I signed up for a free training program for potential organizers at Community Colleges across the United States. I admit, I am a terrible students. I attend the webinars infrequently. I don't participate in the forums. I don't do my reading. It's like undergrad all over again.
I did manage to learn something, though, from my limited participation in the program. I learned a little bit about the history of organized movements. This framed the conversation about organizing basics. What is organizing? What is power? How does organizing work? How do we successfully organize around the issues of the day, having learned the lessons of the past?
If I understand the talented and dedicated folks who took on the role of teachers in this online program, they were explaining that an organization or movement comprises a group of people who want something specific to happen. They define themselves according to what they want to see happen and who can make it happen. The people who can make it happen have the power. The people organizing do not have the power - otherwise they would just make the thing happen themselves.
This was an insight I had months ago, but it took time for my thoughts and feelings on this point to metastasize. Organizers put pressure on those in power. They use what means they have to influence those in power - to coerce, entice, threaten, or otherwise persuade in any way they can. Historically, however, organizers and their respective movements don't challenge structures of authority in a way that might result in more meaningful and permanent shifts in power. This I see as problematic.
If I'm understanding what I was supposed to learn correctly, a 'successful' movement is one that ends with those in power making whatever concession for which the people in the movement were petitioning. My problem with that is that those in power retain the power to decide whether or not the people get what they want. They retain their monopoly on the ability to make things happen.
The women's suffrage movement was given as an example. The organizers wanted something very specific - that women [edit: *white* women] should have the right to vote. So they employed a number of tactics in order to put pressure on those who had the power to decide whether or not someone should be allowed to vote. Ultimately those in power were persuaded - but they retained all of the power they had to begin with!
The way I see it, there has to be an alternative response to a systemic injustice. The response I've been describing (and I apologize to any self-identified organizers or movements that do not take this tack) amounts to trying to correct the injustice without changing the system. I think at this particular moment in history the time has come to challenge authority itself. I believe very strongly that the institutions that house our collective social power - economic power, military and police power, power over information and communications - are fundamentally unjust and undeserving of our sanction.
Basically, I'm tired of seeing so much time and energy go into efforts to appeal to people who operate within those power structures to use their powers for good instead of ill. I'm tired of working within the power structure myself, tired of helping to perpetuate it, and tired of trying to reform it without upsetting its base.
It is a pernicious myth, in my opinion - that we would all be fine and live in a happy peaceful world if only those in power within our systems were virtuous and benevolent. I think we would all be fine and live in a happy peaceful world, to the greatest extent such a reality is possible, when we shift our perspective away from reform and towards revolution.
I am disappointed in the organizing education program I signed up for because I was looking for an answer to the question of how to disrupt the system - or how to build a society that is constantly challenging, disrupting, and demanding real change. What I got instead was a lesson in how to get people in positions of power to do what you want, without rocking the boat too much.
Noam Chomsky gave the most excellent description of anarchy I've ever heard - a rallying cry I can get behind. Anarchy is not really the absence of government, but rather it means to constantly challenge the legitimacy of power and authority, and to swiftly dismantle and replace any system found to be unjust, whether it be social, corporate, or state. That's the society I want to live in!
