A Dual-Power Kind of Nationalism

One of the most powerful things about a dual-power revolutionary strategy is the way its ideas can capture people’s imaginations, and really help them think about what a totally different kind of society could look like. It’s very poetic, visionary, and hopeful. On the other hand, one of the strategy’s biggest weaknesses has been how decidedly small-scale, diffuse, narrow, and meager most actual dual-power style projects are.

It’s so common for a dual-power vision to inspire activists and artists to pour hours into community projects that they internally see as the seed for a transformative shift…but what the rest of the community sees is a cute, if somewhat uncomfortable bike space or community garden or food pantry. It’s neat, and it brings lots of character to the neighborhood, but it’s hardly the radical threat to institutionalized oppression that activists had hoped to embody. And after all their work, the founders often either move on, or they recognize this problem and they try to get their project to be even more serious, significant, accessible, and efficient…and this is usually the road to yet another professionalized non-profit organization. Even more sustainable, even less of a threat to the system.

But this isn’t an indictment of the whole strategy. I’m a big advocate for the strategy. The problem is scale: both the scale of the individual dual-power projects, but also–critically–the scale of the messaging of the project.

What if we had a new kind of nationalism in our revolutionary movements? A type of nationalism that is inspired less by the identity-based or geographically centered nationalism of past decades, and more inspired by ideas like the Zapatistas’ Other Campaign, and other autonomist type projects.

I really hate to use pretentious-sounding language like “anti-nation,” but that’s kind of what I mean. What if a sizeable group of anti-authoritarian dual-power advocates got together and sort of put out a declaration, even a constitution, for a dual-power nation…a project of constructing a functioning parallel society right here and now, all over the place. This wouldn’t just be some insurrectionist style declaration that dissolves away so sweetly and so emptily, like cotton candy on the tongue. This would be a concrete project of identifying all of structures that an alternative society would need, and then actually supporting people to build pieces of those structures now, to whatever capacity they have. The lone bike project, for example, wouldn’t be a lone bike project, it would be the transporation or ecology arm of a much larger project; and it would actually be accountable to the needs that such a project entails, not just the sub-cultural proclivities of people who like bikes and hate cars. Same for the community accountability collectives…they would be understood as accountable to and prefigurative of the society’s needs for safety and defense.

This is a pretty large idea, and I’m not going to go deeply into it in this series of posts, but I want to at least get clear about why I’m mentioning it: if we can frame and structure our dual-power projects as the expansive, revolutionary threats that we intend them to be, then we also expand our ability to grow them more quickly and creatively through mass energy.

Let’s stick with the bike project for a little while. I want to stick with it because these projects are so common amongst my fellow radical type folks, but I personally feel like they are kind of a waste of a lot of revolutionary energy (as they are currently formulated). Yet I don’t think I’m going to convince people to stop working on them. Instead, I’m hoping that they’ll work them to a more revolutionary purpose.

If a more or less inactive but sympathetic person walks into a radical bike project, and it’s just framed as a bike project, what is the potential for inspiring and harnessing that person’s creative activity toward revolution? Beyond reducing their consumption and carbon footprint (which is at least something!), not much. They might be inspired to take a tire patching class, or even to become an occasional volunteer, but it kind of ends there.

Now imagine if that project–with the same enthusiastic bike activist volunteers putting in their creative work and hours–was branded as, wedded to, and accountable to a larger dual-power society-building project. On the wall there are explanations about the larger project, sign-ups and notices about other linked projects, invitations to mass assemblies, etc. When the inactive person walks in to get their bike fixed, they are also told (in a respectful and non-pushy kind of way) about how the bike project operates and how it’s rooted in this vision for a new society. There are clearly presented volunteer opportunities, event opportunities…and crowd-sourcing activities (I’ll get to this in another post). This person may say no to all of this stuff, but they came in to fix a tire and they leave having at least engaged with a transformative vision for society. And if it was done in a responsible and friendly way, it won’t push that person away in the future, either.

If that same stuff is happening at the food pantry, conflict mediation center, radical mental health center, with shared branding (like a little logo on all the fliers and brochures that says “member of the new society building project,”) each and every day that these projects are providing their alternative services, then there is a substantial opportunity for engaging thousands of people a month–in a big city like Seattle. And if these were all linked to a common volunteer management system, a common internal education system, and a shared dues or income-sharing system, there could be really effective harnessing of people’s activity. And if these projects were linked to, and accountable to mass-based decision-making assemblies…wow.

And since this project could be national or international, it could also allow people to continue and link their work as they travel or move.

What’s special about this approach is that it turns our small scale projects–and their distance from our large-scale vision–into an asset rather than a liability. When we have a clearly articulated vision for the structures our communities need, and we see the gaps from what we have and can communicate that openly and transparently, then people who are inactive will perceive a clear, concrete invitation to not only be active, but to be active creatively to solve meaningful, potentially revolutionary problems. This is something that I’ve learned from the non-profit world: there are way more people out there who are interested in being involved in radical projects than we think…we just haven’t invited them and motivated them with structures and activities that keep them in the movement. This dual-power nationalist idea could be an approach to this–even better in concert with the revolutionary congregation idea!

Another strength of this approach is that it doesn’t ask people to change their interests to suit a singular, linear Revolutionary Strategy. It doesn’t tell the bike activist, “hey, you’re wasting your time and you should study more Marx,” (which they won’t do anyway, they’ll just think you’re a jerk…trust me!). Instead, it actually takes people’s existing interests and even their hobbies and it invites them to connect with a more revolutionary edge–something they are often yearning for anyway. And it would even give existing alternative projects an opportunity to link in and affiliate themselves without too much muss and fuss. Once again, it’s all about expanding our capacity for collecting, irrigating, moving, recycling people’s human activity…not narrowing them.

In Part 3, I want to actually dig into the actual, concrete activities involved in dual-power work themselves. How do we create a wide variety of activities that can meaningfully collect a wide variety of people’s “rogue” activity? Stay tuned for that exploration.

This gets me for a half-hour or so. It always does. I get upset, tumble through the briefest stint of depression, and then I find the threads that give me hope in the mass nature of change. If technological revolutions like the telephone, the TV, Facebook can enter into all of these people’s lives, why can’t revolutionary ideas and practices, properly organized? And if social shifts like universal (or not quite universal) suffrage, women’s liberation (at least at the 2nd wave level), recycling, the minimum wage, and voting for a black man can spread through masses of people, then why can’t more radical ideas and practices? And if our language is constantly shifting at a mass level, with new words and phrases like “bourgie” or “couch potato,” shooting across the culture, then why can’t the same happen with more powerful words?

That usually settles me down, but then it begs the question: how do revolutionary ideas and practices get to that level of mass impact, and become integrated into the core practices of millions of people’s daily lives?

I’d like to play with some ideas here, probably over multiple parts.

Fluid Dynamics and Popular Energy

Imagine that each of us human beings is a faucet of water or even a sprinkler–it helps to actually imagine people’s heads as big faucets, or their hands as big firehoses–and that whenever we are active and doing anything–which is pretty much always except when we are sleeping–our actions, our practices are manifested as the water flowing out of us. It might flow out at different volumes and velocities, it might pour and it might spray depending on the day or the time, but all of our actions flow out of us like water. And, just like our actions which always are happening in real time, once the water flows out, it’s in the world, it has passed through us and it’s on its way somewhere else. You with me so far?

Now imagine that if you take a bunch of people and their faucets of activity, and you focus them in a steady flow, all standing over a huge concrete hole, and you have them all stand there and just flow their energy, their activity into that hole. At first it may seem like it’s an impossible task to fill a huge whole like that, but with enough people standing there for enough time, that hole will fill right up.

