For those of us who’ve been around for awhile, this presents a challenge. How do we avoid sticking our noses up at the movement’s various mistakes and contradictions, and actually join in and meaningfully support what’s happening?

With my life so over-capacity right now, it’s been hard to think about how to best contribute…but one answer I have is writing. I can at least share some of the ideas and questions that I’m asking to help generate more strategic thinking.

So, get ready for a series of posts trying to think strategically about Occupy Together!

In the hours before the church service that we had for Glendi’s dad here in the house, I sat with her uncle and talked with him about the upcoming elections. He told me that he had no hope for any changes, and then he proceeded to talk about the ongoing land occupation that he’s involved in, the organization, Plataforma Agraria (Agrarian Platform) that he participates in, and about the radical radio programs he listens to. When I talked to him about my upcoming studies, he started getting excited and told me that he too was taking classes at the university, and that’s when things got really interesting.

It turns out that Glendi’s uncle is taking these Saturday classes in Political Economy and Popular Education at the nearby university in Xela. The classes are free, and they are taught voluntarily by radical professors who aren’t otherwise free to share all of their perspectives. Glendi’s uncle loves the classes and how much they are opening up his mind about the way Guatemala works, the history of colonialism, and the necessity of struggle. He’s well into his fifties, but he looks like a teenager when he talks about these things.

Naturally, I wanted to see the classes for myself, so this morning at 6:30 he came by and we took the 1 ½ hour bus ride together to Xela. We had a quick cup of coffee sitting there at a stand at the bus terminal, we walked a brisk and winding path through the open market, and then arrived at the university at 9am.

There were multiple classes taking place at the same time, but the class we entered was political economy. The students were all indigenous, 5 of them men (ranging in age from late 20′s to mid 50′s) and 10 of them women (mostly in their mid-twenties, and almost all in traditional Mayan clothes). Many of the students seemed to speak an indigenous language in addition to Spanish, and the youngest man speaks Spanish, Mam, and English (he spent 7 years working in a chicken farm in North Carolina, and in a restaurant in Lousiana). The professor looked to be in his sixties.

When we entered, the class had already started, and the topic was gender roles and patriarchy, and their relationship to private property. The perspective was definitely Marxist, with a strong slant toward discussion of the specific history of colonialism and imperialism in Guatemala. It was very lecture-based, and the students were deeply attentive but quiet. I was fascinated, especially to see such concrete analysis and discussion of dynamics that I witness all the time here, but from a solidly Guatemalan perspective.

At one point, the professor had to step out, and the students started talking to me, naturally curious about who I was and why I was there. They asked for a quick English class and I obliged, teaching them typical greetings at the whiteboard (the classroom was old and dirty, as most Guatemalan classrooms are…like one would imagine a really old, poor elementary school classroom in the U.S….except the whiteboards looked relatively new and clean.). Then we discussed all sorts of politics. It was so fun!

To close the class, the professor played a CD of this kind of radio play (I’m thinking that it was from the guerrilla times, when they had a clandestine radio station) about the true story of the Spanish conquest. It was entertaining and informative, but I couldn’t get a sense of what others thought.

The second and final class was related to actual techniques of teaching and sharing political ideas. The focus today was on making a magazine, and the professor—a middle-aged lighter skinned woman—guided the students toward understanding how to select themes, analyze problems and conditions, and how to organize the theme into different articles. She was really smart, funny, and good at guiding student participation. By the end of the class, the students had voted on their magazine’s theme, which will be health and the political conditions surrounding it.

After the class, Glendi’s uncle introduced me to the professor. I asked if the classes were linked to any specific political organization, and she told me that, no, they are just extensions of the university, which the professors are fighting to get formalized into real courses. She continued to explain that she is a deeply committed revolutionary and that during the war, the university was a key base for the urban guerrilla (according to Glendi’s uncle, the professor actually spent time in the mountains). She told me that many students and teachers died because of their participation. I told her about the revolutionary study groups that I see around me and participate in in the U.S., she was very excited and we mutually acknowledged our international bond of struggle.

Just like the evangelicals here who always greet each other with “hermano” and “hermana,” there is something so deeply warming about greeting other leftists across international lines. I feel rejuvenated. Especially because of so many terrible things happening around us here in Guatemala all the time, it feels so good to be able to talk with Guatemalans using a language and perspective that can mostly share. While I’m not a Marxist, I very much appreciate the Marxist understanding of class and power, and it was really cool to see that applied to this specific country’s context. It just fits so much better for explaining all that’s happening to us than the religiously heavy language that I mostly hear.

