Building Participatory Democracy in Chicago

If you are interested in organizing for local power in Chicago please get in touch with Nick Kreitman at mrsituationist@gmail.com

Building Participatory Democracy in Chicago

We live in a unique time in Chicago history; finally we are witnessing the erosion of the political machine in local politics. After decades of scandals, an increased eye turned towards city hall from federal investigators, and the defection of many major labor unions from Daley’s coalition, the political machine is limping along on the major contributions from downtown developers. Another blow to the political machine has been the mobilization of the progressive Hispanic community over issues of immigration and assimilation. Similarly, Chicago’s progressive white community has been invigorated by the anti-war movement and is engaged in a myriad of “greening” projects which have largely been frustrated by Daley, either used solely as symbolic propaganda tools, or totally fumbled like the city recycling program.

Frustration in Chicago’s black communities is also coming to a head, with rampant gang and police violence wracking neighborhoods already suffering from limited school resources and an increasing number of school closings. Although the problems of Chicago’s predominately black neighborhoods are dire, hope is being restored as Obama’s campaign, along with other rising local black figures like Jesse Jackson Jr., are bringing a new momentum towards the impetus for change in Chicago.

Most importantly, Chicago’s youth are again paying attention to politics and are becoming active participants in politics. The Jena 6 mobilizations saw hundreds of student across the city organize busses to Jena, Louisiana, in addition to organizing solidarity actions to support the defendants. Much of the energy of the recent immigration rallies was from the youth, organizing by the thousands through myspace, text messaging and at high schools and shopping malls. Mobilizing this generation more than any other issue however has been the occupation of Iraq and imperialistic foreign policies of mainstream politicians of both parties. Barack Obama has managed to direct this upsurge in youth enthusiasm to launch a historic presidential campaign, which has already trained hundreds of dedicated youth/student volunteers from Chicago, who will be returning from positions around the country as seasoned electoral veterans after the election in November. We are in an exciting time; we need a strategy that can combine our peers’ heightened expectations from politicians and an enormous reservoir of trained volunteers returning from Obama’s campaign into a lasting transformation of society.

Substantive political change is possible only through political organizing at the most fundamental levels. In Chicago the most fundamental political identity is the ward, or neighborhood district that is guaranteed a representative on City Council. Our focus has largely been on challenging corporations like Boeing, or on challenging national political figures like Dick Durbin. This approach has not yielded results because we have not challenged the source of these institutions’ power, the Chicago Democratic Party Machine. Boeing is in Chicago because of the enticement package given to it by City Council, and Durbin banks on the turnout efforts of the machine each election. Our explicit agenda outlined in SDS’s name is to build a democratic society, but we have ignored the fact that the most logical launching point for a democratic society is the neighborhood we live in and the precinct we cast our vote at. Instead we have made “radical demands” on City Council, only to have our demands fall on deaf ears. Without building our own power in Chicago we will forever be at the mercy of the well organized political machine that will never deliver a resolution against a war on Iran, or for supporting military desertion, nevermind materially support such efforts, no matter how “militantly” we “demand.”

We can change direction however. Not only are we students, but we are situated in Chicago wards. Together with others in our communities we have the leverage to build a democratic society beginning in the wards in which we live. If we can use our talents and energies to build a democratic society in our wards we can present a new challenge to Daley’s machine, one that is directly democratic and empowering to everyone in the ward community. We have the potential transform the role of alderman from an authoritarian “representative” of the machine, into a delegate on City Council voting the wishes of a participatory ward assembly where the entire community can be empowered. Precincts, or district divisions within the ward with a physical location where people can vote, can be organized as the basic units of political deliberation within a new democratic framework for a ward.

Changing the identity of the ward into a directly democratic community, with a candidate selected from the ward assembly to serve as a delegate on city council would be revolutionary. Almost all social services received by Chicagoans are directed by all-important departments of city government. If we are serious about improving public housing, ensuring quality public education, ending police harassment, and transforming our local economy, organizing along ward lines is imperative. Ignoring City government will only make us irrelevant as we will continue to be locked out of making the decisions materially affecting our communities. Revolutionary organizing means working to build directly democratic institutions today, and building these institutions will require engaging and challenging the power of the machine in the wards.

The success of this campaign depends on the energy of those interested in making participatory democracy in Chicago a reality. Our success will hinge on our ability to engage in meticulous and democratic project planning, including our ability to execute our decisions. The rest of the document is structured as a project plan for the initiation of a local, ward-based political organization, tentatively called Chicago Solidarity Movement (the name is irrelevant).

If you are interested in organizing for local power in Chicago please get in touch with Nick Kreitman at mrsituationist@gmail.com

September/October 2008

-Attract around a dozen interested organizers to hold an initial meeting of the Chicago Solidarity Movement

-Hold a weekly or biweekly study circle on Chicago politics, focus on Harold Washington’s campaign in 1983, Richard J. Daley’s Democratic Machine, and the contemporary “growth-coalition” of Richard M. Daley

-Establish an online domain where directed reading sessions can be followed by those unable to attend meetings

-Outreach to graphic designers to begin designing thematic graphics for organization

-Debate and select which ward to begin the initial ward organization

-Build a database of 200 potential student volunteers at campuses across the city through organizing successful social events like movie showings, parties and activities like softball/Frisbee

-Make contact with every existing student group on each university campus across the city

-Outline a budget for the next two month period, write a provisional constitution for Chicago Solidarity Movement

-Map out points of interest in the selected ward with volunteers and local establishments who offer to host events

November/December 2008

-Dedicate time from the study circle to research issues within selected ward

-Make contact with all influential social organizations in ward, identify allies and begin discussion about creating a process for a creating a search committee for an aldermanic candidate for 2011 election

-Identify provisional structure for resident participation in ward assembly

-Build a database of 100 ward resident supporters

-Expand student volunteer database to 500 names

-Create orientation program to student volunteers about the ward, its history and its issues

-Begin outreach (canvass) effort to ward residents about a ward specific platform, and a city-wide platform

-Identify opportunities for student volunteers to build social programs to help serve ward issues, begin recruiting students specifically for Chicago Solidarity Movement operated social programs (for example free SAT tutoring)

-Identify space within the ward to use as a temporary office, begin planning to move to a permanent office space

-Begin full scale fundraising operation to finance temporary/permanent space and draft compensation procedures for organizing expenses e.g. gas, coffee for meetings etc.

Draft Article for Platypus, Leveraging Social Power Through Wards in Chicago

Leveraging Social Power Through Wards in Chicago
Nick Kreitman

Chicago is a city of opportunity and has a unique potential to fundamentally change how people relate to each other and to political institutions. The social power sustaining contemporary political institutions is a matrix of personal relationships between those identifying with the institutions and those on the periphery of such institutions. Those on the periphery perceive a marginal benefit from participating in relationships defined by those institutions. Successful efforts at building social power will begin with an understanding of where social movements have the most leverage to engage and alter our political institutions and the web of relationships nourishing them.

Towards this end, identifying which institutions are the most relevant in people’s lives and building the social power to transform their operation is critical. Social transformation occurs when enough people live and experience alternative ways of life. Revolution will only materialize once enough people live in institutions that are based around the revolutionary principals of democratic cooperation and mutual respect. This is a process that requires organization, which in turn takes political strategy. Revolutionary Democracy (Rev Dem) is a political strategy of building a dual power. Dual Power builds alternative institutions in our communities with the goal of building commitment from the people towards a social transformation while also leveraging our social power to engage existing institutions.

Think of an organization as a rope connecting two people together, two families, two neighborhoods, or whatever scale you want. The more strands in the rope the stronger the bond between the two. Rev Dem asks organizers to identify the relationships in their lives, and asks them to reshape them around the principals of mutual respect and democratic cooperation (relationships like how you treat your partner, how your job is organized, how your education is organized, how you find housing etc.). Each relationship based upon these principals is another strand in the rope. Each strand advances the larger goal of the rope, tying people together, transforming society. Rev Dem employs the strategy of building dual power, creating new institutions that connect people around revolutionary principals, strengthening their relationships with each other, realizing our own strength and realizing our own society. Dual Power is about creating new institutions and reorganizing how we relate to existing institutions.

Chicago’s recent social movement history has been in contrast to the strategy of Rev Dem. Our powerlessness has been the result of a strategy emphasizing critical advocacy petitioning existing institutions and fetishizing the tactic of protest. In Chicago alone, hundreds of thousands of dollars have been expended, with the movement banking on the success of mass demonstrations. Costs for these demonstrations (in the “radical” community mass “direct actions”) have only escalated each year bankrupting organizations and individuals. While many regressive politicians (like the 06’ Congressional Republicans) have had their political careers evaporate because of their support for the war or for racist attacks on immigrants, it has largely been the result of progressive organizing within the Democratic Party that is more parallel to Rev Dem than the mass demonstration mentality of ANSWER, mainstream “radical” thought or UFPJ.

A phenomenon of particular interest to Chicago has been the path of our progressive immigration movement. During the debate on the fascist Sensennbrenner bill that would have turned the undocumented into felons, it was effective to create a visual reminder of the cost of racist legislation to uncommitted voters and legislators. Additionally in Chicago the large coalition supporting the undocumented threatened to use its electoral weight to win concessions from the City government; forcing it to neglect its obligation to enforce immigration law through the Sanctuary City ordinance. These victories however have not translated into further success because of the failure to identify where the movement could employ the most leverage; constructing a dual power to challenge the City Government. While there are a myriad of programs that address particular needs of Chicago’s immigrant population there has been little coordination of these programs to substantively challenge the most relevant institutions in the city, City Council and the Mayor.

Chicago has a long history of a powerful local government, composed of a county government, a City Council and Mayor. Chicago City government is the most ubiquitous set of institutions that social movements have a formal opportunity to participate in. While opportunities to challenge the capitalist relationships commanding Chicago’s economy are available, without control of the local government such efforts would necessarily remain on a small scale.

Chicago’s ward divisions facilitate the construction of dual power. Although the wards do not necessarily align with self-identified communities, they present the opportunity for the growth of directly democratic neighborhood committees which can direct the decisions of movement aldermen (such committees could be organized around existing voter precincts). Aldermen could be explicitly run by our movement on the promise to be directly accountable to these neighborhood committees until their power could be formally amended to reflect this relationship, adding the ability to immediately recall aldermen. The obstacle that has prevented a sustained challenge to City Hall has been Chicago’s infamous Democratic machine. While manipulation of elections has played a significant role in the supremacy of the machine, it has also relied on an extensive network of relationships, leveraging its resources to employ armies of city workers in elections, obstructing services and investment in politically rebellious areas and harassing challengers through inspections, spurious legal challenges and outright intimidation.

Two other important obstacles face a Rev Dem challenge to City hall; the lack of a reputation in Chicago’s communities and the lack of infrastructure (including financing). Confronting Chicago’s political machine would be quixotic at best without a reputation in the community, the all-important name recognition, without a strong commitment from community allies who would have to deal with consequences of the machine, and without any infrastructure such as office and meeting spaces.

Understanding the concept of concentric interactions is important since our challenge to the city machine does not have to rely exclusively on electioneering. Commitment towards a political idea is engendered through increasing the number and intensity of relationships sharing similar dynamics. Commitment from neighborhoods to a Rev Dem ward organization can be built through community programs managed by the ward organization in a directly democratic manner. People can become involved, and more importantly stay involved, in the ward organization in off election years through programs like free SAT-prep courses, free yoga and nutrition classes, community gardens, legal clinics, etc. Existing social programs can also be invited into the ward organization’s network with each benefiting from the other’s resources.