That is precisely how capitalism and other systems of oppression and exploitation (but capitalism in some uniquely dynamic ways) have survived, evolved, and built the tremendous, overwhelming infrastructure that they have today. That’s where the skyscrapers, the malls, the stadiums, the highways, the war machines, have come from. The powerful have created a system of hoarding, corralling, focusing, and collecting our human activity, our constant flow of water, so that it is leaving us and our control, and then it’s flowing into someone else’s pools, bottles, tanks, and reservoirs, to be used as the new owners see fit. Usually–but not always–that process happens to us in the form of a job, rent, or shopping, right?

This is something that is so useful about Marx, actually. In his discussions of human activity as labor, his understanding of the exploitation of labor, his crucial idea of alienated labor in which the products of our activity leave our control, and in his understanding of the mode of production–or, in this case, the organization of the faucets and the plumbing.

See, this is all really critical to my first point. What makes these horrible social systems so big, powerful, and effective is not the systems themselves, it’s us. It’s actually the fact of how many of us human beings there are in the world, and how amazing and dynamic we are…and how these systems have found a way to harness and exploit that at a mass level. But, as is old news to most socialists and syndicalists, when the masses shift and turn their faucets elsewhere, the system dries up and can even die. These systems depend on the steady flow of our human activity.

So, if this is a cursory understanding of the fluid dynamics of exploitation and capitalism, what are the fluid dynamics of revolutionary change?

Well, the first thing to realize is that even when we’re not on the job, we are always flowing with activity. In rest, in eating, in socializing, in intimacy, in play, in hobbies…we are still working, producing, flowing out into the world.

What activism is for most of us–except those who are full-time activists–is the attempt to redirect just a tiny portion of the faucet in another direction, even if it’s a slow drip…so that at least for a moment our activity can go toward something different, more promising.

But here’s the trouble: after we have defiantly redirected the flow of our activity, after the water of our rebellion has left us and entered into the world, where does it go? What lasting impact does it have? Think about a huge protest march, for example. Sometimes I think about it as like a flash flood of rebellious human activity. It flows roiling down the street–essentially a canal organized and controlled by the powerful–it makes a lot of noise and it showcases a forceful and hopeful energy…but then it flows to a stop, and then just drains away. Some drops of water may linger on the streets, but the for the most part, all of that human energy just flows and then dissipates. It’s not captured, it doesn’t enter into any movement reservoir, it can’t be recycled or irrigated out to other radical projects. It just comes, and it goes.

If the system exists as it does because of its ability to capture, direct, and capitalize on the flow of human activity, and if our radical movements depend on siphoning off a mere drip, drip, drip of that exploited energy, then we’d better be damned good at harnessing every last drop of that activity! But we’re not.

What are the capturing devices of our revolutionary movements? What is our plumbing and infrastructure? Do we have the means in place to make use of not only the intense flow of activity of full-time activists, but also the occasional, rambling trickles of busy and overworked people who don’t have much time for activism?

Sometimes I imagine the state of the left like a powerful hose shooting a jet of water into a ceramic bowl. A handful of really smart, intense people just throwing their energy out there, but most of it just bounces away, and very little of it ends up being collected. No wonder our attrition rate is so high.

What, then, is a revolutionary plumbing and collection strategy in this analogy?

Well, the insurrectionist or general strike perspective would involve singular, massive turning of the faucets, alongside an occupation or smashing of the plumbing around us. That’s all fine but I think that’s less useful for the purposes of this analogy. In that perspective, what matters is taking or destroying control of all the infrastructure that’s already built…which I agree with, but for this analogy I’m more interested in the process of capturing the flow of energy that we’re missing every day that there isn’t a revolution.

Instead, I want to talk about the dual-power, or pre-figurative revolutionary strategy with this faucet analogy. Dual-power is the idea of our movements building the new world now, in the shell of the old, with the hope that eventually the alternative we are building is a sufficient counter-power to the old system, and then we can wrest final control from that old system or it just withers and dies. See, here is where the faucet and water analogy can be really helpful!

What this strategy essentially says is that we want to create new capturing devices, right now, so that we can harness the slow trickle of wayward, rebellious energy and turn that energy in a lasting, sustainable way against the system. If the system can exploit mass energy to build skyscrapers and highways, then we can harness more and more rebellious activity to build clinics, neighborhood councils, mutual aid structures. Right on!

However, in practice, what this usually ends up looking like is a handful of very subcultural people who have found the means to completely redirect their energy to flow into a handful of very subcultural projects, and there’s sort of a culture of, “if you haven’t completely turned away from the system, then you don’t really fit here”…we don’t want the drip, drip of mainstream people’s extra after work energy…we only want the full-time energy of people who are “dedicated” to revolution. This is a crime.

Working in the non-profit world, and seeing how grassroots fundraising and volunteer management work, I can’t overstate how angry it makes me the way that dual-power practitioners are wasting opportunities to capture and collect massive amounts of human activity. It’s so upsetting. It is possible to build a dual-power strategy that isn’t subcultural, and that truly is a threat to the system. It is possible that dual-power, pre-figurative strategies are a meaningful, peaceful alternative–or compliment–to insurrectionist or general strike revolutionary strategies. But we’ve got to be more clever about how we think about people’s precious time and energy.

I’ll explore more about this in part 2.

If I wrote it again, it would be different…it really shows me what I was prioritizing back then. But nonetheless, I think it’s a fun piece of imagination, and it fuels me to think creatively about current organizing possibilities.

While I don’t want to spend this article writing about Freire and Pedagogy of the Oppressed alone, I do think getting back to that book is a good first step to seeing the untapped potential of the popular education approach. See, in most movement discussions of popular education in which Freire is referenced (and this is actually less of a problem when Myles Horton, Highlander, and the civil rights movement are the reference points, since they were less academic and more rooted in a movement context that is popularly understood), we get really stuck in chapter 2 of that book.

While chapter 2 is great in its discussion of the banking method, student-teacher relationships, and the alternative of dialogical and problem-posing education, there are two other chapters that come after it! In chapter 3 the concepts of minimum thematic universes–systematically mapping out the underlying themes and categories of students-teachers’ experiences and worldviews, and using a team of investigators to develop an in-depth and contextually relevant curriculum–and limit situations–those opportunities when the student-teacher’s own worldview confronts its contradiction with reality and with its own unrealized potential, and thus is pushed to grow and expand the thematic universe–are introduced and, though the elaboration is unnecessarily academic, the ideas are fascinating. Except for AK Thompson’s Black Bloc, White Riot, I don’t think I have seen even a reference to the idea of limit situations in many years. In chapter 4, dialogue is explicitly politicized in a very useful proposal for a change in the way revolutionaries relate and communicate with the masses, going beyond the classroom setting to the movement setting at large.

Like I said, I don’t want to get stuck on Freire, but my point is that, even using this one book as an example, most social movement approaches to popular education are stuck at what I’d consider the tactical level. We are concerned with how participatory the content is in the individual instance of education–almost inevitably the 1 1/2 hour to 2-day workshop–but we spend much less time talking about the long-term strategy of popular education as praxis: as a process of reflection, action, and then more reflection that, over time, transforms ourselves and the world.

This is where I want to go now with this piece. I would like to explore how grassroots educators can deepen popular education at the level of strategic, long-term praxis. I think the concepts of presence and power can aid us here.

Presence: Weaving Revolutionary Curriculum Into the School of Life

I think the best thing that grassroots radical educators can do for ourselves is to de-emphasize the thinking of ourselves as short-term workshop facilitators or classroom instructors and, instead, to more intentionally understand ourselves as long-term (that is, multi-year, multi-decade) accompaniment to both our students and to the movement. That is rather than rooting our understanding of ourselves in these singular (and often repetitive) educational interventions like the workshop, we think about ourselves with a long-view, as organic intellectuals who are present and engaged in praxis with the people around us for a number of years. We see ourselves consciously, systematically weaving educational dialogues and problem posing questions into the years long struggles and changes of our localities, making community life itself our priority area–with classrooms and workshops as tactical tools, but not the core of the thing.

A story to help give this texture:

I worked at Tyee High School for 5 years, alongside my friend Briana Herman-Brand. In that first year we started using political education curriculum with youth as young as 8th grade, usually in 1-4 hour workshop style sessions. At the time, I went through a process that I think many radical educators go through. As the sessions progressed I judged our success based on how much energy and participation I saw, and how dynamically and creatively youth worked with the concepts. I assumed that because it was participatory and that youth engaged so well, that the specific intervention was transformational and revolutionary, and I went home each of those evenings really excited. Then, I’d run into those youth weeks later, and they would still be using oppressive language, fighting, sexually harassing other youth, etc. This was the moment of self doubt in which I started questioning both their abilities to learn and my workshops’ abilities to teach. I would end the year not knowing how successful any of my work had been, especially with the youngest youth, who were particularly all over the place in their reactions.

Well, Facebook can be a beautiful thing! Because now, 7-8 years later, I can reconnect with many of those youth, and a good number of them have explained to me the power of even some of our most unforgettable programs–one of which I had actually completely forgotten!–and it even shows in some of their career choices. One particular young woman, who I had a really hard time working with, just straight up disappeared from my life after her 9th grade year, and then I saw her again back at Tyee 5 years later and she was doing a similar Americorps position to my old job, citing our time with her as an inspiration. As most educators know, the feeling that news like this gives you is priceless.

Education takes time. Building knowledge takes time. That’s why the concept of praxis is so crucial. The workshop, the lecture, even the book are not the fulcrum of education, as I think we know. Life is. Experience is. Our conscious, curricular interventions are just that: interventions into the daily actions and reflections of the people we’re working with. The implications of this, then, is that our interventions can be much more powerful if we can approach them with a long view.

We already know that a weekend long workshop is more effective than a 2 hour workshop. We already know that a 10 week program is better than a weekend workshop. And we know, implicitly, that long-term organizing relationships are the most effective of all. So I think we should put more of our focus and attention there. If we, as radical educators, know that we are committed to a place for at least, say 4 years (even better if it’s more like 10-20), then I think we should work with other similar committed people and really map out a curricular approach that is based on our movement presence over that long period of time.

By movement presence I mean the traditional writings, weekend workshops, guest speakers, 10-week programs, etc., but I also think about long-term mentoring relationships (something I hear a lot about from my friends in the Bay), yearly reflection and commitment-setting events, programs of organizers writing letters to future selves and actually delivering those letters, and the study, mapping, and articulation of the trends that we are observing over the years. How are the winds changing? Where does movement energy seem to be going? Most of us are left guessing on these questions, relying on anecdotal evidence, but this is an area where grassroots educators, along with researchers, could really be helpful!

This is also where inter-generational relationships are so powerful! By maintaining their presence in our communities and our movements, by sticking through all the past dramas and dissolutions, victories and failures, movement elders can offer essential insights to all of us. Though I’m still young, my own 15 years of experience can often be really helpful to younger or less experienced organizers, often in sort of unexpected ways. For example, when younger activists complain about the state of the left and how right wing our culture is, I give them an example of the current events section of Barnes and Noble. When I first starting looking for books at Barnes and Noble in the mid-nineties, I jumped for joy when I could find even a single Howard Zinn or Noam Chomsky book. Now, walk into a Barnes and Noble current events section and you can see Naomi Klein, Vijay Prashad, Amy Goodman, the Zapatistas, etc. Not ideal, but a huge shift! (funny/sad sidenote: the New Age section has also grown to overtake the philosophy section) This is just one trend that can be useful to talk about to give context to the growth of the left/progressive forces, but it requires a long term presence to see it.

Presence is also important for radical educators to model because of how hard organizing is, how thankless it can feel. Simply the act of staying in the struggle, still being there after so much hardship, can be inspirational and can give much needed depth to people’s sense of movement commitment. After 9/11 pushed the global justice movement into a sad sort of hibernation, the moments when activists simply came out of their homes to see each other and to see long-standing organizers still doing work was really pivotal in rebuilding and strengthening the anti-war movement.

As a small town person, I’ve always had a deep love for the small town regulars. The old man in Oak Harbor who would wave to passing traffic near the Roller Barn. The Bellingham bus driver who would always start his route with a Simpsons trivia contest. I believe that is a conscious role that radical educators (and really by that I mean all revolution-minded organizers and artists!) should take up. We should be movement regulars; humble, helpful presences who can listen attentively, ask questions, and provide solid educational content that is attuned to the current local context, the key questions that the local movement is facing from year to year.

This can help us to go beyond the repetitive cycle of 101 workshops, and really engage with popular education as the praxis that it’s supposed to be.

I have a lot more that I can say about presence, but these ideas are still feeling pretty raw, pretty first draft. I think I’ll leave it here for now, talk about power next time, and then refine the ideas further in a future pass.

But here I want to talk more about why I’m doing this in the first place, and how I’m conceiving of the eventual end of this game.

The purpose of this game is to leverage both my playfulness and my propensity toward game addiction to become a better friend, partner, comrade, organizer, and thinker. It’s about using fun and games as a means of actually helping myself to mature and get more “serious” about the way I want to contribute to the world in my lifetime.

The roots of this are many: I’m getting older (30 on Sunday) and working with youth all day increasingly makes me feel old; I’m responsible for a huge family and will hopefully be a father in the coming year or so; I’m professionally adrift; family finances are a constant hell; I’ve been struggling with politically-rooted depression for a good decade now; and yet I’m still deeply, thoroughly, gut-level committed to building a just and democratic world.

Though there’s always more to learn, of course, I feel like my 15 years of radical struggle now have given me a pretty good idea of the work that I want to be doing, and the kind of social movement participant that I want to be. I’ve made my peace with the fact that I don’t want to be a famous movement superstar (though I do want to write a book or two). I know that I don’t care about professional advancement (except to bring Glendi’s family stability and to fund the movement) and I know that no matter what job I have, I’ll always hate working. I know that I want to be rooted in one geographic region and to slowly foster long-term revolutionary movement building from there. But all this time the sticking point has been the follow-through.

So many years of insecure fumbling. So many hard experiences of failure, followed by months of despondency. So many repeated conversations, promises, proposals. As the stakes have gotten higher and higher (now with lives depending on me being present and responsible), I’ve come to realize that it’s time to really get growing. It’s time to really apply what I’ve learned over the years in a meaningful, consistent way.

Thus, the game. The game is a way of motivating myself–really its more of a manipulation–to do the kind of personal work that I know I need to do to be the organizer and person I want to be. By getting points for participating in social spaces, attending political events, reading, playing, walking, and appreciating the work of friends and comrades, I am building new practices for myself that key off of my already developed triggers of, “just one more game,” and “I’ll quit as soon as I level up.”