Even cooler was to see the explicit expressions of hope from the students. They don’t expect anything from the upcoming elections, and they don’t expect any major changes soon, but there was an optimism about long-term change and movement building that I don’t usually see in Guatemala. Glendi’s uncle, for example, doesn’t believe that he’ll live to see the revolutionary changes that are necessary, but he says that he’s taking the classes so that he can help the next generation.

It’s that kind of attitude that hits me in the tear ducts every time.

I like to pretend sometimes
that this glow is a kiln,
I wipe my brow, and it makes no matter
that my hand comes away dry.
Because this feels like the work of a workman,
and I make like I’m adjusting my spectacles
and gripping my tweezers
as I deftly shift another syllable.

I like to pretend sometimes
that I’m just like that man I watched
crack firewood with ballet strokes,
cut grass finely with a dull machete,
coax coffeebeans to fall with massaging fingers,
like the spider spindling the fly.

I like to pretend sometimes,
because I’m good at it.
Because that is what carefree little boys do.

Because what fun is it to recognize
that this squirming bad posture
comes from all the slouching,
as I remove a handful of Doritoes from the bag,
and gently wipe the orange dust on my bedsheets,
so as not to sully my controller?
What adventure is there in the truth
about all the books I never wrote,
all the marches and meetings I left early
because I didn’t want to miss my shows?
How do I look at Don Mario’s picture,
and remember wincing at the sunburn from swimming,
that day when he planted all day and then collapsed?

I like to pretend sometimes,
not because I feel guilty or inadequate,
but because this is what I know how to do.
Because, don’t you understand my part in this whole thing?
My actual craft, at which I excel?
My calling is to escape, over and over again,
Using all the fine instruments that more calloused people make for me.

My emotional resonance was tuned early to Skywalker,
my first loyalties were to the autobots.
And so all the grandeur and dedication of art and revolution,
gets tiresome after a half hour with no breaks.

However, my pretending didn’t prepare me
for marriage,
family,
and so much loss.
I didn’t expect the toll on my artisanship,
as the loom with which I textured my fantasies
broke apart in my arms.
All the posing and posturing feels awkward,
when the people next to you in the picture
are the real deal.

Now, at least for a moment,
this writer is not content with pretending.
I open this toolbox again,
and the glow this time feels like nothing more,
and nothing less,
than what it is.
I unearth old notes and plans and blueprints,
search for my sharpest and most effective verbal implements.
I hunch here and stare into these white spaces
and I feel driven to fill them.
Because now I don’t want to be a craftsman,
but instead, there’s something I need to craft.
These soft pink fingers need to come up with something,
that can stab and tear,
that can motivate and heal,
that can take on just a piece of the fighting work
that so often falls to more calloused hands.

Don’t think that I don’t know that. Don’t think for a second that I’m fooled by all those temptations you offer for us to blame ourselves, for me to blame them.

Well, okay, for a second I was fooled. But not now. This has you written all over it.

See, I can follow the money, I can follow the violence, I can follow the misinformation, there’s actually quite a number of trails I can follow back to you. The coffee trees, the dialysis bags, the gunshots, the distended bellies, the fucking casket that’s lying there in the living room right now…I know it’s you.

You made their homeland into an experiment in fractured, traumatized psychosis. That is what your counter-insurgency and your anti-communism boiled down to. You run the poor against each other just like those bored, twisted rich kids that pay homeless men to fight to the death. And now, you want me to actually believe that this is happening because my family just isn’t doing things right? That we just don’t work hard enough? Are you kidding me?

And you’re right. I can’t do shit about it right now. The powerlessness is palpable. This pain, this unimaginable frustration, has me gnawing at my own hands, has us sniping at each others’ jugulars. But I like to think that there are at least small parts of us that are saving up just a little bit of the rage that we’re not investing in self-hate, in circular attacks. And that little bit, we’re saving for you. Multiplied by 7 billion, that rage could count up to something big.

Hopefully it’ll be enough to topple you. Hopefully, I will get to see it. Hopefully, when we have taken it all back, and you are curled into your isolated little corner, you will just repeatedly tell yourself that you just didn’t work hard enough, that you just didn’t have the drive to succeed. That would be a good laugh.

I forgive many people for many things they do to me. I forgive easily, and I forgive in abundance. It fills me with dignity to do so.

But I don’t forgive you.

I want my father in law back, you pieces of shit.

Because I want to be prepared for the discussion, I’m trying to write down some of the lessons that I’ve learned over these years. Keep in mind that I’ll be editing this for awhile, so you might want to check back over the multiple parts from time to time.

