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.

Knoxville

Yesterday was the first presentation of the Building Revolutionary Anarchism tour, and honestly it didn't go great from my end. It's been about 2 years since the last time I did this presentation, and I really came into the conversation feeling like I didn't need any serious preparation. The presentation ended up being a bit scattered, and probably tried to make too many points in one sitting.

There were some good folks there though. It was scheduled for midday on Saturday at a space called The Birdhouse. This space seemed like a sort of eclectic little spot. There was a art and music show being prepared in the background while the presentation took place. There were 8 people there, and a couple that didn't have much of a base-line understanding of anarchism. So, there was some need to do a brief introduction to anarchism. I gave the introduction, but it was probably a little too brief, as there was a lot of ground to cover with the more in-depth organizational conversations.

Many of the people in the room seemed to identify anti-mountain top removal activism as the major form of organizing happening in the Knoxville area. So many of the people there had an affinity for a sort of "green anarchism", which I always have a hard time with. Sometimes this term is used to identify as anarchists who focus their organizing efforts in the environmental movements and other times it means an affinity for anarcho-primitivism.  It seemed to mean a little of both in Knoxville.

It also seemed as though the term anarchism wasn't very frequently used in Knoxville. The smaller group had a some what mixed batch of anarchist ideas among them and they seemed fairly disconnected from the nationwide anarchist discussions. Although there were a few people that certainly seemed interested in keeping up with the formation of a nationwide organization and that may be interested in developing a local group.

On arrival I didn't actually know who exactly was my personal contact when I came into town, and didn't even know if I'd have a place to stay for the night. But, the people that came to the event were very hospitable. After asking the group if anyone could put me up, one couple immediately offered a place at their house and then showed me a fun night on the town too. Through one of them, I was also able to meet a local activist with Jobs with Justice and union postal worker.

I was glad to find a connection to local economic justice work, as Knoxville was pretty apparently poor and segregated. I don't want to diminish the importance of anti-mountaintop removal work, but just to highlight that it was pretty noticeable that I didn't make much connection with anti-poverty or union organizers while in Knoxville.

New York City and Fast Food Workers!

The first stop of the Building a Revolutionary Anarchism Speaking Tour isn't until Saturday the 20th in Knoxville, Tennessee. I had hoped for stops at Wooden Shoes Books in Philadelphia and Red Emma's in Baltimore. But, I think the details for the tour went out a little too late for those dates to get put together.

This gives me some time to stop by New York City and visit some friends. A couple of those friends work for New York Communities for Change, one organizing tenants and the other organizing fast food workers for the Fast Food Forward campaign.

That campaign has some exciting moments coming up. A third strike of New York fast food workers is planned for July 29th. While in NYC I was able to attend a meeting of organizers and workers that was one of many meetings throughout the day helping to plan and build for the strike. They also used these moments as opportunities to talk about the strategy of their work and do some base level political education with some of the fast food workers present.

They've clearly got a strong intention of having their activities reach hundreds, even thousands of fast food workers in the city. Their first strike had around 100 participants, their second around 400, and they were calling for around 1,000 to participate in the third day of strikes.

As a former restaurant worker, who spent a decent amount of time in a Pizza Hut, this is incredibly exciting work to me. In 2008, I attended a Restaurant Opportunities Center conference around their efforts to build a nationwide worker center of restaurants. There were some things that bothered me there. Firstly, it didn't seem like there was unanimity within the organization that their aim was to eventually form a union for all restaurant workers. Second, there was a strategic focus on higher-end restaurants as the drivers of industrial standards. I don't know the argument for them being the drivers of those standards, so that might actually be a very good strategy. Unfortunately for me, I was working in a little cheap diner. I wasn't the sort of worker they were organizing, especially in a city where they didn't have an established office and line of funding.

Since fast food seems to represent the floor in terms of working standards, benefits, pay, and job security in the US, it seems like an important place to see serious workplace organizing despite how difficult this work would be.

Had you asked me 4 years ago if we'd see a movement of fast food workers organizing in their workplaces in multiple cities around the country, I'd have laughed at you. But, not only are we there, these workers are demanding a union for all fast food workers, $15/hr starting wage, and are striking to demand recognition rather than relying on the awful NLRB election process. This is an exciting moment, and I was glad to participate in the meeting of those workers beginning to build their strike for the 29th.

I hope that all fast food workers will go out in solidarity on that day, and that anarchists throughout the country will also support those efforts!

