Direct Action, Occupy and the Power of Social Movements: An Interview With Noam Chomsky

Posted on by
Reply
A young Chomsky, just starting a life of activism when organizing against the Vietnam War.

A young Chomsky, just starting a life of activism when organizing against the Vietnam War.

As a commentator, educator, public intellectual, and one of the best known anarchist voices in the U.S., Noam Chomsky has become a defining perspective as social movements develop.  His analysis of the shift in global capitalism, and our own role in its flux, has seen a recharge of importance as we entered the “new normal” of the post-2008 economy.  Like was done with workplace struggles at the birth of the union movement, we are attempting to locate housing struggles out of the abstract legislative sphere and back into the neighborhoods.  With the foreclosure crisis and the Occupy Movement that followed, a housing movement that saw occupation and defense as central began to be birthed against all conventional wisdom.

 

 

I sat down with Noam Chomsky to discuss the growing Take Back the Land and housing justice movements, the nature of the foreclosure crisis, the Occupy Movement, and what radical politics will look like in this new period of social movements.

 

SB:

I am working both with both Take Back the Land and local housing non-profits to create a big housing focused movement.  The two primary things that we do in Take Back the Land are foreclosure resistance, setting up blockades, working with families, trying to get neighborhood solidarity.  And also finding empty bank-owned homes and moving homeless families into them.  So one of the things is that it is a very direct thing, it uses direct action.  What is direct action, and why does it end up being so important as a kernel for movements like this?

 

Noam Chomsky:

Direct action carries the message forward in a very dramatic fashion.  For one thing it can help people.  So resisting foreclosure sometimes does help people get into their homes, but it also dramatizes the issue in a way in which words don’t.  Direct action means putting yourself on the line.  That’s true of civil disobedience and many other types of action, which indicate a depth of commitment and clarification of the issues, which sometimes does stir other people to do something.  That’s what resistance and civil disobedience were always about.  In fact, direct action has often been the preliminary to really major changes.  Revolutionary changes, in fact.  In the United States the sit-down strikes of the 1930s were a major impetus for passing significant New Deal legislation.  The reason is that manufacturers could perceive that a sit-down strike was just one step before taking over the enterprise, kicking out the owners and managers, and saying ‘we’ll run it ourselves.’  Which can be done, and it’s the real revolutionary change.  Changes the structure of hierarchy, domination, ownership, and so on.  And direct actions of the sit-down strikes were dramatic indication of that.

 

The same was true of, say, the civil rights movements.  Things that had been going on forever, hundreds of years, but what sparked it were a couple incidents of direct action.  Rosa Parks insisting on sitting in a bus.  Greensboro, North Carolina a couple years later.  Black students sitting at a lunch counter, and these things then took off and became major movements with a lot of consequences.  Without the direct action that probably wouldn’t have happened.  You could do as many speeches as you like and it wouldn’t have had the effect of those actions.

 

SB

One thing we have also been talking about is that this is built out of necessity.  People need a place a to live.  Do you think that this kind of necessity helps with the idea of direct action, making it more fundamental?

 

NC

It should, if done properly, bring home to people that human rights are being taken away by a social and economic system that has no real legitimacy.  I mean take foreclosure, take a look at the legislative history.  As you know, when the bank bailout was legislated by congress, the TARP bailout, it actually had two components.  One was to bailout the bank, essentially the people who created the crisis.  The other half was to do something to help their victims.  Of those two components only one was implemented, the first one.  And people ought to know that.  It’s the second one that counts.  Yes the perpetrators were bailed out, how about their victims?  They’re left hanging out to dry.  And I think almost anybody can see the extreme injustice of this, in fact criminality if not illegality of it.

 

SB

In the language, when we are discussing the issue, we draw on the idea of housing as a human right.  It’s the slogan we use.  We call on the U.N. Convention on Human Rights(Universal Declaration of Human Rights).  Why do you think this “human rights framework” is important for talking about housing?

 

NC

Well there is a kind of a gold standard on human rights.  It’s the Universal Declaration in 1948.  Its important for American’s to understand the status of that declaration.  It was not a Western imposition.  It was arrived at by consensus over a very broad range, including input from elsewhere.  In fact, much of the initiative came from elsewhere.  Some from here, Eleanor Roosevelt in particular.  But it was agreed upon and affirmed by congress.  It has the highest legal status you can say.  It’s got three parts, all of equal status.  The first part is political and civil rights, so the right to vote and so on.  The second part is social and economic rights, and that includes the right to housing, the right to healthcare, the right to education.  All fundamental rights, and by world standards are easily as significant as voting rights.  Maybe more so.  The third section is cultural rights.  The right to preserve your culture, to protect it and so on.  Well the U.S. attitude from the beginning has been to dismiss the third component, not even talk about it.  It’s never discussed.  And to reject the second component.  So U.S. officials have disparaged and dismissed the social and economic provisions.  That’s true especially under the Reagan and Bush One administrations.  Jeane Kirkpatrick, the U.N. Ambassador under Reagan(1), just dismissed the socio-economic provisions with ridicule.  It’s a letter from Santa Clause.  That’s exactly the same as throwing out the civil and political rights and saying their nothing, just a lot of words.  Paula Dobriansky(2) in the first Bush administration, she described social and economic rights as ‘a myth.’  That there are no such rights.  The only rights are civil and political rights, and it’s just a myth to think that these are rights.  Morris Abram, who was the delegate to the international U.N. human rights group(3), they were debating something called the ‘right to development,’ which basically paraphrased the Universal Declaration.  He voted against it; I think the U.S. was the only country to vote against it, with, again, very disparaging remarks.  Saying it’s preposterous.  Incitement.  You can’t talk about social and economic rights.  They don’t exist.

 

So the U.S. has been one of the strongest opponents of social and economic rights, which is a core part, one-third, of the Universal Declaration.  Actually the U.S. is opposed to two-thirds since it doesn’t discuss the cultural rights.  We should know that our country is in the lead in undermining human rights.  That’s important, especially given the standard rhetoric from political leaders, intellectuals, media, and so on about how we defend human rights all over the world.  We don’t defend them at all in principle.  We defend them against enemies.  So we are all in favor of human rights in Easter Europe or Iran, and say that’s fine.  But not in our domain.  Not here.

 

Foreclosure is one case in point.  The right to housing is a core part of the Universal Declaration.  Its particularly obscene her, for the reasons I’ve mentioned, because in the foreclosure case these people were cheated.  They were cheated by the big banks, who created the crisis on the verge of criminality, some of them actually criminal.  They created the crisis; induced people to undertake obligations they couldn’t possibly fulfill, and are now throwing them out in the streets, even though congress legislated there should be assistance to the victims.

 

SB

One thing I think is interesting is the housing movement starts to take shape, likely because of the 2010 crisis, but the character of it takes shape along with the Occupy Movement.  They are both about taking over spaces.  Either trying to reuse space, or take it back from another entity.  Do you think there is actually something significant about this idea of actually occupying a space?

 

NC

They both have that theme, but as you say it’s a different type of occupation.  In the Occupy Movement, it was to take a public space to use it for developing structures of solidarity.  Mutual aid, debate, discussion, organization, a place to reach out into the community to bring about badly needed changes.  In the case of the housing movement, its much more concrete.  It’s a matter of giving people a roof over their heads.

 

There are straightforward ways to deal with the foreclosure.  First, a number of people could be granted the right to rent their old houses and pay rents that are not that high until they reconstruct their finances and are able buy them back.  That could be done.  There are other simple means that could be applied.  So I think for the anti-foreclosure movement should have a very strong appeal to the general public if the issues are formulated clearly and properly.

 

And there’s just the straight human side.  Why should people be thrown out of their houses because the banks are crooks?  Then they get bailed out, of course.

 

SB

Do you think communities of color have been especially affected?

 

NC

Sure.  Victimization increases with poverty, it increases with race.  We can’t overlook the fact that despite some progress, racial oppression is still a major feature of American society.  It hasn’t gone away.  Just take a look at the distribution of people in prison.

 

SB

There is kind of a sweep effect that ends up happening, where one house becomes empty, two become empty, it becomes six…

 

NC

It begins to destroy the neighborhood, so everybody has a stake in it.  It’s a real reason for everyone to cooperate to prevent it from happening.  It’s wholly indecent as far as the original family is concerned.  It is also unnecessary because there are clear ways of dealing with it, and then there is kind of a domino effect.  It destroys the neighborhood.

 

SB

As we are starting to see the, I guess I shouldn’t say the “end” of the Occupy Movement, but we are walking away from that kind of rhetoric and the occupations, what do you think effect do you think it has had on movement building?  On the way that we discuss the issues.

 

NC

Well, the Occupy Movement was very brief.  It started a year ago(4), lasted for a couple months.  It had a brilliant tactic.  It was very effective.  It had an enormous impact.  Far more than I would have guessed, I must say I was surprised.  It spread all over the country to hundreds of cities.  All over the world.  I gave talks in Sydney, Australia to the Occupy Movement.  It just galvanized a lot of energy, activity, and so on.

 

But it was based on a tactic, and tactics don’t make movements.

 

Tactics, for one thing, they kind of a half -life.  They have diminishing returns.  You can’t apply them forever.  The same is true of the most famous of the Occupy Movements, in Tahrir Square in Egypt.  I was just there the day before yesterday.  People are still there. Tahrir Square is still a symbol of ongoing struggle, but you can’t keep occupying Tahrir Square.  For one, people in the neighborhood just get angered and irritated by it because its disturbing their lives.  The effectiveness of the tactic begins to diminish, so you have to turn the tactic into a set of principles, which you then pursue with different tactics.  And I think that’s the stage in which the Occupy Movement is today.  As it is in the case of Egypt, where they’re debating, discussing, asking how to go on under the new circumstances.  Not necessarily rejecting re-occupying of Tahrir Square, but moving in another direction.  Occupy needs to do the same thing.