Critical to implementing an effort to build a political dual power through Rev Dem ward organizations will be the participation and massive mobilization of Chicago’s students. There is clearly a huge potential for mobilization when outfits like World Can’t Wait can routinely bring out hundreds of students while having no identifiable goals except “Driving out the Bush regime.” Our movement must engage students in ways that encourage long-term commitment. Instead of just asking for another body in a march we need to apply the skills of students. Organizing departmentally and at-large at universities will be crucial to this effort, as we will need students who can staff community programs like legal and medical clinics, and who can share important project management skills. Students will be an invaluable component in building the ward organization as community canvassers. Only through utilizing the free time and disposable incomes of hundreds of Chicago students will we be able to match the visibility and outreach of the political machine. Obama’s campaign has both politicized and trained hundreds of Chicago students in canvassing and community outreach, whose student manpower must become involved in our effort.

Since our ward organizations will rely so heavily on student participation it is necessary to focus on potential wards where there are significant numbers of students. A cursory look at which wards have aldermen that are not progressive in proximity to students reveals around ten wards where we could begin building a ward organization and community social programs. To win an election in the most favorable wards would require around 3,500 votes. Each ward should be evaluated for potential student support, the strength of the machine ward organization and existing neighborhood institutions that our organization can network with.

Clarity of purpose coupled with effective cooperative management and a strategy that can command the most leverage towards building our own social power will lead to our movement’s success. By engaging people on multiple levels, through student supported social programs directed by the ward organization and by community allies, as well as through neighborhood committees to ensure community control over aldermen, we will be able to overcome the obstacles posed by Chicago’s machine and build a directly democratic dual power in Chicago.

Revolutionary Democracy can be further explored at www.piratecaucus.com and at www.nextleftchicago.com

A Chicago Response to “Hipster, the Dead End of Western Civilization.”

Read the Adbusters Article, “Hipster, the Dead End of Western Civilization,” at http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/79/hipster.html

A Chicago Response to “Hipster, the Dead End of Western Civilization.”

One of the few things more depressing than the explosion of the Hipster consumer culture is the collapse of the critical engagement with this culture. Instead of acknowledging our movement’s enormous influence on the mainstream hipster culture and using it as a springboard towards organizing we have reverted to the same elitism that is so pervasive in the Hipster scene. Adbusters, have you forgotten that it was you that helped give birth to the Hipster culture? You have finally become popular but your response has been to toss away your opportunity to reach millions of youth because of your own subcultural snobbery. Who do you think made those bandannas so fucking hip? Who brought Che back from the garbage bin of history after the cultural wasteland of the 90’s, Nelly and popped collars? We did, it was our sweat, blood and tears, our bricks through their windows, our blackspot sneakers and our insistence on wearing only USA made, lifted shit and thrift store clothing. Our ideas have finally started to become mainstream and now you are demanding that we march back into our ivory towers of radicalism.

This isn’t a letter in support of the superficiality of the Hipster culture. Chicago is home to more hipsters than anywhere in the Midwest; they have overrun Milwaukee avenue with the trendy thrift stores, their clubs dot Wicker Park and Lincoln Park (and are making inroads into Humbolt Park, the South Loop and Pilsen) and their chic, yet totally confusing, band stickers are on every light pole and every abandoned store front up and down Division, Grand, North and Milwaukee for blocks in Wicker Park. Most hipsters in Chicago are refugees from the choking consumer culture of the suburbs, home to more people in Illinois than the rest of the state, who are mostly working and middle class white folks. Contrary to Adbusters’ demographers, Hipster culture is definitely not an exclusively white, upper class phenomenon. Many Hipsters are refugees from oppressive working class cultures. You’ll find that most born and raised Chicago hipsters are people of color trying to build their own identity from the stifling expectations of their parents and importantly, the church (And if you forgot, white people are a minority in Chicago). Chicago Hipster culture has taken from “radical” punk, emo, metal, hip-hop, Puerto Rican, Mexican and many more cultures.

From reading your essay it seems that the reason you judge Hipster culture as the “dead-end of Western Civilization” is because it lacks an ambiguous and undefined notion of “authenticity” and that it lacks an explicit challenge to authority. Hipster consumer culture does not challenge capitalism, but why you single out people who wear skinny jeans, bug sunglasses, or shop at thrift stores over those who wear Cubs jerseys and fight after nights of drinking at Wrigelyfield bars seems unfair. Clothing, music taste, etc. seems pretty value neutral. My opinion is that your singling out of Hipsters is a Freudian projection our movement’s secret, collective shame at creating Hipster culture and our subsequent failure to mobilize it politically.

One could say that my own organization, Students for a Democratic Society, is largely an expression of those that helped define the current Hipster culture. Unlike the old SDS, which took flight in college towns in the 60’s, the new SDS has largely exploded in urban centers, from students who live in Hipster neighborhoods. You’ll find more SDSers at an art institute than at a state school; you’ll find more skinny jeans and bug sun glasses at our conventions than blue jeans or Adidas sportswear. SDS however, like the rest of America’s political left (including Adbusters), has largely failed to expand past our own cultural ghetto, and now we have adopted our own past time of jeering our cultural progeny, the Hipsters. But we haven’t asked why most of these people have chosen to opt out of “politics”.

First, we have to drop the double standard. Expecting more from one community over all the other communities we could have singled out is patently unfair. We should ask with the same conviction why sports fans, or why metal fans, or why most women have stayed away from politics. Blaming a lack of political commitment on an entire group’s superficiality is a sorry and dangerous rationalization, especially when Hipsters are becoming the dominant demographic of global youth. We need to break with our traditional excuses that have reinforced our own “radical” elitism. Political organization is a process of building relationships with people and then progressively leaning on those relationships to build a similar commitment towards liberation from those being organized.

Your article is part of our collective, though irrational, set of higher expectations made on Hipsters. Why should Hipsters be more disposed to join the merry-go-round of stale and pointless meetings, protests and police stompings? Building relationships starts with meeting new people, something that has been de-prioritized by our movement behind online debates on the meaning of “violence” and criticizing irrelevant Marxist wing-nuts. If the same energy was put towards throwing parties when most schools start on September 2^nd, where we could meet a hundred new contacts at each SDS chapter, as will be put towards driving all our people to the DNC/RNC and subsequently paying their legal costs, SDS could expand ten-fold. People haven’t come to our protests in front of empty recruitment stations because they know it won’t make a difference. We need to be out in the neighborhoods where those going into recruitment centers live, organizing them to engage in power structures that affect them.

As a movement we need to reevaluate our targets. Sure multi-national corporations need to be toppled, but so do our corrupt local aldermen, who win Chicago elections in student wards(voting districts in the city) with a meager 3,500 votes. Our movement talks a big talk about direct democracy; why can’t we start holding neighborhood assemblies to talk about how to challenge the crooks in local office and local boardrooms? Empty lots in student wards can be used to grow food that can be stored and cooked at community meals at the lofts that Hipsters throw parties at. Hell, why don’t we get in with the best DJ’s in town and make a few jones off those Hipster parties we so despise? All politics are local, and local politics means encouraging people to vote early and often.

Adbusters, you are free to take me up on my suggestions and to call me on my own bullshit if I don’t live up to my own talk. But right now you are in the hot seat and I’m calling out your condescending bullshit. Hipsters are people too, and criticizing them without suggesting a strategy to transform and mobilize them makes you come off as pompous and arrogant as the Hipster connoisseurs of cheap plastic jewelry, thrift store fur jackets in July and obscure emo-core bands we all lament.

Students and Dual Power in Chicago

Students have a unique role to play in building dual power. Contemporary social movements have overlooked the capacity of the university and especially students to participate in building alternative institutions. Student organizing has chiefly taken place in a vacuum, outside of a coherent strategy of building power. This lack of a larger strategy has been highly problematic and has been responsible for the stagnation of our movement. Building power and creating alternative institutions such as legal and medical clinics, cooperatives, education programs etc. are impossible tasks without the professional and occupational expertise learned through higher education. To say the least our movement has not taken an appropriate inventory of our strengths and capacity to transform society. Law students, pre-med students and engineering students have only been as potential sign holders; or if they are truly committed to the struggle, punching bags for the police. These limited opportunities for long term participation and the extremely limited career options offered through existing movement institutions have significantly bounded our demographics. This has favored those who can make a career dealing with social justice, lopsidedly fine arts and liberal arts majors.

Students do not need to wait until graduation to engage in building community power. Universally acknowledged is the fact that universities can do more to benefit their surrounding communities. Offering positions in the cafeteria, even with a union contract, is a sorry excuse for community engagement. Students within the university have a special leverage on the direction of their institution, as well as the direction of individual departments. Changing how the university interacts with the surrounding community takes organization. One example of such student faculty collaboration in Chicago is the New Life Volunteer Society at University of Illinois at Chicago (NLVS). NLVS is now a national student organization of students in the medical field emphasizing service to the community. UIC’s chapter worked with the university and the faculty to open a registered community health clinic on Chicago’s northside that is largely staffed by UIC students for internship credit.

Similarly most law schools in the Chicago offer students the ability to obtain course credit for staffing the school’s affiliated legal clinics. While such opportunities are valuable to low income Chicagoans, their reach is limited, as most law students do not want to sacrifice an opportunity to intern at a high paying law firm internship to work at the schools’ clinics. This represents the clinics’ problem with orientation. As most clinic work is done within the context of a permanent welfare state and not as part of an effort to fundamentally change the dynamics of society, the majority of students are not interested in sacrificing their careers. Few people have the wherewithal to make a career out of being the proverbial thumb in the dam. The story is the same for almost every skilled profession. Our movement desperately needs the skills and talents of students enrolled in universities, but students as struggling individuals almost universally prefer a well paid, secure position at a firm over a lifetime of toil, frustration and projected failure being a “social worker.”

If our movement is to overcome the psychological barriers separating our communities from those qualified to operate the necessary institutions in our communities we need a political strategy. Revolutionary Democracy is a political strategy of building a dual power. We aren’t interested in drawing ourselves and our colleagues into being the footsoldiers of the welfare state; we want an equitable, participatory society, one that ends the exploitation of contemporary capitalist society. As organizers we need to be relevant through orienting ourselves and our neighborhoods around the dynamics of the society we envision. Revolution will only be materialized once enough people have transformed their daily lives around the values of cooperation. This transformation is only possible through participation in alternative institutions. Progress towards a revolutionary transformation can be benchmarked by the public adoption of the dynamics championed by our alternative institutions.

Student organizing has to take another direction, one that is parallel to organizing and building alternative institutions. Not only should organizing be done through at-large chapters at universities but also by professional and occupational interests. Such a tactical orientation recognizes the greater potential of students in the same department cooperating together on the same project. Organizing on campuses should be related to organizing in the larger communities in which the universities are embedded.

In Chicago one immediate goal of SDS could be to organize students in the medical field to reopen one of the cook county satellite clinics closed because of the county’s fiscal mismanagement. Federal subsidies are available for such efforts, as well as loan and tuition reimbursement for those students who guarantee they will staff such community health clinics after graduation. Knowledge of how to run such clinics efficiently can be shared between SDS and student organizations like professional student unions that already coordinate internships, and groups like NLVS at UIC.

Another idea would be to recruit students with plans for small scale green enterprises. With the help of the revolutionary ward organization, they could approach local banks and credit unions for lines of financing to start operations in the neighborhood, with the affiliated campus organization pressuring the university to lend its support to the new enterprises. Leveraging support from specific departments at Chicago’s major universities for local green entrepreneurship would be a great initial goal for such a community development effort. Most likely however, qualified local entrepreneurs will be found in the Chicago City College system, or at less high profile institutions like the Illinois Institute for Technology. Making inroads at such locally focused institutions would also be a great objective for our student movement which has virtually ignored organizing on such campuses.

