We Are Seeds

We Are Seeds

About This Zine This is a short zine written to test out some ideas. Its main audience is organizers and activists. I hope to inspire people to keep going, to help us know that our work matters, and maybe even to inform strategic decisions.

This zine is also for people who feel that things are deeply wrong with the world, but are not yet involved in social movements. I hope this zine will motivate you by showing the joys of being in movement together. Organizing in a social movement with others can be a little scary, and at times it can be depressing. The ideas in this zine are a counterweight to those facts.

My hope is that this project can eventually become an edited book, complete with the perspectives and experiences of lots of other activists. If this zine resonates with you, let me know! Especially if you are interested in being a contributor.

If you have constructive feedback, I’d love that too. This zine is a test drive of these ideas as I’m working on the book version, and I want the book to be as good as it can be.

And that takes input.

Finally, please get in touch if you want to republish this material.

by Meghan Krausch meghan.krausch@gmail.com www.drmegkrausch.com

Introduction There is a popular slogan “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we are seeds.” The title of this zine refers to that idea, highlighting that joining a movement or getting together with others to change the world collectively is always the seed of something. or organizer is rarely a glamorous one. Protestors are sometimes beaten and gassed by police when they take to the streets. Activists sometimes work very long hours for little or no pay. People outspoken about social issues receive death This zine is a product of my ex- threats on social media, and poliperience in social movements over ticians may attack them by name. the last 25 years. It’s also the prod- The actual work of organizing is uct of my academic research on sometimes boring drudge or cleanhow the world is shaped by social up work. movements. Finally, it’s especially Nonetheless, the world we live the product of everyone I have ever in now has been fundamentally co-struggled with. I have learned so much from these comrades, shaped by social movements, and whether they were mentors in the by the actions of people who wantproper sense or just other people ed to create a better, less oppresengaged in the struggle to create a sive world. Suffrage in the U.S. is better world. Along with these folks universal, the 40-hour work week is – you all – I have felt so much and the legal standard along with othcreated some beautiful new things er international labor protections, South Africa is no longer an aparttogether. heid regime, most former colonies The image of being an activist We may not always see the plant that will grow, but we are always down there, in the ground, doing something. When we work with others to make a better world, we are already the seeds of that world.

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are now independent nations, rivers are no longer open garbage dumps, queer and trans people hold Pride events, legal segregation in the U.S. is gone, and more. Even bans on smoking in enclosed public spaces is the result of activism. None of these reforms are perfect or perfectly enjoyed, but they are distinct improvements and changes.

underground) working to bring about that next, better world. Even when we aren’t hearing about their work or it is largely invisible.

This axiom, that where there is repression, there is resistance, is critical to keep in mind. It can help us remain hopeful in dark times, and it can support those who want to resist to know they will not be Many of the people involved in alone. I believe, based on history, these struggles didn’t necessarily the fact that some will resist whenknow how their struggles would ever people are oppressed is a basic end, or if they would achieve suc- fact of being human, and this idea cess. Generations of people, for also gives me hope. example, struggled relentlessly Social movements and people in toward the end of chattel slavery struggle are often thought of – ofin the United States before it was abolished in 1865. Enslaved people escaped their conditions and fomented active revolts for the duration of the system. These revolts all shaped the institution in different ways and ultimately created the conditions for abolition.

There’s something else I like about the idea that we are seeds.

Seeds are also all around us, all the time, often with few resources.

They are tenacious survivors, even when most of us don’t realize they are there, underground.

Social movements are like that, too. Where there is repression, there is resistance. There are always everyday people on the ground (or 2

the state.

Like most ideas, this one is not completely novel. Contrary to Euro-settler logics, most ideas do not have one singular history or source.

I have highlighted a few of the lineages of thinking that have personally influenced me in boxes throughout the text.

Social movements put new things in the world. When we organize, we are engaging in a productive act. Social movements create things: new institutions, systems, knowledge, big ideas, norms, and changed relationships between people.

In fact, I’d argue that the major focus of social movements - at ten think of ourselves – as people least those that are for the people in opposition. We are often focused and anti-oppression - is to create on what we want to tear down, what things. Movements create new viwe want to change, what we want to sions for the future. stop.

When we look at movements this This makes sense a lot of the time. When we think about a revolution, many of us think first about the existing government or system that needs to be torn apart and torn down, and how to do that. Similarly, abolition, both the movement to end chattel slavery and the contemporary movement for prison industrial complex abolition, have centered in their very name the need to abolish the problem.

way, it changes our ideas about failure and success in organizing for social change. If we look for what has been created (instead of only what the movements’ original stated goals are), we are able to see that many movements that are sometimes thought of as failures were actually quite successful. In other words, the movement that does not achieve something is rare. When people get together, the world moves.

But it is not true that social movements only or maybe even primarily tear things down. Anytime we organize for liberation, we are not just opposing a policy, a system, or some existing social arrangement.