 

The Occupy Movement is far more diffuse and diverse.  It doesn’t have the central character that, to some extent, the Egyptian Movement had, or the Tunisian Movement.  Its got similar problems all over the world.  Spain, Greece, Portugal, England.  In some places its had real successes.  Take Quebec.  In Quebec the Student Movement, which is not part of the Occupy Movement but I think was stimulated by it just as Zuchotti Park was stimulated by Tahrir Square.  The Quebec Student Movement had remarkable success.  It should be better known.  Initially it was a protest against a sharp rise in tuitions.  It expanded, and gained enormous that could have led to overthrown the government and a significant change in a whole range of policies.  That’s an enormous achievement.  That should be better known, and it can stimulate other things.

 

SB

What is interesting about them is that they turned an idea of an occupation into a permanent, long-standing social movement that was going to be there after this took place.  It was going to continue to maintain that student power, not let it dissipate after a large victory, but maintain that presence.

 

NC

It was a popular movement.  Students have often been kind of a stimulus and a source for broader activism, but it can’t succeed until it goes well beyond the students.  That was the case, for example, for the civil rights movement.  Greensboro, North Carolina was students.  SNCC spearheaded the civil rights movement with students.  The Freedom Riders, not all, but the majority were young people and students.  Over time it grew and became a mass popular movement, and had major achievements. Like all movements, it was limited and never achieved its real goals.  They were aborted.  In fact, right when the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King turned to class issues they were crushed.  There are lessons there.  And everyone knows Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech in 1963, but not many people know what, in many ways, was a more important ‘I Have a Dream’ speech of his in 1968.  The evening that he was assassinated.  That evening he spoke to a large crowd.  He was in Memphis, Tennessee to support a public workers strike.  A sanitation workers strike.  He was moving towards establishing a Poor People’s Movement.  Not black, Poor People’s Movement, which would address the fundamental issues of housing, that was a crucial part of it, poverty, malnutrition, and so on.  Actually, one of steps was an early housing movement in Chicago.  Urban Chicago.  He used his usual biblical style rhetoric.  He described himself to the crowd as like Moses, standing on a mountain.  He could see the Promised Land.   The land of freedom and justice, and overcoming poverty and oppression.  He could see it, he was not going to get there, but you’ll get there.  He spoke to the audience, then he was assassinated right there.

 

Poor People's Campaign

Poor People’s Campaign

There was supposed to be a march on Washington, a ‘poor people’s march,’ which he was to lead.  His widow, Coretta King, led the march, and, from Memphis, it went through the places in the South where the major struggles had been.  Birmingham, Selma, and so on.  Ended up in Washington, and set up a tent city(5).  An Occupy Movement.  They set up a tent city in Washington.  They were going to appeal to congress to legislate bills that would deal with the fundamental class issues, like poverty and housing and so on.  They were allowed to stay there for a while and then congress sent in the security forces.  They smashed up the tent city in the middle of the night and drove them out of Washington.  That’s a part of the civil rights movement that you don’t hear about on Martin Luther King Day, but it’s important.  It won major victories, but it couldn’t break through Northern racism and insistence on class privilege.

 

And we are right there now.  Occupy is a sort of a Poor People’s Movement.  Of course, there too the tent cities were broken up.  People were driven out, but you have to go on.

 

SB

If you look back, this is not the first time that people have done things like eviction resistance or occupying houses.  Can you talk a little bit about where in the past this has happened, and maybe internationally?

 

NC

In the 1930s it happened all the time, and in large parts of Europe left groups, often anarchist groups, have taken over buildings.  Reconstructed them so that homeless people could live there.  These movements have never reached a point of take off where it becomes a general thing to do, but they’ve been effective in many places in limited ways.  You never know when it’s going to take off.  You couldn’t have predicted that in Greensboro, North Carolina.  You couldn’t have predicted it with Rosa Parks.  You couldn’t have predicted it with Zuccotti Park.

 

SB

Do you think that now there’s an open discourse about radical politics that anarchism has a voice in the discussion?

 

NC

It certainly opened the doors, but whether it has a voice in the discussion depends on how people walk through those doors and develop the opportunities and possibilities that are available.  So, yeah, there’s openings.  And people have also sensed in their own existence the possibilities of mutual aid, solidarity.  One of the most important things about the Occupy Movement, I think, was just to create the kinds of bonds and associations that will be necessary for a more just and decent society.  People just helping each other, instead of ‘I just want to enrich myself add to my number of commodities.’  I’m going to join in a soup kitchen or a library or a public discussion, and we’ll all do it together.  We can win together.  That’s critical.

Notes:

  1. Jean Kirkpatrick was nominated by Reagan as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
  2. Paula Dobriansky has worked as a foreign policy expert in the administrations of five presidents in total, with her position ranging.  Her statements were made when acting as Secretary of State for Human Rights and Human Affairs, which she did for both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
  3. The official title for Morris Abram that is being referenced is Representative of the United States to the European Office of the United Nations, which he was appointed to be George H. W. Bush.  He served from 1989-1993.
  4. The date of this interview was 10/26/12.
  5. Called Resurrection City

 

 

This interview was a part of the larger documentary Expect Resistance, which chronicles the Take Back the Land and Occupy movements in the context of Rochester, NY.

Learn more about the film here.

Marriage or Bust? A Conversation on Marriage Equality

Posted on by
1
29966_1299721417968_2911990_n(1)

Photo by Amber James

 

Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State- and Church-begotten weed, marriage?

-Emma Goldman

The answer, I believe, is to defend marriage (het or gay) as one viable option among many for a person, not attack it as an inherently heterosexist and patriarchal institution. Context is all. Typically marriage and the traditional family has been patriarchal and heterosexist—but not necessarily in the Black community, and not necessarily for GLBT relationships, either. Thus, marriage and the traditional family can be subversive in the right context. Radicals should encourage this subversion by defending the right of people to freely engage in unions of their choice, including marriage.

-Joel Olson

892090_10100199094679745_919615533_o

Marriage equality was literally put on trial a few days ago as the U.S. Supreme Court looked over two complimentary cases.  First was Hollingsworth v. Perry challenging constitutionality of the 2008 California bill known as Proposition 8.  The main purpose of the bill was clearly stated in its less-than-subtle title” Eliminates Rights of Same-Sex Couples to Marry.  This would essentially reverse the previous decisions to recognize same-sex relationships in the same way that conventional ones are through the state’s marriage process.

The very next day the court convened with Massachusetts v. United States Department of Health and Human Services, which challenges a piece of the Defense of Marriage Act.  Together these cases became one of the largest rallying cries in favor of marriage equality, leaving few detractors and a swell of supporters using the Human Rights Campaign’s equal sign as a show of solidarity.  Marriage equality seems inevitable at this point, which is being claimed as a major victory in much of the liberal LGBT community.

But just as the cheers are being heard around the country, many people who take a more radical stance on LGTBQ issues question whether or not marriage is the institution worth fighting for and if this is really the victory it seems to be.

The opinions about this are rarely uniform, and so we have decided to spark an informal discussion and compile a few different opinions that can hopefully challenge some of the conventional narratives.  Here they are arguments in support of marriage, against marriage, and the many shades in between.

 

 

Zora

The institution of marriage needs to be destroyed. The idea of privileging one kind of relationship over another by granting married couples extra rights, be they legal or social, is the creation of a hierarchy, which is against anarchist principles. At its inception marriage was the institution that legitimized the position of women as chattel. It was an economic contract between two men, involving the transferring of responsibility and ownership of a woman and whatever material wealth she came with. While women are no longer directly treated as property, marriage has remained an economic arrangement.

In the modern day, the dominant view of marriage is a guarantee of a number of social and financial obligations. Things like financial support and emotional support, a caretaker in sickness and old age, and sexual satisfaction, are all key elements of this arrangement. We know that, in reality, many marriages do not actually provide all these things. There are many single (and married) people who find these things in different and varying places. These are relationships that may very well be healthier and longer lasting than half the marriages officiated in the U.S. but they receive no special treatment in the eyes of the law, and instead may even need to defend their choices in the face of public scrutiny.

 

One example of this, which stands out, is that of single mothers. Single mothers frequently live and rely on family members and friends as their main support structure. They support themselves, and may have one or multiple sexual partners, or none at all. They then face scrutiny over not providing a father for their children, cannot access their relative’s health care plans (because they are not a spouse or a child), and are not receiving the same tax benefits given to any Tom, Dick or Sally who wants to get a marriage license.

Far too often marriage isolates people with their partners. Making it a state-sanctified institution only furthers this by adding an economic burden. The dominant focus on partnered romantic relationships is a remnant from a time when capitalism caused the family structure to be a profitable arrangement. If we are separated into categories, and given license to abandon our communities for the sake of one partnership, how can we ever expect to organize a revolution out of this mess? Marriage has been an issue that divides and disenfranchises those on the periphery of the hetero-monogamous culture. It is time to take this issue out of the public eye. Marriage is a partnership between two consenting adults. Coercion by state and market forces poisons relationships, and should be kept out at all costs regardless of the sex or gender of the people involved.

 

 

Shenzi

My position on Marriage Equality (to the extent that I have one) is that if I’d been in the room when the decision to foreground marriage as the main goal of the LGBT movement was made, I’d have argued hard against it for all the reasons usually mentioned: it’s a narrow demand benefiting mostly middle-class LGBT folks, it’s exclusionary toward non-monogamous relationships, it tends to overlook trans struggles and it’s not nearly so urgent as other issues like queer youth homelessness, etc.  However the political reality is that the decision to foreground Marriage Equality has long since been made. There’s no way to get the LGBT organizations to switch now. Plus this issue seems like it’ll inevitably be won in the next decade or two, and possibly much sooner. So let’s just win it as quickly as possible so we can move on to bigger and better things (and separate the queer prole wheat from the bourgeois chaff).

 

 

Isabella

I want to start off by saying that I am a queer, femme, anarcha-feminist. I am also a queer rights activist from New York. This informs a lot of my opinions on marriage equality, not just because it is a fight I engage in, but also because it has put me arm-in-arm with many older queer couples. Looking someone in the eyes and seeing their struggle first hand, as they and their wife talk about their arrest records, is powerful. Those human experiences rightfully shape my opinions. This life experience lends me to write from a perspective in defense of marriage equality as a means of furthering human liberty and justice.