Focusing on connecting students with entrepreneurship opportunities would be a winning tactic for a dual power strategy. In Chicago such a dual power strategy would probably take the shape of ward organizations. Such organizations would work with affiliated student groups to bring investment into their wards, and would reap the collateral benefits of successful endeavors. Each successful community entrepreneur would bring the ward organization closer to its goal of being a substantive political alternative to the incumbent alderman. Eventually enough people in the community would be connected to the ward organization through social and economic cooperatives and institutions that they would be willing to participate in a political cooperative. Such a cooperative embodied in the ward organization, would make decisions in a directly democratic manner and communicate decisions to a delegated alderman that would run to replace the incumbent alderman who acts on the alderman as representative model.

Coordinating the expansion of the ward organizations is another opportunity for student involvement in building dual power. Although the ward organizations were conceived as efforts initiating in student neighborhoods, they should also work to attract students interested in local politics from around the region. The Summer in the City project out of New Brunswick New Jersey, is a model for Chicago’s revolutionary democratic ward effort. Students from across the country are participating, canvassing neighborhoods, organizing events like bbq’s and concerts and bringing people out to Empower Our Neighborhoods meetings. Something similar in Chicago could involve the ward organizations putting up students on semester breaks to work building ward organization.

Students have a crucial role to play in building dual power in Chicago. They will be the lifeblood of the ward organizations since they are at the heart of the new institutions being built. Students have the ability to leverage the university to support the efforts of the ward organizations. Realizing this powerful capacity will take a shift in strategy in the contemporary student movement. We have to move away from the strictly reactionary politics of protest and move towards a strategy of building power in our neighborhoods. Initially such power building efforts should take place in wards where students live, taking full advantage of the position and resources of the existing student movement. A successful dual power strategy will coordinate the parallel efforts on campuses in neighborhoods, and would effectively harness the potential for the university to transform our neighborhoods.

Architecture of Dual Power in Chicago

Dual power was a phrase coined by Lenin, referring to alternative revolutionary institutions functioning in competition with the institutions of the established power. In his work, “The Dual Power,” he outlined the basic qualities of a people’s dual power, first that it cannot be legislated into existence. It must be a “direct initiative from below,” a direct, local seizure of power. This initiative seeks to replace “officialdom,” or the bureaucracy of the state with the direct rule of the people. Local councils in geographic areas and in workplaces, called Soviets in Russian, were the base of this dual power, operating on direct democracy principles when convenient, when it was impractical representatives were selected and were to be immediately recallable, to be simple agents of their constituency and were to be remunerated similarly to any other worker. Similarly if these local councils were to participate in the established power, through the legislature or any other branch the individuals elected were to be directly responsible to their constituency and were supposed to be held to the same standards of accountability as representatives of the local councils.

Lenin also wrote about the importance of arming the people by the dual power as a counter to the reactionary and class oriented institutions of the police and military. Though this question was eminently relevant in April of 1917, its relevance is not as immediate for 2008 Chicago. What is important however is the long term strategy thrust forward in “The Dual Power.” Lenin was arguing that revolutionary situations were the result of acute clashes between powers in society . Such situations were only possible through the diligent construction of institutions responsible to the people within the context of conflict with repressive established institutions.

As organizers our roles are to be the engineers of the dual power. We have to use our limited resources to build durable, lasting institutions. Revolutionary upheaval will materialize when we can replace the institutions of capitalism and corporate government and make their institutions irrelevant enough to either topple or to quietly fade away. Generations of organizers have been involved in the struggle to build alternative power. We’re faced with what’s left of the old and questions about where, when, and how to begin anew.

Concentric Interactions: Importance of Building Revolutionary Identities

Whether we are transforming the economy, social relations or the government our strategy must be to build our dual power at the most basic, tangible levels available. Without starting at such constituent levels our engagement faces needless abstraction and theoretical confusion as we over extend our resources and begin to treat people as numbers, statistics and “data.” Revolutionary communities are built through the adoption of revolutionary identities by individuals. Any identity is constructed through social interactions, whether revolutionary or reactionary. More interactions means a stronger affiliation with the identity being constructed.

Our strategy to build dual power must be oriented around the idea of concentric social interactions. Commitment towards a political idea is engendered through increasing the number and intensity of relationships sharing similar dynamics. This can help explain the paradox of how such broad based organizations like Moveon.org can wield so little actually power. Movements that fail to build institutions that people interact on a consistent basis have small returns on the limited investment of their members.

The literal construction dual power necessitates an understanding of the how power is exercised by different institutions in society. The first step is identifying the fundamental actors in each institution and how they are related. Next we have to envision our own institutions framing new dynamics between these fundamental actors. Each new relationship someone has with our revolutionary movement, the more invested they become in the idea of social transformation.

Dual Power in Chicago: Where to Begin

In Chicago, the first decision to make about organizing is geographic, where to begin. Chicago has many rich and diverse neighborhoods, but the most fundamental units of government are the city wards. City Council is composed of alderman from each ward, with a mayor elected from an at-large vote every four years. While neighborhoods often overlap with wards, to be politically relevant we have to work on the level of the ward. Politically, our goal must be to build a directly democratic institution alongside the representative aldermanic one, essentially creating a revolutionary democratic ward assembly to replace the dynamic between alderman and constituent.

Chicago’s political realities and the privileges and powers yielded to the aldermen and mayor necessitate a nuanced approach to building dual power. Although our goal is to transform our City Council, and eventually our country, we have to build institutions in ways that won’t overstep our resources. Taking on an alderman connected to Mayor Daley without adequate preparation would not only lead to an embarrassing defeat but also alienate many potential supporters who can’t afford to alienate the Mayor and his allies without having alternatives already in place.

The solution: Ward based organizations whose identity and membership are built through economic, social and other dual power institutions. Applying the concept of concentric interactions, we can build revolutionary power without immediately confronting the power of the aldermen. Under the economic institution of capitalism, the basic actors are producers and consumers, with their relations determined by individual market transactions. Challenging capitalism using a dual power approach means organizing consumers and producers to act collectively. Dual power applied within this context would have our ward organizations creating purchasing cooperatives, building institutions that could eventually replace their capitalist counterparts (Sam’s club, Costco etc.) Consumption of services like childcare, healthcare, as well as education can also be reorganized into cooperative alternative institutions. Similarly changing the context of production in our society would necessitate not only organizing unions to balance the power of management, but engaging in entrepreneurship and employee ownership to change the dynamics of ownership and management altogether.

Exactly which institutions should be organized first should be answered only after a careful analysis by organizers working within a particular ward. The general idea however is to start with those institutions that have the greatest return on invested resources for the residents and to continue introducing new institutions until there is enough commitment on behalf of the ward to engage in a challenge against the seated alderman. Once a person or group is involved in one institution, for example a grocery or childcare cooperative, it is less of an effort to get the same people involved in a workplace or political campaign championing the same ideas and relationships. Social mapping techniques can shed valuable insight into building new institutions and engaging in existing institutions in neighborhoods. Not simply an academic exercise, social maps of neighborhoods can be crucial tools towards leveraging influential individuals and institutions to either participate or at least not oppose organizing in neighborhoods.

Connecting with Existing Institutions

Luckily brilliant and inspiring efforts have been undertaken across Chicago by people who share the ideals of participatory democracy. What has been missing has been the focused coordination around such efforts to build tangible power. An initial inventory of a ward for organizers would include existing institutions that could serve as allies in building dual power. Within the context of sympathetic institutions, for example existing purchasing cooperatives, our goal would not be to outcompete them but to engage their members with revolutionary democracy and our objectives for building a ward organization. Even if the existing institutions in question fail to support our mission or endorse our goals, we could almost be certain that some members within such institutions would be sympathetic and we must be ready to involve them in building dual power.

A key task is to support our natural allies struggling to change how power is exercised in existing institutions, for example in unions or schools while also maintaining a critical distance from the agendas of such institutions. We want to simultaneously organize within the base of these institutions while also working to involve those who are more invested in these institutions in our organization. To this end, we want to involve them, like anyone else, in as many dual institutions as possible to cement their identification with and commitment to social change. One relevant example of this happened during the heyday of the CIO and the Communist Party, along with other revolutionary socialist organizations. These groups recognized the power wielded by the industrial unions and sought to build their membership within the unions. Our contemporary organization should also work to build memberships within unions and within other sympathetic organizations with the aim of solidifying relationships between our organizations.

Criteria for Initial Ward Organization

Choosing exactly which ward(s) to begin organizing is a decision with important consequences for the long term development of the campaign. The first ward would ideally be one controlled by a Daley machine alderman so we wouldn’t be challenging a potential ally on City Council. Choosing a Daley stronghold would be a foolhardy decision however, since there are many wards with machine aldermen which would be more receptive to our message of revolutionary democracy and participatory democracy. We want to choose a ward that has resources we could tap into, for example a ward near a major university so we could tap into the resources of the student movement, or a ward with allies who are already mounting a challenge to the ward organization. One tool to suggest potential wards would be social maps of neighborhoods, allowing organizers to make decisions on which wards to begin with through comparing inventories of networking resources available. Once an initial ward organization is started through the efforts of a number of organizers within the neighborhood and through organizers loaned from other neighborhoods, the model could be transplanted to other wards across the city. Each planned expansion into new wards would mean collateral benefits for existing ward organizations, for example, 100 people can purchase goods and services for less than 50 people. Economies of scale will accumulate if we can establish solid initial ward organizations that can anchor future growth.

Prospect for Success of Ward Organizations

The prospects for the success of our revolutionary democratic movement in Chicago are bright. Daley Jr.’s machine is in a state of decomposition after being weakened by federal hiring probes. Contributing to the decomposition is the defection and counter mobilization of Daley’s traditional constituencies, labor unions and Chicago’s Hispanic communities. Although the administration is courting the white liberal vote through initiatives like free rain barrels and bike paths, there has been little commitment to Daley shown by those constituencies with little over 15% overall turnout in the last mayoral election. Our short term goal is to create a number of localized ward organizations that will be engaged in building revolutionary communities. These communities will be built through engaging ward residents in alternative institutions such as free childcare programs, purchasing cooperatives and free education initiatives. While the ward organizations are growing it would be appropriate to lobby the specific aldermen of those wards to become more independent of the machine. Long term however, the goal is to create a more directly democratic ward organization whose will would be expressed in the City Council through a delegated Alderman, maintaining the integrity of the decisions made at the level of the ward organization. If the initial efforts at building ward organizations prove successful, Chicago can become a model for transforming local governance, as well as transforming capitalism into a more participatory economic system.

Methodology and Epistemology of a Neighborhood Social Map

Methodology and Epistemology of a Neighborhood Social Map

Catalysts serve to spark organizing in new and important directions, overcoming the inertia of the old. A social map of our student neighborhoods aims to serve as the catalyst towards SDS engagement in the neighborhoods where we live. Moving from protest to building power requires a more systemic sharing and application of our collective knowledge relevant to organizing. Many of the insights that will compose a project like a social map will be discovered through organizing activities.

What exactly do we need in terms of data for this project to be a success? We do not need an academic endeavor divorced from organizing. No walking around aimlessly at protests asking people to fill out surveys, no sitting in a room making millions of follow up phone calls like a market researcher. We need information that can be gathered through the experience of people’s everyday lives. Insights relevant to organizing are gathered whether or not you wear an organizing hat or have a stack of flyers. These insights into how social networks work or what waterholes would be best for an event are often concentrated in the hands of a few exceptional organizers. Without a formal way to record this knowledge it often leaves with the organizers crippling the organization mid campaign.

This project aims to employ two tools to help record information about neighborhoods and will allow organizers coming into neighborhoods (for example college freshmen or out of towners) to come up to speed with the dynamics of where they are organizing. The first tool is one being pioneered by groups like AREA Chicago and Precarity: Chicago, a physical map overlayed with information. Literally it would be a “social” map, local points of interest would be identified in a neighborhood like bars, clubs, coffee spots, restaurants etc., colors might be used to identify the amiability to organizing of certain city blocks, relationships between scenes and points of interest would be identified, potential locations for events would be identified, socially connected people/houses might be identified, high visibility intersections might be identified etc. Most of this information is gathered through simple observation, and sparing our organizers the academic trappings of boxes of surveys, low response rates, and awkwardness. Everyday experiences in the lives of organizers can be translated into productive information for building social power.