Despite what some sociologists argue, what unites movements is not the way they contest for power with

About Failure

A few words here about failure, and how we think about it in relationship to social movements. A lot of our movements in the last 200 years, including those that were lat3

er used as historical benchmarks for what social movements can do, have been considered failures. Failure is often overstated because power doesn’t want to admit the changes that actually have occurred, and there is a special reluctance to ever attribute changes to the collective action of everyday people.

“The best [social movements] do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society. We must remember that the conditions and the very existence of social movements enable participants to imagine something different, to realize that things need not always be this way.” Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 2002, p 9.

The incorporation of many of these changes into our everyday life and into the norms of society, in other words the very success of a movement, often obscures the origins of these changes. Furthermore, institutions work to preserve themselves. As a result, most of us are taught that union soldiers and Abraham Lincoln (the military arm of our current government) are responsible for emancipation rather than the thousands of Black people who revolted and who joined the Union Army specifically for this purpose.

losing. Anything else is perfectionism - and it’s worth noting, that perfectionism is contrary to the healing justice and anti-capitalist values of most contemporary movements for liberation. “Most victories are partial or compromised, nearly all of them are interim, because the story continues,” Solnit writes.

Another barrier to feeling successful is that sometimes the people who worked on a particular campaign or issue are really burned out by the work they’ve done so they do not celebrate their own success.

Burn out and exhaustion make it really hard to see the good outcomes that have actually occurred. When we’re depleted, we’re even more likely to emphasize the negative and give it greater prominence and significance than positive informa-

Sometimes as activists we accept these definitions of failure and success. We are in a constant battle for the narrative and we don’t always win that, including among ourselves. Rebecca Solnit argues in her beautiful work about climate grief, Not Too Late, that as activists and people who care to improve the world, we need to be ready to stand 4

tion or feedback. And the work that goes into campaigns like this is often really intense, leaving organizers and activists wounded by the end.

When the people behind the campaign don’t publicize it, the larger group of supporters may not even hear about the win.

Operating from the perspective that movements do more, much more, than fight for power, contend certain policies, and look to overturn regimes, we can begin to see the generative and creative work that results from many if not most movements.

These mindsets are the same reasons why we find it hard to emphasize and really celebrate the creative and fulfilling things that come out of our activist formations and projects. When we join with other people to change the world and form deep, meaningful relationships with those people, that is reason enough to celebrate.

Take for example Occupy Wall Street. The movement arose in 2011 on the heels of the financial crisis of 2008 and, in particular, the incredible financial resources that the Obama administration used on bailing out banks and other financial institutions that were “too big too fail.” The corporate bailouts were justified to the public on the grounds that allowing financial institutions and large corporations to go through bankruptcy would ultimately cause too much hardship for everyday working people, who might lose their savings or their jobs.

This justification sounds good, except that no such

Instead of focusing on why a movement failed, or what went wrong, we can try asking, in what ways was this a success?

This question changes our analysis of previous campaigns as well as people’s feelings about their involvement (or getting involved) in a movement.

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relief was given to homeowners or everyday people, who experienced devastating losses as a result of the mortgage crisis. According to a 2013 article in the Nation, ten million people were displaced as a result of eviction from 2006 to 2014 and African Americans in particular collectively lost $200 billion in wealth from 2009 to 2012.

The demands people made varied widely, and this became one of the most common criticisms of the movement levied by mainstream and right-wing forces. The movement was accused of lacking focus, with pundits shrugging that it was impossible to know what people occuppying Zucotti Park or other public squares even wanted. In reality, however, what was happening was that people associated with Occupy were making a broad, radical list of demands for better living conditions across the board. Refusing to stick to the narrow terms of economic policy that the state and other elites prefer, the demands of the movement included calls for a radical overhaul of society to create a more just world.

Occupy Wall Street arose in the wake of this devastation and the bailout, which allowed the architects of the crisis on Wall Street to go on with their lives and experience little to no repercussions for their actions.

Many people cast this movement, which began with the occupation of private Zucotti Park in the Wall Street area of Manhatttan, as a failThe demands of Occupy reflecture because it did not bring about ed in part what Black feminists had transformative economic policy. been saying for decades: that liberBut Occupy was an enormous ation cannot come at the expense success in mobilizing everyday peo- of some. Liberation must include ple to ask more critical questions transformation with regard to race, and to work with their neighbors gender, sexuality, and all of the sysin ways they never had. The move- tems that oppress everyday people. ment spread well beyond a park in An intersectional understanding New York, as tens of thousands of of social problems means that the people were mobilized across the fight for liberation will necessarily United States and even across the be messy, expansive, and difficult globe to move into public squares to confine to a few bullet points. and make demands via large, demDuring the wave of Occupy enocratic assemblies. campments, people joined up with 6