My case is that marriage equality helps destabilize a means of capitalist rule. Capitalism necessitates marriage inequality because straight marriage is a means of labor production. It is clear that the 1,138 federal privileges that come with marriage are a “reward” for making love, not being in love. They are a bribe. By taking those rights from the heteronormative culture for ourselves, we as queers are helping to publicly expose a major capitalist bribery technique for promoting unlimited labor production by the working class. This is the first step to liberating the entire working class from the tyranny of marriage as an institution, and further from capitalism as a whole. Education on this topic is crucial and happening because of this fight.

You might say, “but these privileges given to married couples is unjust in itself and giving more people these privileges will just expand the problem!” And, for the most part, you’d be correct. Marriage having any benefits is unjust and should be smashed to help destroy capitalist bribery as a means of controlling labor. I would argue that this critique is relevant and true. As it stands, however, it is an easier fight to get the privileged class to expand others into their “club” that it is to get them to give up their privilege. There are couples whose livelihoods depend on marriage equality, and although I hate the idea of them getting some privilege to cover their costs, I also hate the idea of my friend’s spouse being deported.  It’s a complex issue for me that boils down to this, “Privileges are shit, but if they have them, we should take them too.” It’s not a perfect proposal, but it meets needs right now. You might say, “marriage equality takes up too much activist time, there are better things to fight for. And once we win marriage those activists will fight against us, not for us.” This is also relevant and important to remember. There is a large mass of non-radical, conformist people in the marriage equality fight who will not fight for other basic rights once marriage is won and will resist us when we try to smash capitalism. Those people would be actively fighting for capitalism if they were straight.

I have addressed two common critiques of marriage equality and made a counter for these arguments, as well as addressing my own point on the issue. These are logical points to be made. On a more personal level, marriage equality levels the playing field for all working class people to get benefits, which helps sustain them under the oppression of capitalism. In debates about marriage equality I have said things like, “if someone is starving and marriage equality can feed them, then it is justice to give it to them.” And others have responded, “if you only feed yourself with unjust marriage privileges then you should be ashamed and deserve to starve.” I fundamentally disagree with this response because those fighting for marriage equality are struggling under capitalism and are fighting against their own unique oppression. Instead of critiquing marriage equality, fight hunger. Feed this person and you will take away their need for marriage. Do not pick on the table scraps queers are fighting for, even if you don’t feel that this is as substantive as other social issues. Show them the feast and they will fight for it. But remember that they cannot fight while starved. In the words of a fellow anarchist, “First, marriage equality. Second, full liberation.”

 

 

Lynn

What are the benefits of getting married? There are 1,138 federal benefits, rights and responsibilities associated with marriage. Sounds pretty good, right?  The social benefits of marriage are fewer incidents of poverty and mental health issues. Unless you are LGBT those benefits aren’t yours, thanks to DOMA.

So how does the repeal of DOMA improve and benefit class struggle? Marriage can pull one or both people out of poverty. Immigrants can get visas. Now not every marriage can save you from poverty but two incomes is better than one.   If a partner dies the bills don’t fall on ones lap with no help from any kind of insurance. A death or an illness isn’t going to cripple a couple or a person. It’s a partnership of a business called my choice less life, living with capitalism.

The state can use words like procreation. That’s pretty dirty. What I do with anyone’s procreation is my business. This is that crazy idea that the only reason why you get married to is to produce children. I think we are doing just fine producing children without marriage. I can go reproduce one right now if I wanted to.

I personally don’t understand why anyone would want to get married. I don’t understand why people don’t reach for more.  We hide behind our partners. We cling to them when we are scared instead of finding it with in ourselves to be strong. We become dependent on people who can crush our hearts in seconds and put us in financial ruin. It is too much pressure and power for one person to have over you. It is a special thing to have a partner who pushes you to be everything you can be, loves you for everything you are.

Marriage can socially isolate you from the rest of your community. Why need anyone else when you have your partner? Do we know some married couples that are still committed to community? Yeah sure we do. But look at everyone else focused on their own benefits, their own houses, and their own families. Instead of being focused on the fact that we are all married to each other, we are all family, we all have housing, food, and heath care needs. I want more than one husband and I want more than one wife.   I don’t want to ask for permission to have that. I want to have sex with who ever I want and have children with strangers.

 

 

S.B.

A couple quick thoughts on the recent marriage equality conversation…

The first thing I should say is that I have a moderate support for marriage equality as a strategic focus.  The criticisms about this choice tend to range between questions about whether or not the institution of marriage is something to associate with and the fact that it is much less substantive than things like healthcare, housing, etc.  While these criticisms are true, the choice to target marriage comes simply from the role that marriage still plays in society.  Today it stands as the arbitrating institution that grants acceptability to romantic relationships, even if it has evolved out of an ingrained patriarchy and maintains many of those qualities today.  The “opening up” of marriage begins to change not just the institution of marriage, but the barometer that is set for acceptability in our communities.  Its not just beneficial because it would allow for a new type of marriage, but because the restrictive institution that interferes and defines relationships has now been made to allow a wider grouping of possible relationships.  This is not a liberatory endgame, but a step-by-step for attempting to target institutionalized forms of homophobia and heterosexism and dismantle them.  From here the hope is that this will be a way to further undercut social institutions that maintain the legitimacy of homophobia, relegating same-sex relationships to the outskirts of the community.

One of the additional criticisms that has been leveled against the recent show of support was its branding through the Human Rights Campaign, which has created an incredibly narrow agenda that has maintained transphobia and has no long term goal for challenging the real institutions of inequality.  While this is true, the majority of the people who changed their social media avatars to equal signs knew nothing about the HRC.  More than that they do not know any other way to show their opposition to homophobia than to support same-sex marriage, and they are usually baffled by people’s opposition to marriage equality outside of a blatant homophobia.  In this way it was a chance to tap into a growing swell of support and to develop a movement that moves beyond marriage and into a force of change.  It is exciting to see a simple show of support on such a massive scale, and it should be a priority to stand with many of these people who have never spoke out politically before and may be inclined to start.  Many of the criticisms that have been spoken have been confusing to those uninitiated to the complexities of these issues, often times making them feel alienated.

IMG_2380

A simple issue is at play in the case of marriage equality, and that is how it intimately affects people.  This is abstract as there are thousands of individuals who have a vested material interest in having a federally recognized marriage.  More than this, it has been fundamentally important to many people who are directly affected.  Though it may not be the issue that would be first on my list to target heterosexism, I think it is important to stand with people as they challenge forms of oppression that they feel affects them in an important way.  It is not my role to argue with a couple that has been restricted legal marriage recognition that instead they need to question the bourgeois institution of marriage.

With all this being said, there are a lot of issues that should be thought about here.  When the entire issue of queer rights is framed in terms of marriage equality it inevitably begins to neglect trans people, especially the frightening bigotry they face in the workplace and medical clinics.  It additionally acts as a conservatizing force that accepts non-traditional relationships to conform to the stands set by a society founded on conservative moral structures and property relations.  Marriage stands as a structuring force that lets limits on what kinds of relationships outside of the marriage are acceptable and requires that the state be intimately involved in a number of different ways.  It attempts to normalize same-sex relationships by remodeling them in the image of heterosexual ones, and that is not something we should necessarily be celebrating.

 

Marriage Equality Rally in Portland, Oregon.

Marriage Equality Rally in Portland, Oregon.

 

 

Tim Kiff

Gay marriage is important insofar as it secures people concrete rights. It is unconscionable that homosexual couples aren’t allowed visitation rights, access to their partners healthcare, and do not receive the same benefits that straight married couples do.

That said, the institution of state-sanctioned marriage, and the doling out of rights/benefits along the lines of married couples, is restrictive, outmoded and unnecessary. Marriage, and its associated benefits, is a tool the state uses to make life easier for those who chose to act in a way that is beneficial to its continued functionality.

The fight for the rights of LGBT people to marry is important because it is going to improve people’s lives, but we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the idea of state-sanctioned marriage is creepy and weird.

Harvey Milk Day of Action in Rochester, NY, 2010. People rally and marched into the County Clerk's office, demanding marriage licenses. This is shortly before New York State began granting same-sex marriages.

Harvey Milk Day of Action in Rochester, NY, 2010.
People rally and marched into the County Clerk’s office, demanding marriage licenses. This is shortly before New York State began granting same-sex marriages.
Photo by Amber James

 

Please join in this conversation!  Post comments on this page, share the article around, and use Twitter with hashtag #radicalize_equality.

Check us out on Twitter!

Marriage equality has been important to activists in Rochester, NY, for years. Check out this video of a 2009 rally in response to Maine’s repeal of same-sex marriage rights.

 

The Task of Us All: An Anarchist Review of the 2013 State of the Union Address

Posted on by
Reply

Pre-Game:
The Spectacle begins with the absurd and offensive ritual of the President taking his sweet time proceeding up the aisle to give the speech. This ritual serves the function of showing President-as-rock-star while making Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner watch and wait. This may get a few partisan jollies for those so closely enmeshed in the state’s internal drama, but nonetheless serves primarily to further enshrine the President (and by extension the state and its trappings generally) in grandiose spectacle. We see his ‘encounters’ with now-Secretary of State John Kerry (also known as the guy who managed to lose an election to George W. Bush) and Justice Sotomayor who both serve as important personalities for the liberal base. We then see a lengthy and rather more formal set of encounters with “the brass” by which I mean uniformed military dignitaries.

When the President finally reaches his destination, we are informed by an NBC commentator that he’ll give two copies of his speech to VP Biden and Speaker Boehner. When the President turns to do this he apparently gives each manilla envelope to the wrong guy and Biden and Boehner then go through the process of switching envelopes, a bit with the comic feel of Sesame Street or an early SNL sketch.

Bipartisan Beginnings and Progress:
The President’s speech begins with a civics lesson to Congress on “bipartisanism.” He harkens back to Kennedy’s having said that the two parties are not “rivals for power, but partners.” Then he announces point of progress #1: troops coming home. This moment is made all the more vile for the President’s use of “after a decade of grinding war” as a preface. Now of course, the war is smoothly sailing over the heads of those we slaughter, dropping death from automated machines instead of risking a pilot or soldier. The costs of maintaining Imperialism continue to approach those of a very expensive video game. Good news for American military families perhaps, but decidedly terrible news for civilians and resistance fighters all over the world.

