From time to time we have to reevaluate the things we hold most dear, the things we cherish, and the things we have come to ‘know’ as infallible fact. This process of self-reflection is one of the most difficult processes because it pushes us to be self-critical and self-perceptive. In a society that often worships the individual (i.e. individual wealth, individual achievement, and individual aggrandizement) self-reflection and self-criticism are celebrated far too sparsely.
The significance of self-reflection and self-criticism holds many parallels in the groups that we constitute. Much as in the individual case, it is imperative to constantly reevaluate the things that we have come to hold as unmovable truth. These lessons about reflection, self-questioning, and self-critique, are particularly important when the groups that we are a part of, are organizations that are committed to social, economic, and political change.
Many groups that are supposed to be organizing for radical economic, social, and political change have gotten mired in comfortable patterns of organizing responses, writing grant proposals for large grants from foundations, critiquing other groups about their small (and often insignificant) differences in analysis and approach, building organizational hierarchies that reflect the white supremacist, sexist, and hetero-normative tendencies of the US more generally, and working on a host of inane projects that don’t build power.
While I understand that many of these ruts that we find ourselves in are a reflection of the significant and growing power of what many on the Left call the non-profit industrial complex[i] , I am not willing to resign our organizing models, methods, and actions to the alluring power of non-profit status and foundation funding. We need to begin to reflect on our work and its impact and we need to reevaluate the ways in which the models we use contradict the values and goals to which we aspire. If we don’t, it’s very likely that all of our organizing efforts will remain in the same hard-spun ruts we’ve been in since the rise of Cointelpro, Reagan, and the Prison State.
From reading these words, this probably seems like a gigantic and indigestible task, since I AM calling for the reevaluation of our most basic units of organizing resistance. But never fear, there are important lessons available from other places, contexts, and times. Most basically, the ingenious work of Paulo Freire, the Brazilian teacher and organizer, who taught thousands of Brazilian peasants to read by reflecting with them on the problems they faced as poor peasants, is instructive. Paulo Freire based his model of organizing and pedagogy on what he termed a critical praxis. That is reflection coupled with action, and back around again to reflection. Freire’s model, while tailored to its Brazilian context, has important lessons. Prmarily, Freire realized that we couldn’t just accept the ruts that we’ve dug ourselves into or that we’ve been placed into by outside forces. Freire recognized that to organize resistance effectively, we had to be self-reflective, i.e. we had to question what we are doing, why we are doing it, and to what outcome we are aspiring, if we were to truly organize a democratic resistance.
Freire’s lessons call into question our organization for organization sake, non-profitization for comfort, and foundation pandering for ease. While I’m not suggesting that these aren’t sometimes helpful and effective tools, I am saying that we can’t afford to continue building groups under these sorts of models unreflective of the consequences. We also can’t afford not to build organizations that are outside of these models. As Ruth Gilmore reminds us in the aforementioned Incite! anthology, we are going to have to sometimes (and my opinion, most often) operate in the shadow of the shadow-state, meaning we have to operate inside and outside of the non-profit model simultaneously.
In a similar vein of reflection, we should be drawing on our foremother Ella Baker for inspiration. Ella Baker’s model of organizing wasn’t trapped in the hierarchal mode in which so many of her contemporaries and our contemporaries were and are trapped. When Baker was helping to organize the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, she didn’t allow her age and expertise to lull her into believing she had all of the answers. Baker respected the expertise of the students with whom she was working and they came to respect her expertise as an older and more seasoned organizer. Ella Baker also recognized that good organizing had a substantial reflective component. She realized that groups with democratic intentions that did not self-reflect and self-evaluate would be doomed to spinning aimlessly in the mud. Our organizations could learn much from Baker’s self-reflective, democratizing approaches. We might question the fact that many of our organizations look eerily similar to the hierarchies that dominate our society more generally. We might question the fact that ‘experts’ in grant writing and public speaking come to be the ones with a majority of the limited power in our organizations. We might question our operating modes.
Another group that I think we could learn important lessons from is the Zapatista Movement in the state of Chiapas in Southern México. There are many lessons that the Zapatistas can teach, but one of the most important is to just not give a fuck! The Zapatistas, who have been organizing resistance among Indigenous communities in Chiapas for many years organize with the clear goal of liberation for the Indigenous peoples of that part of México and for the world’s majority. They have never, nor (let’s hope) will they ever pander to any government or foundation for support. They often get support from foundations in the United States, but they never change their models for organizing or end goals or methods for anyone’s money. The Zapatistas get a large portion of their money from things that they make and sell.
This stance is vitally important for peoples organizing in the belly of the beast. We cannot expect that the Ford Foundation is going to fund revolutionary activity. We cannot expect that other similar organizations are going to fund threats to global capital. We have to recognize that there are MANY contradictions in asking the police for a permit to protest police brutality! We have to, in some respects, just not give a fuck. We may not get money from the Ford Foundation, but perhaps fundraising among the people we’re organizing is more helpful to our cause in the first place. We may get shut out of 501c3 status, but perhaps being a non-profit hinders us from doing the work we need to be doing.
So let us start to reflect on what is not going so well and what is flawed in the organizing that we are doing. Let’s organize and make self-reflection and evaluation a central part of that process. Viva la victoria siempre!
[i] For a great analysis of the power and influence of foundation money and the non-profitization of our organizations on the paths and fights we choose, see The Revolution Will Not be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex by Incite! or the Incite! website at http://www.incite-national.org/index.php?s=100.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment