Chattanooga

Only about an hour drive from Knoxville, the day I presented in Chattanooga allowed for a real slow day to drive and hang out with the host of the Chattanooga stop. This turned out to be a great opportunity to learn a bunch about the history of the city and the context of current social movements there.

This stop was coordinated by a man that is well connected to a number of other great organizers in town. The talk had about 15 people attend, and they were nearly all organizers involved in a variety of efforts in the city. Two social movement groups present were particularly well represented. Chattanooga Organized for Action is an organization that works to help develop the power and organization of everyday people from marginalized and oppressed communities.  Their efforts to organize alongside tenants in public housing was particularly exciting to me as it related to past efforts of Buffalo Tenants United. Their model of offering their efforts and resources as a catalyst to help with the development of organizations of marginalized and oppressed peoples' was itself a model that I think deserves a lot of thought and attention. Concerned Citizens for Justice also had a number of members in the room. CCJ was partly founded by Lorenzo Kom'boa Ervin before he moved to Memphis and were really excited about the success of a recent march against the acquittal of George Zimmerman. CCJ also does work towards the direct organizing and empowerment of marginalized and oppressed communities and were having some great conversations about potential upcoming campaigns with public housing tenants while I was there. There were also some members of the Freedom Road Socialist Organization there who seemed to mostly be engaged in CCJ. They had been pretty heavily involved in trips to Jackson to help with the election of Chokwe Lumumba. Leaving here I was hopeful to spend some time in Jackson, Mississippi to see what the situation there was like on the ground.

The presentation itself went far better than the stop in Knoxville. I felt more confident and tried to squeeze in less information. Also, the entire room had a fairly strong working knowledge of anarchism and class struggle anarchism specifically. It seems like there is a strong group of a few people there that would be interested in forming a local anarchist organization, given the right resources and support. A lot of the conversation after the presentation focused on details about the growing nationwide anarchist organization. Some of the questions I was in a position to answer based off of our ratified constitution. Some of the questions were unanswerable, as they have not been collectively figured out yet.

Because many people in the room were organizers, the notion and importance of especifismo wasn't hard to pass on to them. Many were radicals involved in broader movements alongside reformist and more moderate elements.

The day I was in Chattanooga, the front page article of the paper was also one of the most absurd stories I had ever seen. Apparently Volkswagen is planning to expand an auto-factory that they have in the area. But, VW has said they would only make this expansion if the factory would be represented by the United Auto Workers as a closed union shop. Amazingly, conservative activists on the ground were coordinating efforts to sop the expansion by VW and the creation of many jobs in the area because of the expectation that those jobs would be union! Apparently in the South it isn't necessary for the right wing to couch their anti-unionism in anything at all. Just outright anti-unionism even in the face of a business that wants the union there and the promise of creating lots of jobs. Just amazing.