Point of progress #2 follows promptly, lest we linger too long on our subjugation of the globe: economic recovery. Bowing to the political vocabulary around job creation, Obama is careful to say that “American businesses” have created over 6 million jobs. In a nod to the (de)industrial Midwest, he cites an uptick in domestic consumption of American cars. He cites downward foreign oil consumption, previewing the (disastrous) energy policy section later. Then he comes to the part most interesting to the TV audience: “millions of Americans whose hard work… has not yet been rewarded.” “Too many people still can’t find full time employment,” the President tells us, and “corporate profits have skyrocketed to all-time highs, but for more than a decade wages and incomes have barely budged.” This sort of rhetoric no doubt feels validating and overdue to many working class Americans.

Economic Policy and Class Politics:
As to his solution, the President sets our sights on “the true engine of America’s economic growth: a rising, thriving middle class.” Emphasis his. Rooting itself in the not-so-long-forgotten Keynesian economics that made the New Deal, the President deftly assuages any fears that “middle class” Americans might have that they might not still be a safe and superior cut above the poor. This false consciousness and conditioned fear conceals the fact that “middle class” Americans belong to a broad (international) working class with common political interests. It is crucial to the Democratic Party and State politics to keep this false middle-class consciousness alive, because as soon as those blinders fall away, there is a united proletarian agenda waiting to emerge that could threaten to crush them both. And of course, the first and worst effect of this language is the perpetual (and convenient) invisibility of the poor in national politics.

Referring to the “basic bargain that built America,” and slipping “who you love” into the list of things that shouldn’t matter in a nod to LGBT advocates, the President appeals to such basic values as “if you work hard… you can get ahead” and “government works on behalf of the many, not just the few.” What begins to emerge from the President’s speech here is a pattern of very common sense-sounding appeals to values that the right is fond of calling “class war” rhetoric. The President shows in this speech how easily a case can be made to overwhelming swaths of the electorate for an aggressive liberal agenda, and leveraging the GOP opposition with the threat of beginning to agitate those struggling masses down below. In other words, Republicans should rather deal with Obama than with even the most manufactured inklings of an awakened popular movement in this country. Of course such a movement genuinely building power would be no more in Democrats’ interests than in Republicans’, but the threat of manipulating the people into an electoral mobilization in the future (specifically the 2014 midterm elections) might well disconcert those wanting to maintain a Republican majority in the House of Representatives. At least enough to inspire a little reconciliation across the capitalist aisle.

Bipartisanism II:
“Put the nation’s interests before party” comes another exultation towards bipartisanship. Then follows a fairly straightforward recap of the whole “fiscal cliff” charade. In one of his near-constant concessions to Fox ideological spin, the President agrees that “the biggest driver of our long-term debt is the rising cost of healthcare for an aging population.” This simply is not the truth. The cost of the US’s global military apparatus and its incursions into other lands and its slaughter of other peoples dwarfs by a mile the cost of any other federal expense. This of course, is just not on the table.

Retirement Entitlements:
In the next section on Social Security, Medicare, and retirement, we see Democrats allowing for “modest reforms” by which we should understand them to mean “modest” concessions in the standard of living of retirees. And in the very next sentence he assuages the AARP and other liberals while waving the same stick at the right that no reform can “violate the guarantee of a secure retirement” and no legislative deal should come without the fair balance of asking some help from the “wealthiest and most powerful” in exchange for Democrats agreeing to the incremental impoverishment of elderly proletarians.

Taxes and the Business of the State:
The President goes on to discuss the tax code, proposing to close loopholes and give incentives for domestic manufacturing – a pair of policy proposals that seem to get talked about as an “of course” measure every few seconds but never gets done for reasons as simple as that the interests of foreign manufacturing and high finance are too influential in federal politics to allow such things to be done. Obama then harshly and rather comically slaps the GOP around for the recurrence of “manufactured” crises, referring to any number of hilarious Republican antics since the 2008 election.

Something interesting happens here, though: Obama is telling Congress to compromise, put nation before party etc, and then he says to “do it without the brinksmanship that stresses consumers and scares off investors.” While the brinksmanship is a fairly clear allusion to the Debt Ceiling and/or the Fiscal Cliff, what is most interesting is that he here refers to the federal government’s consumers as though government were itself a business. Who he’s talking about here is the American public generally, and Americans who vote in particular. These are the government’s consumers and big businesses and high financial institutions are the government’s investors. And anyone who knows anything about business (particularly one trying to recover from hard times) knows that the job is to court investors by doing whatever they might want without pissing off too many customers. That’s their game.

Moving on to jobs, Obama employs what may be the oldest trick in the book – he advertises. In talking about favorable economic progress, he cites Caterpillar (the company bulldozing Palestine), Ford, and Apple by name. And Apple’s new CEO gets the camera for more than a few moments to sit there and look beneficent. The President is literally giving ad time to corporations in the State of the Union.

All political content momentarily aside, President Obama mentions investing in 3D Printing technology. So, obviously we live in the goddamn future. I’m just sayin’.

Black Enough Already I:
Another interesting moment: while talking about economic stimulus policy, the President refers to middle class job growth as “the north star that guides our efforts.” In what I can only imagine is a rhetorical tickle of black voters and educated liberals, Obama seems to signal here (and at one or two other points as well) that he may be done hiding from his blackness, politically. In either case, an interesting choice of metaphor for a president whose presidency has so far been defined by thinly veiled white supremacist hysteria.

Energy, Ecology, and the Perversion of the Commons:
Finally, we come to Energy Policy. “We produce more oil at home than we have in 15 years.” As if this is a good thing (though it did get an audible “yeah!” from somebody in the crowd). “We produce more natural gas than ever before.” Yes, and our water is flammable as result. “But for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate change” begins what is perhaps the only redeemable portion of the speech. Not on how to fix climate change (“bipartisan market-based solution”), but on emphasizing it’s scientific irrefutability and awesome importance to not-so-distant posterity. This same rationale is imminently at our disposal as revolutionaries to argue for direct action against the ecological devastation of hydro-fracking, tar sands, the Keystone XL pipeline, and other threats to our ecosystem. The President outright states his intention to use maximum executive power in the absence of congressional action. Constitutional concerns aside, it is distinctly unclear what this would actually mean given his heaping praise on the “natural gas boom” (a sadly fortuitous choice of words) and his promise to include domestic oil extraction as part of an “all of the above plan.”

Obama dreamily tells us that much of natural gas and oil extraction is currently taking place on publicly-owned property (though it’s all being extracted by privately permitted corporations). It is apparently not enough to plunder and despoil our planet, but the private sector must plunder from those chunks of the planet supposedly owned by a people’s common government. And the President tells us this to our faces, selling it as a good thing that shows we’re all in this together.

Infrastructure and Housing, Just How Business Likes It:
We then move to infrastructure, a fairly generic topic. Good infrastructure attracts business, we’re told. The rebuilding will create construction and technology jobs, we’re told. This can be partially paid for by a “partnership” with private capital, we’re told.
Moving on to housing, we hear a boast of rising housing prices. Clearly this is a perspective based on the interests of the housing industry (big banks, essentially) not on the interests of struggling working people. Obama then proposes a law to allow large-scale refinancing of mortgage rates. An interesting, if stop-gap idea.

Education and Capitalist Ideology:
The next policy point is an appeal for universal Pre-K. The President cites the myriad benefits that result from stable Pre-K and early childhood education. There is, though, another wording choice that reveals things that should embarrass the powerful but apparently don’t. “Let’s… make sure none of our children start the race of life already behind.” The race of life. This is perhaps a less immediately consequential point, but this blithe remark is a vomit-worthy capitulation to the most foundational ideological underpinnings of capitalism. That life is a race, that life is about (even for toddlers) your future job, your future “success,” the dollar value assigned to your future and your ability to compete. The idea that the early development of children should be commonly provided for is a thoroughly progressive and beautifully communistic idea. But that the reason to do this is to head-start training for the next generation’s toil for the profit of the masters of capital is one of the most offensive and insidious notions I can think of. It’s an affront to the very idea of childhood and every single parent, teacher, and student should be outraged by it.

Now on to the rest of education policy. The major proposal was to increase the caliber of high school curricula to include more advanced vocational and technical training, citing European systems. What isn’t addressed is how to do this. In the absence of a stated way, we can only assume that the method would be the same dangling competition-based initiatives like Race to the Top/No Child Left Behind. The more interesting idea that came later was the proposal that federal aid to colleges be tied to cost/accessibility and to create a federally standardized index for the public to evaluate colleges cost/benefit ratio.

Who We Are vs. What Capital Needs:
Next, immigration. “Comprehensive immigration reform” sounds good, doesn’t it? Once again, the President seems to favor an “all of the above” approach. Apparently amnesty isn’t “above” but that’s just how it goes. After outlining reforms for dealing with so-called illegal immigration, he moved to legal immigration protocol, proclaiming that we should “attract the highly skilled entrepreneurs and engineers that will… grow our economy.” This is a far cry from “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses,” (the immigration policy of a time when capital needed those masses of cheap labor to build industry) and aptly pivots the subject away from the fact that undocumented workers tend to be those poor, huddled masses to which the Statue of Liberty so eloquently refers. If we talked about that too much or for too long, someone might eventually point out the that Administration’s policy of mass deportation of the most downtrodden and their families sounds a bit… unAmerican?

The Liberal Saviors of Women:
Now what better way to introduce the next section (women) with a listing of the three things we expect women to be in America: “our wives, our mothers, our daughters.” The recurrent “our” is as telling as the unholy trinity of women’s roles listed. The President lauded the Senate’s passage of the Violence Against Women Act. Well, it’s about damn time I suppose. The President and the cameras could not have been more personally congratulatory of Vice President Joe Biden (an author of the bill) while of course ignoring the generations of feminist movements that struggled for decades to get domestic violence onto the political table at all. The President also urged passage of a law that, judging by the name, would legislate equal pay for equal work.

The Long-Awaited Minimum Wage:
“Today a full-time worker making the [federal] minimum wage earns $14,500 a year…. A family with two kids that earns the minimum wage still lives below the poverty line. That’s wrong…. In the wealthiest nation on earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty – and raise the federal minimum wage to $9.00 and hour…. [and] Let’s tie the minimum wage to the cost of living.” Perhaps the most significant specific policy item in this address, such legislation would be a game change for the better for so much of the struggling working class in the US.