Action for Action's Sake: Or How Activists Can Hurt Social Justice Movements

Note: Obviously I'm not keeping up this blog anymore. But, I've recently found this article I wrote back in 2007, before going to Argentina. It's come up in a couple of conversations with organizers I used to work with in college. So, I'm posting it partly so anyone out there can read it, and mostly so that I can keep better track of what I've written!

Action for Action’s Sake

Or How Activists Can Hurt Social Justice Movements

By Colin O’Malley 

January 2007

            It’s January 2007, despite 4 years of massive protest, President Bush has said that he is the sole decision maker in the ongoing occupation of Iraq. He says that even the disagreement of congress would not deter him. As part of the movement against this war, I think it is important that we now consider our path forward with a bit more depth than we have in the past. But the peace movement isn’t the only progressive force in our society that is under attack. Workers rights are being destroyed by the minute in the new global economy. Prisons are being built at new and astonishing rates. Democratic controls of our communities are falling apart. But, it isn’t all lost.

As such, I write this appeal to local and national organizations. More importantly I write this for new activists of new movements in the hopes that we can learn to build a resistance movement in the United States to take our nation back.

Philosophy of Futility

In building grassroots movements, we are faced with a need to develop and activate the power of communities that are withheld power in our society. We do this in hopes of changing the course of those in power, to assert a people’s perspective over those in power, or even to overturn the structures that creates those with power and those without. In building our own communities collective power, we mobilize, and are forced to ask the question: What motivates our community to action?

            The left, particularly the academic left, in the United States seems to have assumed an answer – knowledge motivates. We need to educate people about our issues and the problems inherent in our society to get them motivated. It seems with this method of motivation that we are trying to activate people disconnected from the issues at hand.  Or even worse, that we are coming to teach the poor about poverty, the war torn family of the problems with war, the disenfranchised and marginalized of their own lack of power.

            Acknowledging a variety of reasons that people do or don’t get involved, I believe our major roadblock is the philosophy of futility. This philosophy is a belief that we are already defeated, that there is no alternative. This belief pushes us away from taking action in the defense of our own communities. It stops us from fighting the injustices around us and teaches us to accept them. Even more insidiously, it demonstrates that knowledge of our own oppression is worthless -- or at the very least depressing as hell!

            So, if our own powerlessness and futile outlook on the world keeps us from action, then our previously mentioned method of motivation seems particularly useless, even harmful. We are working to reinforce our own powerlessness and strengthen the philosophy of futility. This is why I believe that action for action’s sake doesn’t build us an effective resistance. Just because you’re doing something doesn’t mean that you’re helping anything.  We’ve all heard it before – the road to hell was paved on good intentions. That isn’t to say that we should stop or slow down our action. Instead, we need to consider more carefully the way we act. If our own sense of powerlessness is what holds us back, then what can we do to move forward? 

Breaking Free

If the main roadblock to building serious social justice movements in this country is a simple philosophy that each of us has internalized, that means that we have the ability to break free. But, this means that we need to reconsider the basis of our movements and organizations. Rather than looking at our organizations as tools to show people how horrible the world around them really is, we need to use them to show that victory is possible. Our movement needs to offer a road to that victory, even if it’s a long road.

            This of course means that we as activists need to envision that road as well. In their recently made article “Building a Successful Anti-War Movement” Beyond the Choir does an excellent job of articulating a need for strategic planning and action:  “Taking action with a faith in the possibility that we may somehow end the war is very different from taking action with a strategy about how to do it. The former is a shot in the dark. The latter is a hard target, but one we’re likely to get closer to with more practice.”  Building this strategy is where our movements should focus. 

            What exactly do I mean by strategic planning and action? In short, this means that we need to be less obsessed with tactics, and more concerned with the goal of a particular tactic. We can develop goals by considering the support that a particular oppressive structure, or symptom of that structure, needs to continue its existence.  We then consider how we can isolate and deprive that structure of its support, rather than continuing to shoot in the dark hoping that politicians and corporations are suddenly going to care for public opinion more than profit and power. 

This also means training. Building our movements isn’t always intuitive. We should always be open to learning and refining our strategic plans. There are dozens of organizations that provide these trainings specifically for social justice groups – beyond the choir, the Midwest academy, and the ruckus society to name just a few.  Find them and build on your base of well-trained and experienced activists and work with them to constantly train new activists.

Let’s fill it with hope.