The second tool used would be a spreadsheet application that would basically be a list of the information on the map with more fields for detailed explanations of why the data is displayed as such on the map. Such a spreadsheet could easily be envisioned as a Wikipedia that people could compile their information on. Most of the data inputted initially would not be coded, to maximize the total amount of information that people could later cull for readability.

What is the timeline for this project? For the next month this project will largely still be an idea to be tossed around and refined by interested participants. To facilitate this process there will be a google group created, but hopefully people who are interested can meet in the flesh to hash out questions around the project. The first step is to select a neighborhood to create a pilot project around. Once participants can agree to focus their resources on a neighborhood the next step would be to create the infrastructure necessary to the project, like a Wikipedia spreadsheet application and a google map or another map application. Interested people in the project would then contribute their knowledge of the neighborhood to the project, and those with the most commitment would help organize contributions into the applications. Ideally this project would also prompt organizers to use their “downtime” from organizing to explore the neighborhood. Exploring new places, meeting new people outside of the context of organizing for a meeting or specific event will be key resources for the success of the project. Insights from active campaigns will also be important contributions to the social map, and hopefully the reflections derived from the project will help propel further organizing and success on campaigns.

Divorcing this project from actual organizing in student neighborhoods would result in its failure. This process is a first step to building a more professional, sustained and more effective student/community organization. Expanding our organizing past the physical campus to include the neighborhoods we live is a crucial step in building student power. With the correct application of social mapping we can maintain our organization’s integrity when key organizers move on, and we will be able to effective involve new participants in the core work of organizing instead of delegating them busy work until they catch up with their more seasoned colleagues. Using this information will allow us to mobilize more effectively, and will help us build power in our communities through understanding how spaces relate to different people and social networks.

Politics of Scenes and Introducing a Chicago Student Neighborhood Social Map

Removing radical politics from the exclusive grip of social scenes and subcultures to expand its appeal is a popular topic of discussion. What is often missing however is a clear understanding of how critical scenes are to the communication and expression of political ideas. Everyone’s life is composed of the interaction between the different scenes they participate in, from their own family scene, to their school friend scene to their work friend scene to possibly an explicitly cultural (punk rock, hip hop or jazz scene etc.) or political scene (anarchist, socialist, obamaist scene etc.). At the lowest common denominator, scenes are just social networks of people who share similar interests, situations and relations. There’s nothing particularly insidious about scenes, its more important how individuals balance their engagement in scenes and how they deal with personal and social identity.

Political ideas are usually introduced to individuals in two ways, they can either be introduced into an existing scene or social network through someone they have a relationship with, essentially politicizing a scene or a politicized individual can participate in creating an entirely new scene centered around political engagement. Discussions of the exclusivity of scenes do not usually include the dynamic of the particular scene being discussed and whether or not such a scene was created explicitly around political relations. Unrealistic expectations about the appeal of newly created political scenes can lead to cynicism when the scene doesn’t realize the expected levels of growth and participation. These expectations of explicitly political scenes have to be tempered with the understanding that many people who are receptive to politics already have a full plate so to speak of social networks and scenes and that they may not be willing to neglect other social relationships to engage in a new and unfamiliar political scene.

An important task of the political organizer therefore is to learn how to identify existing social networks and scenes. We need to politicize such networks and attempt to connect them with explicitly political scenes to increase the capacity for mobilization of our political movement. The radical catch phrase, “meeting someone where they are” is an expression for pushing someone who is outside of an explicitly political scene to become more political. Although most politicized individuals will eventually either becoming related to, or participate in an explicitly politicized scene over time; their initial interaction with political ideas should not have to hinge on adopting a social identity. Identifying social networks is a useful exercise for political organizers because it allows the organizer to understand relationships of influence between people. If the goal is political mobilization and political consciousness then relationships of influence are important to influencing people’s attitudes towards mobilization and their commitment to political ideas. While such ideas are nothing new to the science of organizing as practiced by most labor unions, they have largely have fallen outside the purview of radical political organizing.

One such story of frustration that is familiar to many other white anarchists is the dilemma of the punk scene. Like it or not, the anarchist scene in Chicago has a strong relationship with the punk scene. At different times over the past five years of my political organizing I’ve found myself with my punk rock friends banging my head against the wall, “why aren’t there more anarchists/anarchist punk rockers?” The anarchist punk scene in Chicago was an example par excellence of a scene created explicitly around political ideas, though we didn’t grasp that during those frustration sessions. Being in such an explicitly political scene was helpful for our personal, political and social development and helped to reinforce our commitment to a better world. What we needed to understand however was that such participation came with a high social overhead. People who may have sympathized with us politically but did not have the extra energy or time to participate would not join the scene. As organizers we need to create an organization that can value the positive aspects of an explicitly political scene while consciously expanding to connect itself to other social networks based around other situations and relationships.

One example of how political organizers are successfully mobilizing political and non political scenes towards political goals is in the neighborhood of Pilsen. In Pilsen many of those in the radical political scene have made conscious attempts to create social spaces where those uninvolved in the scene can come and be exposed to political ideas. These social spaces include house parties where the neighbors are invited and encouraged to stop by, events like block parties and progressive programming held by community institutions like Radio Arte. While the immigration attacks have helped to cement the neighborhood’s largely Hispanic and liberal white communities together, much of the credit has to go to the conscious effort of political organizers. Political mobilizations reflect the diverse constituencies and networks mobilized, from punks, to gangbangers to families and hipsters. The vibrancy of the political movement is due to the efforts of political organizers to expand their social networks, talking to social networks on the block, family networks, punk and hipster networks and radical political networks etc.

The solid success of Pilsen’s political organizing can be contrasted to other neighborhoods with significant radical political scenes like the Wicker Park/Humbolt Park area and Hyde Park. There are many committed political organizers in both the Wicker Park/Humbolt Park area and Hyde Park, but what may be missing are the social spaces where different networks can be exposed to each other. Since I haven’t had the same kind of exposure to either neighborhood I can’t speak very precisely about the political efforts going on in those communities, but there is significantly less cross pollination of social networks compared to Pilsen.

Answering the question of why some neighborhoods are more politically vibrant than others (or why Chicago is the center of attention when (gasp) far more people live the suburbs) first requires an appreciation of how individuals can become more politically effective. One resource that identifies a process on how to overcome obstacles to communicating to others is the book Becoming a Moral Cosmopolitan by Depaul professor Jason Hill. It is a philosophic work but has many insights on personal and social psyches that can encourage or discourage one’s organizing potential.

Hill recognizes that the only permanent feature of the human condition is the potential for adaptation. People however, frequently discourage themselves from adapting to change through the adoption of a tribal identity that reinforces set characteristics and stereotypes on a person or group. The remedy to overcome one’s tribal identity is the process of moral becoming. Moral becoming is a process where an individual creates a critical distance between oneself and their tribal identity, challenging assumptions based on morally arbitrary differences about those outside of the tribal identity. Hill emphasizes that overcoming tribal identities is not only a moral imperative and mental exercise, but a social activity.

Moral masking is the social process advocated by Hill where the individual constantly pushes themselves to explore relationships with others through masking one’s tribal identity, forgetting inherited constructions and abandoning moral assessment based on arbitrary qualities of a person. Personhood is defined by the process of moral becoming for Hill, with individuals pushing past their inherited identities and expanding their networks of friends and acquaintances.

Being socially proactive in connecting other people is a moral obligation for Hill because it’s the only way to avoid stereotyping others. One can see how such a moral imperative can be a useful for new organizers trying to build a lasting philosophic foundation for their work and life. Such a philosophy has many practical applications and is easily translated into situations we face everyday.

Political apathy in America is derived from a sense of skepticism, but also from a sense of isolation and alienation. Reinforcing apathy has been a breakdown in the sociability of Americans. More time than ever is spent by youth doing activities that are essentially anti-social, or reinforcing clique behavior, like watching tv and playing game systems. Digital technology has also created many more opportunities for clique behavior on otherwise social mediums such as through fantasy sports leagues, online forums and myspace and facebook applications. There’s obviously nothing wrong any of these outlets in moderation, but these activities insular nature limits an individual’s potential for participation in broader communities. Our technology and how it has been applied has created a society of introverts. Its problematic because insular people and insular groups of friends are not interested in messages of social power since they don’t want to participate in the wider community. Throw in existing class, race and sexuality barriers and you have political stagnation from disenfranchised youth.

Massive public spectacles have ironically contributed to the increasing insularity of American society. Rock concerts drawing tens of thousands like Lollapolloza at first glance provide an opportunity for thousands of relationships to be built and for communities to be created and strengthened. Only the opposite has happened with these enormous events, cliques are not broken down and communities are not built up, the dynamic more resembles just a massive collection of insular groups all being passive spectators to the same acts they previously watched on tv or played on guitar hero.

Struggles to change people’s psyche’s towards each other and sociability are nothing new, it’s the same struggle Saul Alinsky faced when trying to organize extremely insular neighborhood communities in Chicago. The suburbization of Chicago has multiplied the difficulty of the task of bringing people together because the suburbs were intentional designed to be insular communities. If we are going to be successful in reversing this trend of insularity in American society we need to explicitly oppose it. Organizers have to emphasize that it is not only a personal goal, but a political necessity that we break down cliquish boundaries separating and dividing communities.

Diving into unknown territory and going to spaces where one doesn’t know anyone isn’t an act of social desperation or social inauthenticity but an opportunity for building relationships that will pay dividends in community political power. Organizers and leaders within Student for a Democratic Society need to legitimate these new social norms through actions and explicit appeals for such sociability from the rest of SDS’s members. For the most part SDS members share this insular nature with the rest of society, we have to strategically leverage SDS’s organization and identity towards changing ourselves. We have to have a doctrine of personal transformation that creates better and more effective organizers.

Being uncomfortable in a social situation is largely due to not being familiar with the people or etiquette of a particular scene. Such awkwardness is a natural part of personal and social growth and should be seen as a challenge by organizers instead of as reason to stay home. Sometimes however, people do legitimately feel uncomfortable, especially when there’s open bigotry in social spaces. Almost universally every social group, clique and individual, to quote an SDS conference, “has some work to do,” on anti-oppression, but again as organizers we have to be mature enough not to be mortally offended and break off from the rest of society. Instead we have to build relationships with people and leverage moral and social arguments to turn social spaces into safe spaces free from the negative –ism’s fragmenting our society.

The most effective organizers are cosmopolitan, they move fluidly between scenes, cliques and work to construct social identities and spaces that encourage participation. Being so committed to a particular identity, whether it be hipster, jock, bro, punk rocker, etc. that one doesn’t see a need to expand past it to reach other communities and if one is so bound up in one’s identity in a particular scene that crossing over to others is impossible, limits the resources available to the organizer and the organization. Its not asking individuals to be inauthentic or pretend to be some identity they aren’t; its about learning enough and participating in other identities enough to feel comfortable around those you don’t primarily identify with.

Our strategy must be one of using our individual actions to build new social constructions. We don’t want a society of introverts holed up infront of HDTV’s playing Grand Theft Auto. We want a vibrant community where people know and care about each other enough to be willing to die for each other’s freedom and liberation. Cosmopolitan organizers have to engage insular groups and scenes and connect them with inviting social spaces. Sometimes we need to create our own explicitly political spaces and sometimes we need to work to politicize existing ones. Social spaces in the context of organizing are like spokes on a wheel connecting different scenes and people, those that have influence and participate in constructing these social spaces will have the ability to mobilize a community for political liberation (though the same principals work if your goal is reactionary).