their neighbors and experimented Occupy can be seen in the anti-debt with radical democratic forms like movement and the changed national consensus and assembly-based de- conversation around student debt. cision-making. Although the human If banks can be bailed out, then mic and hand gestures used at Oc- surely everyday people should not cupy have been ridiculed by some, be shackled for their entire lives the fact remains that people inno- by student loans or medical debt. vated new ways of sharing their sto- While this would still be true even if ries and opinions, and of making banks had not been bailed out, the decisions, among injustice of hundreds of peothe debts evDavid Graeber, a well-known ple with little to theorist of anarchism and a eryday peono infrastructur- key early participant in Ocple shoulder al support, and in cupy Wall Street, writes in seems more the face of repres- Direct Action: “Anarchists transparent sion outlawing reject states and all those now. amplification. systematic forms of inequality There are The result of states make possible. They do other ways not seek to pressure the govthis mass mobilithat Occupy ernment to institute reforms. zation can still be was a success seen today, as we Neither do they seek to seize too. One of state power for themselves. experience a new the most obwave of unioniza- Rather, they wish to destroy vious is in the that power, using means that tion campaigns, enduring use are so far as possible strikes, and inof the term creased aware- consistent with their ends, the “1 perthat embody them.” p.

203. ness of class incent,” coined equality in the by the moveUnited States. As a series of mass, ment on Wall Street. With its explicit sustained, public demonstrations class analysis and succinct way of unseen in the decade prior, Occu- pointing out the vast gap between py also pre-staged the mass mobi- the small group of elites and everylizations in defense of Black lives in one else, the phrase made class relasubsequent years, for example the tions visible and crystallized a fact movement in Ferguson after the po- that had previously been murky for lice killing of Michael Brown. the majority of the U.S. public.

The influence and trajectory of

The phrase the 1 percent (and 7

Save Our Liberal Arts

its corollary, “We Are the 99%”) is not just a contribution to popular language, but an actual shift in the way that people in the United States think about class and class On October 31, I came in to work relations that has endured for at and was told that without warnleast a decade after the movements ing, the top administrators on the end. campus had decided to eliminate Movements often contribute and threaten a full one-third of the to these sorts of paradigm shifts academic programming, including in dominant narratives and con- most of the liberal arts in which the sciousness. Changing these base university offered majors and most level assumptions is one of the of the critical disciplines on camways that movements contribute to pus. social change.

The campus and state political enSometimes this impact is not recognized, because social change itself is a somewhat slippery concept that is usually left undefined. Without a clear idea of what is meant by social change, it’s difficult to asses the impact of movements and uprisings. Below, I devote a section of the zine to the concept of social change.

First, though, I’d like to examine another failed movement. This one is more personal; the campaign to roll back disastrous cuts to the education offered at a university where I was employed as a professor, University of Wisconsin-Superior (UWS).

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vironment are important contexts for these events, and the reactions to them. This event happened seven years after Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s infamous near-elimination of public unions in 2011 under the legislative bill known as Act 10. The majority of my colleagues and other staff on campus had been working for the university in 2011, and some had engaged in the intense struggle against Act 10. People filled the floors of the capitol building in Madison – five hours away from us in Superior – and occupied it for weeks. The protests were long and sustained and reached up to 100,000 people in number. They grabbed international headlines and were supported by people from all over the US and beyond, many of whom ordered food delivered to the Capitol to sustain the occupation. Ultimately, however, the occupation was unsuccessful in stopping the implementation of Act 10. Public sector unions, with the exception of police and fire, lost almost all of their rights to collective bargaining in the state of Wisconsin, which meant that by the time I came to work in 2014, I was part of a greatly weakened union.

changes were announced mid-semester, many of the experienced activists on campus had lost their faith in our power as workers and people to change such a policy. The dominant mood was exhaustion and resignation. Scott Walker and his cronies had already beaten us.

My personal experience was different, in part because I had not been in Wisconsin during the time of that uprising. I had the energy and especially the rage to fight the administration, buoyed by the rage and organizing of some close co-workers and friends. Ultimately, what was clear to me personally was that fighting such a declaration was the only way for me to move forward with dignity, despite the risks to my income by making myBy 2017, we were living through self hypervisible to the administraWalker’s third term as governor. tion in such a precarious moment. It When these dramatic (and illegal) would have been much less work to accept the decision, or to accept de9

feat after our vote of no confidence in the university president failed to change her actions. Yet I did not feel that I could face myself or my students if, when faced with a direct attack on my teaching and on what was important to me, I did not keep fighting against it. I also knew that if we failed to oppose the measures, it would only hasten more austerity-minded devastation. Forfeiting would only make my work conditions worse, not more secure.

for our lives. Dignity is something that cannot be taken away; it must be given. I learned in this struggle how true that is, and that the only way to be free is to act as free as you possibly can.