The idea was actually inspired by what I’ve seen from people doing Somatics and Trauma work. Their idea, in a nutshell, is that we are sort of made up of our practices, and that those practices are based on years of responses to the world that we live in, so the things that we do that are unhealthy are usually rooted in survival strategies that once worked for us, but which are no longer serving us so well. The trick to growing and changing, then, is to be engaging with our mind-body-spirit (soma…somatics) to develop new, centered practices that can take us toward our values and our commitments. Right on. The problem is there are a whole bunch of reasons why the straightforward somatics practices and groups won’t work for me right now, so I chose to come up with something that could meet me right where I’m at and support me from there.

It’s working. My god it’s working so beautifully.

It’s my hope that in 6 months, 9 months, a year I will have developed and internalized enough new practices that the framing of the game can go away, and I can engage in more social ways of doing this work. Somatics groups? Maybe. Revolutionary organizations? I hope. Revolutionary congregation building? If only!

Of course, if the game does pan out for me, I’ll try to share about it, maybe with a special website, or a small book, or a youtube video or something. I do think it’s fun and creative and could be a help to a lot of other gamer types. But that’s not the point for me.

The point, for me, is entirely personal.

I want to end this game considerably more practiced in the skills and habits that I want to carry with me into fatherhood and old age. Because I know that my ideas and habits will continue to get more ossified with age, I want to make a big offensive right now toward getting myself on a better track. Of course, there is no endgame in trying to be a better person, but I believe there will be a point where I can do it without these wonderful training wheels that the game provides.

Onward to level 4, then level 10, and then version 2.0 of the game!

And my friend was absolutely right. I had actually been triggered to a similar thought in Part 1 of the congregations piece, when I mentioned churches having disability accessible spaces–I began thinking about how lonely that one little mention of ablism is in this whole blog of mine. And with my friend’s push on Sunday, I’ve decided to do something about that. I’ve started re-reading Eli Clare’s work, and my co-worker Sunny just let me borrow their Disability Studies reader from college. I do think the absence is stark, and I can bodily feel that it’s deliberate. Similar to my absence of deep discussion around transphobia and trans liberation, ablism is one of those areas where I get physically uncomfortable talking about it, both because of the trickiness of language and the fear of speaking wrongly, as well as the lack of time and energy that I’ve put into studying it.

The absence is particularly jarring for me because I really agree with an important theoretical observation that I believe my friend Bruin (was it you, Bruin?) made to me: that ablism is the canary in the social movement coalmine. The idea is that if a social movement or a movement organization fails to make good space for people with disabilities, that is a strong negative sign for the long-term sustainability or liberatory quality of said movement. I think this observation is brilliant, just totally right on. Because the same skills and structures that it takes an organization to be less ablist are much the same skills and structures that make it responsive to issues of abuse and sexual violence, to issues of self-care and burnout, and to issues of power hoarding and space sharing. They are the skills of patience, consideration, listening, and caring. Particularly because of the vast diversity of disabilities that exist in our current society, the flexibility that our movements require to meet the anti-ablism challenge is powerful preparation for the flexibility that our movements need for thousands of other issues and tactical challenges as well.

Okay, so if I really totally believe this, then why such a low prioritization of study and work on ablism? Hypocrisy, of course! While I believe it theoretically, I think that I’m embodying the contrary, ablist reaction of thinking that addressing ablism is too hard, that it’s not worth prioritizing, that it’s not a core issue…and even that god-awful default defense of the status quo: that talking too much about ablism is divisive. Additionally, in my secondary reaction to my friends critique I found myself thinking, “but that’s not an issue I know about or have experience with, that’s something that other people are blogging about.”

It’s this last thought that I want to talk about today, with the other stuff coming later as I read more.

It’s incredible how, in the areas where we are privileged or where a deeper critique frightens us, we can ignore constantly lived realities that are staring us in the face. That’s the case with ablism. I seriously can’t believe that I think ablism is not an issue that I’m dealing with, when actually it’s all around me!

First of all, my own chemical sensitivities, and the fact that almost all perfumes and chemical smells give me an instant headache…and thus that I have headaches weekly.

Then, there’s the youth organization where I work, and the deeply challenging politics of unspoken and unseen learning disabilities and how youth hide them, but then are lightly teased about their behavior…but it’s never politicized beyond calling out the teasing, and we adults don’t know what to do because we don’t want to put a youth on blast by naming it as ablism, but then it also never gets talked about. This has been an issue for years, and I think about it every time certain youth are in the office, but our inaction and our lack of strategizing around it is actually pretty terrible!

There is my last post about being put into gifted programs at a young age…and the whole flipside of that of people who I’ve loved who were put into remedial programs, medicated, sent to tutors, etc. Their experience also made me hate the system that separated us…yet I never considered it ablism??

There is Glendi’s hospitalization, the months of healing afterwards, and the patience I occasionally lost as the weeks of taking care of her went on. And there’s that question that Glendi hoarsely voiced the day after the emergency, about whether she was broken.

There is Glendi’s friend and college classmate in Guatemala who, after a bus accident 6 years ago, is paraplegic and who lives in this tight, winding little cobblestone alley and almost never leaves her house…and has been systematically shut out of the teaching profession that she was previously in.

There are my friends who write and talk and think brilliantly about disability and ablism, but who are also living much deeper realities ablism than I am. I think about them, and I think about supporting them, but it’s sadly typical that I haven’t take the step of really applying the politics beyond it being something that’s sort of “their thing.”

Then, there is the really, really big reality. The daily family issue. The unspoken tension underneath much of the suffering in our Guatemala family. There is Glendi’s dad’s condition. As a man with type-2 diabetes who now also faces kidney failure, he has been unable to work for 3 years now, and the pain and shame of him not being able to contribute financially to his family has been a defining frame this whole time. In the mix of poverty and manhood and rural pride, the ablism piece has been there this whole time, but I’ve been missing it! All of the embarrassment that gets expressed, the exasperation with life and the questioning of what living really means. The softly spoken question, so wrapped up in ablism, of when is the time to give up, stop operating, pull the plug. And for us, with the economic power in the situation, to miss this piece is profound. Man, this is big.

This is bringing up a lot of questions for me, and a lot of feelings. But I think this is the point where I need to quiet down, do more work, and do more reading. This was sort of just a first clearing of the lot lot before building the foundation. The additional building will come slowly.

I am so thankful to my friend for the push to be thinking about this, and I’m excited for Eli Clare’s Exile and Pride to arrive in the mail. As hard as it can be sometimes to overcome the initial hump of defensiveness, I love realizing the places where I need to stretch myself and grow.

I’m going to wrap up my writing about revolutionary congregations by discussing some of the potential pitfalls and criticisms that I would expect from this approach.

I also should state that, although I believe that this is a good idea that’s worth trying, I am not wedded to any one social change strategy or organizational form. I guess I kind of think of my mind and my imagination as kind of a nonviolent, radical left DARPA—I like thinking about all the different creative and wacky ways that we could do revolutionary struggle, but I know that most of them will go nowhere. Even though I’ve been quietly suggesting this idea for 6 years now, I’m prepared to be wrong. But I’m no longer interested in just being quiet about it because of that possibility.

Okay, then, what are the potential problems or push-back that I anticipate from this proposal?

The Master’s Tools/Christian Dominance Problem

I often fear that even mentioning Christian churches and anti-authoritarian revolutionary politics in the same breath is a non-starter. After all, the evangelical right is on the “enemy’s list,” and Christian cultural dominance is an historical part of this system that we’re trying to transform. Therefore, people have good reason to be skeptical of any lessons we might learn from church structures, and especially of any organizational forms that we might adopt that could potential replicate Christian cultural dominance.