Introducing a Chicago Student Neighborhoods Social Mapping Project

The creation of new social spaces and the connection and politicization of existing social spaces have to be priorities for SDS. We need to stitch together communities that can wield enough power to topple the institutions we are fighting against. In order to consolidate our progress towards these goals and to sustain the momentum of our movement we need to envision systemic ways of data collection and organization so we encourage participation without overwhelming new organizers.

Chicago SDS has a significant network of organizers who have expressed interest in the organization. Each organizer undoubtedly is a valuable source of insight into the communities they are embedded in. We need to start systemically collecting this information and make it accessible to other organizers. Collecting information about social spaces in neighborhoods would be an invaluable tool towards helping us plan campaigns in neighborhoods and would be invaluable for mobilizing large numbers of students. In addition, knowledge of such neighborhood social spaces would be our primary ways of comfortably interacting with more insular groups that may be willing to stop by a nearby party or show but not drive across the city for a book discussion.

This is a call out for anyone interested in creating social maps of student neighborhoods in Chicago. Ideally this should be a national SDS priority. Information on different social spaces can be collected and compiled into spreadsheets, and visual representations of these can easily be mapped onto google maps or any number of other graphic design applications. As much data as possible should be collected on the social spaces of neighborhoods, as organizers we need to become social scientists and experts on the communities we want to build and mobilize for political change.

Hyde Park, Wicker Park, Humbolt Park, Lincoln Park the South Loop and Pilsen are solid initial candidates for this project as there are large numbers of students living in these neighborhoods and many social spaces that are not always accessible to organizers unless they are “in the know.” Any neighborhood with organizers and students however would be a good candidate for this type of work. In Chicago there are already allies working on similar “mapping” projects and the synergy between our projects should be mutually beneficial. These social spaces will literally be the launch pads of our future campaigns, no matter what their goal, and are our most valuable assets as social and political organizers

If we can start organizing with a working knowledge of the communities we are embedded in, we will have an incredible advantage. This social mapping project will be an absolutely necessary resource to overcome the obstacles presented by insular scenes and cliques to forming a unified student community and  towards political mobilization for a participatory democracy.

If you are interested in participating get in touch with me, mrsituationist@gmail.com

Five Years of Counter Recruitment in Chicago

Reviewing Five Years of Counter Recruiting in Chicago

Counter recruitment is shorthand for a strategy by the peace movement to make the military withdraw from the occupation in Iraq and other countries through impacting the enlistment levels of willing soldiers. Countering military recruitment involves dissuading people who might interact with the recruiters from doing so and removing the public presence of military recruitment altogether.

Over the past five years of counter recruitment in Chicago there have been roughly four areas of struggle; confronting the military presence inside high schools, the military recruitment at public events, recruitment at universities and confronting military recruitment centers directly. Unfortunately there have been few moments to pause and allow ourselves to review our accomplishments and setbacks. Hopefully those engaged in counter recruitment and those who want to know more will be helped by this work which looks to outline some of the questions that need to be asked in order to help benchmark our progress.

Before discussing the individual arenas where counter recruiters have acted in Chicago, we have to acknowledge the fact that there will probably never be reliable statistics published on our efforts. Most likely the military will never keep statistics on counter recruitment, and if some government agency did receive a budget to track counter recruitment there would be a number of serious issues about reliability. This dearth of information on the regional and national levels however, does not prevent us from collecting information and drawing conclusions about our efforts at the city level. Although the need to collect data of more quantity and quality from actions is universal to the social justice movement, it is particularly necessary in our case because such data could help us choose between a number of possible strategies towards ending the war.

 

Counter Recruitment in High Schools

Countering recruitment in Chicago area high schools is generally done through students and by outside groups like the American Friends Service Committee. My experience has been that student led efforts at counter recruitment are few and far between and unfortunately are rarely communicated to the larger world. Large personal and social obstacles facing those who speak out against recruiters are part of the reason there are so few student led efforts at confronting high school military recruiters. Military personnel command respect in spheres private and public; we treat them as heroes. The recruiters attempt to use this universal respect as a wedge to advance their agenda, for students who disagree with the war this exploitation of social respect poses a problem. Like it or not, students confronting military recruiters are found by their peers guilty until proven innocent of being iconoclasts and misfits. Such an exclusion of political discourse is unhealthy, but one has to remember that its purpose is to serve as a social control mechanism. In America you don’t need a Gestapo or a KGB if you can get people to hum along with murderous policies.

Another often overlooked issue recruitment is the physical presence of military recruiters. Even as a football jock I was not always immune to the boasting and physical intimidation of military recruiters at my school; for average sized high school students it is even more intimidating to confront such imposing authority figures. Recruiters know that one’s physical presence in a space is just as important as the verbal message and frequently use it to their advantage, walking up to people who disagree with them nose to nose, circling, and basically exploiting opportunities to intimidate those who are not completely confident with their message of peace. Though it’s a pretty childish way to win arguments, it greatly increases the stress on potential counter recruiters and raises the personal investment needed to confront the military. The only effective way to counter such disparities in physical presence is thorough preparation; enough to build an unshakable confidence in the counter recruiter. A confident organizer that can win space from a recruiter then can either rap on about how the military lies to students or about the Iraq War, or inject humor into the situation to deescalate and to further dissolve the bravado and bullshit of the recruiters.

One of the biggest obstacles faced by students is the lack of a clear message to counter recruitment and the consequent lack of thorough preparation and training. I knew many students who would help me engage in counter recruitment but wouldn’t take individual initiative because they weren’t prepared to argue with a professional salesman for the military. Unfortunately, most of the literature around counter recruitment sends mixed messages because it is written by liberals arguing against the military with their hands tied behind their backs. The literature offered debunks military enlistment myths but does not include more general criticism of why we oppose military recruitment. This has served to distract and add another layer of complication for potential counter recruiters. Understanding a substantive critique of the occupation should be a much higher priority for counter recruitment than memorizing specifics about military enlistment contracts.  A clear and cogent message about the goal to end enlistment and end the occupation can help resolve issues about confidence and presentation when confronting military recruiters.

Another problem when straying from a debate on the merits of the Iraq occupation is the lack of alternative opportunities facing many students who are interested in the military. When emphasizing a career based approach to counter recruitment, one quickly realizes that there are few alternatives to military recruitment for those who don’t have the resources available for post secondary education. Viewing the compensation offered by the military without regard to the potential consequences or moral decision making, it compares pretty well for those with few occupational skills. An obvious corollary to this discussion is how our movement can generate employment and also leverage more employment from local institutions without compromising our values. Such questions come to the forefront when counter recruiters begin to engage in career counseling with high schoolers during counter recruitment sessions. I have seen first hand however how easily these discussions with military recruits fall apart, both because of the lack of a focused message about why we really oppose military recruitment and because of the inability of the counter recruiters to role play a career counselor.

 

How We Can Be More Effective in High Schools

What is necessary is an explicit opposition to military recruitment on the grounds that our military engages in occupations of nations around the world. Military recruiters almost uniformly recoil when engaged in arguments about the Iraq war; they even did in the good old days of the war when I was in high school and counter recruiting five years ago. Our literature and training however lacks such a critical edge, and instead students are burdened with calling our respected military personnel as liars to their face. Its much more inviting for a student to question the logic of the war and to oppose recruiters on that level then walk up to a soldier and call him a bald faced liar. Though we do need to call recruiters out on their lies; whether soldiers get 3,000 or 15,000 dollars for college is irrelevant to our ultimate goal of counter recruitment, namely the end of neo-imperialism and occupation.

When military recruiters enter into a high school, or are embedded into it, they might be ignored by students, but rarely are they confronted by students without some organizational support. SDS or CAN must embrace the rather fleeting high school counter recruiters that usually burn out before even being plugged into a city wide network. Whichever group that steps up to the plate must actively search for these high schoolers and must be able to provide trainings to these organizers on the Iraq War to make them more confident and effective when confronting military recruiters. A first step would be to connect to other groups who are actively engaging high school students like the American Friends Service Committee, CAWI, etc. Accessing contacts through social networking websites like facebook and myspace is key to expanding our own networks of who we know in high schools and are interested in opposing military recruitment.

Outreaching to students at events like concerts and shows has to be changed as well. Instead of sitting behind tables of pamphlets we have to be as enthusiastic and social as the recruiters we oppose. We should look to get commitments from people specifically for counter recruiting when we canvass events and already have a follow up meeting planned that contacts can attend for more information and training. Making sure canvassers at events are adequately prepared beforehand to deal with contacts helps the awkwardness of connecting with people out of the blue. Preparation includes not only having appropriate materials for potential counter recruiters that explain our strategy and why we oppose the occupation but also having an organized system to arrange contact information. Half of the battle is entering contact data into a useable form and making the effort at follow up.

Our movement’s goal should be to have high schoolers lead counter recruitment at high schools. Students listen to their peers much more so than older folks coming into high schools no matter how polished they are. We need to be aware that our strategy requires us to identify and access social networks of students who can be mobilized to confront military recruitment in high schools. Part of this is learning how to effectively organize data obtained from social networking websites like myspace, part of this is better data collection like finding out friend relations from contacts, and part of it is maintaining relationships with people who are in different social networks.

The most egregious oversight our movement has made in counter recruitment is failing to acknowledge the importance of our relationship with the Iraq Veteran’s Against the War. Military veterans are the single greatest resource to counter recruitment. Every high school student engaged in counter recruitment needs to meet someone from the IVAW. Nothing steels someone’s convictions like a personal interaction with someone who has been through what one’s fighting against. The IVAW is an autonomous organization with an agenda to organize veterans and active duty personnel but it has also tried to engage in counter recruiting through campaigns like “Talk to a Recruiter.” We have to articulate our movement’s needs to the IVAW and clearly state how they can help us further our objectives of ending further recruitment by the military.

Creating more social exposure for members of the IVAW should be a priority. We need to be organizing networking events like parties, shows, trainings and conferences where veterans can interact with high school students leading counter recruitment efforts. They need to learn from first hand sources why they are opposing the war. So far our movement has not associated social networking goals with political goals. Changing our perception about the importance of building relationships through social spheres is necessary to build a much broader movement. Cosponsored events would be mutually beneficial, especially since there are so many veterans in the Chicago area who oppose the war but are unaware of the IVAW and may only need an introduction from a friend at party to get involved.

 

Military Recruitment at Public Events

Chicago is a city of public celebration. From block parties, to music festivals, to ethnic celebrations, to the Taste of Chicago, the military takes advantage of dozens of opportunities to recruit more soldiers. Many of the same groups that have taken a leading role in counter recruitment in high schools have taken similar roles at counter recruitment at Chicago’s festivals. Two of the events with the best attendance by counter recruiters have been the Taste of Chicago and the annual Air and Water show. Several similar issues arise when counter recruitment is taken outside the context of the high school and into public space. Counter recruiters are still primarily targeting military age men and women but also have a broader audience of other attendees at the festival. Problems of accessibility for counter recruiters are still frequent however, only a few years ago at the Taste of Chicago the Chicago Police decided that the counter recruiters needed to leave the premises, leading to a number of arrests and a fiery response (a burning President Bush delievered in a wheel chair). The best defense against such bare knuckle oppression is usually having a contingency plan to deal with police harassment that includes legal support, if not a planned response that might deescalate the situation and allow for the counter recruitment to continue.

The importance of maintaining a clear message is elevated when addressing the general public. When groups engage in Direct Action to remove recruiters they remove their focus from the people in public who are being recruited and instead place their focus solely on the recruiters. It’s a calculation that most groups have not considered when using direct action to literally shut down the recruiter. Direct Action attempts to dislodge recruiters in public spaces through tactics like locking down on recruiter equipment has had mixed results. Sometimes it has lead to the frustration and departure of the recruiters but often it has lead to significant court fees and a less than supportive crowd response. The same factors for successful interactions in high schools are still true when the audience is the general public. Having confidence in and a broad knowledge of the argument against recruitment (our war in Iraq is wrong and you shouldn’t fight in it) is the only way people can be comfortable enough to be effective counter recruiters.