HANDLING CONFLICT (I’ve put this section first, because it’s so critical to avoiding organizational implosion)

Explicitly discuss different personal communication and conflict styles. In the non-profit, corporate, and conflict mediation worlds, there is a wealth of curricula, charts, tables, and funny cartoons that help people identify their conflict and communication styles, and tips for relating across different styles. Groups should use these early and often, tailoring them as needed (with some class and cultural consciousness, for example) as a part of group formation and new member orientation. It’s amazing how much trouble we get into when we misinterpret each other’s style cues…especially across identity differences.

Groups should strongly avoid seeking one homogeneous conflict/communication style. It won’t work and all it really means is that the people with that style will dominate and everyone else will blame themselves for not measuring up to the “right way.”

Create structures for conflict mediation before problems occur. Groups should have preventative structures and channels already established to handle conflict before anything happens. Members should do internal training about how these structures work, and how to utilize them in a variety of scenarios. That way, when problems do occur, members have already internalized a sense of what it means to handle the conflict responsibly.

Create regular spaces for self-evaluation and critique. I am skeptical of the cricisim/self-criticism of the Maoists, but I do think groups should create regular spaces for self-evaluation and the airing of constructive criticism. It’s important to have an expectation in the group culture that everyone will receive criticism, so that everyone can improve our work. But this is so dependent on these other lessons being heeded as well…because otherwise these spaces for criticism are just weapons for vindictive and manipulative personalities.

Dedicate and honor time for appreciations. Organizing for social transformation is hard, especially when the opposition heats up. We need a steady stream of love and encouragement from each other, and this should be structured into the group at regular intervals…and not in a way in which the good is always accompanied by a “but.” We need spaces and times where all we hear are the good things…with a trust that our criticisms and unmet needs will also have structured spaces to be heard.

Let it out or let it go. If you have a problem with someone in the organization, it’s a simple choice: either it’s not a big enough deal to communicate out to the group–and then you need to authentically work to let it go–or you can’t let it go and you need to find a responsible channel to communicate it…ideally directly to that person. If you’re scared, or you are unpracticed in conflict resolution, that’s a real challenge…but it’s not an excuse. Be creative and find resources you can trust. Keeping it to yourself and building resentment is not a legitimate option.

Make an anti shit-talking commitment. Shit-talking is poison to movements, and it’s also a preferred channel for intentional destabilization by the powerful. If you are going to talk critically about someone without talking directly to them–or communicating through previously established group structures–then you only have one reason to do so: to constructively seek or give advice for how to eventually deal directly with said person or utilize established group structures. If weeks have passed and you’re still talking to uninvolved people about this without constructively engaging with the people directly involved in the conflict, then you are entering shit-talking territory. And if someone has been coming to you for more than a week to talk critically about someone who is not you, and they aren’t seeking or utilizing constructive advice, then you are also in shit-talking territory. We need to stop this! Period.

Seek to name conflict honestly. It’s common in radical groups to couch our conflicts in political terms, when the real problem is personal. We don’t like someone, but we say it’s their ideas. We feel threatened, but we say that it’s actually about pressing political disagreements. This stuff should be aired out honestly. Even if I think the root of a conflict is about ideas, I need to also be up front if I’m feeling insecure, threatened, jealous, etc. This isn’t about being touchy-feely, it’s about honestly naming the root of what breaks apart organizations. If a person can only frame their conflicts politically, but they clearly manifest emotional responses to those conflicts, that’s a red-flag that they aren’t fully articulating what’s going on for them. Because so many groups actually fall apart around issues of sex, relationships, violence, jealousy, and power-mongering, this is really important to hold on to.

Anger is not unprincipled behavior. Anger, defensiveness, yelling, crying, are not inherently disruptive or unprincipled behaviors. They are normal human responses and survival strategies for intense situations–even if we don’t perceive the same intensity in some situations. If members are angry or yelling, they should be given space, and they should be clearly acknowledged, and the actual conversation should be paused until they can return to a mutually respectful tone. This does not mean admonishing or shaming them, or using their yelling against them later. Sure, yelling and anger can be used to dominate and manipulate situations, and this is unprincipled behavior, but that’s not always the case. How much of a pattern is this, and how disruptive to the group? We all have a lot of internalized baggage about this based on our upbringings and cultural/class backgrounds, and we need to be careful about putting political spins on it when it’s actually pretty complicated.