Okay, that’s real. However, the model for revolutionary congregations that I’ve proposed is not actually very “churchy” at all, and I think it could be transformed even more to be even less churchy, while still retaining the important structural elements that make it what it is.

In case I didn’t make it clear elsewhere, I don’t actually want us to call these churches, and really I don’t think we should use the word congregations beyond this piece. In fact, I even played with the idea of not even mentioning churches anywhere near the proposal, but I think that’s pretty intellectually dishonest and silly. I believe that the left needs to get better at learning lessons from outside of the narrow revolutionary canon, so at least in this first proposal I want to be clear about its intellectual roots.

Nonetheless, it might be true that I’m arguing for a cultural form of organizing that somehow has inherently oppressive elements. But if that’s the case I need help identifying them. Weekly gatherings? Basic political agreement? Building infrastructure through offerings? I don’t see anything oppressive in these elements. Nor do I see anything particularly middle class, white, or otherwise culturally narrow—for those who might put forward that critique. But then again, I’m prepared to be wrong.

Magnifying Cultural Insularity

A criticism that one friend of mine has leveled against the revolutionary congregation idea is that it’ll just attract to same old faces from the social justice community, and wouldn’t actually reach non-political masses. A similar critique is that this model would allow communities to get comfortable in their numbers and just build and even celebrate their insularity.

This concerns me as well, but I don’t think there is anything about this model that makes it more culturally insular than any form. In fact, quite the opposite. Because the weekly gatherings have the potential for exploring all types of issues and programmatic styles each week, there’s a lot of room for a wide variety of experiences and ideas to be explored by a big group of people. Still, there would need to be deliberate work to maintain movement building relationships with other communities and organizations, and there’s no way around that.

But the fact that this structure is so open, and emphasizes recruitment also is a help in avoiding this problem.

Over-emphasizing the Personal, at the Price of the Structural

This organizational model is centered around weekly gatherings that, although political, are mostly about personally connecting and rejuvenating ourselves as radical people. That is, there is no minimum level of political action demanded of members.

The danger of this, as Andy Cornell discusses in Oppose and Propose and as we’ve seen in many other radical groups that make space for the politics of process, caring, and healing, is that revolutionary organizations can slowly lose their edge of political action. They become dominated by individualist or lifestylist attitudes and disengage from the deep (and hard) fighting and building that revolutionary change requires.

I think this danger is very real, but it’s a danger that any organization that makes any space for feelings is going to face. We are people, and we are complex, and we are believing in and fighting for things that create a deep disconnection from the society and people around us. It is a completely natural survival strategy to take whatever spaces we get to retreat and lick our wounds, or try to numb ourselves and avoid the fight altogether. There are no structural magic bullets for this problem. It has to be part of the basic founding statement of the organization, reinforced in the culture and messages of the weekly gatherings, and supported through a warm, inviting, yet militant culture of action among the more active members of the congregation. The group has to be aware of the danger of retreat and de-politicization, and guard against it with conscious action.

I think the opposite danger is far worse, however. The reason why I support trying this revolutionary congregation model is because I think most revolutionary groups heavily de-emphasize the caring, reflective work, to poisonous consequences. How many people do we lose every month, every year because they no longer feel like they can keep up, because they feel a need to balance their lives and have no space to do that and stay active, because they feel like they can’t measure up to the radical superstars in our midst? And how many of the great lights from previous radical generations had hidden problems of drug and alchol addiction, abusive relationships, and untreated trauma that ate away at them personally while we celebrate them publicly? By rooting our organizations in a shared, reflective space—the weekly gathering—we also shift the pace of our revolutionary work from a non-stop and unhealthy urgency to something slightly slower, more affective, but more sustainable.

It’s a Structure, But What’s the Strategy?

The revolutionary congregation proposal is about experimenting with a different organizational form for doing radical social change work. It’s not a strategy in itself. It’s not naming specific targets for action, specific counterinstitutions (beyond the congregations themselves), or specific elements of theory (for example stances on the centrality of race, or of class struggle). That’s deliberate.

My view is that revolutionary anti-authoritarian movements in the U.S. are far too undeveloped to be focusing our organizational forms solely around specific strategies. This is a big cause of the sectarianism and disorganization that makes us so perpetually weak. Despite the fact that probably millions of us agree on broad elements of vision and and analysis, we split and fracture into smaller and smaller little organizational universes on the basis of questions that none of us are even close to knowing the answers to.

The revolutionary congregation model is about grouping together and building community around larger points of agreement among radicals (but, once again, not as catch-alls…there should be some sharpness and clarity to the basic founding statement), while giving space to experiment and develop different strategies and theories from within the congregation. For instance, there are probably 8-10 radical groups in Seattle right now that have disagreements over specific tactical questions and especially questions of issue emphasis. We could maintain those disagreements even if we were all in a revolutionary congregation together, with room for all those people to experiment with those ideas…but with the regular community space of gatherings and study groups and infrastructure to keep us working together. This also allows for groups who recognize that their strategy isn’t working to be supported in swallowing their pride and quickly rejoining their fellow radicals, without the need for bitter splits, self-blame, and burn-out.

I think we’ve inherited way too much sectarianism from the Marxis left, and I think that has been punctuated by the internalized politics of brand loyalty that corporate culture has taught us since we were young. We pick sides around relatively minor questions, and then they become identities. And the price is that they keep us not only from coalition, but even from the basic relationship building and infrastructure building that could make the left, as a whole, much more powerful.

Indeed, I know that even this idea—regardless of its merits—will potentially go nowhere because of that sectarianism.

I think I’ll probably think of more over time, but I’m actually way behind on some work, so I think I’ve gotta just post this now. Probably expect a few more edits later.

Okay, time for my description of the revolutionary congregation, as I have imagined it up to now. Please keep in mind that this is my first time articulating this in writing with any depth, so I imagine it’ll be pretty rough.

Overview

The core purpose of the revolutionary congregation is to serve as a stable community for people who condemn the current organization of our society, who want to believe that a wholly different, participatory organization of society is possible, and who want to gather together and fight for that new society right now. The most fundamental goals of this particular formation are:

1) To provide a consistent, warm space for participants to reflect, internally and interpersonally, on revolutionary ideas as a comprehensive worldview, and the implications of those ideas not just for society but for our lives as whole people.

2) Build infrastructure for shared personal growth and study, shared action, and shared counterinstitution building, which is also then shared with broader movements.

3) Provide opportunities for a rich variety of programming that allow people to connect with revolutionary politics from a variety of different angles, education levels, and personal needs

Rooted in “The Idea”

Like the Spanish anarchists who talked about living and fighting for “the idea” and who let that basic, core aspiration fuel them for generations, the revolutionary congregation is rooted in a basic statement of beliefs and aspirations.

This statement wouldn’t be more than 2 pages long, and ideally it would be less than one page. It expresses, in as accessible of language as possible, the core principles, analysis, and vision of the congregation. This can be as general or specific as each formation wants, depending on what kind of base-level political agreements that they want from the beginning.

The critical thing about the document is that it honestly spells out what ideas people are seeking to congregate around; it expresses both analysis, vision, and strategy; and it articulates the need for both personal change (including a changing orientation to our power, privilege, and material relationships to the world) and institutional transformation.

This document forms sort of the essential compact of trust between members of the congregation. There is an understanding and trust that anyone who keeps coming, no matter what their level of education, level of time commitment or particular interests, believes in those core beliefs. There is a regular celebration and mutual recognition that all participants are fueled by these ideas and hopes, and that though we are each walking individual paths towards transformation, and at different speeds, we all broadly share the same destination. As the Zapatistas have said, “we walk at the pace of the slowest.”