One of the biggest obstacles to communicating our message about the Iraq War and military enlistment to people is the distraction of the debate around first amendment rights of the military. In actuality the first amendment is not a justification for protecting the speech of an organization engaged in unlawful violence but it’s a debate that prevents a lot of people from becoming participants rather than supportive spectators of our work. Not enough attention has been paid to issues around the clarity of our message to our audience, who is the general public that would otherwise only interact with the recruiters. If at all possible it would be best to avoid unnecessary harassment from the police in order to maintain our focus on defeating the message of the military and its recruitment drive for war. Ultimately the military recruiters stay wherever they feel they will be the most productive. The military perceives hostility by the most sustained threats to its message, not necessarily privileging a few incidents of physical resistance that can bankrupt the resources and energy of the individuals and groups responsible. Transforming the recruitment experience into an explicit defense of the Iraq War powerfully takes away from the message of the recruiters and allows us to organize a much broader audience.

Similar to counter recruitment at high schools, we need to be more meticulous about collecting contact information. Appropriate organization of the data is crucial and in my experience has consistently been neglected by counter recruitment efforts. Part of the high turnover of people engaged in counter recruitment is a result of the failure of consistent follow up and because of the often sporadic nature of direct action approaches to counter recruitment. Unfortunately, conflict with the law and the potential for stress and legal consequences deters a lot of organizers from dedicating time to counter recruitment. Re-envisioning counter recruitment as an opportunity to canvass against the war and build relationships with people lowers the necessary personal investments from the counter recruiters and would encourage new and more consistent participation. Sometimes conflict with the law is inevitable and anyone engaged in counter recruitment needs to understand that organizing for change always incurs risks of financial and personal risks but we need to evaluate necessity of actions that lead to escalations of force.

 

Counter Recruitment in the University Setting

Military Recruitment at public universities, as in high schools, is explicitly endorsed by the No Child Left Behind Act. While Obama’s presidency and the Democratic control of Congress hopefully will mean a slight reprieve from the full court press by the military, we can expect that NCLB will continue on and that the legal enforcement of the military’s right to recruit in public schools will continue. Humor and attempts at detournment (using created pretenses to radically alter the context of a message from an institution) have been common in counter recruitment at the post-secondary level. Since college students are under much less scrutiny and college campuses are much more physically open institutions than high schools, more options are available for counter recruitment at colleges.

The military however acknowledges that there are less potential recruiters who are in four year institutions and only occasionally recruits on campuses in the Chicago area. More frequently the military or other agencies look for recruits at colleges to fill specialized programs like ROTC, combat nursing or intelligence analysis. Military recruitment at private universities and colleges is near non-existent except for the occasional job fair appearance recruiting for these specialized occupations. Not surprisingly the military recruits more frequently at the community colleges in the suburbs and within the CCC system.

Military recruitment efforts at universities and colleges should also be treated as opportunities to engage in a debate over the occupation and to canvass the public about opposition to the war. Such efforts do not always need to be somber affairs as humor can help deescalate awkwardness and tension between the public and the counter recruiters making conversations more comfortable and more productive. The main concern however should be maintaining the clarity of our message against the war and against recruitment while still incorporating humor. Ideally humor and communicating a clear message to an audience are mutually beneficial but sometimes the creation of a spectacle is privileged over the overarching goal of building popular opposition to the war and specifically recruitment.

One of the most overlooked resources available to counter recruiters at the post-secondary level is the ability to use students from multiple campuses to focus on a single campus. If SDS or CAN could create a network that has the capacity to be mobilized to counter recruitment efforts the military would be hard pressed to justify spending any money recruiting at universities in Chicago. Realistically it would take around a semester’s worth of effort to create a cell text communication system that could alert people interested in counter recruitment about recruitment at universities. The biggest investment would be getting schedules of recruiters from universities and widely distributing the information since the actual text networking technology would take a week or two to create.

 

Organizing Against Military Recruitment Centers

Chicago’s counter recruitment effort has had the least success confronting physical military recruitment centers, even though there has been a significant investment of resources and energy in opposing them. Military recruitment offices in Chicago have been expanding in our communities and on our campuses, even with military high schools opening on the physical campuses of existing high schools like Senn High School on the North Side. One recruitment office that has been protested since its inception has been the one recently opened in the “Superdorm” downtown, the world’s largest dorm with students from more than four schools.

Protesting physical institutions is problematic because the protests do not significantly affect recruitment. While organizing protests at recruitment centers expends hours of energy on behalf of organizers, the recruiters usually aren’t in the office when protesters are outside, and even when they are they can do most of their work over the phone or on their computers for the short duration of the protest. Recruiters are not particularly affected by the limited press around recruitment center protests. Serious escalations of force to close the recruitment centers have been sporadic and those organizing towards such goals don’t have the resources immediately available to sustain such high intensity campaigns.

Some recruitment centers have become targets of opportunity for protests and are often visited by crowds from unrelated protests. To my knowledge, one of the few longer term campaigns against a recruitment center was Columbia College SDS’s attempt to create a weekly drum circle around the recruitment center at the Superdorm downtown. Although such events do not represent an immediate threat to the operation of the recruitment center they are further opportunities to engage the surrounding community on the occupation.

The first question we have to ask ourselves when confronting physical spaces dedicated to recruitment is about the goal of our confrontation. Are we protesting in front of the recruitment center in order to shut it down or are we there to communicate to the community around the center, or both. If our goal is to use protests to actually shut down recruitment centers we have failed. Dislodging institutions like the ROTC from the University of Illinois Chicago campus, or the superdorm may not be immediately accomplishable. Confrontation at this point is likely unproductive because we don’t have the social resources to sustain the confrontation and to use its momentum. My limited experience around the superdorm organizing was that the organizers that dedicated their time to organizing for a confrontation over the superdorm were overwhelmed with obligations from the campaign with not enough effort was expended recruiting new participation. Unfortunately it’s a trade-off constantly faced in organizing. For Chicago, the onus should be on expanding the networks of contacts outside of the “activist” communities and being more selective about confrontations to increase our success. Participation in the movement is not limited to engaging in work around active campaigns and just as much relies on personal development and an expansion of relationships with people and communities.

Alternatively, our confrontation could be based on communication with the community around the center. Logically tactics with less legal consequences would be used, like dance parties, drum circles etc. and less emphasis would be placed on organizing for sit-ins or occupations of buildings. The strategy of using confrontation selectively and in a less escalatory manner to expand our movement’s interactions with the community and even with potential recruits would help build the resources necessary for more sustainable direct action. Essential is treating every public action around recruitment as an opportunity to find new participants in the movements and to canvass support for ending the occupation and radically challenging authority in our country.

 

On the Bicycle Bomber and Property Destruction Against Military Recruiters

No discussion about counter recruitment would be intellectually honest without citing the influence of advocates of property destruction. Public justification outside of the relatively anonymous communiqués and manifestos for property destruction has been sparse and incomplete at best. Many have led themselves to believe that the feelings around property destruction are held only by a disgruntled minority and carried out by an even more extreme fringe, but the reality is that there is a significant number within the counter recruitment movement who believe that property destruction targeting recruiters is not only legitimate but necessary immediately. Examples of attacks on recruitment stations are becoming more frequent and also more intense. Recently a New York City recruitment station was the target of an explosive device, later glorified on stickers by a number of insurrectionist anarchists as the bicycle bomber. Incidents are geographically widespread but are not limited to individual solo actors. With increasing regularity recruitment stations in Washington D.C. have been targeted by the revived tactic of the black bloc and have been physically attacked.

However, one would be hard-pressed to find an example of a recruitment station closed because of a physical assault post 9-11. What has been the pattern without exception has been escalated security around attacked stations, with the confrontation quickly ending and the station reopening. One of the few exceptions to the trend has been the persistent work around DC, including DC SDS chapters. When the sacrifices asked and risks taken are calculated however, many of physical confrontations are not worthwhile.

What has been lost to the counter recruitment advocates of property destruction is the breakdown of the parallel between the 1960’s counter recruitment and our contemporary efforts. During the 1960’s there were massive social resources available with which to literally launch guerilla warfare against military recruiters. The website www.historyisaweapon.com details the dozens of attacks against military facilities on campuses that eventually succeeded in the military’s withdrawal. The key difference is that those engaging in the actions had communities to fall back on and to be protected within. There were many more opportunities to hide one’s identity because of the vibrant nature of the counter culture. The movement was at a popular height and that shared sense of community helped to protect members from intimidation by authority. Investigations were much harder pressed to find records from of communes and crash pads then from corporate employers or apartment management companies.

We need to focus on bringing in more people into the counter recruitment movement and creating a community than can marshal the resources for sustained direct action campaigns. Our goal is to end military recruitment and we have to be prepared to use any means necessary to end the occupation in Iraq. “By any means necessary” means that we have to be able to determine the most expedient ends to that goal. Redirecting effort towards canvassing and communicating to others over the individual work around direct action would yield multiplied benefits because of the greater number of participants contributing.

Those considering property destruction need to examine the true sacrifices in time and energy of their actions. While causing property destruction may seem like a small commitment from the individual, the planning to make sure one is not caught is significant, and the consequences if caught can make such actions totally consuming of their actor. If actions are to be taken its only logical that they can be envisioned as part of an immediate effort at the removal of the recruitment center and that there are the resources available to sustain the resistance against the center and win the campaign.

 

On Our Movement’s Fragmented Understanding of Economics

“Theory” about economics from the self-identified left is usually detached from how contemporary economies actually function. Participation in and identification with the movement is lopsidedly left brain. Our general lack of goals concerning the transformation of the economy, outside vague concepts like worker cooperatives and living wages, negatively impacts our ability to build organizations that have enough resources to effectively engage in counter recruiting.

The 900 pound gorilla in the room for counter recruiters is that there are few options available to those with no job skills, few job skills, or with too little social capital find a position. Taken at a morally neutral face value; with pay, housing, and the promise of job training, the military offers a compelling opportunity for young people to survive. Counter recruiters often have the unenviable job of playing the five minutes or less career consoler to potential recruits who are in even less enviable occupations and are looking for a way out and up.

Our central contradiction is that none of the major peace organizations, or even most organizations on the “left”, are engaged in building career paths for individuals being counseled away from military enlistment. Without these career paths open in other occupations, counter recruitment will always be an uphill battle and we will continue with mixed success. Chicago needs a coalition to step forward and tackle the lack of clear career paths for youth that do not involve taking on tens of thousands of debt in student loans. We are on the literal cusp of a green technology and manufacturing revolution but our internal discourse about the Chicago economy is pathetically unsophisticated and out of touch. Research and dedicated effort to identifying opportunities for entrepreneurship and effective engagement with existing companies embodying our core values is long overdue.

In Chicago the Daley family has built a political behemoth because of its ability to manipulate the local economy. The jobs provided by municipal and state governments and their contractors have lifted many out of poverty. Imagine an opposition, not based upon political cronyism and dynasty, but based upon creating equal opportunity for economic security and personal expression. Image a movement that could demonstrate that the values of solidarity and innovation are both competitive in a world economy but necessary to create the resources to save the planet. Some are working towards such an economy with their heads in the sand about America’s foreign policy and the stranglehold it places on our potential economic boom.

As long as there are desperate people there will be soldiers in desperate occupations. We need practitioners who organize for an end to the occupation but also who create the infrastructure necessary for a sustained fight against recruitment and against capitalism. Without clear alternatives to the military we will not be able to realize our goal of short circuiting enlistment to the levels necessary to end American imperialism. What is working to our advantage is the potential to realize the collateral benefits from engaging in creating a solidarity economy and counter recruitment. The social networks identified and mobilized for each effort can be incorporated into the mobilization for the other. Each opportunity to engage the public during counter recruitment is an opportunity to begin an extended dialogue about changing the fundamental forces driving our economy. America’s occupation in Iraq is a symptom of the domestic deterioration that we have allowed to happen but is now a self fulfilling prophecy for destruction. Our only solution from this point forward is to resolve our economic crisis at home as part of our fight against the occupation.

Freedom Festival at Elmhurst College

SDS Organizing Lessons From Freedom Festival

Nick Kreitman Elmhurst College SDS

Freedom Festival was one of the events this year that marked a beginning of a dialogue between campus groups at Elmhurst College. It was an idea inspired by the Tent State and Revolutionary Democracy strategy of creating and participating in social spaces and institutions and using them to mobilize for political change. Originally conceived as a Tent State event with students pitching tents on the quad (mall), it eventually turned a three day series of concerts, events and an action. Freedom Festival was one of the most successful political events held on campus in recent years and its success will be a stepping stone if some of the lessons learned from organizing it can be applied to future efforts.

Rocking the Boat at Elmhurst College

Stories of glory from the expanding national Tent State movement originally inspired me to build a similar event on Elmhurst College campus in January (2008), to be held at the end of the school year in May. Tent State’s model was largely communicated through a number of organizers involved with Rutgers Tent State and those working on RD (Revolutionary Democracy). Motivating the organizers of the Tent State movement has been the RD strategy of creating social spaces within student communities to build the relationships necessary for social power.

Revolutionary Democracy understands “power” essentially as the breadth, intimacy, and material resources behind social networks that compose institutions and organizations. Such an understanding of power informs organizing efforts around engaging structures of power and the creation of alternative structures. Both efforts involve gathering information about relationships between people and organizational identities. The Tent State model is a synthesis of efforts to engage current student groups on campus, while organizing an entirely new space for student expression, socializing, and organization. Tent State University (TSU) is a student occupation of the public space on campus, usually on the open quad area, with events organized by SDS and other events organized by students groups within the TSU coalition. The TSU strategy motivates SDS chapters to become proactive in outreaching to other groups to open up dialogues and get their participation in the event.

Maximizing the mobilization of social networks is the goal, since these networks form the basis of our counter power against the social order. Artists, actors, jocks, Muslims, Christians; everyone is invited to participate in TSU. At other campuses TSU has focused on spending cuts by the state to education, abuse of disciplinary actions towards students, exploitation of workers on campus, abuse of overseas workers making university apparel and creating a space to talk about the Iraq war.

To say the least, Elmhurst College has little in common with the schools where TSU has been successful. Whereas TSU has been the product of organizing larger state and private universities usually having 10,000 or more students staying on campus, Elmhurst College is a private commuter school with about 1,500 students staying on campus. The sticker price of our tuition is around 30,000, with the College quietly working with most students to make the outrageous price workable. Quiet is an appropriate adjective for Elmhurst College, it is in the heart of the quiet suburb of Chicago named Chicago. While it’s on the border of Cook County and a short 30 minutes from Lake Michigan, along with its neighboring suburbs, Elmhurst has been an exclusive refuge for the white flight from Chicago.

If “Rich Liberal” could be materialized as an entire campus, Elmhurst College would be a good candidate. Everything superficial about the 90’s “Multiculturalism” fetish is at Elmhurst College in spades. This is not to insult the sincerity of many in the faculty or administration who want to see a positive social change, but this biting critique is necessary if we are ever going to move forward. Our administration loves anything “multicultural;” music, events, speakers, and even has endorsed a move to expand the general curriculum to include some subversive classes. We loved and interned for Obama when he was only a small fry US and state senator. We are affiliated with UCC, Obama’s [former] church. Elmhurst College is Obamanation.

While our college makes sure every promotional photograph is exploding in diversity, it has stalled on reacting to key issues on campus, for example circulating the hate crime email response to last year’s hate crime on campus, for the hate crimes happening again this year. It has also done away with our minority based scholarship fund; instead, folding its money into “less controversial” scholarships that we have been told will not affect any current students receiving money, but the future is uncertain for prospective students.

Holding fast to the “white flight” mindset that helped populate suburbs like Elmhurst, Lombard, Glen Ellyn etc., our institution has largely maintained this arm’s length separation from the problems of “the city,” even though the problems of the city can also be found in the suburbs as well. Our Theology department and other programs at EC mandate student service as part of the course work in different charities but outside of these limited commitments that usually are tangent to a student’s future work at the university, there is little connection to outside community organizations and few relationships to broader social justice movements.

Conceiving Freedom Festival and Reflecting on the Need to Engage Social Spaces at Elmhurst College

“Activism” at Elmhurst College has largely been a few faculty, administration employees, and students working individually on different movement issues. Such individual work was usually constrained to academic investigations of problems, with little engagement with the student body at large or with those directly involved in struggles studied. Many “Activists,” including myself, spent the past few years narrowly viewing movement organizing as an individual effort, asking how could I contribute, what could I do to stop my participation in this corrupt system.

What these questions obscured was a problematic motivation for movement organizing, namely, the fact that many of us “Activists” were working for social justice because we felt guilty about our community and what it was doing to other communities. This led to a negative motivation for organizing that emphasized individual catharsis over social organizing; the mindset of, “I need to speak out to clear my conscience,” not “How I can mobilize the most people towards collective liberation.”

Hegemonic culture, or the collection of “accepted” norms of how people should act, what are “acceptable” expectations and responsibilities towards society etc., created this stigma about social justice organizing in an attempt to protect the dominant social order. Those questioning the social order are ostracized and their identity and self imaged stripped from them. You aren’t an athlete, hip-hop fan, a construction worker, a frat brother or anything other than an “Activist” to the hegemonic culture when you start talking about how to change society.

While many embrace the title of “Activist,” hegemonic culture has successfully exiled political discussion to the small and socially insignificant “Activist” subculture. “Activist” subculture has both non-violent, and violent tendencies, but both suffer from the same contradiction. Both tendencies elevate tactics and “action” over strategic mobilization because of the motivation to release guilt instead of identifying as part of the oppressed and a desire to attain liberation from the social order.

At Elmhurst College the contradictions of the “Activist” subculture has been the creation of a socially segregated community of students and faculty pursuing social justice. Student and faculty efforts have often been diverted into career and academic advancing projects that do not work to organize others into a counter power. Sparsely attended lectures, video screenings, and small demonstrations organized largely by word of mouth within the “activist community” for social justice causes are frequent on campus, which have helped to maintain a clear distinction between “activism” and the social life on campus.

Collectively as EC organizers we need to address our motivations of why we are involved in movement work in the first place. We don’t need to feel guilty about ourselves, most of us are in precarious economic situations as it is, and even those who aren’t are still victims of the social order. Even though we aren’t dying of preventable diseases or living in squalor, the price we have to pay for material security is our dignity and autonomy to work for some corporation or government office. Our personhood is too important to sacrifice on America’s alter; the only option is to resist and recognize our situation is the same, though not identical, to those who are fighting for their right to survive. This Revolutionary Democracy philosophy demands the solidarity given to equals instead of the charity given to our inferiors.

Part of the resolution of “Activism’s” contradictions is the reassertion of our sociability as organizers. No more can we accept the imposed division between the social and the political, we have to recognize that our political effort is a social effort. Our movement is more than a subculture and we have to be ready to engage others outside of it to build the relationships necessary to restructure society. In addition to being political organizers, we have to adopt the role of social organizers, creating and engaging in social spaces that we can mobilize towards building our own social order.

It was towards this recognition that Freedom Festival was created. Freedom Festival was to be an effort to outreach to a number of campus groups and create a social space where we could introduce our movement politics. Each group was asked to host their own event, and we lined up a night of music that was planned to be a three day outdoor festival.

Challenges Faced Building the First Annual Freedom Festival

EC Students for a Democratic Society, and EC Amnesty International have always been loose organizations and during this past school year met separately even though there was a significant overlap of members. Freedom Festival emerged first as a Tent State type event after winter break. After the break none of the groups were meeting and I threw up flyers with pictures of Rutgers Tent State, a mission statement and a gmail/blog for the event. Not only did these flyers not get any response to the gmail account, they alarmed the campus administration who ordered them taken down.

The failure of the first few weeks of Freedom Festival outreach was symbolic of some of the greater problems with Elmhurst College’s organizing. It took a series of events on campus to help SDS realize that however cool a flyer, however interesting a blog, these impersonal forms of outreach did not accomplish the level of mobilization we were looking for, even though such tasks could be rather labor intensive. Unfortunately we never effectively overhauled our organizing efforts during the spring semester but the relative success of the Freedom Festival was largely a result of these realizations.

Later in the semester EC SDS and AI began meeting, and Freedom Festival was introduced to the larger group, who thought it would be a good event to build towards and end the year with. It took a number of meetings to hash out exactly what Freedom Festival would be, which expanded the planning time to nearly a month and a half before others outside of the group were contacted about Freedom Festival. In retrospect, the planning period for Freedom Festival could have been compressed to a few weeks if those most interested in it could have met outside the weekly meetings.

Freedom Festival began to take shape as two days of events on the college mall sponsored by different campus groups, with a concert on the first night and with the third day being Mayday and a focus on freedom of movement. At this point we called for a larger meeting where we divvied up the other campus groups to contact and invite to this planning meeting. We were able to expand our coalition to new groups such as the Black Student Union, Progressive Organization of Women, HABLAMOS (Hispanic culture group), Spiritual Life Council and the Music Business Student Union.

Our planning meeting had a good turnout of around 15 people from different groups on campus, but was changed mid meeting to being dedicated to planning the Hate Crimes rally that was happening the next week. After about an hour the person planning the Hate Crimes rally had to leave, and most other people couldn’t stay much longer, leaving us with only enough people for a framing session for Freedom Festival. We had a few roles given out that were not well defined for people and most of the tasks were put off until after out spring break which was the week after the Hate Crimes rally, leaving us with a little more than a month to put together Freedom Festival.

Throughout the end of March, where we diverted some of our attention to anti-war organizing, and April, we gave presentations to different groups on campus about Freedom Festival and obtained their support, forming a large coalition on paper similar to our Jena 6 rally. Our approach was to get endorsements from different groups, try to help them brainstorm different events they could host on the campus mall during Freedom Festival, but leave the commitment on them to actually follow through on hosting the events.

Unfortunately, most campus groups that were not purely social clubs like fraternities or Union Board (the event hosting arm of student government), suffered from the same problems we encountered when holding political events because there was no social understanding of power. Similar to SDS, many groups were embodied by a small number of people who were in leadership roles, with a somewhat larger periphery membership. While identity based groups like BSU and HABLAMOS held well attended social events like dances or family celebrations that were well funded by the student government; when they engaged in political events like other groups on campus such as SDS, Coalition for Multicultural Empowerment, Progressive Organization of Women, and Amnesty International the attendance and energy plummeted.

The problem with having a small group of people in leadership positions is that the larger social networks that must be mobilized for a successful social movement are out of touch unless those in leadership positions happen to be extraordinarily social. At Elmhurst College, when these leadership positions were combined with organizational work, and in many cases academic work related to the organization, the leadership often became too busy to seriously engage these social networks even if they did recognize those networks’ importance. This doomed their groups to irrelevancy since those members on the periphery were not invested enough in the organization to seriously outreach to their social networks.

After spring break EC SDS and AI continued to organize for Freedom Festival, reserving the bands for the night of music, reserving the space, equipment and maintaining contact with a groups committed to the event. A number of members made flyers for the event and most buildings had a number of different flyer styles for the event, which may have helped raise Freedom Festival’s profile. We did not get an advertisement in the student paper due to the lack of time, but we did get announcements in the low readership campus email listserve.

