Friends,
I agree that we Bernie supporters and
others should urge the campaign to become a massive change operation.
Keep it going during the campaign and during the election. But more
importantly after the election, we have to pressure the legislators to listen
to the demand for real change – Medicare for All, End to Militarism, the Green
new Deal et al.
Kagiso,
Max
Coronavirus Is a Historic
Trigger Event. We Need a Massive Movement in Response.
The front entrance of
the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is closed on March 22, 2020, as the
city attempts to slow down the coronavirus through social distancing. LAMPARSKI
/ GETTY IMAGES
March 23, 2020
There are times in history when
sudden events — natural disasters, economic collapses, pandemics, wars, famines
— change everything. They change politics, they change economics and they
change public opinion in drastic ways. Many social movement analysts call these
“trigger events.” During a trigger event, things that were previously
unimaginable quickly become reality, as the social and political map is remade.
On the one hand, major triggers are rare; but on the other, we have seen them
regularly in recent decades. Events such as 9/11, the Iraq War, Hurricane
Katrina, and the financial crash of 2008 have all had major repercussions on
national life, leading to political changes that would have been difficult to
predict beforehand.
COVID-19, the coronavirus
pandemic, is by far the biggest trigger event of our generation. It is a
combination of natural disaster and economic collapse happening at the same
time. Topping it off, this public health crisis is coming right in the middle
of one of the most consequential political seasons of our lifetime.
Trigger events can create
confusion and unease. But they also present tremendous opportunities for people
who have a plan and know how to use the moment to push forward their agendas.
These agendas can be reactionary, as when conservatives and fascists pass harsh
austerity measures and spread xenophobia — the type of activity documented in
Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine.” Yet, this type of response need not
prevail. With a counter-agenda rooted in a commitment to democracy and a deep
sense of collective empathy, communities can flourish, even amid a crisis.
In fact, we can find many
examples in history of how progressive and solidaristic impulses have come to
the fore in response to trigger events. The New Deal’s emergence as a response
to the Great Depression of the 1930s is one example, as is the more recent
Occupy Sandy’s mobilization in New York City to support hurricane-ravaged
communities in 2012. Rebecca Solnit’s 2009 book A Paradise Built in
Hell contains myriad more examples of humane, collective efforts that
responded to disaster.
Today, as we face the prospect
that hundreds of thousands of people in the United States — and millions around
the world — may die, the only way we can prevent some of the worst tragedy and
destruction is with such a response.
In my
writing on social movements, I have argued that triggers create
liminal spaces that mass protest movements can use to mobilize the forces of
grassroots democracy. In the wake of such an event, organizers often find
themselves in a “moment of the whirlwind,” in which the standard rules of how
politics works are turned on their head. Many of the great social movements of
the past have been born out of these moments. But these moments require
skillful navigation, the ability to use “prophetic promotion” to spread a
humane vision, and the faith that mass mobilization can open new avenues to
change that, at the outset, seem distant and improbable.
In order to craft a people’s
response to the pandemic, we should draw both on the possibilities of new
technology that allow for decentralized action and some time-honored lessons
from past social movements.
Social
Movements Are the Vehicle for Mass Participation
Right now, lots of people are
formulating action plans and policy demands, focusing on how the government
should respond or measures that elected officials might pass by way of
emergency response. These include plans by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call for an emergency universal basic income,
and proposals by groups like the Working Families Party, National Nurses United and collections of grassroots
organizers.
What’s missing is a platform
and vision for mass participation — a means through which people can join in
and collectively take part in a movement to create the type of just response
our society needs. A movement can support, amplify, and fill in the gaps left
by government and the health care infrastructure.
Obviously, social distancing
and the isolation required to slow the spread of the pandemic presents unique
challenges. For one thing, people are limited in their ability to physically
come together and congregate. Meanwhile, many of the traditional tools and
tactics of social movements cannot be deployed under current circumstances.
