She who stumbles

First of all, I have to sigh and restate my desire to get away from blogosphere conflicts that centre around white North American women. I consider the conflict itself a waste of time for me, since I don’t think I’m going to make a difference to the business of the US feminist blogosphere by contributing on white peoples’ blogs.

I am appropriating from this conflict a few specific issues which I want to address, because they caught my attention and jibed with a few other things I’ve been thinking about. But they do involve criticism of another blogger, who is being criticised for a few other things at the moment. If that hurts her feelings, well, ok.

I want to talk about the blogging v. book publishing and how the divergence between these two modes of communication reflects divergences in social justice work in general. My ideas about his have been informed by the work of Brownfemipower in writing about the nonprofit-industrial complex and blogging as a tool for liberation. (And yes, I’m referring to the Incite! Women of Color Against Violence anthology with a similar title, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.)

I guess my other deleted comment* from the Feministe thread is a good place to start:

I don’t buy that in the years of reading and commenting at Bfp’s blog, Amanda didn’t notice that Bfp was working on dealing with immigration as a feminist issue. I can remember, last year, Bfp blogging about every single issue that Marcotte mentions in her article. If Amanda wants credit for not being stupid, then she has to own up to paying attention to a blog she claims to read.

I also find the article in question highly bizarre since it doesn’t mention a single immigrant women’s/women of colour organisation which is working on the issues, despite Marcotte’s willingness to make ambiguous statements about the relevance of feminism and intersectionality. Returning to Jessica Hoffmann’s piece, it’s clear that the state of feminism is such that it’s women of colour who are the innovators and doing the most cutting-edge work. Hoffmann is one white woman who isn’t afraid to credit specific woc for that work. So why the disappearing act with woc in Marcotte’s article? Why do woc appear only as victims, but not the originators of the concept of intersectionality — one of the ideas which woc use to push for liberation?

It points to a common practice whereby white people render women of colour, especially radical woc activists, invisible. Where white women take credit for the innovations of woc. This is harmful to women of colour. It reduces the visibility of the resources which are out there, and it limits the growth of woc-initiated initiatives.

I for one don’t trust Marcotte’s judgement in deciding who is out to get her and who has genuine criticism. It’s common for her to claim that her critics are jealous of her book deal. I find it interesting that accusations against her are egregious and unethical because she’s a professional, but that she can attribute all kinds of motives to people who don’t have book deals, and that’s okay because writing isn’t their livelihood. So accountability in the feminist movement has to go out the window to support those privileged women who get into positions of power? So the work of women of colour is less valuable than that of white women because woc are unpublishable (then again, Marcotte’s publisher is Seal Press)? Again, I would expect that from conservative feminist organisations like NOW, not from people who are familiar with and accept the work of radical women of colour like Brownfemipower. I don’t accept the implicit vanguardism in that formulation.

If it’s personal and about Amanda Marcotte’s livelihood, then it should be equally personal for Bfp and all the women of colour involved too. If Marcotte stands to have her means of making a living damaged by accusations of “stealing,” what do woc stand to lose? And the answer is no less personal, no less vital, than the means of our existence too. Woc might not make our bucks by blogging, but woc have long criticised and resisted co-optation by capitalism as the strategy for achieving justice (and yes, Bfp blogged about this as well). For radical women of colour, blogging in itself is a tool for change, used in different ways than it is used by white liberal feminists.
Hence why white liberal feminists who do deal in capitalism have to face up to the onus of dealing justly with these alternatives. And that means not appropriating, and giving support to woc initiatives whenever possible. I do not see that Marcotte has done these things, and in fact has made a series of excuses to avoid doing them in the future.

The fact is, ‘professionalisation’ in feminism is not a new issue nor an issue specific to white US feminists. I have had a number of conversations with women around the world who have criticised the women who take up “leadership” positions in their regional/local/national feminist movements through a combination of class/ethnic/race/sexual/able-bodied privilege and professionalisation of feminist work.