Crystallize and map political conflicts with imagination and patience. A group doesn’t know if a conflict is truly political and not personal until the politics of a conflict have been thoroughly articulated, polarized, and the points on the spectrum between different sides have been identified for potential compromises. If one side of a conflict can’t clearly, respectfully paraphrase the authentic position of the other sides of the conflict–even if they thoroughly disagree–then the conflict is still personal. It’s still in the realm of not having enough trust, patience, or respect for the other sides to even clearly listen to and articulate what they are saying. A common trap here–especially around conflicts of power, privilege, and identity–is when one side of a conflict says they are tired of having to explain this over and over, and so it’s not worth their time to have to explain it again. This might be true, and that might be perfectly legitimate, but that’s personal–it’s about trust in the group…it hasn’t yet been crystallized as a political conflict, because all sides haven’t had a chance to fully be heard and articulated. Further, once the sides of a conflict have been articulated, distilled, polarized to their key components, the group should imagine what possible compromise positions could exist. The group should consider these positions carefully before any votes or splits. If the group isn’t willing to make the time to consider these compromise positions, then the conflict is probably personal, and the members really just don’t want to work together anymore. Like I said, that’s fine, but don’t call it a political conflict when it’s not.

Assume good, revolutionary intentions…and specifically name the behavior that makes you doubt those intentions. As marginalized individuals within a harsh, oppressive culture, we get into the groove of feeling like we’re alone in our revolutionary intentions and our intense hatred of injustice. It can be an almost default reaction to mistrust the commitment, ethics, and good intentions of those around us. That’s why it’s so important to consciously work to assume good intentions from our fellow group members, and only doubt those intentions when there is specific, nameable behavior that makes us doubt them. Then, we should clearly communicate those behaviors through established structures so that the individual and group can respond. If you can’t name behaviors that make you doubt someone, then seek support to more deeply explore what is making those doubts rise for you personally–beyond that the ethical thing to do is take them at their word.

Take internalized oppression seriously, but don’t project it on others. I think a lot of the conflicts and other problems that we have as individual activists and as groups comes from the ways we’ve internalized oppression as well as privilege. Whether arrogance and domination, defensiveness and a sense of perpetual crisis, or constant passivity and self-doubt. This is something that our groups should take seriously, and should put time and resources into supporting their members with. But, there is an overlapping problem of individuals projecting internalized oppression and privilege onto other members, and using that as a shortcut to keep from actually understanding or respecting other people’s emotional realities. This is really dangerous, and it tries to make us experts in something that we actually understand very little.

Same as the above, take mental health issues seriously, but don’t play psychologist. Groups should seek and develop robust politics around ableism, trauma, self-care, and mental health, and these should inform our structures, our support systems, and our approaches to conflict. However, we should not make the mistake of thinking we can diagnose and pathologize members who demonstrate behavior that we don’t like or understand.

Acknowledge the possibility of infiltration. We know it’s a real threat, and we know that they will use conflict as a constant wedge to destabilize and neutralize our groups. It’s naive to pretend that it won’t happen to our groups, and it’s also dangerous to live in permanent fear of each other. Groups should do internal training about past patterns of agents and informants in groups, and should seek to distill best practices for maintaining an open and trusting culture while still keeping strategies of destabilization in check.

Recognize the high likelihood that you’re wrong. The track record of the radical left is bad. In fact, it’s terrible. So, chances are that the make-or-break, super dire political disagreement that makes you feel like the whole revolution hinges on what your fellow members do right now…that’s probably a bullshit, self-important exaggeration. What happens too often is that we break relationships and split organizations over differences that end up being badly characterized in the first place, and 3 years later we end up all being wrong, and in the same terrible political state…just with fewer friends and more cynicism. We lose too often to act like we actually know what we’re doing. We don’t know, and we should be humble and flexible about that.

If there is an active process going on:

If you aren’t formally involved in the process, don’t insert yourself into it. It’s simple. If members of your group are in an official organizational conflict process, then it’s not your place to be informally talking with individuals about this. Period. It doesn’t matter if they are your friends, and it doesn’t matter who brings it up. Gossip and side-talking almost always feels innocent or even productive while it’s happening, but it’s toxic. Build good official group processes, and then trust and honor those processes…which means setting clear personal boundaries while those processes are going on.

If you can’t trust and commit to the process, then be clear about that. If there is an official group process going on, but you actually think it’s ineffective, or manipulative, or a straight-up witch hunt, then it’s your responsibility to be honest about that and to state clearly to what extent you are willing to honor the boundaries of the process. It is a death sentence for the integrity of a process if participants in that process are simultaneously pursuing other avenues for dealing with the conflict without informing the group. This is especially true in community accountability processes.