This should not, however, blind us to the things that can be done. From mutual
support in local areas to collective responses of protest from home, we can
build a powerful people’s response that brings us together and uses our
combined effort to provide care in our communities and reshape the limits of
what is politically possible.
A social movement response to
major trigger events often emerges from unexpected places. Major
structure-based organizations have infrastructure and resources that seem like
they would make them natural candidates for rallying the wider public into a
response. However, they also face institutional limitations that prevent them
from scaling their efforts to meet the enormity of the challenge. Groups like
labor unions are commonly preoccupied with responding to how the crisis is
affecting their own membership, making them essential hubs of action for people
within their structures but leaving them with little capacity to engage people
outside of their ranks or to absorb the energy of others who might want to get
involved.
Meanwhile, politicians and
leading advocacy organizations are often focused on the details of the inside
game — carefully monitoring and attempting to use insider leverage to influence
the policies that are being debated at the local, state and federal levels.
This is an important role, but it does not address the vacuum that exists in
terms of mobilizing large numbers of people to change what are perceived as
needed and possible solutions to the crisis. Therefore, it is often scrappy,
decentralized and sometimes ad hoc groups that play vital
roles in shaping a social movement response — which more institutionalized
organizations can get behind once underway.
The People
Have Responded Before
The good news is that there are
clear historical examples in which social movements have been able to step into
the vacuum of a crisis, and we have seen several of these in the past decade
and a half. After Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast in 2012, the mutual
support operation Occupy Sandy —
which drew on networks and infrastructure built during Occupy Wall Street —
coordinated thousands of people into a fast and efficient response, providing
food and medical attention to those in need. It also opened a collection and
distribution center for needed supplies, kept track of individuals who might
otherwise have been isolated and abandoned, and moved debris from homes and
streets. Likewise, Common Ground — one
of the most significant relief organizations to quickly form and respond in the
wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans — served some of the city’s most
impoverished neighborhoods, set up temporary medical clinics and repaired
damaged homes. Meanwhile, in recent years, the DREAM movement,
which works in communities of undocumented immigrants, has provided services
such as scholarships, job opportunities and legal support for immigrants denied
services from state and federal governments.
Looking back at another public
health emergency, we can remember that, during the AIDS crisis of the 1980s,
the LGBTQ community came together to respond to the sickness and death of
thousands of individuals — even as society ostracized people who were
HIV-positive, and the medical establishment often turned a blind eye to their
suffering. Groups like Gay Men’s Health Crisis in New York City organized the
community to raise money for research, distribute information about prevention
and care, and provide counseling and social workers for thousands who needed
it. At a time when the doctors and hospitals were either overwhelmed,
indifferent, or antagonistic, they stepped up to fill the gap and meet basic
human needs.
Meanwhile, the decentralized
affinity groups of the more militant ACT UP worked tirelessly to raise public
awareness about the crisis, rallying under the motto “Silence Equals Death.” They
quickly became on-the-ground experts in the community impact of the disease —
publicly confronting leaders who spread misinformation or were hesitant to
adequately fund public health efforts, calling out drug companies more fixated
on profits than humane treatment and brashly insisting that health
professionals be in dialogue with patients themselves. Ultimately, ACT UP
fundamentally changed the country’s response to AIDS.
“They helped revolutionize the
American practice of medicine,” The New Yorker’s Michael
Specter wrote in 2002. “The average approval time for some critical drugs fell
from a decade to a year, and the character of placebo-controlled trials was
altered for good … Soon changes in the way AIDS drugs were approved were
adopted for other diseases, ranging from breast cancer to Alzheimer’s.” In
1990, the New York Times paid reluctant tribute to the group
with a headline reading, “Rude, Rash, Effective, Act Up Shifts AIDS Policy.”
In response to the current
coronavirus epidemic, the only thing that most people have been given to do is
to participate in social distancing and join preemptive measures to slow the
spread of disease. But if people really believed they could participate
meaningfully in a mass campaign to care for others and pressure public
officials to adopt humane emergency policies, we can be confident that hundreds
of thousands would quickly join in.