The criticisms — that these women represent only a narrow agenda based on an even narrower conception of the problems, that they are self-serving and unresponsive, that their work is compromised by the agendas of business, academia and the state — are predictable and well-worn, but still have yet to be addressed or dealt with.

However, there’s a bigger criticism out there. It’s an elephant-sized issue, and hardly anyone talks about it. Anne Summers mentioned in a speech last year, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it, and I want to explore it more.

That is, when you rely on bureaucratisation and incorporation of high-level leaders into the state and business, once the state decides it doesn’t want to deal with women’s issues any more, you’re basically fucked. And this is what has happened to the Australian women’s movement in the eleven years that John Howard was in power. Women’s government agencies were consistently de-funded, attacked ideologically and dismantled, while sexist policies around abortion, welfare, family, childcare, maternity leave and workplace relations were put into place.

This is also occurring in the environmental movement, where large NGOs are becoming more conservative so as not to lose lobbying access, while ineffective and even dangerous policies are being pursued (e.g. increasing reliance on nuclear energy, carbon trading, bio-fuels, carbon sinks, ‘clean coal’, electricity privatisation).

It is not a new observation I’m making (regrettably, I’m at a loss for who to link on this, other than Paula Rojas, who I found via Bfp), but I would like to explore it further than it seems to have been. Specifically, I want to explore what kinds of consequences it has on social movements when relatively fragile (and I use the term relatively here, for contrast) social movements must interact with the agendas of the state, of business, and academia. For it seems to me that these interactions are often toxic, producing a huge level of division, disorganisation and ultimately, in destroying fragile coalitions and organisations.

The much larger apparatus’ of the state, business and academia seem to appropriate the best energies of the activists whose genuine ingenuity and passion are co-opted into ossified hierarchical structures. And the movement responds by rallying support for those activists because they command unprecedented levels of power and mainstream credibility. Yet that credibility is premised on an overall tokenism about the issue at stake, be it ecological justice, women’s liberation, racial justice, disability rights, or queer rights. The hierarchical accountability structures which authorise that credibility can muzzle the most radical activist (e.g. Peter Garrett).

In many cases, a lack of political will at the top co-exists with fluctuations in activist work in creating alternatives around an issue or set of issues. Howard’s ruling out same-sex marriage rights hasn’t stalled queer community-building, and the announcement of a “new paternalism” in Aboriginal affairs hasn’t stopped Aboriginal activists from organising their communities. But when equal access to elite status becomes the goal of a political movement, it becomes apparent that it is no longer concerned with justice, and it develops a parasitic relationship with the grass-roots of that movement.

This is why I’ve started to believe in the concept of ‘revolution’, if not the actuality of a national revolution. It’s because optimism about piecemeal change relies on putting your faith in incrementalism — the model where small changes accumulate on top of each other to eventually lead to a situation of greater justice. But the strategies of the system only reproduce injustices and inequalities in different ways. If you abolish legislative racial segregation without ousting the agents whose interests lie in certain types of labour and certain types of housing being devalued, then they will continue to be devalued. If you abolish nuclear energy without ensuring more ecologically sound energy production, you stand only to strengthen fossil fuel industries and pave the way for re-nuclearisation.

Ultimately, incrementalism only works insofar as goals stay the same while everything else changes.

We may be able to make a difference by initiating reforms which work against the logic of the existing system. But that requires deliberate and very considered work, involving a great variety of groups, to achieve. And to achieve that, we need spaces in which radical forms of democracy operate, so as to establish a level of independence from outside agendas.

This is why the most path-breaking work is outside most of the power structures in society, and why non-profit/non-governmental organisations, government agencies, and for-profit corporations lag so far behind in transforming society in the shape of radical justice. It’s why the revolution will not be published, and certainly not by Seal Press. It’s because the most groundbreaking feminist work isn’t being published at all, and in fact is in an antagonistic relation to the publishing industry and the academic-industrial complex.

Perhaps grass-roots radicalism will frame the shape of a new, just society, because it needs to frame new ways of being to survive. Or perhaps those new ways of being are only transitional forms, or maybe they’re just instrumentally useful. I’m not a soothsayer, so I don’t have the answer to that. I do, however, believe that I need grass-roots radicalism to survive, and that I can see changes occurring because of what I do. That’s good enough for me; I don’t need a book deal.

* With Feministe and the thread in question I can readily believe it was just a case of caught-in-moderation, but it doesn’t seem to have affected anyone else, and the mod restrictions seem lax enough that a pointless provocateur got through when I didn’t. After the Seal Press imbroglio, I’m just a little bit sensitive to being censored for making reasonable criticisms, so excuse me if I need to joke about it to blow off steam.

Tomorrow is the big APEC protest in town. Yes, I will be there.

I wish I had some insightful analysis of the effects of APEC in the Asia-Pacific region, but I’ve been too busy with my thesis to really educate myself beyond “provides a forum for Australian and North American imperialism in the Pacific, services the USA’s global nuclear agenda, and legitimises heads of oppressive states like Arroyo, Bush and Yudhoyono.” Those reasons are good enough for me to go and protest, as are the massive disruptions to public life and violations of civil liberties (such as police being instructed to fire on protesters in certain circumstances) that have accompanied this summit for the sake of ’security’ (I thought police were meant to keep citizens safe, not foreign dignitaries mass murderers).

But in the past few days I’ve had a few experiences I felt like sharing.

The first was on Sunday. I went to see a play with my family. The play is about Gandhi, performed by a theatrical company from Delhi, and touring around the world as part of the 60th anniversary of Indian independence.

Australia saw fit to celebrate this occasion with a series of exhortations about trade links between India and Australia (what, like uranium?), something that sits awkwardly alongside the critique of imperialist trading systems that Gandhi himself made (and which figured prominently in the play).

I got a lot out of the play, including some really good ideas about non-violence (violence involves the manipulation of fear, and using it in liberation struggles reproduces domination), but it seems like I was the only one who was interested in Gandhi’s politics.
My family spent the entire trip to and from the theatre bitching about APEC — how it’s shutting down the city, how Bush is unwelcome, how we’re all forced to change our lives around, how the fence around the CBD is making the place into a fortress — but then when I told them I’d be protesting against it, they all tried to convince me it was a terrible idea, that I’d get hurt, that it wouldn’t achieve anything, that I was wasting my time. Now, I personally know people on the exclusion list, I know people whose phones have been tapped and who have been harassed by police in the lead-up to this summit. I’m scared, but not so scared that I’ll cower and let these things happen. Knowing our history of struggle, the fight that an earlier generation of activists undertook to liberate India from British imperialism, that they went to prison for, that helped my resolve. At no other time have I felt more like I was living in an outpost of an empire, and that it was my duty to resist.

I’m not sure how other people saw this, given my parents’ characteristically apolitical response to APEC right after seeing the play. There’s a tendency to romanticise Gandhi and the independence movement, to take the focus away from its politics and dramatise the heroism of its leaders. It makes it seem like liberatory politics are the provenance of extraordinary people, rather than being accessible to everyone who needs them.
Certainly, given that I never grew up with the imagery of the independence movement in the public, popular culture I was consuming, I never had its politics distanced from me by the processes of constructing popular heroes. I always looked to the Indian independence movement as a political force that I could identify with as an Indian, where I felt the whiteness of social movements in Australia excluded me.

Which, I guess, brings me to my next anecdote.

I went along to a discussion on ‘white privilege’ as part of a pre-APEC convergence of social movement activists. When only two other people turned up besides me (one of them being a good friend of mine who I urged to come along), I ended up volunteering to host the workshop.
Both of the other people were white, and weren’t anti-racist activists. They were looking at how to deal with whiteness and race in their own movement, which is a desire people have often come to me with since I started putting the word out that my thesis is on whiteness and I want to work on anti-racism.

After talking a whole lot about my thesis, I asked what they were interested in. They were looking to overcome white guilt.