I should emphasize that this is not a wishy-washy, catch-all document. Being simple does not have to mean being vague or simplistic. For example, the opening line of the IWW preamble is, “the working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” It’s simple, it’s accessible, but it names the system honestly.

What’s important about this first point is that this organizational model is based on a belief that “the idea,” at root, is pretty simple, and that we can build large fighting organizations that allow people to build skills and take action at all levels of education and dedication, so long as they agree with those simple ideas. It holds that this is a sufficient foundation from which revolution minded people can build a rich and nourishing community. This differs from many cadre examples where revolutionaries seem to believe that they need to come to careful and detailed political agreement before they feel like they can settle into building a political home together.

The Weekly Gathering

The most basic building block of the revolutionary congregation is the weekly gathering. Different from a mass meeting or weekly workshop, this is a 1 ½ to 2 hour convening in which people share music, poetry, and art, but also hear opinions and reflections about current events and revolutionary ideas, and have opportunities for participatory dialogue as well. More than anything else, these gatherings are designed to refuel the soul and keep the mind energized after a week of having to survive in our absurd society.

Additionally, the congregation could have occasional “street gatherings,” in which instead of meeting at their usual location, participants gather and carry out their program in particular sites of struggle (like a picket line or in a squatted building, etc.). The gatherings could also offer a regular opportunity for guests to come and share about movement experiences elsewhere, but it’s always really important that it be more than just a news and announcement session.

After the gathering, there is a food and chatting period, as well as resource booths, action bulletin boards, and petition tables for people to check out (sort of like a weekly resource fair and potluck).

The gatherings would be planned thoughtfully, with a multi-issue emphasis, by member-run committees, not by any permanent leadership. That is, there would be no pastor or single congregational leader. I’ll discuss the leadership question in more detail shortly.

Opportunities to Go Deeper

In addition to the weekly gathering (and maybe duplicate gatherings at other times for people with different work schedules) the congregation offers groups, programs, and action projects throughout each week. Multiple levels of study groups, action committees, counterinstitution committees, solidarity committees with larger struggles, somatics practice groups, caucuses and personal change groups, childrens and seniors programs, art classes, etc. would be offered.

A lot of these opportunities would also be open to the broader public, and many congregation members would probably spend their weeks involved in other, non-affiliated movement projects, not just congregation projects.

The idea here is to offer opportunities for growth and action directly to members, but also to encourage building and actively participating in the larger movement.

Speaking personally as someone who is responsible for a huge family and who has a really hard job, this model is perfect for me. It allows me to be a full-fledged member of a revolutionary community, sharing space and art and life each week with both my other busy comrades and my comrades who are full-time, super intense organizers. At the same time, I can take on additional activities as I am able, and those who are more free can take on a whole lot more without feeling like my busy schedule is holding them back.

Here’s another thing that’s cool about this: it allows way more people to share in the comradeship that makes revolutionaries form cadre organizations in the first place. Think about it: cadre organizations usually exist to 1) give committed revolutionaries a space to feel safe and not alone in this harsh world, 2) do in-depth theoretical development together, 3) create finely honed strategic interventions in movement work. This congregation model allows 2 and 3 to happen in small mid-week groups, just the same as a cadre model, but it’s all grounded in a 1 that includes potentially hundreds more people (people who agree with the politics but don’t have time for the intense theory or strategizing). This overcomes the primary problem of cadre organizations: that they create insularity, and the lonely righteousness of being more “serious” than everyone else in the movement.

Building Revolutionary Infrastructure

At the weekly gatherings, financial offerings would always be requested and expected, and that money would first be used to build a space (I imagine that first congregations would start by meeting in existing schools and non-profit spaces, just like fledgling churches do), and then furnish that space with resources like a childcare area, a gym, a playground, a kitchen, a music setup, a stage, etc. even our own schools!

Along with building congregation-specific infrastructure, additional money would be put towards supporting counterinstitutions that serve the larger movement, as well as action campaigns that the congregation believes in.

This part is really exciting to me, because evangelical churches generate a lot of dollars, and they put a lot of those dollars toward international mission work. I’d really like to see what revolutionary congregations could support with that kind of money on a global level.

The Leadership Question

Leadership development is a big priority in the revolutionary congregation idea. The goal is to offer consistent, structured encouragement and opportunities that move people from their first curiosity about the group, to their attendance and agreement with the core beliefs, to their active membership in the congregation, to their committed action and organizing, to their conscious democratic participation in the core leadership of the organization.

Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church is really helpful here. He has a whole diagram that shows the flow from the larger community, to the curious crowd, to the congregation, to the committed, and then to the core.

All self-identified congregation members would be welcome to participate in decision-making and in all committees. But what’s particularly cool about this model is that the hardcore people have lots of opportunities to delve deeply into analysis, theory work, experiments in strategies and actions, but in committees where they are bolstered and held accountable by the larger congregation that they belong to. Similar to the Zapatista idea of “governing obeying,” those who don’t have the time or interest to be full-time revolutionary organizers or theorists are able to be in weekly communication and have direct oversight over the work that their more intense comrades are doing. This is the reverse of the cadre model, where the professional revolutionaries concoct their revolutionary ideas first, and only then decide when and how the masses are prepared to see them.

Geography and Size

I imagine that revolutionary congregations would start as singular, geographically amorphous entities in all areas, but especially in big cities the idea would be to get them as local and neighborhood-based as possible. I think 200-300 people congregations would be ideal, but part of me would be really curious to see an experiment in a 30,000 person mega-organization like Rick Warren’s church is.

The Question of Power

The revolutionary congregation does not have the goal of becoming a mechanism of popular power in itself. Its goal is to provide what George Lakey has called a “base camp” for people to learn, grow, reflect, and take care of themselves between their interventions in the larger sites of struggle such as workplaces, community councils, etc.

In this way, they have a very similar role to the FAI and ateneos in Spain or even to the old IWW halls.

However—and I think this is cool too—because of its infrastructure and resource base, in moments of crisis, social collapse, or insurrection, this model does offer the flexibility for like-minded congregations and sister counterinstitutions to quickly federate and become sovereign communities…if that’s what the conditions demand. This is exactly the capacity that right-wing evangelicals are building. It’s a structure that allows us to be prepared at a moments notice for revolutionary opportunities like the Spanish anarchists had in 1936, like the Bolsheviks had in 1917, and like we’ve seen recently in Egypt and Tunisia.

Recruitment

Because the revolutionary congregation isn’t religious, and is advocating for a down-to-earth, democratic approach to the problems of daily life and the world, participants should have no qualms about spreading the word of their congregation. What’s more, because the center of the congregation’s life is the weekly gathering, it’s not as if entry-level activities are some afterthought that the group has to come up with–which then is dropped when intense organizing heats up, which is another common phenomenon with cadre organizations. Of course, because this is a model so similar to a church model, people would need to be careful about not copying the annoying tendencies of both Christian and Social evangelicals (that is, paper peddlers), but this, funny enough, another area where evangelicals have done a lot work, sort of understanding the nuances of their recruitment.

Now, of course there will be questions and issues of the demographic makeup of congregations, just as there are currently with both radical groups and churches. But I don’t think this model absolutely depends on the need for, for example, always multiracial groupings, or cross-class groups. I think it’s possible, though not ideal, to form even relatively homogenous congregations that are honest with themselves about that reality, and then seek to build relationships of trust, solidarity, and shared resources and action with other congregations and organizations. But like I said, that’s not the ideal.

Building a Revolutionary Movement to Scale

Because this model is both growth oriented and focused on building its activity around the whole lives of its participants, I think it could be uniquely capable of building revolutionary ideas and counterinstitutions to the scale that we need to be a threat to the system.

One thing that kind of irks me about us radicals is that we get so self-satisfied about all of the neat and special organizations and collectives we have across the country, yet we don’t think more intensely about how weak their diffusion makes them. I mean, it’s fantastic that we have a radical mental health collective in New York, and massive community gardens in Detroit, while we have bike projects in Tucson, and Seattle Solidarity Network fighting bosses and landlords in Seattle. But the the problem is that to actually be a serious force, we need all of those types of projects and campaigns in all localities, actually being accessed daily by stable populations of people! Sometimes I think we almost take it is a badge of pride that some regions and cities have their own little unique collectives, but as soon as we move from niche thinking to revolutionary thinking, this should be seen as a considerable problem and a challenge.

The evangelicals and other spiritual groups have been successful at building to scale, and almost entirely from their own grassroots fundraising, as opposed to making demands on the state or foundations in order to survive. This is because they have a mass base and they regularly receive offerings, but it’s also because they build outward from that core premise of building institutions that serve the spiritual and material needs of their congregants. It’s that fixed orbit around the central idea that’s so important, and it could give coherence to the current chaos of disparate projects–that are also usually unaccountable to a base–that the radical left faces now.

Closing

At least for now, these are my main points about the revolutionary congregation model. I’m hoping that after I get this all written and I share it around a little bit, then I can polish it into a more formal article. Hopefully then it will generate enough discussion and interest that some people (please be people in Seattle!) will be willing to try experimenting with it.

But before we get that far, and potentially waste resources on a model that could be disastrous, I have one more section to write: the pitfalls and criticisms that I anticipate from this proposal.

Click here for part 4.

The Organizational Gap

One thing that I want to make clear right from the start is that I’m proposing a strategy of building revolutionary congregations not as some kind of lazy copycat maneuver, nor as some cynical ploy that I think could appeal to the masses although I actually dislike it, but rather because I personally thirst for an effective, long term revolutionary organization to put my energy into, and most current models on offer leave me unconvinced. That is, I think there’s a gap in our spectrum of revolutionary organizational options, and it’s one that I think my idea of revolutionary congregations could fill.

As I see it, the following list summarizes the organizational models that anti-authoritarians currently have on our menu. Of course, in practice many of these forms can be fluid and they overlap with each other, and there’s probably some that I’m missing, but I think this gives a pretty good picture of what’s out there:

-Collectives/Affinity Groups
-Study groups
-Non-profits or alternative institutions (including radical healing and therapy groups, collective houses and intentional communities)
-Online communities
-Lone-wolf/security culture phantom organizations (like the Earth Liberation or Animal Liberation front)
-Clandestine militant groups
-Spontaneous and specific groups like Black Blocs or other quickly forming and dissipating formations
-Direct action and campaign groups (including direct action casework groups like Ontario Coalition Against Poverty or Seattle Solidarity Network)
-Various lifestyle groups, craft groups, or practice clubs
-Political parties
-Labor/student/consumer unions
-Cadre organizations
-Revolutionary mass organizations
-Networks or federations of collectives
-Community assemblies or councils

I believe that, depending on the context, all of these forms are potentially useful and can serve specific functions in building a vibrant ecosystem of social movements. However, as anti-authoritarian revolutionaries, it is vitally important that at least some of our organizational forms can answer the question of building mass democratic power. Are our organizations building, in some way or another, the concrete mechanisms for millions of people across the country and the world to directly discuss and decide on the economic, political, and social organization of their own communities and of the society as a whole? If so, what are the sites where this power will reside and how will it be exercised? How will people be supported or prepared to participate dynamically and equally in the exercise of that power? How will that mass democratic power be defended from degeneration and hostile counter-revolution?

Advocates of all the above models have at least partial answers to these questions, but in my view the most interesting and promising debates are currently between the advocates of cadre organizations, advocates of revolutionary unions and community assemblies, and advocates of revolutionary mass organizations.

Those who favor cadre organizations tend to argue for the approach of social insertion, or of being a conscious minority within either existing mass spaces or within new spaces that the masses build out of their own self-activity. That is, they don’t believe its the place of conscious revolutionaries to build organizations for the masses to then “come to them,” but rather that they should work within the masses and argue for their positions within those spaces—while simultaneously maintaining their small, consciously revolutionary side groups.

Those who favor revolutionary unionism or community assemblies tend to argue for building mass organizations of workers–or consumers or the unemployed or community members–who will build enough power as a class/community to shut down or take over the workings of the system and then reorganize it along radical democratic lines…usually with a lot of counter-institution building in there as well.

Those who favor mass revolutionary organizations tend to argue for building explicitly revolutionary organizations that are designed to grow and support the energy and participation of large numbers of people of a wide variety of experience and commitment levels (unlike cadre organizations). They actively recruit and politicize even non political people. However rather than choosing just certain specific sites of mass power like unionists/syndicalists do (the workplace, the community, the schools, etc.) they often maintain a more flexible approach of trying to build and strengthen multiple movements, spaces, and forms of mass democracy, through both confrontational action and counterinstitution building.

Of course, these aren’t necessarily rigid positions and there is some mixing within current discussions—particularly with some recent interesting writings about “intermediate level” organizations by groups like Miami Autonomy and Solidarity.

Yet within these discussions I’m observing that the cadre organization tendency is winning the most adherents among people I know and trust (and I include class struggle “especifismo” or platformist strategies as cadre tendencies), with revolutionary unionism and communal council “unionism” (along the lines of either the Wobblies or libertarian municipalism) running a distant second, and with the mass revolutionary organization tendency somewhere in third.

This is disturbing to me, because I am skeptical of the cadre model as potentially elitist, self-important, and inaccessible to working revolutionaries trying to live balanced lives, and I am skeptical of revolutionary unionist tendencies because of their strategic rigidity in rooting themselves in specific sites of struggle that the current system is capable of rapidly transforming or shifting in response to movement gains (as it did to the labor movement and as it has done to many historically organized neighborhoods and communities). In short, I’m an advocate for mass revolutionary organizations, and I’m frustrated that the tendency is not more popular.

I believe one reason for this is that we are sorely lacking in workable proposals for how such organizations could look. We just don’t have many visions out there for organizations that:

-Are explicitly revolutionary, multi-issue, and multi-identity
-Are capable of supporting memberships of hundreds, or even thousands within an area
-Are capable of providing a democratic and nourishing political home to both hardcore activists and busy, tired working people, without making the hardcore people feel held back or “dumbed down,” or making the busy people feel tied to the vanguardism of a well-studied elite
-Are recruitment friendly, warm, and accessible to non-radicalized people
-Support approaches to movement building that see organizers as whole people with the need for balanced and healthy lives
-Are simultaneously building grassroots funds, infrastructure, and people power for confrontational action; personal growth and internal education; and counterinstitution building
-Are strategically spry and allow for the transience of populations and the quick shifting of social, political, and economic realities

I believe that the evangelicals have things to teach us on this front, and that the building of revolutionary congregations might be one organizational experiment that could help us hit all of those marks.

Tomorrow, finally, I’ll explain what I mean and propose how they might work.

Click here for part 3.