Black Enough Already II:
Another interesting moment occurs while the President is discussing families and marriage for the poor (a strange subject discussed strangely). The President regurgitates to the nation the platitude that “what makes you a man isn’t the ability to conceive a child, it’s having the courage to raise one.” An easy applause-getter on both left and right (by which for the purposes of this article only, I mean Democrats and Republicans) for its implicit emphasis on personal responsibility, this is also a fairly-well used rhetorical device within poor and oppressed communities. We should still acknowledge though, that this device in the hands of the leader of the Democratic Party still places national blame on the Young Black Man for the problem. And more to the point, it is the Prison Industry in this country (fueled and backed by the President’s education and drug policies) that kidnaps millions of young black and brown men from their homes and communities to lock them in cages and labor camps, depriving them of even the option to “raise one” as the President so virtuously suggests.

Empire, and the Political Costs of Global War:
Afghanistan. 33,000 troops have been brought home, we’re told. This year another 34,000 will return, we’re told. “By the end of next year, our War in Afghanistan will be over,” we’re told. The brass did not stand for this announcement. Outlining his military approach the President tells us, “We don’t need to send tens of thousands of our sons and daughters abroad or occupy other nations. Instead we’ll need to help [emphasis mine] countries like Yemen, Libya, and Somalia provide for their own security, and help allies who take the fight to terrorists as we have in Mali. And where necessary, through a range of capabilities, we will continue to take direct action against those terrorists who pose the gravest threat to Americans.” So what that means is that instead of maintaining global hegemony through large-scale, loud means that attract all kind of attention and criticism from the people of the world, we’re going to do it nicely and quietly through “voluntary relations” with “ally” governments (many of which we’ve installed recently and/or propped up over many decades, and many of which are egregiously anti-democratic). We’ll still be the gun behind global trade and capital. We’ll still kill you if you try to fight back or free your people from our yoke. But we’ll have your government’s consent, whether your government has its people’s consent or not. It’s still Empire, it’s just Friendly Empire. And it’s easier domestic politics too, now that we can reign death from above with a video game controller in Fort Drum instead of having to put boots in harms way.

The President goes on to state his “support” for the Syrian opposition and to say that the US will “stand steadfast with Israel in pursuit of security.” He does not say the word “Palestine” aloud.

He includes equal benefits for LGBT couples in the section on military and veterans benefits. He pridefully announces that women are “ready for combat” as though it is a good thing.

Internet, Security, and Control:
Next comes the warning of “cyber-attacks.” And we are told of a new executive order to increase cyber security. How exactly? It’s unclear. He urges congress to act further to “secure our networks.” One can only imagine the relief so many of the powerful might feel without the needling threat of Anonymous or another WikiLeaks. And as cyber-literacy increases by generation, how long until the poor simply start hacking the accounts of the rich and taking their digitally-imagined money. The state cannot allow that to happen. The free nature of the internet poses a threat to stability, though attempts to control the internet may well backfire as they did throughout the Arab Spring, posing the much more fundamental threat: people.

Getting (Y)ours Abroad:
Foreign trade is up to bat next. Obama touches on the Trans-Pacific Partnership to “level the playing field” for American exports in Asian markets. Many of those markets enjoy lingering protectionism and national regulations from a time when the regions governments justified their rule with the idea of “communism.” Such lingering barriers must of course be swept away for the new future of global capital. The President also announces his pursuit of a Trans-Atlantic Partnership to improve exports to the European Union from the US. For those who may not know, there are currently a number of Latin American nations whose domestic economies are dependent on import/export trade deals with Europe (the idea being for European nations to help out their former colonies by importing from them exclusively). Such trade deals crowd out American exports in certain European markets, but could have devastating effects of the economies of Latin America if removed. The poaching of Latin American export markets in Europe is what the President proposes, as though the US hasn’t done quite enough to screw Latin America. Also, one can only imagine the opportunities such an awful shock would create for American investors…

Finally Fighting the Plague:
Another unexpected thing happens about a minute later: the President is talking about global poverty and humanitarian aid (all well and good) and includes in his list of goals “realizing the promise of an AIDS-free generation, which is within our reach.” Many activists, queer communities, and families may be reminded of those who might still be alive today if such a goal had been publicly set by President Reagan at the time of the emergence of the epidemic rather than ignored by the government for so long, silently sentencing thousands to hard and lonely deaths.

Suffrage, a Dream Deformed:
Again unexpectedly, the President talks at some length about voting rights. While avoiding accusations of intentional electoral tampering with great skill, he speaks of the need to “improve the voting experience.” The legislated disenfranchisement of imprisoned Americans is not mentioned. This issue touches on the legacy of the black liberation struggle in this country, though erasing the role the issue of suffrage historically played as the first not last demand of a people. In the words of Kwame Ture (then-Stokely Carmichael and then-Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee): “We were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy.”

Gun Control and the House of Representatives:
In the anticipated opus of the evening, President Obama finally broaches the issue of gun control with the exhortation to “protect our most precious resource: our children.” He quite skillfully addresses Newtown without making it feel like political opportunism. He frames it with an artful combination of ‘common sense’ and ‘law and order’ language. What then follows is a forceful call for an up-or-down vote on gun control reform in the House. The political obstacle is that with a Republican majority, many such bills would die quietly in committee without a floor vote. So the President told a handful of deeply moving stories of victims of gun violence and then acclaimed again and again that “they deserve a vote!”

Always Leave ‘Em Wanting More:
Finally approaching the conclusion of the address, the tone shifts down a bit (adding an air of dignified thoughtfulness) to tell stories of chosen examples of patriotism in the audience (including a 102 year old black woman from Miami). This pious display segues gracefully into another appeal to bipartisanism before the obligatory “God bless America.”

white house

Beyond Procedural Justice: Finding Our Foundations in the Worst Case Scenario

Posted on by
5

295072_470646616283707_1640899392_n

One of the foundations of foreclosure-based eviction defense tends to be a close reading of the entire mortgage history of the property.  This could include closely looking at all of the ownership records, reading through every single foreclosure document, looking up bank information, and so on.  The idea behind this is two-fold.  First, it gives us a clear understanding of what has happened, and what will happen.  This allows us to competently work on the case, discuss it with others and the media, and then create a strategy with tactics that make sense for the situation.

The second reason is basically to look for fraud and inaccuracies.  In a recent study sample coming out of the County Assessor’s office in San Francisco, 84% of mortgage foreclosures issued had some level of illegal fraud on the part of the bank.  A full 99% of these foreclosures had some degree of irregularity.(1)

 

Most people you may talk to who work in foreclosure defense, myself included, rarely see a case that does not have something confusing and conniving coming from the bank.  This often includes the fact that the occupant(s) were never actually served the foreclosure notice, though the bank insists they were and has forged documents indicating that the paperwork had been adequately delivered in person.  Beyond this there could be issues about who owns the note, how the mortgage was written, and then obvious conveniences for the bank like “robo-signing” and MERS mortgages that leave it confusing as to whether or not anyone owns the property.

These issues are foundational when discussing the crisis of foreclosure in the U.S., especially when discussing moratorium policy.  Here people ask the sheriff of a locality to stand down from executing foreclosure-based evictions, often times simply because there is no way to guarantee that they are executing a foreclosure that is legally “fair.”  With fraud so rampant, it seems completely logical to challenge the execution of foreclosures on a systemic level since the mechanism for executing this type of property law is fundamentally broken.  The procedural justice, the idea that if you play by the rules as they are written you should get the fair result, has completely gone out the window today and the logic of resistance is becoming commonplace.

But that is assuming that the rules were fair to begin with.

Fraud is a key component of the discussion of mass foreclosure and displacement, but there is often an interest among foreclosure activists to stand with the case that is actually more cut and dry.  The absolute anger about the lack of procedural justice is an easy talking point, and most people in most communities can share in this outrage.  But what about the person who simply cannot pay their mortgage?  Is there situation not as key to the discussion about the problems with housing law and property inequality?  In many ways it is a clearer tool for fighting the foundations of housing injustice.

When a mortgage foreclosure is executed fraudulently most people can look at it with outrage. Politicians, bankers, and the neighborhood trash collector can equally say that this was done unfairly and illegally.  The assumption ends up being that we need to weed out the bad elements so that the property system can continue more fairly.  The idea here, like radical reformists that continually cite the constitution in their arguments, is that if we just clear out the illegal and selfish elements from the banking institutions then we would be able to return to our procedural justice.  Problem is, the procedure was never fair.

The foundation of the economic framework in the U.S. is inequality.  Unequal access to resources has been part and parcel of the American capitalist experience, and there is no question that this will continue without interruption unless the system is halted altogether.  This inequality exists objectively, but the fairness of it tends to be an accepted part of our culture.  Property law is merely an extension of this like anything else; the only difference is that even though housing is a basic necessity we have yet to ensure access to it.

For most low and medium income people, a slight change in their living conditions can create a catastrophic result for all of their financial efforts, including their home.  The loss of a job, an illness, injury, legal expenses, or some other hardship can easily throw a person into extreme turmoil.  This is not because of some moral failing, but simply because of the circumstances of one’s life, including not having a crash pad for when things go wrong.  Given that this reality is at the heart of the housing crisis, the campaign for housing justice and community control over land must be a fight for people to have access to adequate housing no matter what their income situation is.  There should not be a point at which someone gives up the right to a home because of a reduction in income.  It is easy to come to the defense of a person who was cheated, but it is harder for many to support resistance to eviction when the tenant or homeowner simply cannot pay.  To support such resistance would challenge the basic assumption that the right to access comes from the ability to pay.