This issue annoys me, which is a mask for what it really does, which is frustrating and confusing me. I really don’t have time to listen to white people talk about how guilty they feel, or to hold their hand and make them feel better about themselves. I think that allowing white guilt, and white peoples’ need to find absolution for that guilt, to obfuscate anti-racist agendas is very destructive for anti-racist work (e.g. I’ve heard it suggested very seriously, by an older white feminist, that we should abandon the word “racism” because it makes white people who have “good intentions” feel bad). So I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want it to waste my time, and I guess I’ve been lumping the baby in with the bathwater in terms of crafting a pragmatic response to it. So in the discussion I made the mistake of treating it like an issue for individuals to sort out by re-orienting themselves towards the movement; I psychologised it.

While I still don’t have time to hold anyone’s hand or make them feel better about their whiteness and privilege, I do think that white privilege is something that needs to be dealt with in social movements.
I’ve had a couple of casual discussions about this with people. White privilege isn’t something we can either will away, nor do away with simply by reconfiguring how social movements operate. But the kinds of hierarchies that come into being when people get organised can do a lot of damage to the intentional goals of the social movement… like the whiteness and male-domination of the anti-war movement that I’ve talked about before.

After the workshop I thought about this, and immediately wanted to call both of the other people to tell them what I figured out. I don’t think the key issue is either (1) getting white people to refocus away from themselves on an individual level — because white privilege isn’t necessarily the unconscious positioning within personal attitudes — or (2) in “giving up their power.” The voluntarism implied in both those statements has a very static model of power at its basis, something which isn’t true for social movements at all. In fact, social movements are an arena in which power is negotiated and consciously circulated more than anywhere else. That’s because, in social movements, the kinds of resource-control underpinning power have a lot more to do with space, speech, and decision-making than in other parts of society. That makes accountability a key relation.
And making sure that white accountability to people of colour doesn’t follow the format implied by the statement “giving up power” means that people of colour need to be in control of the agenda in the first place. Political space, and the sharing of it, isn’t for white people to “give”, it’s for poc to take and make into an arena for the construction of power relations along certain lines. “Giving” implies maintenance of the relations of host and guest — while guests are honoured, they don’t have mastery and never will.

When I was asked to do something representatively anti-racist for a women student’s conference, I responded by requesting an autonomous space for women of colour, organised autonomously by women of colour, and not answerable to the network that set up the conference. Then we negotiated the terms of their accommodation of us. It worked well, because we never gave any ground to white women, even in organising, and they never asked for it, assuming autonomy.
While I think autonomous organising has its limits, it can be very good for getting poc to speak about issues which get occluded in white company and which white people will deliberately obfuscate on in order to reassert control of the agenda. And that creates a powerful space in which to forge new agendas, outside the limitations that white silence.

So while I was thinking about this in terms of white peoples “needs” — a need to confront the realities of racism in such a way as to be maximally receptive to the lesson — this came across as making it about ‘reversing’ the lines of control. But the thing is, one of the privileges of whiteness is that its effects are never accounted for, and it can frame discourse in such a way as to assert the primacy of its needs without explicitly stating that white is more important than anything else. By framing the issue in terms of accountability, in terms of a relation, it does away with the necessity for pretending like ‘being a good ally’ is an individualistic, all-or-nothing proposition.
The truth is, a lot of poc have something to learn in terms of being good allies too: straight men have something to learn about being good allies to queer and trans poc; non-Indigenous poc have a lot to learn about being allies to Indigenous people; middle-class poc have class issues to contend with in organising with working-class people…

Because while this is “identity politics,” the issues really are structural and historical, and you can’t completely resolve them through identity or tinkering with individual subjectivity. The “anti-racist white,” as a fixed identity with fixed politics, might be an impossibility (according to George Lipsitz), but there are political resources to turn to where white people want to engage in anti-racism. And, especially, those potential resources are there for poc to engage in social movements without feeling like there’s nothing that can be done about white privilege or overwhelmed by whiteness.

This all might sound incredibly naive, because I’m very new to theorising about social movements. I really do have a lot to learn in that respect. But it’s kind of the place I’ve arrived at after writing my thesis, and it is helping me work out ideas for one of the two essays I have yet to finish.

So, goodnight!