Despite our eventual failure, I do not look back on my involvement in this struggle with regret. I would likely do most of the same things again, even with hindsight, and despite the personal costs. By rejecting the destructive plans of RepubUltimately, we lost that strug- licans and administrators, even if gle. UWS never reinstated the cut I could not stop those plans, I exmajors or minors, and never faced pressed my freedom. any consequences for their illegal actions that violated principles of shared governance as well as state statute. I am nonetheless proud of As I mentioned above, social what we did to fight it and to high- change is often left undescribed light the injustices to students, to in works about politics or social the community, and to faculty and movements, leaving the idea vague staff. I am happy with my choic- and meaning different things to es to hold on to my dignity rath- different people. er than my (first and only) house, I understand social change as which I had to sell once I decided ongoing. The world is always in to resign. Movements teach us nevprocess, and the changes that are er to accept someone else’s terms occurring are always contested by a variety of groups (there are ofAbolitionist geograten many more than two sides). pher Ruth Wilson GilmAs Octavia Butler wrote, “all that ore, is well-known for you touch, you change, all that you the saying “abolition is about presence, not change, changes you, the only lastabsence. It is about ing truth, is change.” Change is the building life-affirming only constant. institutions.”

Social Change

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Informed by Foucault as well as Marx, I see the social world as in a continuous cycle of repression and resistance. Far from being hopeless, this means that wherever there is repression there is resistance, and this resistance will change the terrain as part of the overall process of change. Yet just as that change has been made, we can also expect new forces of repression and control to emerge in reaction to and especially learning from the successes of resistance.

Crucially, this idea of change means that things can and do change in the social world but they are not necessarily getting better.

This is in contrast to a progressive view of history, a view which is powerful in the contemporary U.S. and affects much of our latent thinking about social change.

A progressive view of history is one that teaches us to believe that once older generations are gone, the U.S. will be less racist, less patriarchal, and less heterosexist. The idea embedded here is that these systems are changing just because time goes on, or, maybe, because of people born into and after the gains of the Civil Rights Era. Nonetheless, the idea is that passively things will improve, simply through the passage of time.

It is just not true that history is always improving and/or liberalizing. The late nineteenth century provides two clear examples of this fact, among many others. The first example is the backlash and retrenchment of racial capitalism that occurred after Reconstruction in the U.S. south.

A second example that deeply challenges the progressive view of history is the emergence of the Victorian Era. Famously prudish and conservative, it is easy for those of us still living in some ways in the long Victorian Era to forget how much more liberal attitudes were toward sex, gender roles, and social order in general prior to this age.

The changes that occurred during the Victorian Era show in particular that there is no inevitable progression toward liberalization of social relations. Instead, what we can observe, is change.

People on the left are also susceptible to a related view of history, expecting that things must change when they get sufficiently bad, or as part of a Marxist analysis of phases of history. As theorists Mark Engler and Paul Engler write, social theorist Antonio Gramsci teaches us that “history will not do our work for us.” Instead, for Gramsci, revolutionary change depends on both 11

organizing and history. Revolutions are a result of thoughtful strategy as well as a careful analysis of the historical moment.

freedom is in the struggle. In other words, freedom is not some thing that’s waiting for us in the future, or after a long road of resistance.

Going back to the circular oppo- To be honest, I’m not sure there sition of repression and resistance, is such a thing as a world without it is likewise important to reject the repression. But that doesn’t mean idea of a happy stasis that will oc- that there’s no such experience as cur “after the revolution.” This is freedom or liberation. Freedom is not to reject the idea of revolution something that we create and expe– after all, far too many revolution- rience in the act of resistance. ary changes have occurred across Far from being depressing or the world to reject this possibility overwhelming, I find this idea very – but rather to highlight that the freeing. We can release ourselves nature of the social world fore- from the idea of freedom after the closes the idea that we can fight struggle, and instead know that and win a revolution and then rest. there are ways we can taste freeWith change as the only constant, dom today. we must be prepared to continue to To return to the example of the make the revolution each day. “failed” struggle at UWS to regain Does this mean, then, that there is no freedom? That we are struggling in vain? No, of course not! Instead, I am a firm believer in the fact that

faculty shared governance and students’ access to the liberal arts : I was able to feel free when I determined to do only what my con12

“Building the struggles against racism, police violence, poverty, hunger, and all of the ways in which oppression and exploitation express themselves is critical to people’s basic survival in this society. But it is also within those struggles for the basic rights of existence that people learn how to struggle, how to strategize, and build movements and organization,” Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, p.

216.

science and sense of justice allowed me to do. I was free once I determined that as a scholar but especially as a teacher, I would not submit to the idea that the study of the social world, or that the pursuit of learning, was too “high-minded” for people in northern Wisconsin.

I was free once I decided to fight with others for what was right.

Struggling for liberation, no matter how, is the rejection of the status quo. Political scientist John Gaventa uses the term quiescence to refer to the act of going along with the status quo. Importantly, quiescence is not the product of “bad individuals” but is itself produced by power. Yet going along, not challenging the ways things are or the direction that they are moving, is an act. There is no neutral position in a world that is constantly changing, for better and for worse.

Hegemony Key to the discussion of social change is the concept of hegemony.