When I went to Guatemala, my thoughts got even more complex about this. I saw a country that had experienced a 37 year civil war, in which revolutionary ideas, though suppressed, were spread throughout the population, and yet, after the peace was signed, in the areas where the guerrillas had been really active the only social force that was really growing was the evangelical church (one can read about this in Rethinking Protestantism in Latin America by Garrard-Burnett and Stoll). Especially since my wife herself calls herself an evangelical, I felt a need to understand this phenomenon and at least try to respect it.

Okay, so I think the left has a lot to learn. But what, specifically? What do I see the evangelicals and the right doing that I would like to see us doing more?

1) A Comprehensive Worldview

One point that I’ve often made is that both evangelicals–and the right more generally–offer a totalizing worldview that offers masses of people a way of processing the ups and downs of their daily realities and a way of participating in communities of people that share that worldview. At the same time, the left tends to only offer single issue or wishy-washy ways of interacting with left values, and doesn’t offer sufficient spaces to engage deeply with a comprehensive worldview–especially in ways that connect with our personal lives and contradictions. Sure, in small revolutionary collectives it happens, but these are often insular and elitist spaces…on a mass level, the left doesn’t trust non-activist people to engage with a left worldview…as if they aren’t prepared or can’t handle it or something.

2) Multi-Layered Infrastructure

Make no mistake, there are probably millions of U.S. evangelicals who have embraced what is more or less a duel-power strategy. They are building a Christian country parallel and under the surface of the larger U.S. society. Evangelicals have their own flag that they raise, they put that little jesus fish on their businesses to signal out which businesses to support, they have their own TV channels, toy lines, video games, publishers, therapists, food producers, summer camps, etc. And the very reality of everyday church buildings themselves is worth paying attention to. On almost every other corner in the U.S. there is a church, temple, mosque, or synagogue with comfortable meeting spaces, a kitchen, a childcare area, music equipment, and more (not to mention the stadium sized mega churches that serve more than 10,000 people at a time!) Contrast that to a handful of labor temples and the occasional super-uncomfortable info-shop.

One recent example: Glendi has a side job with a non-profit that sells fair trade Guatemalan goods at various festivals and sales throughout Seattle. Each weekend of November and December Glendi had me helping her at these different winter bazaars at different progressive evangelical/protestant churches. We went to 5 different churches, and all of them were multi-leveled, disability accessible, with playground equipment, a stage with sound system, meeting spaces and classrooms, childrens programs, and each one had current events bulletin boards and posters put up from their “social justice committees” about issues of LGBTQ rights, the war, poverty, etc. These are people who I would never expect to see at a protest. Yet they are utilizing these space and even talking about social issues each week.

3) Whole-Life Programming

Evangelicals don’t just do sermons. They don’t just do bible studies. They have music. They have socials. They have excursions. They have couples support and singles meetups. They have sports leagues. That is, they look at every facet of life and they have tried to create and support a response from within their own movement and values.

4) Grassroots Fundraising

One of the reasons they are able to support their intense levels of infrastructure isn’t just because they have the numbers, but because they have a culture of grassroots fundraising through tithing and weekly offerings. Though it can definitely be manipulative, fraudulently used, and competitive, the regular stream of money coming from ordinary people’s pockets and into church infrastructure is huge! Now the left has something analogous with non-profit infrastructure, but the crucial difference is that with churches people are paying for something that they participate in monthly, weekly, even daily. With non-profits we are usually just donating to a separate, professionalized group that isn’t intimately connected to our daily lives or even accountable to a social movement.

5) Clear and Unapologetic About Values and Purpose

One highly recommended read about evangelicals is Rick Warren’s Purpose Driven Church. See, Christian bookstores have a whole section in them called Church Building (they also have another section on “Spiritual Warfare,” also worth checking out), and one day in 2005 I found that book. It’s pretty incredible and one of the big lessons of it is that churches shouldn’t pretend to be what they’re not. They shouldn’t hide their beliefs in order to grow. Instead, they should clearly state their purpose and doctrine, and then they should build a warm and inviting environment for those who choose to embrace that purpose as well.

See, evangelical churches don’t really care about alienating non-believers. They believe, by and large, that the bible is the inerrant word of God, and that there isn’t that much room for interpretation. Thus, if you don’t like it, tough. Now I don’t advocate the same arrogant attitude for the left (and I do think it is arrogant on the part of evangelicals and all fundamentalists), but I do think it offers important lessons about movement building.

The left can build mass organizations with clearly stated, radical politics, and still have them be warm, accessible spaces for people of all political levels and levels of commitment. We don’t need to do this thing of picking a single issue with a simple message, and then looking for the most promising elements within that single struggle and offering the deeper truth of our radicalism to those select few who can “take it.” We can be fully, openly radical from day one, and build from that position with all people, even the non-political.

6) Widespread Leadership Development and Small Group Democratic Practices

Because evangelicals in particular (except for maybe some pentecostals?) don’t believe that God speaks to only select elites, everyone is capable of leadership and active participation in the church. Sure, patriarchy is often heavily in play within churches, and a lot of churches have power tripping pastors, but at the same time churches are filled with all sorts of committees and study groups and charity societies that empower ordinary people–particularly women and young people–with real leadership roles. Once again, if you go to that Church Building section of the Christian bookstore, you will find literature on building “small group ministries” and other types of cell structures that teach evangelicals how to maintain, recruit, resolve conflicts, and evolve small groups of active members. That is, they have put serious thought into bottom-up leadership development and mentorship!

7) Mind-Bogglingly Huge

There are tens of millions of evangelicals involved in all of the above stuff. That means that they are participating daily in building and evolving their infrastructure and ideas. They are learning lessons about structure, small group dynamics, recruitment strategies, conflict resolution, leadership development at a pace and scale that significantly dwarfs anything we’re doing on the radical left. Sure, not all their lessons learned apply to us, but there are lots of things that are common to any social movement that we could learn from them so that we can grow faster and smarter. Which brings me to my last point for part one:

8 ) They have Spawned Their Own Radical Left Current

Ever heard of Shane Claiborne? I hadn’t either, but he’s a bestselling young evangelical author who’s basically a Christian crusty-punk type anarchist. He’s anti-imperialist, anti-consumerist, and he gets massive stadium mega-churches to chant along with him this catechism of radical Christianity he wrote. He is just one of thousands and thousands of a new generation of evangelical radicals who still believe in the bible (and thus retain some really messed up views about things like queerness) but who have interpreted the bible to be a total rejection of capitalism, the state, and the current system. These ideas are being discussed RIGHT NOW in hundreds of bible studies across the country, and they have very little overlap with the language or culture of the left. But the evangelical movement is such a huge force that it spawns its own internal movements to develop, especially with new generations of youth who have different interpretations of doctrine than their parents. Seriously, this stuff is worth checking out and seeing how we can ally with them!

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These are just 8 points that I could think of this hour about why we should be learning from the evangelicals. Ironically, many of these points also apply to how we could learn from Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Muslim Brotherhood. They also have very similar processes going on that are making them a scary force to reckon with in their countries.

These observations about churches and evangelicals have progressively made me more insistent in my view that revolutionary anti-authoritarians should try to experiment with creating similar structures but which are rooted in our visions and values.

In complete seriousness, I believe that we should consider a strategy of building revolutionary congregations.

When I say this some of my comrades end up agreeing with me, but most dismiss me pretty quickly. Fair enough, but since 2004 I have yet to be convinced otherwise. So I’m starting to think that I should be working hard to do some convincing of my own. So, in part 2 of this piece, I’m going to lay out a proposal for what I mean by revolutionary congregations.

Click here for part 2.