In the past month I haven’t blogged much because I’ve been focusing on assessments, the Big T, and activism. While I’m not as overcommitted as some of my collaborators, I’m definitely finding it difficult to balance all these projects as well as regular social and family life. As my theoretical adventures became more thesis-oriented, my political adventures got a bit more hands on, and I found myself heavily preoccupied with concepts in radical organising (caucusing, open spaces, facilitating, strategy, etc. etc. etc.).

I’ve been reluctant to write about the latter because recently police and intelligence agencies have made it clear that they are watching us and trying to infiltrate our organising. It’s suspected that these actions are part of a co-ordinated campaign to intimidate protesters in the lead-up to the APEC protests.

But I’m also apprehensive of the interpersonal consequences I might face if someone in the local activist community found this blog, because what I have to say about it isn’t terribly flattering.

When any group of people gets together and does anything in close contact, norms and orders develop. Ad-hoc hierarchies that people take for granted, not because that’s “the way things are” but because they know the reasons for it from the inside. Established methods become custom and then habit. Ideas attach themselves to one another for people to make sense of all these goings-on. I’m going to call this “orthodoxy,” cos that’s what I’ve been calling it in my mind for the last couple of weeks. You can call it something else if you like.

I hate orthodoxy. I always have. It’s part of the reason I don’t get along with popular people, or feel comfortable in social groups; and it’s part of the reason I’m feeling very anxious about getting involved in activism again.

In the long break I took from activism I spent a lot of time reflecting and thinking about politics. My politics changed a lot. Outside the influence of activists, I was able to critique both their politics and their methods. I’m gonna focus on talking about methods in this post, so that I don’t stretch things out too much and because that’s what the carnival is about.

I had a long talk with a couple of women about strategies and approaches after a protest, and it was wonderfully cathartic to be able to speak our piece about the effects of socialist activity in our social movements. What they’ve said has interwoven with my ideas, so I just want to mention that I don’t come up with this stuff all on my own and they have great ideas too!

We started by criticising the sorts of things they organise — large demonstrations, and only large demonstrations. Other activities, like forums, public meetings, film screenings, concerts, etc. are organised in such a way as they support the building of large demonstrations. And it’s always white men who lead these demonstrations, who are given the opportunity to speak, and who set the agendas.

These means of engaging can be really alienating for lots of people. Speaking at demonstrations involves loud, angry invective — talking at people, not to or with them. Inevitably they engage in every other conversation this way as well. Speaking to them is very one-sided (and that’s a criticism I’ve heard from people both within and outside the activist community), which makes it difficult to work with them or to get one’s priorities represented at organising meetings where the real decisions get made.

The reason they behave like this is because they get a sense of entitlement from their ideology. One of my interlocutors compared it to evangelical Christianity: aside from the need to evangelise (recruit), there’s also a single book/prophet (Marx, who has canonical interpreters), a teleological view of human history that will end in a single protracted moment where everything will be set right (in Christianity it’s the Second Coming, in socialism, it’s Revolution), inability to acknowledge any problems other than the ones they prescribe (e.g. patriarchy), and an inability to analyse with any other perspective (e.g. environmentalism).

Because there’s such a time-lag between our efforts and the proposed goal (revolution), their methods need to be aggressive, unilateral, and macho. “Building for the revolution” is proscriptive — it involves “radicalising” social movements by injecting their ideology and priorities into them. There’s no learning or change that goes the other way. In fact, socialist groups are so creepy because they never change, they only undergo divisive schisms over points of ideology.

That said, I also have to say that socialist ways of organising and approach to social change has been very influential for me, and it’s not all bad. Not only because I have found Marxist political economy to be the most sense-making and radical of all schools of economic thought, but also because I spent so much time around socialists that their methods rubbed off on me. See, I joined a socialist organisation when I was 14 and spent a whole lot of time reading things from a socialist perspective (even if I didn’t really understand how all the theory and practice hung together until I came to University), and I learned all about the Russian revolution in my latter years of high school.