Hegemony is a way of understanding power as the dominant way of doing things and, importantly, of thinking about and understanding things. Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist who produced his most famous works while in prison, is the

social theorist most associated with the idea of hegemony. Gramsci theorized the way that power is maintained via “not only the use of force and ‘legal’ discipline, but includes the ways in which ruling ideas are disseminated through society, creating legitimacy and consent for the rule of the dominant group,” as Engler and Engler write.

What’s key is that hegemony is not something that just happens, but instead is something that constantly has to be produced. Hegemony is a process, the process of maintaining dominance. Things aren’t just the way they are “because.”

Things are the way they are because of the struggles and history that have preceded us. Things are also the way they are in the world because of a series of choices and because of existing power arrange13

ments.

becomes a critical part of maintaining power. I find it particularly helpful to focus on the fact that things beyond the simple distribution of material inequality need to occur for elites to remain in control and maintain their power. Power is not only a firm, tangible product of material inquality (although that’s certainly an aspect of it), but must be maintained through the reproduction of beliefs and behaviors legitimating it.

The decisions I refer to that shape current social arrangements are not just ones that were made in the past, although they remain impactful too. But the world itself is in constant flux. Dominance and the dominant way of doing things, not only has to be created, but it has to be actively maintained. Or, as the anarchist anthropologist and theorist David Graeber says, the world has to be continually made and remade each day.

Gaventa, building upon theories

by Steven Lukes and Paolo Freire, argues that one of the facets of this ideological maintenance is actually foreclosing even our understanding of the world and changing what we think we want and know. In other words, our very consciousness itself can be shaped by elites through an iterative process of power and inequality. In these circumstances

Hegemony needs active work and consolidation. Its need for maintenance is one of its weak points.

This re-creation of existing power relationships can be resisted (or it can be strengthened when we adhere to it).

Thinking about hegemony demonstrates how ideology and controlling the ways people think

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“He [Ivory Perry] signs all his letters ‘peace in the struggle,’ because for all its pain, social protest has enabled him to learn, to grow, and to make his mark by helping others,” George Lipsitz, A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition, p. 252. education and specifically popular and political education become key precursors to social change. We need to change our/each other’s worldviews to know how to change the world, yes, but also once we start doing that we have also weakened the reins of power over our lives.

Breaking through that hegemony is a critical part of what’s needed to make transformative change.

This break involves problematizing what’s normal, first for ourselves and then increasingly for others. Struggling against injustice – challenging, complicating, working against the existing system in whatever way – allows us to find occasional glimpses of freedom. It allows us to experience a different world, one outside of the hegemonic systems of oppression.

More importantly, engaging in these struggles allow us to feel

more human. Systems of oppression are dehumanizing. To everyone. We dehumanize ourselves by participating or benefitting from or even just allowing the rampant degradation of other human beings to go uncontested. The form and content of this varies by the system, but dehumanization is a constant.

Forms of activism that focus on re-humanizing ourselves and our relationships with one another can be very powerful. For almost a decade, I have been engaged in building friendships and political solidarity with people in prison. Most of what I have been involved with has been very small scale, writing letters to one or two people and creating structures to welcome other folks into the practice of reaching inside to offer friendship and support. This work, however, has been absolutely transformative for me and the folks I have worked with because it challenges every popular narrative about people held captive by the state, and refuses to accept the many barriers that keep us apart. These friendships re-humanize all involved; people outside are able to demonstrate that we are not a monolith dedicated to harmful and violent policies, and people inside demonstrate that they are more than the worst thing they 15

have ever done or that has ever happened to them. We are able to know each other as full, complex, human beings.

else. In his book about how and why elites (within group as well as out-group) are able to persistently capture group values and resources, philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò highlights the ways that the actions of elites shape and constrain the choices that everyone else has available to them. In our contemporary media economy, the outsize influence and value of some over others is particularly visible. By “fame culture,” I do not only mean the use of celebrity lives for entertainment, like the fascination with Johnny Depp’s defamation lawsuit against Amber Heard. Consider also the reaction when a celebrity or politician dies, or is physically harmed in some way. These events make global news. But why is that death more valuable than the violence against a neighbor who is evicted somewhere in our cities everyday, or the three people killed by police every day,

In the larger culture, dehumanization as a hegemonic norm is reproduced in multiple ways. One of these systems of reproduction is the deeply unequal and entrenched system of racial capitalism. Racial capitalism enforces a world order based on the mutually reinforcing aspects of racism, extraction, and exploitation of workers for their labor. This system places everyone in competition, including for basic dignity and right to life, and as a part of this competition and false scarcity some groups of people are degraded.

Hegemony also reproduces dehumanization with a fame culture that openly values the lives and experiences of elites over everyone 16

or the ongoing deprivation and ca- an unquestionably valuable person sual violence against the 1.9 million is revolutionary. people held captive throughout the When we organize together to United States? change these conditions, taking The hegemonic order of things care of each other and refusing to dehumanizes us, ranks the impor- abandon one another, that is revotance of our lives, and tells us that lutionary. The alternative to these our everyday experiences do not acts, the alternative to counterhematter. The very act of fighting gemonic organizing, is to accept back is meaningful in a system that the status quo. The status quo of tells us there is no point in resist- oppression, dehumanization, and ing. daily, regular violence.

