political
parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public
universities and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party—that were capable of
responding to outside pressure from movements. They did so imperfectly. They
provided only enough reforms to save the capitalist system from widespread
unrest or, with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, from revolution. They
never addressed white supremacy and institutional racism or the cruelty that is
endemic to capitalism. But they had the ability to address and ameliorate the
suffering of working men and women.
These liberal institutions—I
spend 248 pages in my book “Death of the Liberal Class” explaining how this
happened—collapsed under sustained assault during the past 40 years of
corporate power. They exist now only in name. They are props in the democratic
facade. Liberal nonprofits, from MoveOn to the Sierra Club, are no better.
They are pathetic appendages to the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party,
as the community organizer Michael Gecan said, is not a functioning political
party but “a permanent mobilization.” It is propped up with corporate money and
by a hyperventilating media machine. It practices political coronations and
manipulates voters, who have no real say in party politics. There are, as the
political philosopher Sheldon Wolin reminded
us, no institutions left in America that can authentically be called
democratic.
But, even more ominously, the
militant movements that were the real engines of democratic change have been
obliterated by the multi-pronged assault of communist witch hunts and
McCarthyism, along with deindustrialization, a slew of anti-labor laws and
deregulation, and corporate seizure of our public and private institutions.
This has left us nearly defenseless.
The corporate state ignores the
suffering of the majority of Americans. It rams through policies that make the
suffering worse. This is about to get turbocharged under Donald Trump.
Institutions, the courts among them, that once were able to check the excesses
of power are slavish subsidiaries of corporate power. And the most prescient
critics of corporate power—Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader and others—have been
blacklisted and locked out by corporate media, including a public broadcasting
system that depends on corporate money.
We will have to build movements
and, most importantly, new, parallel institutions that challenge the hegemony
of corporate power. It will not be easy. It will take time. We must not accept
foundation money and grants from established institutions that seek to curtail
the radical process of reconstituting society. Trusting in the system, and
especially the Democratic Party, to carry out reform and wrest back our
democracy ensures our enslavement.
“Power is organized people and
organized money,” Gecan told me when I interviewed him in New York recently. “Most activists
stress organized people and forget organized money. As organizers, we stress
both.”
“We think the issues are, in a
sense, the easy part,” said Gecan, who is the co-director of the Industrial Areas
Foundation, the largest network of community-based organizations
in the United States. He is also the author of “Going Public: An Organizer’s Guide to Citizen Action.”
“When we go to a place like East Brooklyn, or South Bronx, or the west side of
Chicago, you can take a ride around the neighborhood and see many of the issues
right up front. What we can’t see is—is there a fabric of relationships among
institutions and leaders in those areas? We spend the first year, or two, or
three, building that. Identifying leaders. Identifying institutions that are
actually grounded in those communities. Doing training with leaders. Raising
money so that the organization doesn’t run out of money right at the start.”
“We don’t take government money,”
he said. “We want independence. We want ownership. We want people to have skin
in the game. We want people to be able to walk away from any situation they
want to, to confront anyone they want to, without worrying about having their
budget being slashed or eliminated. So we stress both. Organized people and
organized money is essentially building the foundation of the organization
first. And then, once that’s fairly solid, we begin identifying issues through
a real, deliberate process of house meetings, individual meetings, soliciting
to people. And not just doing a poll in the community. [We find out] what do
you care about? What are you concerned about? By asking people what they are
concerned about and are they willing to do something about it.”
This process of institution
building permits organizers and activists to eventually pit power against
power.
“The decision-making in those
situations is not about merit, how nice you are, or how deep the need is,”
Gecan said. “It’s about do you have enough power to compel a reaction from the
state or a reaction from the corporate sector. When people say what are you
building around, I say we’re building around power. People who understand power
tend to have the patience to build a base, do the training, raise the money, so
when they go into action they surprise people.”
The corporate press echoes the
pronouncements of the power elites. It is blind to the undercurrents and moods
of the wider society. It did not anticipate the election of Trump any more than
it did the financial crash in 2008. It does not report on the lives of ordinary
men and women. It shuts out their voices and renders them invisible. And
it—like the power structure—will be among the last to know that the bankrupt
social and political systems that sustain it are collapsing. Once the ruling
ideology, in our case neoliberalism, is understood by the public as a tool
for corporate and oligarchic pillage, coercion is all the state has left.
I asked Gecan what
characteristics he looks for in identifying leaders. “Anger,” he shot back.
“It’s not hot anger. It’s not rhetorical anger. It’s not the ability to give a
speech. It’s deep anger that comes from grief. People in the community who look
at their children, look at their schools, look at their blocks, and they
grieve. They feel the loss of that. Often, those people are not the best
speaker or the best-known people in the community. But they’re very deep. They
have great relationships with other people. And they can build trust with other
people because they’re not self-promotional. They’re about what the issues are
in the community. So we look for anger. We look for the pilot light of
leadership. It’s always there. It’s always burning. Good leaders know to turn
it up and down depending on the circumstance.”
If we are to succeed we will have
to make alliances with people and groups whose professed political stances are
different from ours and at times unpalatable to us. We will have to shed our
ideological purity. Saul Alinsky,
whose successor, Ed Chambers, was Gecan’s mentor, argued that the
ideological rigidity of the left—something epitomized in identity politics and
political correctness—effectively severed it from the lives of working men and
women. This was especially true during the Vietnam War when college students
led the anti-war protests and the sons of the working class did the fighting
and dying in Vietnam. But it is true today as liberals and the left dismiss
Trump supporters as irredeemable racists and bigots and ignore their feelings
of betrayal and very real suffering. Condemning those who support Trump is
political suicide. Alinsky detested such moral litmus tests. He insisted that
there were “no permanent enemies, no permanent allies, only permanent
interests.”