While I’ll elaborate on this in Part 2, I definitely think that my structural and materialist approach to social injustice and conflict comes from that socialist background, and I definitely think it’s a positive thing. In a socialist frame, social problems are the result of an unequal distribution of power, which is based on an unequal distribution of resources. The solution to social problems is to equalise power and equip people to take care of things themselves.
While there’s a lot of other theoretical baggage that socialists carry along with that assumption, as a basic starting point, I haven’t been able to find better.

Where it goes wrong is that unilateralism — a belief in a single Prime Mover for all injustice, and a single solution to it. That used to be very compelling for me, when I was 14. I think I stopped believing in it the year I turned 20. I don’t think that the aggression and rage that motivates socialists is really a sustainable source of motivation for me, or a lot of other people, even if I do feel enraged at injustice. It’s not the kind of energy that I want to put into my activism, or into the lives of oppressed peoples. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s particularly effective.

Shortly after my break with the anti-war movement, I started to learn more about community-based fights against neoliberal imperialism in the Third World. The subjects of these conflicts were the revolutionary subjects — a global labouring class — that socialists always rabbited on about, but they weren’t organising in the ways that socialists prescribed. This occurred just after the anti-corporate globalisation movement was getting its act together for the Cancun conference in the Doha round of WTO talks.
Rather, these subjects were organising on a community-based level, around injustices occurring in their own lives which didn’t map neatly into the teleology of socialist critiques of capitalism. Issues like land reform, energy, food security and housing as well as workers’ rights have dominated the agenda of this global movement, and have done so in ways that defy the socialist orthodoxy yet warm the cockles of my little anticapitalist heart.

I’m not sure that I see a clear logic in these kinds of movements, but they do present a powerful alternative to the kinds of organising that socialists engage in. While socialists built the Cancun convergence as an end in itself, the Zapatistas organise indigenous communities in Mexico to empower and to make lives better.

It’s a distinction which Bfp hit on perfectly in her carnival post: between centring people and centring a more abstract goal. It’s a plague in most student organising; crippled by its own class privilege.

Socialists don’t centre people, so they don’t engage well and haven’t been able to build effective change. They have no space in their teleology for communities — the only legitimate social bonds according to socialists are those of class solidarity, sometimes a frightfully abstract thing. Yet this kind of radicalism — relentlessly pursuing a bare, almost metaphysical version of justice — is compelling because it doesn’t make the kinds of compromises that might lead to injustice. It will fight the power and fight it to the end.

It’s just a bit mistaken about where that power lies, which is why socialists can be up in arms about injustice overseas but ignore the injustice in front of them, when they talk over everyone in a meeting, and declare that racism or sexism in social movements aren’t their problem — without addressing how their organisations will become anti-racist once the war ends or the government is thrown out of office. Instead, they have abstract discussions about unionism and party organisation, which are supposed to stand in for real alternatives to capitalism and domination. It’s theoretically, politically, emotionally, socially and economically weak.

It leads to a kind of “anti-racism lite” on their part. They can bleat hard about the racism of anti-terror legislation but not be bothered to talk to the families of people arrested under it. They can condemn the racism of white rioters in Cronulla but not engage in self-criticism when they shout over young women of colour. Ultimately, it’s the same strategic hypocrisy that any other privileged group of people engage in: irresponsible buck-passing.

Focusing more on these kinds of issues has really facilitated by other women of colour, who link them into broader structural processes of oppression. Bringing the voices of woc to the table isn’t about quantitative representation, it’s about the qualitative character of a movement, how it functions, what it aims for, what it does.

I’m struggling hard to overcome ingrained socialist norms in my activism, though others seem to hold them, and to bring into it some of the priorities I’ve learned that I share with other woc bloggers. Sometimes it’s really difficult to adhere to my central priorities, while so many others don’t share them. Other times my willingness to self-criticise leads me into an unsustainable spiral of doubt and disillusionment. Blogging really is helping.

Since The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum has closed, Sylvia has asked me to re-post the first Carnival Of Radical Action (CORA) here.

Welcome to the first Carnival for Radical Action!