For a person suffering the disregard of imminent risk of losing their housing at the hands of people that daily commit wage theft without repercussion, being protected and listened to by a group of people fighting to protect your home is a revolutionary change, as in the home defense I was part of in Minneapolis in 2012. For people isolated by the violence of incarceration, being cared about and spoken to by strangers is a transformation.

The world is made and remade each moment. This is a hopeful fact, full of possibility. But it also leaves us without the option of neutrality. Either we go along – however grudgingly – with hegemony, with remaking the world as it is, or we join with others to swim upstream.

The fact is that many, maybe even most, of us live in conditions that are inhumane, unjust, and alienating. All but those in the highest strata are told constantly that we do not deserve rest, joy, or free time, and we are all part of many systems that conspire under racial capitalism to rob those things from us when we do achieve them. Under these conditions, being treated as

A little over 10 years ago, I had the immense joy to be part of a school in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

My experience there is an example of how some of the things I’ve been describing play out for participants in so­ cial movements. I share this example in some detail, but this is not an isolated example. It is one of many times I’ve experienced the

Transformation in Practice

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creative power of people together workers, cooperatives, and profesin struggle. sionals across a spectrum of fields, The school was what is known as well as long-term unemployed locally as a bachillerato popular, a and disenfranchised people living movement-run school for people mainly in the southern sector of to receive a high school education. Buenos Aires. Many members were This people’s high school (a rough residents of the large shantytown translation of bachillerato popular) (villa) at the edge of the city. was part of a movement of unemployed workers (MTD – movimiento de trabajadorxs desempleadxs), one of many mass poor people’s movements that arose in response to financial crisis in Argentina in the late 1990s. This particular MTD was multi-sectorial, including wage

The school was run mainly via consensus and non-hierarchical decision-making. I was there as a researcher and comrade, wanting to learn more about how larger scale consensus-based movements work.

I spent a year teaching there in addition to many shorter research trips I made to Buenos Aires in the years before and after that time.

At the school, I was one of the comrade teachers, and I co-taught a social sciences class for a year.

This year was a formative one for me as an activist and organizer, even though I had at that point been consistently involved in social movements for about 15 years.

During this year, one of the most important things I learned was how absolutely fundamental to the goals of the school the act of being openly and explicitly warm and welcoming was. The school’s ultimate goal was to build a stronger movement for dignity and political participation for those who had been completely shut out of the labor 18

“The restoration of possibility amid despair is an act of destruction paired with a call to imagine - which is a call to arms. The armament of knowing you have not been defeated. The armament of knowing that the present and the future will have histories that have not been written yet,” Kelly Hayes, Let This Radicalize You, p. 5.

market, a mass anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, democratic movement for liberation. Comrades referred to the school regularly as a counterhegemonic political pedagogical project.

The school also had a concrete goal of creating a pathway for movement members to attain their high school diplomas and greater access to employment.

Both of these goals were achieved, as the school regularly brought in as students people who were un- a night. Six subjects were covered, related to the movement, but were one each night and two subjects taught once every two weeks. Each seeking access to education. class was headed by two teachers Running parallel to the state-run (or at least that was the goal, in high school completion system, practice there was a shortage of the school had a reputation in the dedicated teachers). The aim was to neighborhood for being a place use paired pedagogy, and to work where they helped people enroll, in teams generally in order to make where students could bring their the work and especially the ideas a children of any age, and where they more collective process. An assemwere generally friendly. As a result, bly was held every fifteen days to the majority of the students were make administrative decisions in a young women with young children consensus-based format. and there was a significant group The school was a running, funcof immigrant students who had had tional, educational institution. But trouble obtaining their transcripts and other records to enroll at the what really made the school a special place was the way that everyofficial school. one in it, teachers and students, The school curriculum was arseasoned activists and new memranged into three years, with each bers, foreigners and Argentines, student attending full time Moncame to feel like a collective. day through Friday, for four hours We started the year with an 19

overwhelming number of new students, most of whom did not have previous experience or even that much interest in political activity.

By the end of the year, there was a clear sense of belonging to the place, of belonging to each other at least while we were together in the space, and of shared responsibility for making the school work.

grades are given and on what basis, who should be teaching the class (two people, not one, and shared with the students), and what material is most important to learn in “school.” Beyond that questioning and remixing, we were also setting new norms and ideas for how to behave and how to treat one another. This included different ways of This people’s high school interacting across social class and changed people’s relationships to nationality. These changed norms each other and created a wholly dif- also included different ways of deferent set of norms from those that cision-making and of leadership. operated outside. These changed At the people’s high school, our relationships are also a creation of norms were: Be warmer, greet evthe movement. eryone. Include everyone in the disPeople came to the school be- cussion and in the decision-making. cause it was an alternative to the Share as much as you can, all the formal system that did not admit time. Consider and discuss each them. Or, as teachers, because they other’s safety and what they need. wanted to be co-strugglers with Learn together. It was a failure to some of the most marginalized just focus on your own progress. folks in the city. Creating an alter- This is a direct contrast to schools native institution is a value in itself. where we are all told to mind our own business and focus on our own Once people were there, they progress. Here you were always first experienced as receivers these supposed to focus on how your different ways of relating, but then classmates were doing and help learned to appreciate and honor them. these new and different norms.