The direct action work of defending against a foreclosure is a political statement, where the collective strength of the community has the ability to preserve someone’s material needs.  Here the community both supports someone in retaining one of the most important parts of their life, and in doing so we see that we must violate both the laws and the assumption of capitalism just to meet someone’s basic human needs for shelter.  In some ways, the resistance for someone who is simply behind in payments and cannot come up with the financial resources to stay afloat exposes the more basic contradiction.  Even when the system works, even when a person engages honestly with the financial institutions, they can still be forced out into the streets.  It is true that the ways in which banks often deal with people unable to make the standard payments borders on criminality, but this is still standard practice.  Things like principal reductions and modifications can aid in these situations, and they do, but the fundamental problem is unearthed in situations where everything goes according to plan and it still goes wrong for the homeowner.  In these moments the contradictions of a system fundamentally built on wealth inequality are clear, and there is no way to sidestep it with talk of fraud or some conspiracy theory.  The plain fact is that for the majority of the American population, a change in life circumstances (even for a brief period of time) can leave them without a home.  When people just don’t have the money, the most concrete political conclusion is clear: that we stand with the right of all people to have a home, not just those who were “cheated” by this ruthless system.

Property law is one of the foundations of commercial capitalism in the U.S., even more cemented by the commodification of property through the mortgage securitization process.  The home is also the primary place where working people tend to hold their wealth, except for those lucky enough to have a retirement fund.  Challenging the kind of property relations that exist for housing is essential to undermining the assumptions that inequality is either fair or incontestable.  The illegality of the foreclosure mill process is criminal (in the most basic sense of the word) and must be challenged at every angle, but we have to resolve not to stop there.  If we allow this to simply be a movement to right the new wrongs then we will never get to the systemic truth that it is not a fair economic world in which people are not guaranteed the most central part of their social character: a home.  The fraud exists here often times not because there is some type of interpersonal malice on the part of the banks, but simply that it is easier and more profitable for them to skip proper documentation so that they can roll out the foreclosures even faster.  This is a crack in the system, a point where the inequity of housing property relations can no longer justify itself as properly maintained.  Simply to execute their foreclosures profitably on such a massive scale, they must break the law – and there is the kernel of a movement to resist them at every angle.

It is important for people in the housing movement to join up and take this fight beyond claims of legitimacy, to the defense of housing as a human right.  The most basic case of foreclosure may be the strongest in the long run because a successful defense in these situations is not just a defense against crime, it is a defense against a capitalist system that allows some people to have many homes while others fight to keep just one.

Often times the discovery that there is no illegality in a case, which is quite rare, can be demoralizing to the people working on it.  It is not easy to present in court; under educated public audiences can sometimes lack solidarity, and it is much more difficult to pressure the banks.  That being true, it is a profound opportunity.  When successful, the defensive action will show that a movement does not just have the ability to force institutions to behave honestly, but actually forces them to step back because of the united power of a community.  This is always going to be the foundation of a new power dichotomy in our neighborhoods and, though it is more difficult, it will be the most transformative example of what it means to fight for systemic change in housing.  If the institutions are to meaningfully change it will not be simply because a movement forms to fight “fraud,” it will be because regular people refuse to be victims to the rules of a society that shove them out of their home.  It will be because they rebel against poverty.  We should take these difficult opportunities as the best example that beyond the present financial crisis and the predatory practices of the banks, there is still a world that needs to be transformed.

There is still a profound challenge presented by situations where there is no clear irregularity.  In these situations it is much more difficult to turn to legal resources, or even to convince those who are somewhat uninitiated to the issues that play into mortgage foreclosure and class inequality.  The tactical options left, then, are those based on mass solidarity. When we are stripped of the options that the state has given us then we are left only with the ability to come together in a show of class power to challenge the very infrastructure of poverty.  The tactics then shift away from the entire extra possibilities since those are, by their very nature, already exhausted.  Now it is up to the collective action of the community to defend the home, and it is in those moments that you have boiled down your tactical choices to the ones that will be foundational for all truly transformative battles.  By a lack of resources you have actually stripped away the extra elements and you are left with class struggle in the most literal and real way that it could possibly be imagined.  Now it is people, coming together, to defend their homes against the wealthy.  When this form of organizing can make real gains and measurable success it is both transformative and empowering, giving a vision of what it would take to radically reshape the kind of social relationships we have been told for so long are infallible.

A movement is not just made out of the support of individual people’s cases, but by the ability to unite those cases together into a campaign that changes the conditions of the world.  As we find commonalities between them we can create the kind of community that has the ability to continue defending itself long after individual cases have been completed.  These difficult situations reveal the deeper underlying forces at work and suggest strategic ways forward that can act as the seeds of a new type of neighborhood, and if we can stick with them they can blossom as the movement continues to emerge.

Notes:

(1). Wright, Kai. “84 Percent of San Francisco Foreclosures Fraudulent — Why are Bankers Still Getting Away With Crimes?” Alternet. February 19th, 2012.     http://www.alternet.org/story/154210/84_percent_of_san_francisco_foreclosures_fraudulent–why_are_bankers_still_getting_away_with_crimes

Occupy Is Dead. Now What?

Posted on by
8

occupy_wall_streetThe Occupy Movement is a thing of the past. I think it’s safe to say that now. I don’t say this to be a downer on the movement or to destroy the momentum that we may have built. These moments of accelerated activity for the left are important, but they aren’t all that we are. And so, I don’t see the Occupy Movement coming to an end as a bad thing for us as radicals. But, we should recognize it so that we can begin to move onto new phases and next steps of our continual growth as a movement.

To do this, we need to look back briefly and reflect on Occupy and what it teaches us. My experiences were largely with Occupy Rochester, and most of my reflections will begin from there. But in my conversations with many people that participated in other Occupy’s, I don’t think that what I saw in Rochester was unrepresentative of many Occupations around the country.

As with any movement, we should start with what we’ve gained over the course of the moment. With Occupy, there seem to be a lot of fairly vague things gained. Economic inequality is now a national talking point. Moderate to liberal politicians and mainstream media have been forced to recognize economic inequality as part of the conversation, even if superficially and through the same flawed, capitalist lens that they have always seen through.

For some of the more militant elements of the left in the country, we also discovered that there is some validity to the idea that courageous and militant actions that step outside of the typical venues for social change are in fact capable of inspiring mass participation and self-organization.

But, in some of the more objective outlooks, it doesn’t seem to me as if we’ve gained much. It doesn’t seem as if any of the various Occupy groups have spawned sustainable organizations capable of continued resistance to the structures that cause the inequality that Occupy originally identified as much of the problem. So while we may have inspired ourselves, which should never be dismissed, it also doesn’t look like we’ve become much more widespread in our organization or in our collective power.

The trajectory toward revolutionary change is a long one, and we have moments that may be revolutionary or they may just be moments that we should strengthen ourselves – building new combative organizations and growing the membership of the ones we already had. From where I stand, it seems as though we missed that moment. And, what worries me, is that in my short time of involvement in these sort of movements, that seems to be a regular feature of the US left.

As the global justice movement in the US slowed, it didn’t seem like we had built a stronger left. The energy of this movement, however, did flow nicely into building a large anti-war mobilization movement. Unfortunately, that also didn’t seem to build new or strengthen many existing organizations and resistance movements.

To me, this is central. These movement moments require a great deal of resources. Time, energy, and money are required to build these huge mobilizations. In most movement moments it seems that a lot of activists simply burn out, having put in more energy than they really had. If our movements cost this much, we need to come out on the other side stronger and better suited for the next fight.

So, what is it that leads us to miss these moments? I’m sure there are dozens of answers, all of which are just as partially correct. The part that I’m hoping to contribute is that I think we often display a sort of notoriously short American attention span. We get excited about the exciting portions of movements, but don’t commit ourselves in a massive enough way to the more serious, harder part of building movements – targeted outreach, consciousness raising, analysis development and organization building.

Activists in US-based movements see mass protests in Egypt, student strikes in Quebec, workplace takeovers in Argentina and leap to saying that we have to do those sort of actions. They’re right, partially. In the US we absolutely need movements that can and will take those sort of actions to fight for fundamental changes in our social and economic reality. So we jump to organizing an occupation because that’s the goal and it looks exciting.

However, if we take a step back and look at the movements that inspire us, we’d quickly realize that they’re able to take these mass actions after years of work developing organizations and spreading consciousness. If they didn’t skip that work, we shouldn’t believe that we can. We live in a nation that has an incredible ability to dodge basic class consciousness, with little recent experience in mass militant protest, where people have very little sense of the actual power they could wield.

With a quick glance at some of the many international movements that inspire us, we can see that there is considerably more to them than the mass actions that we see

Egypt – “Ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām (The people want to bring down the regime.)”

Just a few months before Occupy Wall Street broke out, the Arab Spring was inspiring a generation of activists throughout the world. While the demonstrations seemed to begin (can we ever really say begin?) in Tunisia, it’s the mass protests of Egypt that seemed to catch the world’s attention. On January 25th, 2011 mass protests appeared in Tahrir Square to protest growing poverty and the leadership of the three decade-rule of Hosni Mubarak. These protests are largely seen as spontaneous.

However, when we look to the youth that seem to have spontaneously called this protest, we find an organization called the April 6th Youth Movement. What is the significance of April 6th? On April 6th, 2008 a series of strikes led by textile workers in Mahalla led to a national general strike and the push for a labor movement independent of the state apparatus. The April 6th Youth Movement formed from this movement as an organizations of leftists, students and workers calling for drastic social change and recognizing the power of organized people to achieve that change. Much of the groups activity was tied to a facebook group that in 2009 had 70,000 members actively participating in debate and massively extending political, social, and economic consciousness of youth in the country.

Only five days after the initial protests in Egypt, Egyptian workers saw the necessity for mass organization to coordinate their participation and formed the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade Unions (EFITU). On February 6th, EFITU called for a General Strike and began to shut down entire sectors of the economy. On February 11th, Hosni Mubarak was no longer in power in Egypt.

Quebec – “Why do you strike when you have the lowest tuition in Canada? We have the lowest tuition in Canada because we strike.”

More recently, many of us in the US left have been inspired by the huge student strikes that have swept Quebec. What has to be remembered by all of us is that this is a dramatic surge of energy and militancy from students that have a decades-long tradition of organization. Both students and anarchists have been well organized in Quebec for years.

The more militant arm of the Quebec student movement – Association pour une solidarité syndicale étudiante – was formed in 2001 and by the time of the strike in 2012 had 50,000 members in 25 university-level organizations. The other major student unions in Quebec have a combined membership of around 200,000. Members of these unions pay dues into an organization that is then able to hire staff, maintain offices, fund organizing efforts, etc. It’s in moments of mass-movement momentum that these organizations are able to form and then again it’s in those moments that these organizations are able to grow.