Fire Fly and I are pleased to dedicate this carnival to the phenomenal WOC blogger BrownFemiPower. This carnival idea is her brainchild. Fire Fly’s encouragement, along with these excellent submissions, gave it wings. So we thank her and all of you, first and foremost.

There are many reasons that people may choose to hit the pavement, the group meeting (whether as small as the local PTA or as large as the United Nations), the netroots, the writing pad, or the telephone. For example, what do you do when you notice a white male colleague acting extremely out of line with a young black female student, like in Miss Profe’s situation? Do you speak out? If so, how? What do you say? How do you say it?

Conversely, what if you know what to say and how to say it, but your support system is lacking? Like the dynamics in VJack’s situation, you need to organize and coordinate large groups of people who hold different views under a generally agreed-upon umbrella issue. How do you recruit and get some action started? Do you choose advocacy? Coordinated letter writing? Rallies? Create your own organization?

For the duration of this carnival, bloggers from across the ’sphere will offer answers, experiences, and encouragement for instituting radical change. From writing a letter to your local newspaper to coordinating a large rally with multiple organizations, there’s a little something for everyone who wants to learn about making a substantial impact. So let’s get started!

Methods of Organizing

Bloggers have offered their wisdom and experience to explain some of the nitty-gritty details of organizing campaigns, organizations, and events. These wonderful bloggers emphasise clear and effective communication both within the organizing group and with the rest of society.

The incomparable BFP offers, along with some great anecdotes, a comprehensive introduction to organizing from her experience with Incite! Women of Color Against Violence:

I wanted to post the national chapter of Incite!’s guidelines to organizing. It is a very very basic “how to” guide–it doesn’t tell you how to confront people’s hurt feelings after a major fuck up, for example. But it does give you a good place to start. One of the biggest mistakes newbie organizers make is starting too quick. The euphoria of finally deciding you have the power to make change is amazing and exhilarating. But ultimately it’s unsustainable. Recognizing that you have the power to change the world is necessary to get yourself into organizing–but recognizing that you personally aren’t going to change the world in your life time is also necessary. Thus, what you do needs to be done with that in mind–how can you lay a strong enough foundation such that your daughter, your granddaughter, your great granddaughter, can continue to build upon your work?

I offer Vox offers guidelines for groups and individuals who want to increase the public profile of an issue in the news media:

Political action that is mainly unknown or doesn’t toe the established party line goes mainly unreported unless there’s a proven demand. Smaller papers that could establish that demand are mainly limited to covering local issues with their own staff and whatever runs on the AP wire for everything else.

The thing is, though, it doesn’t have to be that way. There are plenty of ways to get important issues into the mainstream press; they just need proof that there will be reader interest.

The Organizing Experience

Activist organizing takes both skill and good organization. Radical bloggers have written about their impressions of organizations, and their effectiveness, inclusivity, and structure on all levels — from small reading groups, to large-scale social movements.

Petitpoussin talks about the co-operative skills she needed to run a successful reading series:

Over time I’ve become more and more interested in the idea of collaborative or collective projects — and I’m excited to see them developing on the blogosphere, through various carnivals, sites like AfroSpear, Ally Work, and arts and cultural projects like Birds of Lace press or make/shift magazine. When I read and think about community among activists, it’s not just about some realpolitik conception of critical mass to create change on a point. It’s about experiencing change in our daily lives, with the people we love and respect, as opposed to working ourselves ragged towards change as the ideal.

In a comment to this blog, Nena Lopez offers insight into the key questions for grass-roots organizations:

Coordination and organization of activists for a grass root operation is extremely tough.

[…]

We began by taking a poll of who wanted to assist in a leader & activist position while changing the issues throughout the nation. We had a meeting (teleconference)
First discussion, Are we a campaign or are we an organization? If we are an organization we must comply within the laws of our state and become organized. We established leaders by state, through a meeting (someone must always take meeting notes). This was the first tier at a corporate level.