We celebrated ourselves and the It was an incredibly transforma- collective we were creating often. tive experience because on the one For example we clapped in the ashand, we were always questioning semblies every time we succeeded the ways things are and the way in making a decision together. I things should be, for example: how found great comfort and wisdom 20

in the saying of one of the activists there, a constant reminder of the need to “buscar la vuelta” (look for another perspective on the situation). It is itself transformative and revolutionary to be in the world in this way with others, especially with others in struggle.

I learned as an activist during my year at the people’s high school that not only is warmth a movement value, but what payoff can come from remaining warm to people in a movement space even when they annoy you or are not acting in a particularly warm way themselves. They are there, and engaging, however tentatively, in the collective process of transformation. As a result, the cold, reticent, skeptical and contrarian behavior we all bring from outside can often be changed just by being insistent on the enactment of new norms of warmth and care.

tached to any other students or a particular group or table.

For example, I’m thinking of one woman, Raquel. She was a large, brash woman with blonde hair.

She regularly arrived an hour late to class, without apology, and expected the class to revolve around her need to catch up. As a teacher comrade, this was pretty annoying.

It was also easy to see, though, that Raquel was pushing boundaries.

She expected to be chastised, to get in trouble, as she might in a regular classroom.

The school was not perfect.

There were, for example, many petty jealousies and rivalries among the students. The class was organized around tables and some of these quickly became cliques. Some big personalities wanted attention and they cultivated a small audiStudents at the school often ence of followers, while other stucomplained that teachers “failed dents seemed always to be on the to control the students,” and some margins, never really strongly atstudents expressed sympathy with 21

me at the way they perceived other students getting away with bad behavior. These sympathetic students believed that I was young and foreign and simply unable to “control” everyone.

her somewhat selfish behavior, I learned how to put into practice my anti-authoritarian beliefs.

In negotiating with Raquel and

Freire argues that the process of

Part of this lesson, for me, was really understanding that it takes people a long time to change. When The truth was that I refused to be people engage in selfish behavior too bossy or authoritarian in this in movements, or when they defer classroom. It was not that I could to or create perceived authority in not control the students, it was that an anti-authoritarian space, they I explicitly did not are often not “It is in [the assembly] want to control being intenthem, or anybody. where there is a collective tionally conevaluation of strength, and I did not believe tradictory. it was my role to the ability to elaborate pos- Rather, they control, especially sibilities that did not preare just actexist the assembly as a space not in this school. ing on their of encounter. But the assemsocialization.

Raquel, like all bly is also constituted as an of us, had been The emoapparatus that is capable of socialized in tional modes anticipating and eventualclassrooms where of warmth, ly casting out the risks and the teacher was generosity, threats that will attempt to the boss and if and patience, capture that common force,” you didn’t follow far from beVerónica Gago, Feminist Inthe rules, you got ing superfiternational, p. 23. in trouble. What cial or “nice it took me a while to have” eleto see is that sometimes this is ac- ments of revolutionary struggle, are tually easier for people; if it’s the a necessary and critical part of the teacher’s job to control you, you struggle for a better world. Without don’t need to take responsibility these intentional ways of showing for yourself. Unlearning this behav- care for each other, we could not ior - and learning the upside of tak- have broken through our socializaing responsibility for yourself - is a tion to create something together. long, slow process.

The Brazilian theorist Paolo 22

collective and popular education was a key component of social struggle. At the school, as we built our collective analysis together, we learned to name our world and the oppressions we and others face in it. Once people have given words to the things they can often already recognize, can feel in their guts but have not previously named and discussed, they are more ready to fight for change and can become more active agents in their own

lives. The process of popular education breaks through the ideological maintenance Gaventa describes and is an important counterhegemonic process.

The years prior to teaching at the school were my most inactive years as an activist from the time I entered high school up to now, in my forties. New to Minneapolis, entering a PhD program at 27, and burned out from a few years in direct service work, I told myself I didn’t have any spare time to get very involved with local community work or activism. I was interested in a few projects, and went to a few meetings and events. But I was not a regular anywhere. I didn’t move my schedule around in order to stick with the things that I was interested in.

On my return, things were different. One of the most important things I learned that year of doing dissertation research is that I feel better when I am engaged in movement work. Even when it makes me wildly busy, even when it is frustrating, even when the formal work I’m doing is somehow related to or in the service of social change, it is always worth my time to roll up my sleeves and be in community with other people struggling for liberation.