Anarchists and other revolutionaries have been actively involved in these organizations and the various movements around them for years. Some of these revolutionaries act simply as participants within the major student unions and some of them coordinate as members of groups like the anarchist Union Comuniste Libertaire. The existence of organizations like this help them to coordinate the efforts of revolutionaries and actively participate in the battle of ideas internal to the student movement.

Argentina – “Que se vayan todos (they all must go!)”

Further back in the early 2000′s many of us involved in various labor and community efforts were inspired to hear about the worker recuperated factories movement and the growing people’s assemblies in Argentina following their massive economic collapse.

As the economy collapsed, many workers took over their factories and workplaces rather than allow them to close and layoff all workers. In many cases, these workplaces began to operate again under worker control. A federation of worker-controlled workplaces grew and began to organize and advocate for further expropriations. In Buenos Aires, directly democratic neighborhood assemblies appeared to organize around the immediate needs of their territory as the government went through many rapid changes. Through workplace and community organizing, movements in Argentina began to create the institutions capable of sustainably maintaining grassroots, rank-and-file power.

In many ways, these were some of the most spontaneous formations. Even here, we find a long history of mass-movement building. Most workers in Argentina already belonged to unions. Thousands of people were active in socialist parties and anarchist organizations. These organizations had participants that were active in unions and community groups before the economic collapse. So, to say that the ideas raised in the intense moments of the 2001 economic collapse and following uprising were totally spontaneous would be faulty. However, this uprising became the birthplace of totally new organizations that took on very new forms from the ones before them.

Even in the case of a much more spontaneous collapse and uprising, the movement forces in Argentina seemed better poised to strengthen their efforts after the movement moment. They didn’t simply wear out activists. They built new organizations, many of which have lasted for years and engaged thousands of new people and substantially built the organized power of working class movements.

Back in the U.S.A.

There is no short-cut for organizing! If we’re ever going to genuinely change society for the better, we’re going to need to build massive organizations in workplaces, communities, and schools. We absolutely should be aiming for the day when we can organize general strikes, student strikes, university occupations, and all of these exciting tactics that keep many of us so inspired by the power of everyday people to take control of the world around them. But, we also have to be real with ourselves. We need these tactics to win rather than get crushed. We need to have them build our movements rather than drain them. We need to come out stronger on the other end of the intensification of struggle.

If that’s going to happen, we need to get comfortable with the real work necessary to build organizations. We need to build a tolerance for the less-than-sexy work of decision making processes. We need to spend more time spreading our ideas and messages to people that aren’t already activists or lefties.

In short, we need to dedicate ourselves to being life-long movement builders and organizers rather than momentarily excitable activists.

Housing Committee Wins Award from Labor Council

Posted on by
Reply

At the recent Rochester and Genesee Valley Area Labor Federation awards dinner the Housing is a Human Rights project gained some recognition, further driving a partnership with unions as we develop long-term solidarity. The recently named Jim Schmidt Award for Community Solidarity was awarded to the Metro Justice Housing is a Human Right Committee for the work they have been doing to challenge foreclosures in the city. The committee’s most central campaign is the demand for the City of Rochester to enact a moratorium on bank foreclosure based evictions, which would mean the city would no longer provide police resources to enforce these evictions.

Recently the committee, along with Take Back the Land Rochester, called for a large Housing as a Human Right march, which had the support of labor unions and organizations such as SEIU 200 United and the local branch of the Working Families Party. Together, with around 300 people, we marched to City Hall with a large rally to discuss the crisis of banking fraud and mass eviction in our city. We then packed the Speak to City Council session, with more than two dozen people from the march speaking to the issues of housing in this city.

The award comes as a culmination of our efforts, and is an energizing force as the committee heads into 2013.

At the same event University of Rochester Students for a Democratic Society were awarded for their participation in the contract battle on their campus, which was instrumental. Both the housing committee and the contract battle remain central to our work, and we intend to move forward on developing community support for housing justice and labor solidarity!

 

Housing Resistance and Transformation: From Direct Action to Direct Democracy

Posted on by
5

If there is one thing that has marked the libertarian tradition, at least in the classical sense, it has been the focus on transformative organizing.  This may simply appear as rhetoric to some people, and in many cases it is.  The phraseology is often employed simply to celebrate tactics that are cartoonish or illogical, while at the same time allowing people to decry more traditional tactics as “too reformist.”  This loses the fundamental nature of the term and its roots in direct action.  As part of the anarchist dictionary, direct action can act as a type of dogma for many people in movements.  Its use is for its own sake, as if this is the foundation of transformation both for the individuals and the community.  This misses the context for how to approach tactics and what will make them truly transformative.

 

As we entered the seemingly perpetual financial crisis, and the realities of corporate finance started to crystalize in the minds of the public, it became clear that there were material necessities that were increasingly lacking in neighborhoods.  As things are taken away from working people, as collapse becomes eminent, the discussions about how transformative an action is can seem arbitrary.  The reality is that people need food, education, and housing.  By the time we entered 2010 the housing crisis became the most obvious eruption and the necessity became critical.  Since the beginning of the financial crisis, some reports estimate that between 20 and 30 million people will be forcefully displaced by foreclosure in the United States.  This is then combined the rising number of rental evictions, the falling standards for rental properties, the slashes in social spending and public housing, and a general climate of instability.  Together this becomes an intertwined net of financial failure, one that allows a margin at the top to pillage the rest of us.  Here is where direct action has become a marker of transformative organizing because it is necessary simply to live and meet your needs.

 

It is on this precept that the housing movements we engage in, especially with movements like Take Back the Land and Occupy Our Homes, allows us to feel a sense of the new world growing within the shell of the old.  There are two primary realities: the homeless population is growing and there are people being foreclosed on and evicted at record rates.  Our response to this?  Put people in homes and block evictions.  This is not a simple proposition, nor is it one where the details are assumed, but it is on this basic declaration that we build the rest of the housing movement.

 

The most obvious of these is often the liberation of empty bank owned homes.  Around our major cities, especially in post-industrial rust belt cities, there are a frightening number of empty homes that litter working class neighborhoods.  Though the specifics may lend a long list of sociological explanations as to why these houses are empty, the broadest way to see these abandoned home is simply “foreclosures.”  The banks, as the primary vessel for home ownership in the U.S., began a predatory and fraudulent lending pattern. We have seen them as an almost paramilitary force destroying out communities; removing people with force and occupying the land for the financial gain of a few.  This is not a story of obscure market forces or the flux of international economies, but a deliberate process of the rich to roll the dice of the poor.  A paradox occurs here where hundreds of homeless people in a given area are matched by thousands of vacant homes.  The answer to this in an organizing framework based in common sense and rooted in direct action.  The project of Take Back the Land, Occupy Our Homes, and other movements is to support people to move into those empty bank owned homes.  Instead of living as a “squatter,” they fix up the home, turn on the utilities, and maintain it as if they own the place.  This is the most efficient and direct way to house a family who is without aid, and at the same time shows that to simply support them to live as human beings we must break the law.  In this way living has become a form of civil disobedience, and for every family that is successful there is another moment of resistance against a web of corrupt financial institutions.

The second foundation of this housing movement is in the direct support of families attempting to fight their foreclosure and to develop a solidarity network that forms between other families going through the same situation.  We are again placed into direct action by the necessity of these circumstances since the position of the state and local governments is to immediately side with the banks demands.  Those in Take Back the Land and other movements often provide casework support for people going through foreclosure, lending our own networks so that people can get the support of attorneys, government agencies, and other organizations.  The work is not in these institutional forms, but is instead in the solidarity that is exhibited by those involved.  The very source of this support is in the notion that any one of us could be victimized next; forced out of our homes and away from our own stability.  We give support in a fashion that working class people use to create change, whether in the union hall or in our communities. A final confrontation with both state and capital takes place when the police use government resources to evict a family at the behest of the bank.  The government, in the form of the police, immediately takes a side in the civil dispute with the bank, even though we have seen a systemic epidemic of fraud in the handling of these foreclosures.  The benefit of the doubt is given to the lender and the family is forcefully removed from their home.  This leaves them with a necessity that must be filled: a place to live.  Just like the housing liberation, we take up the mantle to physically defend the house through civil disobedience.  Here people will protest and picket, blockading the home, often chaining themselves to immobile objects and risking arrest.  It begins to become a liability for both the bank and the city, which both operate under public pressure and commerce.  Here we again are forced to meet people’s needs by engaging in direct action in violation of the law, except it is in preemption of homelessness instead of a reaction to it.

 

In these moments of confrontation, a person is able to see exactly what the power of a movement looks like.  This is not in the abstraction of electoral politics where many progressives finally reduce their hopes, where an elected hero will hopefully combat the forces of repression on their behalf.  In both of these situations, when successful, a person’s situation is overturned.  Their homelessness becomes a memory; their house remains their home.  In these concerted moments a community acts as one, understanding that the plight of their neighbor is theirs as well.  Here we are able to see what happens when we fight together for what is right and what is possible, and to win.  These are the most direct moments in lives where participation is often discouraged or impossible, and where the events of the world seem hopeless.  This can transform those involved by giving a sense of immediatism to a long-term movement.  The relationships that have most recently governed housing like commodification, markets, development, and gentrification, suddenly become replaced by the tools that were able to save it: solidarity and direct action.

 

Anarchism, unlike utopian and revolutionary visions past, is about both the present and the future.  The way we survive today is the way we will be victorious and joyous tomorrow, and if we can build movements that accentuate this mechanism we can hope to “build the new world in the shell of the old.”  We know that transformation comes internally when it comes externally, but only when it comes from the direct involvement of the people and in a way that reflects the world that should be.  When this happens we cease to simply be actors in a social project, but are transformed by the sense that we can really build a society that reflects us.  We aren’t just activists and hobbyists.