In an older post at her (oldschool!) Blogspot blog, BFP posted about a number of principles and issues generated out of communities involved with Incite! Women of Color Against Violence efforts at community-based anti-violence strategies:

How do we incorporate justice into community accountability strategies? If we do not rely on the state to adjudicate cases of gender violence, then how do we ensure justice and fairness before holding perpetrators accountable? How do we ensure that we do not turn into vigilante groups? If we do develop processes do judge cases within a community context, will we just replicate a mini version of the oppressive state apparatus within our communities?

And another older post from Ideas for Change discusses the relative effectiveness of authoritarian and non-authoritarian organisational structures:

There is a problematic history of coercive, authoritarian and inadequate approaches to activist and citizen learning and political practice in Sydney, that is ingrained in many of our activist cultures.

You cannot really point the finger and make accusations, because it is actually very difficult to overcome the authoritarian cultural obstacles to useful and liberatory activism. There is a fine line between having an efficient operation, and excluding members from decisionmaking.

Micropolitics of Organizing

Once in the midst of taking action, sometimes it is hard to keep up the initial momentum. Either the initial problem is more complicated than expected, the supporters do not arrive as readily, or the chosen method falls short of the anticipated goals. Either way, there’s an obstacle. How can these obstacles be confronted? Here, bloggers speak of their experiences with obstacles and activism, and they share some insight on how to perceive them and how to keep moving along.

Fabi shares her personal experience and insights about how to prevent discouragement and unsustainability while working as an activist:

But what I want to focus on are my thoughts on radical actions specifically personal contributions to a organizing project and the feasiability, effectiveness and sustainbility of change and activism. Especially as a mother and full time worker, I divide the two becuase all mothers are working mothers, most of the time and energy is constrained so I always ask myself how is this {fill in the blank} organizing?

Sudy lays out Donna sends out a rousing cry for people to get off their asses and warns against accepting the “wait your turn” mentality:

I can see a day coming when the crowd at the bottom is going to overwhelm the few at the top. The majority of Americans are already discriminated against or oppressed in some way, but this is as it has always been. The difference is that today there are more of us discontented, alienated, and unrepresented since the turn of the century. Many of us are people of color and it’s time for us to come together and shove each other to the top and pull those behind us up too. I’m tired of us vs them in every discussion. I’m tired of people saying to each other, “I must have my important issues first, then we will get back to you”, and always it isn’t enough.

And in this post, Fire Fly discusses the impact that agitating for social justice can take on mental health in a personal and enlightening way:

The nexus of issues — mental health, social justice, and activism — is very confronting for me. In the discussions at university, I haven’t mentioned that I’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness, and I’ve been in and out of the mental health system since I was very young. For me, depression is still something I treat as private, almost secret, and a matter of managing my own time and energy. This is because I’ve felt an intense amount of stigma around it from a lot of circles, especially left activist circles.

Organizing: The Aftermath

You’ve recruited. You’ve organized. You’ve planned. You’ve laughed. You’ve cried. You’ve called and written and photocopied and mobilized. What does the final product look like? Riversider has given us an example of how organizations and volunteers all meshed together in a joint effort on May Day. It’s a photoblog journey of the day’s events, so be prepared to absorb thousands of words in a blink of an eye about activism!

Thanks so much to everyone who submitted to this carnival!
We absolutely couldn’t have done it without you!

This is a fantastic example of how networking across the internet can inspire and empower people to work together for liberation. If you can spare some money, BFP has a list of bloggers who are raising funds to go to the Allied Media Conference next month who could really use your help. We support all kinds of online organising and radical collaboration!

We hope the carnival has a long life ahead of it, empowering many more in the months and years to come. Please spread the word far and wide, and start thinking about what you’ll submit to the next carnival!

The next carnival will be hosted at Fire Fly’s blog She who stumbles. Look out for more details!
Sylvia’s Note: I’ve already set up the newest submission form for entries to be sent to Fire Fly here.

UPDATE: Fire Fly has posted a call for submissions; the deadline for carnival submissions is June 21st. If you are interested in hosting future editions, please let me know by e-mailing me at sylviasrevenge [at] gmail [dot] com.

Much love,
Sylvia and Fire Fly