I was the only member to my knowledge who handbilled for the event, handing out around 150 humorous flyers for Freedom Festival with Barack Obama proudly endorsing the “Audacity of Freedom Festival” on the flyer, along with a skeleton schedule of events. While more handbilling would have further built the profile of the event and the handbilling that was done was much more successful than flyers on walls alone, I found that it was not the silver bullet to mobilizing students.

Far and away the most effective way to turn people out to our events was the personal ask, which happened both during “official” meetings and also during social interactions outside of meetings. Talking to individuals at length about Freedom Festival and trying to obtain a commitment to show up was the most effective mobilization technique. While it was labor intensive and forced the organizer to expand their social network, it was much more worthwhile investment than fuddling around with flyers, websites, etc. We did not recognize the importance of personal interactions, and our turnout reflected the mixed success of our flyering, handbilling, bannering etc.

Arrival of Freedom Festival

Eventually Freedom Festival rolled around, and we were caught relatively unprepared for its arrival. The last two weeks we focused on different avenues for advertising, as well as scrambling for confirming events. Luckily our AI chapter secured the participation of the American Friends Service Committee with their empty boot cost of war display that we were able to set up on the first day of the festival. The bands and the catering was also taken care ahead of time, as well as the space for the events the second day.

Freedom Festival was held April 29^th-May 1^st, during what could be considered one of the coldest springs in recent memory. Our “outdoor” festival had snowflakes, making the few brave organizers manning tables for various groups and serving the food pretty miserable. The turnout for the daytime of the first day was limited to members of participating organizations, with most of the events promised by groups other than SDS and AI falling through. We were able to secure our basement student union area for the night time concert and moved downstairs during the afternoon.

Our concert was much more successful than the daytime events, even though the visual representation of the cost of the Iraq War was powerful, with a class of grade school children taking a field trip to visit our Freedom Festival. Around 100 people filtered through the five hour concert, with some great music and organic stir fry provided reluctantly from Chartwells, our (non-union) cafeteria service. We also had an SDS/AI member deliver a powerful spoken word performance.

The second day of Freedom Festival was planned to be intentionally light, but ended up being even lighter than the schedule intended. Only one of the participating groups actually held their planned events. We found out later that one of the groups that had endorsed Freedom Festival did have an event that day but was not a part of Freedom Festival, which was snub or a really bad breakdown of communication. Our reforming public education financing event had five people from local political circles come talk about resolving the huge financing disparities in Illinois but turnout was limited to a few organizers.

Mayday was a pleasant surprise for organizers, with a dozen students skipping class to take the train to Chicago and demonstrate for freedom of movement and amnesty for immigrants. The weather improved for the Mayday rally, and the energy was high throughout the rally. Tens of thousands came out to the rally in downtown Chicago, with SDS Chicago finally participating as a bloc. While we did walk close to the SDS bloc, and we were one of the best represented schools marching, most of the time we spent marching together as a school and getting to know each other better and reflecting on the events of the past two days. Our contingent had an awesome FREEDOM FESTIVAL two part banner made as a favor by a talented art student that got our pictures taken throughout the day.

Moving Forward to the Second Annual Freedom Festival

Freedom Festival next year already has an entire week reserved on the campus, and now has a reputation as one of the most successful events held on campus. If we are going to build on the success this year however, we need to adapt our organizing efforts around the lessons learned. We need to press much harder to create social spaces leading up to Freedom Festival where we can make the “personal asks” necessary to get people seriously involved in organizing. Instead of having a number of disconnected events held as reactions to tragedies like the Morton West sit-in expulsions, the Jena 6 indictments, or our hate crimes on campus, we need to build a sustainable movement that can harness the momentum around each of these events to build a counter power on campus.

Specifically we need to have our organizers embedded in the larger social life of the college. Instead of regarding partying or socializing as something separate from political activity, we need to integrate it into our political organizing, we need to be at the parties talking about how we can change the world, and we need to be throwing our own parties, barbeques, bowling nights etc. to build a well-connected community and expand our subcultural past and overcome the challenges thrown at us by our hegemonic culture.

Many organizers, including myself, failed to accomplish the responsibilities taken on in a complete or timely manner, including compiling essential contact lists, and establishing formal means of communication with campus groups. As a first priority our SDS chapter needs to build an expansive contact list, with people’s names, numbers, emails, organizational affiliations and interests so we can maintain contact and encourage people to fulfill their responsibilities in a timely and complete fashion. Learning how to keep meetings productive with low attendance would help maintain the energy in organizing even when circumstances prevent some organizers from attending. Being punctual and thorough with following up with people will help us build commitments from individuals to SDS and AI and will encourage those in the periphery to join us in the leadership and expand the social networks we can mobilize for events.

In addition we need to change our engagement with different groups on campus. While talking to organizational leaders was a good first step in building a coalition on campus, it did not yield any results for Freedom Festival as the participating groups near universally failed to live up to their commitments. SDS should take the same approach to building coalitions as it should towards building its own social power. Interacting with a small number of organizational leaders in overly formal contexts did not build the necessary relationships to have them fulfill their commitments, or get such leaders to mobilize their social networks towards Freedom Festival’s goals. We need to identify the social networks that these organizations exist in, and then attempt to interact in social contexts with these organizations’ members and build relationships so we can make the all important “personal asks.”

While this organizing strategy may seem overly labor intensive, and may ring inauthentic at forcing oneself into other’s social networks, it is neither. Not only is this strategy less labor intensive then people working themselves to death making organizational material that is less effective at mobilizing people, it is much more authentic to outreach to people using the most effective means possible rather than treating “activism” as a hobby to release guilt where actual results are irrelevant. Only through an understanding of power as a factor of social relationships can we effectively deconstruct the power of the social order and build our own counter power. Towards this effort, building social spaces like Freedom Festival will continue to be essential, and hopefully analyses such as this one will continue to help improve the success of our organizing.

Cooperative Chicago

Forty years ago the Black Panthers drafted the Ten Point Program; a survival platform designed to build a foundation towards a revolutionary future. The Program demanded that basic needs be fulfilled, and importantly, that decent employment be provided to the people. Forty years later employment remains a pressing demand. Today we need a revolutionary vision on how to generate employment.

To date, the left has largely ignored the issue of creating employment. Generating employment in many communities has been left in the hands of predatory capitalists; the Wal-Marts, the polluting industries that have been rejected everywhere else, the day labor agencies etc. As a movement we have failed to recognize how employment can affect communities and their potential to organize and overcome oppression.

Communities suffering from unemployment, underemployment and poor employment degenerate into concrete jungles. Employment provides economic stability for families; in the absence of such stability it is nearly impossible to successfully organize for change. Without communal stability movements decay from opportunistic survival behavior; selling drugs, silence at the workplace, joining a gang or the military etc.

The failure of Chicago’s campaign to oppose Wal-Mart’s entry was instructive. If our movement is to be successful it must provide a program to meet the basic needs of communities. We must continue to oppose Wal-Mart but we must expand beyond opposition campaigns.

Green Cooperative Incubator

Incubators are institutions that promote entrepreneurship and help existing businesses overcome a variety of challenges. Incubators have traditionally been used as collaborations between universities, their graduates, and local government to promote hi-tech business development. Such collaborations position us as students to use our universities to promote employment in underemployed communities and to bring the benefits of green technology to fruition. Whereas most incubators favor upper and middle class managers to start small businesses, a socially oriented incubator would promote entrepreneurship from all backgrounds and would promote a cooperative model of organization, anchoring the profits and ownership of the enterprise in Chicago.

Cooperative development models have been applied in Mondragon in Spain, Emilia Romanga in Italy, Venezuela, and a variety of other areas around the world. They have shown the viability of economic cooperatives as a tool to generate employment and empower communities. We can learn from these models and adapt a plan using resources available to us in Chicago.

Mondragon Cooperative Corporation

Mondragon is an inspiring example of how worker cooperatives can create an economy from the ground up. The Basque region of Spain was devastated after Franco’s vicious assault during the Spanish civil war, and was punished by the central government for being one of the last provinces to submit to fascist rule. After the creation of a technical school in Mondragon during the early 1950s, five students and the founder of the school, a priest named Don Jose Maria, began a stove making company named ULGOR premised on the cooperative principles espoused by Don Jose Maria. ULGOR proved successful and by 1959 it required more capital, prompting Maria to visit door to door to raise capital for a cooperative bank, also know as the Caja bank.

As a student of cooperatives, Maria knew that cooperatives tended to become isolated and disintegrate after some generations of workers. The Mondragon project was intended to rebuild the Basque region and to generate employment, therefore as Mondragon expanded, each enterprise remained networked with each of the others. A Congress of Cooperatives established ground rules for the cooperatives to operate under, and also served to help restructure and bail out struggling enterprises. This approach has created significant results with only one failed enterprise out of over 150 enterprises within the Mondragon network (the usual failure rate for start up businesses is around 50%).

The lessons of Mondragon are that a network of enterprises is stronger than single lone standing enterprises. The Caja bank has also served to anchor the economic cooperatives by providing financing capital improvements, and has served to concentrate the assets of the workers who are required to deposit their money in a Caja account.

Emilia Romanga

Emilia Romanga is a region in Northern Italy that was also devastated by WWII and was liberated by the Italian communist partisans. It has been rebuilt through the dynamic policies of the Italian Communist Party. The ICP emphasized small businesses and cooperatives. The region now has 325,000 firms with a population of 4 million people, one of the highest firm ownership per capita rates in the world.

Small businesses and cooperatives have been promoted by the Communist Party through the sale of capital and land taken through the equivalent of eminent domain. The local government has also established incubators or service centers, where firms can loan time shares on expensive equipment that couldn’t be purchased on an individual level. Similar to the Caja bank the cooperative movement has an associated financial institution named Legacoop, one of the largest financial institutions in Italy. Many of the businesses emerged after spinning off of other businesses, with employees from one company creating a spinoff company to supply their former employer with inputs. This had led to one of the most dynamic economies in Europe, rated in the top ten most prosperous areas in the entire European Union.

Creating a Cooperative Economy in Chicago

Every campaign has a strategy that applies focused pressure on selected actors. As students we can pressure out universities to participate in an incubator by dedicating funding and faculty to identify market opportunities for cooperatives, and also to dedicate research towards technology for use by the cooperative enterprises. Many schools already have programs toward environmental and sustainable business, which can be used to generate institutional support for a cooperative incubator. More important than the actual monetary contributions of the universities would be the ability to access social networks available through the university. For example, presentations could be made to finance incubator projects through alumni, financial institutions with close relationships to the university, political contacts for grant money etc.

We can also pressure aldermen to obtain local government support. Significant support can be gained from the city with directed political pressure, from TIFF programs, small business loans to outright grants. The political capital behind entrepreneurship and greening efforts in Chicago can definitely be leveraged to gain the ears and even the cooperation of Chicago’s City Council without ruffling the feathers of the mayor.

Our incubator would generate business plans for cooperatives and work with entrepreneurs to help with start up challenges. In addition, these first generation cooperatives could be a useful tool for helping to establish a revolutionary political organization. Employment from these new enterprises could allow organizers to have the personal financial stability necessary for successful organizing efforts.

Green economy market opportunities will continue to expand for cooperatives; from installing green home improvements to manufacturing and installing wind turbines to building emissions free or low emissions vehicles. A green cooperative incubator can distill these opportunities into actionable business plans and provide the sound guidance to help ensure the success of the new enterprises. Universities can be changed from research institutions for war criminals like Boeing into partners providing important technical expertise for cooperative economic development. The green worker cooperatives created can anchor communities and create the stability necessary to build a revolutionary movement.

If the idea of a green incubator interests you, contact Nick Kreitman at mrsituationist@gmail.com and become involved in Solidarity, a proposed green entrepreneurship program dedicated to making a green cooperative economy a reality.