“We have to listen to people
unlike ourselves,” Gecan said, observing that this will be achieved not through
the internet but through face-to-face relationships. “And once we’ve built a
relationship we can agitate them and be willing to be agitated by them.”
The homogenization of culture in
the wake of the death of the local press and local civic, church and other
groups has played a large part in our disempowerment, Gecan argues. We have
lost connection with those around us. We do not fully understand the corporate
structures of power that wreak havoc with our lives both nationally and in our
communities. And this is by the design of the corporate state.
“Over seventy-five years the
process of community dissolution that took place in Back of the Yards has been
mirrored in thousands of U.S. communities,” Gecan wrote of Alinsky’s first
community organization, Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, founded in 1939
in Chicago. “Everywhere the tightly-knit worlds of a dozen or so blocks—where
workplace, church, neighborhood, recreation, tavern, and political affiliation
were all deeply entwined—have given way to exurban enclaves, long commutes,
gathered congregations, matchmaker websites, and fitness clubs filled with
customers who don’t know one another. A world where local news was critically
important and closely followed—often delivered by local publishers and
reporters and passed along by word of mouth—has been replaced by the constant
flow of real and fake news arriving through social media. A world of physically
imposing and present institutions and organizations has morphed into a culture
of global economic dynamics and fitful national mobilizations built around charismatic
figures.”
“You have to organize who is in
front of you,” Gecan said. “Not who used to be in front of you. In places like
Chicago, Cleveland or Baltimore, the congregation used to be very robust.
Congregations that were strong are weaker. We’re still organizing with them but
still looking at different institutions. Schools are institutions. They’re more
complicated, but they’re institutions in those neighborhoods. We’re recruiting
schools in many places; sometimes it’s housing groups. Sometimes we build new
institutions called East Brooklyn Congregations or United Power for Action and
Justice. We’re recruiting the best of the existing, we’re working with the
existing to reconnect with people and expand. And we find new institutions. It
has to be institutional in some way.”
Gecan concedes that America’s
future under a Trump presidency, and amid democratic institutions’ collapse and
climate change, is bleak. But he warned against falling into despair or apathy.
“In 1980 in New York, all the
liberal establishment, the entire establishment, was saying New York would
never be as strong as it once was,” he said. “It was called benign neglect.
They wrote off parts of New York permanently in their minds.” But community
groups, including Brooklyn Congregations, which built 5,000 low-income homes,
organized to save themselves.
“Our organizations and our
leaders simply didn’t accept that judgment from the elites,” Gecan said.
“Things are tough, hard, but we’re going to build an organization. We’re going
to identify things we can correct and correct them—with government if we can,
or without it. We’ll raise our own money. We’ll figure out our housing
strategy. We’ll hire our own developer and general manager. It’s about being
more flexible and plastic about solutions. It’s not relying on what the state
or market says is possible. It’s creating your own options.”
Institution building is possible
only if you “engage institutions or create newer and better ones—whether it’s
churches or civic unions,” he said. Without these, the power in the other two
sectors—corporate and governmental—dominates.
The state, he said, has learned
how to manipulate familiar protest rituals and render them impotent. He
dismisses as meaningless political theater the kind of boutique activism in
which demonstrators coordinate and even choreograph protests with the police.
Activists spend a few hours, maybe a night, in jail and then assume they have
credentials as dissidents. Gecan called these “fake arrests.” “Everyone looks
like they’ve had an action,” he said. “They haven’t.”
He called the choreographed
protests sterile re-enactments of the protests of the 1960s. Genuine protest,
he said, has to defy the rules. It cannot be predicable. It has to disrupt
power. It has to surprise those in authority. And these kinds of protests are
greeted with anger by the state.
No movement will survive, he
said, unless it is built on the foundation of deep community relationships.
Organizers must learn to listen, even to those who do not agree with them. Only
then are organization and active resistance possible.
“Three
things have to be happening in great organizations: people have to be relating,
people have to be learning, people have to be acting,” he said. “In many
religious circles, there’s some learning going on, there’s a little bit of
relating going on, but there’s no action. There’s no external action. And it’s
killed many institutions. In a lot of activism, there’s a lot of acting but
there’s not much relating or learning, so people make the same mistakes again
and again.”
“I was in Wisconsin during the
[Gov. Scott] Walker situation and
the reaction to it,” he said about the 2011 protests by union members and their
supporters. “They did 23 major demonstrations. Fifty [thousand], 70 [thousand],
100,000 people. After the second or third I said to those people, why are you
doing all this? Because as you do these, you can’t be building relationships in
local communities. And you don’t know what your own members are thinking about
this situation. It ended up being unfortunately the case.”
“Can we rebuild unions?” Gecan
asked. “We can. It takes time. And we’re doing it in some parts of the country.
Can we rebuild civic life in our cities? We have and will do more. Can we take
these people on? I know we can. But it will take different tactics. It will
take some very unconventional allies that will surprise people.”
© 2017
TruthDig
Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com.
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a
foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books,
including: War Is A Force
That Gives Us Meaning, What Every
Person Should Know About War, and American
Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of
Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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