 

The center of our housing work is our belief in direct action, and from here we can build a multi-faceted approach to a housing movement that takes on multiple approaches when necessary.  Whether this is work on local policy, land trust models, or radical social work, all of it is in support of direct action with the understanding that this is the most effective method in terms of results and is the way that communities begin to show that they can survive the banking onslaught.  It is through this that people will begin to be revitalized to a political and social life.  Where most people have been so alienated from the power in themselves and their community they begin to see an actual cause and effect and this empowerment breeds involvement, fostering a movement that only grows and grows.

 

The final solution to transformative housing, one that is beyond the temperamental realms of capital or the paternalistic hand of the state, is not something a few people can declare with any certainty.  The final establishment of community control can only come by creating models to prevent mass displacement, foreclosure, and homelessness.  As we are able to see the power that we have ourselves we are able to peer into a possible future for our neighborhoods, and a whole world of social relationships.

 

Nationwide Organization of Revolutionary Anarchists in the United States?

Posted on by
28

By Colin O

Over 150 years of the anarchist theoretical and organizing tradition have passed, yet anarchist influence in the United States is practically non-existent. In some local contexts, we do see occasional anarchist influence, but in a nationwide context anarchists are practically irrelevant.

There has been a conversation brewing for a few years among some anarchists. This conversation has moved forward specifically in a grouping of organizations that have come together in recent years around the Class Struggle Anarchist Conferences. Since the first Class Struggle Anarchist Conference in New York City in 2008, it’s been increasingly clear that these different organizations have a great deal of agreement and could be strengthened by unification into a nationwide anarchist organization.

In anticipation for an upcoming conference of these organizations that intends to found this single, nationwide organization, this article is an effort to bring together the many arguments for why such an organization is desirable. More than that, I hope to show the inspirational possibilities of such an organization in the broader anarchist movement, so that this organization can take off after its founding.

Why Anarchist Organization in the First Place?

A great deal of literature already exists on the question of anarchist specific organizations and the role of such a revolutionary organization. For those who aren’t familiar with these traditions, many of the organizations already involved in this process are explicitly informed by dual-organizationalist, especifista, platformist, and syndicalist traditions. These traditions raise the importance of anarchists organizing specifically as anarchists to spread and further develop the influence and understanding of our revolutionary ideas alongside more broad-based social movements.

Given that many anarchists in the United States are increasingly informed by these traditions, I’d like to focus on the value specifically of a unified and nationwide revolutionary anarchist organization.

Mass Propaganda

An organization with hundreds of members throughout the country is capable of spreading anarchist ideas at a larger scale than we’ve seen from the anarchist movement in decades. We could manage and sustain national or regional agitational papers like Freedom/Libertad and Four Star Digest, as well as the more intensive theoretical literature of Ideas & Action and the Northeastern Anarchist. More importantly, with the skills of anarchist media workers around the country, we could surely move into creating high quality audio and video addressing the wide array of radical organizing already happening.

Beyond simply producing media at larger scale and more energy intensive media, we can also create the spaces for debate on ideas, tactics, and strategies within the anarchist movement that help us to unify and coordinate our efforts.

Solidarity at Scale

When anarchist organizers around the country face repression by the state or bosses, or are engaged in particularly difficult or important campaigns, the ability to coordinate national solidarity in a unified way can be instrumental. Bail or legal funds can be immediately paid off from the treasury of a nationwide organization with hundreds of regular dues-paying members. When a fight of national or international significance is happening, members could coordinate solidarity efforts around the country. When hot-spots of struggle pop up, anarchist organizers from around the country could be sent to participate in the on-the-ground organizing.

Build Local Chapters

The hardest organizing one can do is the real task of creating an organization from the ground up, developing the skills of members, finding effective work that the group can do and succeed at, and work to make all of that effort sustainable enough that it doesn’t fall apart in just a few years. Many of the anarchist organizations around the country right now are started by members of other organizations that have moved to a new city and work to start groups like their previous group.

Why not work to develop an ability to help people start local chapters, train some of them in basic organizing skills, give them agitational literature to use in their town, and support them through the challenges that they will inevitably face? Why not strategically consider where we would like to devote resources and energy to creating local chapters, rather than have the anarchist movement grow more or less by accident?

Many current anarchist organizers have also written books or developed inspirational presentations and gone on speaking tours. Let’s maximize the potential of these tours by giving those touring the tools to recruit people that agree into forming locals after the speaker leaves. At the very least, why not have national tools that help us to keep in touch with sympathetic people in cities where we may not be able to build locals, but might have that ability in a couple of years?

Open to Various Levels of Participation

Part of what keeps so much of the anarchist movement small and fairly homogenous is that in effect we require all participants to immediately become high-level thinkers and organizers. For most people, particularly those most affected by the disastrous consequences of the state and capitalism, constant organizing simply isn’t possible. An effective organization is capable of accommodating various levels of involvement, and making it easy for members to move fluidly through those levels of involvement. A unitary nationwide organization would allow members to join without requiring that they become such  effective and committed organizers as to have to build chapters immediately, but could help to ensure that whatever level of commitment they can agree to can have a positive impact. This is particularly important to anarchists that may not be surrounded by other revolutionaries in small cities, rural areas, or more than 50 miles from the Bay Area.

Bridging the Rural-Urban Divide

Can a serious revolution happen with organization only in the cities? Can the anarchist movement really have an impact on rural issues when we’re incapable of supporting more isolated rural anarchists? When we talk of organizing the unorganized and building militant worker movements how do our movements continue to miss the various opportunities to work within and find the militants already organizing in immigrant and farm-worker communities?

When there is an option for isolated individual anarchists in rural communities to join up with a nationwide organization, not only can they connect with anarchist organizers in cities nearby, but with other anarchists working in rural communities throughout the entire country.

Impact Politics and Organization on a National Scale

So many of the issues that we work on are national questions. While we aren’t nationalists, we do live in a political reality where many policies are decided on a national level. Opposition to US invasions for instance require nationwide opposition and organization. When those broad-based anti-war organizations are working at a national level, for anarchists to have an impact on their strategies and tactics, we need to coordinate at a national level as well. Rather than have this happen accidentally through networks of friends, why not do this purposefully on an ideological and strategic basis?

The same can be said about most major unions. We often complain the activities of workers within the major unions throughout the country don’t match our political or strategic orientation. Well, why would they? We have zero capacity to coordinate the activities of revolutionaries in the rank and file of these organizations. We can’t strategically choose to orient our efforts at any union larger than the IWW, and even there revolutionary anarchists often can’t assert any coordinated influence. To believe that we will have any real impact on the direction of the labor movement without a nationwide organization of anarchists is to fantasize about the possibility rather than organize towards it.

Ability to Mass-Mobilize Effectively

In the case where anarchists throughout the country are trying to instigate a fight rather than influence the direction of a larger organization, we could actually decide on strategies and tactics together and mass-mobilize on a regional or national scale. Being able to turn out hundreds or even thousands without having to rely on liberal and progressive organizations could allow anarchists to influence the political and economic narrative in a purposeful and strategic way. To have the capacity to push issues forward as anarchists, we wouldn’t have to continue trying to put a radical spin to an otherwise liberal effort.

Honestly, in many ways our ability to mass mobilize without the funding and support of big, liberal non-profits is the key to legitimizing our perspectives and tactics throughout social justice struggles. We can strategically decide on ways to move direct action forward as a key method of social struggle locally, regionally, and nationally.

Internationalism not Nationalism

We don’t believe in nations, so why nationwide organization and not continental? The immediate response is that we do live in a political reality of nations. The politics, economics, and foreign policy largely emanate from a national level. Acknowledging this and organizing on that basis doesn’t mean that we are nationalists, it means that we are organizing based in a shared reality.  The Federation of Anarchists-Communists of Argentina, the Anarchist Federation of Uruguay and the anarchist Worker Solidarity Movement of Ireland are not nationalist organizations.

We should be building towards an internationally coordinated anarchist movement. Part of what anarchists in the United States can do is build a strong US organization that can confederate with allied organizations throughout the world.

Our Moment is Now!

The economic context of the United States is drastically changing and this is having an impact politically. We need to take advantage of this moment, because these moments don’t come frequently. To miss this moment may mean setting the anarchist movement in the US back decades. As the nation’s economy slowly implodes, wealth concentration becomes increasingly obvious to millions of people, and the social safety net gets destroyed it becomes clear to millions that the status quo can’t maintain itself and that drastic change is necessary. We are foolish if we think that capitalists, fascists, authoritarian communists, and others won’t be organizing in massive and coordinated ways to take advantage of the moment and manipulate millions of people to fight against their own interests. If we don’t make building anarchist organization on a nationwide scale a priority, than we should understand that we are effectively surrendering the moment to other forces.

Instead let’s take the challenges being thrown at us as an opportunity to build and legitimize to millions our visions of a revolutionary anarchist society. In the coming months, I hope that we will be announcing the creation of a nationwide US-based revolutionary anarchist organization. Let’s get behind this effort quickly and powerfully to show that our ideas are more than just ideas, but an inspired road-map of mass struggle to a genuinely free and equal world.

Movie Screening: Capitalism — A Love Story

Posted on by
Reply

DATE: Tuesday, July 17th
TIME: 7:00pm
PLACE: Flying Squirrel Community Center (285 Clarissa St.)

In anticipation for the local Anti-Capitalist March on July 21st, Rochester Red & Black will be screening Capitalism: A Love Story by Michael Moore.

Afterwords, we will have a brief discussion about the importance of explicitly anti-capitalist activity for today’s movements.

Capitalism: A Love Story

On the 20-year anniversary of his groundbreaking masterpiece “Roger & Me,” Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” comes home to the issue he’s been examining throughout his career: the disastrous impact of corporate dominance on the everyday lives of Americans. But this time the culprit is much bigger than General Motors, and the crime scene is far wider than Flint, Michigan.

Anti-Capitalist March!

Posted on by
1

DATE:Sat July 21st
TIME: 6pm
PLACE: Washington Square Park

Of all the preventable ways we suffer, there is one common factor fueling them.

We will gather in common cause for a world which puts human need before profit.

We have enough food, enough houses, enough water, and enough electricity that these needs could be met.

We give ourselves permission to meet those needs with a new, non-capitalist system.

Because a better world IS possible.

And we are here to fight for for it and build this world! See you in the streets!

Help spread the word: on facebook, get the poster.