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There were many sociological lessons I learned from my time at the people’s high school and more broadly around activists in Buenos Aires, but the one that had the most impact on me, ultimately was this: I feel freer in the struggle. And I need to make time and commit to that.

ments are our only hope for a better future. The future is not going to be better than the world we have today simply because history moves forward. And we can’t trust elites to improve the world for us. We have to act in our own collective interest, just as many of our ancestors have done for generations. Without their work, as bad as things may seem right now, things would be much Taking part in action to change worse. the world is not an easy task. RecAnd as we fight, we are building, ognizing the world as it is, facing creating, and imagining things tothe oppressive systems that we are gether. all part of, comes with the impulse It’s easy to see the failures of tryto despair. The systems and ideol- ing to organize because the world ogies that we are up against can be still doesn’t measure up to the one so overwhelming and feel so pow- that we want. It’s easy to see failerful, it’s hard not to want to give ures too, because it may feel easier up. to just accept the status quo rather

Conclusion

This overwhelm can lead to despair, or burnout, once we have been fighting for awhile. Furthermore, we live in a world that teaches us not to trust each other so trusting others with your safety in the face of government repression, or just trusting each other with our dreams and hopes for something better, can be scary.

than swim upstream.

But every time we get together to work toward liberation, every time we join with a group of others to intentionally rethink the world, to envision a better future, to make tangible changes in how we interact with each other, something changes. When we join with others to move toward our collective libIn short, there are a lot of rea- eration, something is built, somesons why organizing in social thing is created, something shifts, movements can feel unattractive something is planted. These acts and difficult. are always worth it, because we are Despite all this, social move- seeds.

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References The name of the people’s high school and movement it belongs to are not included because my time there was governed by standard sociological rules of research confidentiality. brown, adrienne maree. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2017.

Engler, Mark, and Paul Engler. “This 20th Century Italian Marxist Offers Lessons for Today’s Social Movements.” In These Times, Aug. 14, 2023. https://inthesetimes.com/ article/antonio-gramsci-marxist-socialism-social-movements Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Herder and Herder, 1970.

Gago, Verónica. Feminist International: How to Change Everything. Trans. Liz Mason-Deese. New York: Verso, 2020.

Gaventa, John. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Abolition Geography: Essays Toward Liberation. New York: Verso, 2022.

Graeber, David. Direct Action: An Ethnography. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2009.

Gottesdiener, Laura. “The Great Eviction.” The Nation, Aug. 1, 2013. https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/great-eviction/ Hayes, Kelly, and Mariame Kaba. Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023.

Kelley, Robin D.G. Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. Boston: Beacon Press, 2002.

Khatib, Kate, Margaret Killjoy, and Mike McGuire, eds. We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation. Chico, CA: AK Press, 2012.

Lipsitz, George. A Life in the Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Solnit, Rebecca. Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

Solnit, Rebecca, and Thelma Young-Lutunatabua, eds. Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023.

Táíwò, Olúfémi O. Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else). Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022.

Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016.

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Image Sources * Cover image: Falling Star, by Molly Yang. Part of Dissenters’ portfolio and booklet, DE-MIL-I-TA-RISE. Available at Justseeds.org. * Inside cover: photo of author speaking outside the trial of 3 water protectors accused of trespassing (2016), Duluth, MN * Pg 1: George Floyd protest in Dallas (2020) by Matthew T Rader, License CCBY-SA from Wikimedia commons. * Pg 2: Flyer announcing a protest against apartheid in South Africa, from National Museum of African American History and Culture * Pg 5: Dandelion Seeds, Taraxacium Officinale, by Bertha E. Jaques, from Smithsonian American Art Museum and its Renwick Gallery * Pg 6: Project for a woven fabric, from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum * Pg 8: Flowers at the Desert Botanical Garden, Phoenix, Arizona, by Carol M. Highsmith, from Library of Congress * Pg 9: Greenbelt, Maryland. Buying vegetable seeds in the Greenbelt variety store (1942), by Marjory Collins, from Library of Congress * Pg 11: Design for a printed fabric, from Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum * Pg 12: Entrance of Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, June 2020, from Wikimedia commons. * Pg 14: Activists with Occupy Homes (including the author) surround and defend the Cruz family home (2012), Minneapolis. Photo by Peter Leeman. * Pg 16: Pañuelazo for legal abortion at Congress, Buenos Aires, 2018 * Pg 17: Friendship quilt, by Martha Custalow Taylor, from Anacostia Community Museum * Pg 18: Siembra Mundos, by Pilar Emitxin. Available at Justseeds.org. * Pg 20: Cathedral window quilt, by Viola Canady, Anacostia Community Museum * Pg 21: Change Now!, by Pete Railand. Available at Justseeds.org. * Pg 23: They Tried to Bury Us, by Raoul Deal, Paul Kjelland, and Nicolas Lampert. Available at Justseeds.org. * Pg 24: Autumn in the San Juan Mountains of Conejos County, Colorado, near the New Mexico border, by Carol M. Highsmith, from Library of Congress * Pg 25: Bookworms Image by pch.vector on Freepik 26