How to Make
It Happen
If we know that we need a mass
social movement response, how do we make it happen — especially in times of
social distancing?
Millions of people are stuck in
their homes, unable to go to work. But they can still pursue action on two
tracks: one focused on mutual aid and the other building political pressure
around a platform of people’s demands.
At the level of local
communities, an army of volunteers should be enlisted in mutual aid efforts to
care for one another and meet basic human needs. The possibilities for this
type of action are manifold, but some immediate priorities include assisting the
elderly with obtaining food and prescription medications, creating hubs (online
or otherwise) to facilitate the sharing of information in local areas about
households in need of help, and creating community solutions to the childcare
needs that emerge as schools and daycare centers close. As the pandemic spreads
— and particularly if hospitals and formal systems are overwhelmed — the need
for and potential of this type of activity will grow tremendously. Grassroots
initiatives to collect information about the spread of the disease, help those
who need to be quarantined, distribute information and supplies to promote
public hygiene, and assist with the dissemination and proper use of testing
supplies will become urgent.
Already, this type of activity
is bubbling up. Communities around the country are creating Facebook Groups and
Google Docs — many of them listed here — to coordinate
mutual aid. At the same time, countless religious congregations, unions,
community organizations and neighborhood associations are beginning to mobilize
responses for people in their areas. These activities have tremendous promise,
but for them to take on the character of a movement they need what former
United Farmworkers organizer and current movement trainer Marshall Ganz
would call a unified
“story, strategy and structure.”
Organizers should be looking to
create means for local groups to share information and best practices. And they
should encourage common vision and messaging. In each of
the historical examples mentioned here, it was crucial that participants had a
sense that they were part of something larger than the sum of individual
efforts. Intentional moves toward unity and coordination help build that
collective understanding.
Beyond mutual aid, a common
story, strategy and structure can allow a mass movement to legitimate political
demands that might otherwise be deemed impractical or undesirable, and to
compel public officials to adopt them. The function of mass movements is not to
hash out the instrumental details of proposals currently being debated in the
U.S. Congress or at more local levels of government. Rather, it is to build
momentum for popular, symbolically-resonant demands that would form the
backbone of a progressive national response — ideas like emergency universal
basic income, free testing and treatment for all, and suspension of rent and
mortgage payments for those unable to pay during the crisis.
A movement can advance such
demands with campaigns of distributed actions. While the realities of “social
distancing” limit some of the tactics that grassroots groups might typically
employ, organizer David Solnit, for one, has proposed a range of
protest methods that can be viable during the coronavirus pandemic, including
many that can be joined at home. Among those he lists are livestream rallies,
the proliferation of window and door signs, call-ins, online teach-ins, social
media barrages, and cacerolazo — the mass banging or pots and
pans, commonly used by movements abroad.
Given the activity currently
percolating, we cannot know what efforts will gain traction or what overarching
frameworks for unity might take hold. But we can assess the possibilities that
have presented themselves. One of the most potent is the prospect that the Bernie Sanders campaign could
pivot to become a movement focused on pandemic response. The
Sanders campaign has built one of the largest and most sophisticated grassroots
organizing campaigns in American history. They have tens of thousands of
volunteers who know how to run phone banks and talk to their neighbors. They
also have more than a million donors who
are willing to contribute funds to help support a people’s movement advancing
justice and democracy. If Sanders decided to transform his campaign from a
political, presidential electoral campaign into a mass movement against the
pandemic and its impacts, a drive with massive infrastructure would emerge
overnight.
Whether the Sanders campaign
seizes this opportunity, or an alternate framework for collective action
arises, a mass movement response to the coronavirus pandemic cannot come too
soon. For our own sake, and that of our society as a whole, let us help the
drive toward solidarity emerge.
This piece
was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced
in any form without permission or license from the source.
Paul Engler
is founding director of the Center for the Working Poor, based in Los Angeles.
He worked for more than a decade as an organizer in the immigrant rights,
global justice and labor movements.
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore,
MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at] comcast.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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