Set real boundaries for disruptive/hurtful behavior. Kicking members out of a group or demanding that they meet certain conditions to keep participating are real options that groups need to consider in conflicts. There really are people (not just infiltrators) who just aren’t in a position to respect group processes or commit to doing work in a respectful way, and it is a major drain on a group’s energy to focus months and months of energy just to keep members in check. Groups need to discuss this point and set boundaries around it. If a significant amount of members’ collective energy is constantly being used to respond to and intervene in one member’s behavior…then that member needs to go, and maybe be referred to some other resources. However, it is critical, so critical, that the group have developed some good politics and internal training about ableism, institutionalization, and mental health related oppression, so as not to continue oppressive cycles if working with people who have a history of such conflicts related to their mental health.

Part 2:
ADDRESSING OPPRESSION

Part 3:
BUILDING A CULTURE OF REVOLUTIONARY PRAXIS

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.

In general, I’m feeling optimistic about almost everything right now. Life is moving forward in interesting ways for me, and so I want to give a quick update about some things right here.

-Just 5 more weeks at my job of 3 1/2 years, and I last weekend I completed the hardest part of it! We had our annual spring fundraiser and for the first time in more than a decade, we decided to not do an auction (for anti-capitalist value reasons, not money reasons). This was really scary for us, and we were prepared to make way less money. But, in fact, we made almost double what I expected, and actually surpassed the donations from past auctions. It feels like such a positive way to transition out of my job.

-After long agonizing, I did decide to go to grad school to get my Master In Teaching. I begin in early July, and I’ll be in school for a year. That means that I’m going to be trying to chill during this last month or so of work. I am so eager to actually feel rested and calm for at least the next couple of weeks.

-Glendi’s family is still struggling so much. We’re sending all the money we can, and that’s still not enough, but at least they seem to be holding on for now. For now, what else can we do?

-Some old organizing friends and I are starting to talk about forming a new, open study group in the fall. We just had a meeting yesterday, which I came to thoroughly ambivalent, yet which I left feeling inspired. I think, after the hardship of the breakup of Common Action, I’m now ready for a new political project, and this one is feeling pretty good. Right now, we’re discussing it as a study group that will center around questions of revolutionary intersectional politics…that is, understanding how systems work in an intersectional way, and trying to ask what revolution actually looks like for those systems. Yes!

-I’m starting to work on game design again. This is part of my own real-life game (which I’m still rocking through, though I’m scoring myself less frequently than before as I’ve internalized a lot of the habits)…to be more creative again.

The board game I’m working on is a cooperative game, in which the players must work together to build a post-revolutionary economy. The game will have multiple phases in which players have different roles. For example, in one phase each player represents a different industry’s workers council, and in another phase each player represent a different region’s consumer council. The idea is that players need to discuss and negotiate where to invest the economy’s limited resources and labor to produce a better life for all. Of course there would mechanics representing reactionary opposition, which players would have to cooperatively deal with. This is so fun to design, but the trickiest thing is boiling the concept down to its most essential parts, so that it still fits the them but without being too complex or fiddly.

-I think I’m going to get a haircut. Like a serious haircut. Like maybe even a buzzcut. I think I’m just about tired of having longer hair.

So probably not much writing here until at least Sunday. However, I have so much I want to talk about! Here’s just a preview of what I’m thinking about:

-A new series of pieces I’m thinking of calling, “Transformation Is A Spiral,” or something like that. These are pieces that acknowledge the cyclical and spiral like nature of radical politics, and how, after experience, we often come back to previously rejected positions, but with new insights. For example, how my ideas about dropping out and abolishing the school system have changed…or my recent troubles with approaches to community accountability that are based solely on the wishes of the survivor. Tough changes in my thinking that I want to make time for.

-Reflections on this last weekend visiting with my old friend Chris Dixon, and my new friends Andy Cornell and Harjit Singh Gill, who were on tour for the book, “Oppose and Propose.” There were plenty of moments that caught me off guard with exciting thoughts and I’d like to capture them.

-A fifth part to my Revolutionary Congregations piece, focused on ideas for how such formations could be started from the ground up…since that’s the biggest criticism of the idea I’ve heard expressed to me so far.

-Thinking through all of the exhilarating ways that I’m feeling challenged by Marxist and insurrectionist positions on political questions, and the positive effects that it’s having on my thinking.

-Some fun and interesting pieces on fluid dynamics and revolutionary strategy, as well as the power of crowd-sourcing for building accessible mass movements.

-Some writing about love, loneliness, and trust…because these are feelings that I’m feeling and thinking about a lot lately.

As always, there’s the caveat that I might write more than this or none of it, but at least I’ve got something in writing to keep me honest.

With all my heart to the few (but growing few, for sure!) who read this thing.