            In the end, can our movements survive if they don’t have a passion and hope that eventually we will win? Any experienced and committed activist I’ve ever met had some amount of hope that a more just world could be obtained. Otherwise, why would we even involve ourselves in these struggles? But, so often our messaging is fatalist, or our attitude shows how burnt out we are in the fight. Who would join such a movement? Who would aspire to be burnt out and overworked? We absolutely must build a movement that doesn’t hold these defeatist slogans to be a part of our work. We need to build a movement that excites, empowers and builds hope for a better future. I for one think we’re capable of that and more.

 

Buffalo Class Action Participates in Class Struggle Anarchist Conference

In Detroit, on October 24-25, the organized North American anarchist movement met at the 2009 Class Struggle Anarchist Conference. The second annual conference brought together 9 different anarchist organizations that work to engage within mass movements to help provide a revolutionary anarchist perspective. In part, the conference was a space for these organizations to talk about the possibilities of a future unified anarchist organization throughout North America that could help to broaden a struggle against capitalism and for a world where every day people control the resources in their community and workers control their workplaces.

Members from Buffalo’s local anarchist-communist organization, Buffalo Class Action, participated in the conversations. They attended with an interest in learning from some of the longer-lasting anarchist organizations, their successes and challenges. These local anarchists also went with the purpose of spreading the idea of City Wide Tenants’ Unions beyond their efforts to organize such a group here in Buffalo.

At the conference they met members of many other anarchist organizations. Those organizations involved in planning the conference were: Solidarity and Defense (Michigan), Common Action (Pacific Northwest), Common Cause (Ontario), Four Star Anarchist Organization (Chicago), Miami Autonomy and Solidarity, Michigan-Minnesota Group, Northeast Federation of Anarchist Communists, and the Worker Solidarity Alliance.

There were many discussions about the future of movements of marginalized peoples in North America, and how anarchists can constructively work within those movements to help develop genuine, long-term peoples’ power. Some of the specific workshops were: Anarchists in the Struggle for Housing Justice, Worker Center Movements, Building Anarchist Groups, Intersectional Class Struggle Anarchism, Anarchists & the Workplace, Queer Anarchism, Internal Education, and the questions of Re-grouping the North American anarchist movement.

After the conference, it has become clear that there are now great ties growing between these different organizations and their efforts. There was great hope at the conference that this type of gathering can really help to bring together the organized, class struggle-oriented anarchist movement to spread their ideas, increase the influence of anarchist ideas within North American social movements, and develop a solid alternative to the regular injustices poor and marginalized people face in today’s world.

Buffalo Indymedia Center Has Returned!

With hopes of rebuilding a community-based, social justice media outlet in Buffalo a public forum for the rebirth of Buffalo Indymedia was recently organized. A panel discussion with presenters from Rochester Indymedia, a former Bay Area Indymedia editor, and Buffalo activists began a powerful conversation about the possibilities and challenges that lie in the road ahead for local media activists.

Hannah Dobbz, from Pittsburgh, spoke about her involvement in the Bay Area Indymedia newspaper Fault Lines and the importance it had in garnering attention to local activist efforts. Andy Dillon and Ted Forsyth from Rochester Indymedia shared their experiences with Indy TV and a their work on distributing a print version of much of their website content. Local activists Joe Schmidbauer and Colin O'Malley talked of their inspiration to re-build local Indymedia in a way that would challenge the official story of those in power and help to build the voice of everyday people and their movements.

In coming years, Buffalo Indymedia hopes to build that voice in the region and report those stories that effect people's lives in huge ways that are often left unreported by local and national corporate media outlets. There was some discussion about the possibilities of not only maintaining the website, but also working on radio, print, and film efforts for Buffalo IMC. If you'd like to get involved in Buffalo IMC, you can register and begin writing and commenting on stories immediately on this site. To get further involved, or to inform the organizing group of an important story, please contact them at BuffaloIMC@gmail.com

Tenants' Union: Fight your landlord and win

Decent housing should be an absolute right for all people. But, we continue to live in a world that homelessness, evictions of the poor, and degrading housing conditions are all too common. At the same time, we see abandoned housing left to rot. This should convince us that our housing problems come not from a lack of resources, but from a poor distribution of those resources. As is the problem with so many facets of our lives, housing is organized for private profit and not for people’s common needs. The only way for us to change these problems is to organize together and demand it. But, who do we organize and how? And, who is the enemy?

Who is the landlord?

For most working class people, owning our home isn’t a possibility and we’re often forced into a housing market with large landlords. Just as often, the tenants and the landlords have conflicting sets of interests. While we’re simply trying to hold onto a basic necessity of life, landlords hope to gain a profit from us. Sadly, the interests of the landlords are usually dominant, thanks to a system of legal and government support rarely enjoyed by tenants.

Supposedly, we have a choice. We can live wherever we’d like – if we can afford it. So the “choice” offered to those of us that live in or near poverty is between a variety of bad housing situations and homelessness. This is obviously not a choice, but a threat. Where can you go to leave an unfair housing market? Our life experiences repeatedly tell us: “You will take whatever horrible standards your income can afford, or you will have nothing.”

Not all working class people are renters and many in poor cities, have managed to buy their own home. While at times, we may rent out a room or floor of our house, we generally have more in common with tenants than the large landlords. Homeowners are very often tenants themselves of the largest of landlords – the banks. Even if the mortgage has been paid, working class homeowners occupy a very small and isolated part of the housing market, where much larger landlords have real control. These homeowners may be in a more comfortable immediate position. But, they’re also in a very precarious situation and could easily lose their home in any number of ways.

On the other hand large landlords own apartment buildings or dozens of houses throughout the city. They use our basic need for housing as a tool to create profits, often massive, for themselves. Their interest is to make the greatest possible profit for themselves. That means keeping repairs to a minimum and charging as much rent as they believe they can.

Having little power individually, renters are often on the losing end of this conflict. Homelessness, evictions, and poor living standards are clear signs of our current weak position.

Tenant Power

The beauty of our situation, is that collectively we have far greater power than our landlords. Our rent is the source of their wealth. For them to continue their life of luxury without work they need us to continue living in their apartments, continue paying their rent, and keep accepting the living conditions that they choose for us. Our landlords are absolutely reliant upon us. They rely on the hope that we will never understand our true strength.

The power of the working class has the same limits in the struggle for decent and affordable housing as it does in the workplace – it’s collective. When we struggle alone in isolation the landlord has nearly absolute power. Our power is only real power when we get together with others in similar situations and organize for justice.

Tenants Union

Just as we would organize in our workplace against exploitative bosses, we propose the organization of a Citywide Tenants’ Union to organize our power to assert that decent, affordable housing is a right for all people. A City Wide Tenants’ Union should commit itself to organize all tenants of the large landlords in our city to aggressively demand our necessary rights to good quality housing. The tools of a serious Tenants’ Union are incredibly powerful:

Public Pressure: Through rallies, media events, and public meetings we can hurt the image of our landlords. A bad public image can hurt their ability to find new renters and force public demand for investigations of the conditions in their properties.
Eviction Blockades: In the case that any of the members of the tenants’ union are being unjustly evicted or evicted in retaliation for their organizing efforts, other members of the union should organize a blockade of that member’s house or apartment. With the tenants’ union, the normally disempowering experience of being evicted becomes a show of the power of solidarity. The act that we usually suffer in isolation becomes a moment of true community as serious attention is brought to the eviction.
Direct Action: In the case that our organized public pressure doesn’t solve the problems that we are having with our landlords, we could target them more aggressively by actively disrupting their ability to continue business. Occupation of company offices and disrupting the visits of new tenants are a couple of possibilities that may force our landlords to listen our demands.
Rent Strike: The greatest source of our power with landlords is actually one of the easiest for us to use. A collective refusal to pay rent until demands are met should bring even the most abusive landlords to the table. If an individual were to refuse to pay rent, the landlord would have an easy time fighting back. But when all of their tenants refuse to pay rent, they quickly find themselves outmatched.
Solidarity: An injury to one is an injury to all. When we begin to fight our landlords, we have to know that we aren’t doing so alone, and this is the purpose of our union. Having a Tenant Union would mean that none of us struggle in isolation. Just because one group of tenants has won a fight against their landlord doesn’t mean that they are no longer part of the struggle. They will provide resources, experience, and volunteers to the effort of organizing other renters throughout the city.

Landlords Need Us, We Don’t Need Them

In the struggle against our landlords, there is one important realization. Our landlords don’t do anything for us that we aren’t capable of doing for ourselves. We are more than capable of organizing ourselves to make repairs and maintain the buildings where we live. There are cooperative housing associations throughout the world that show us proof of our ability to live without landlords. So, if we can organize ourselves to maintain our housing needs, what do landlords do? That is exactly the point. Landlords exist purely to take rent from us.

As we develop true power as renters, we will realize that the real battle is for a system of housing that recognizes our right to decent, affordable place to live no matter what. This means getting rid of a world of for-profit housing. No one should exploit a system of vulgar inequality to create massive profits from our need to survive. We know that these inequalities will only exist as long as we permit them. So let’s begin the struggle for just housing today!