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Building the Institutions for Revolt
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/building_the_institutions_for_revolt_201
70115/
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Posted on Jan 15, 2017
By Chris Hedges
Mr. Fish / Truthdig
Politics is a game of fear. Those who do not have the ability to make power
elites afraid do not succeed. All of the movements that opened up the
democratic space in America-the abolitionists, the suffragists, the labor
movement, the communists, the socialists, the anarchists and the civil
rights movement-developed a critical mass and militancy that forced the
centers of power to respond. The platitudes about justice, equality and
democracy are just that. Only when power becomes worried about its survival
does it react. Appealing to its better nature is useless. It doesn't have
one.
We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions-the press,
labor unions, third political parties, civic and church groups, public
broadcasting, well-funded public universities and a liberal wing of the
Democratic Party-that were capable of responding to outside pressure from
movements. They did so imperfectly. They provided only enough reforms to
save the capitalist system from widespread unrest or, with the breakdown of
capitalism in the 1930s, from revolution. They never addressed white
supremacy and institutional racism or the cruelty that is endemic to
capitalism. But they had the ability to address and ameliorate the suffering
of working men and women.
These liberal institutions-I spend 248 pages in my book "Death of the
Liberal Class"
(http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=131166027)
explaining how this happened-collapsed under sustained assault during the
past 40 years of corporate power. They exist now only in name. They are
props in the democratic facade. Liberal nonprofits, from MoveOn
(http://front.moveon.org/about/#.WHwG5FzRHfY ;) to the Sierra Club, are no
better. They are pathetic appendages to the Democratic Party. And the
Democratic Party, as the community organizer Michael Gecan said, is not a
functioning political party but "a permanent mobilization." It is propped up
with corporate money and by a hyperventilating media machine. It practices
political coronations and manipulates voters, who have no real say in party
politics. There are, as the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin
(http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/sheldon_wolin_and_inverted_totalitarian
ism_20151101 ) reminded us, no institutions left in America that can
authentically be called democratic.
But, even more ominously, the militant movements that were the real engines
of democratic change have been obliterated by the multi-pronged assault of
communist witch hunts and McCarthyism, along with deindustrialization, a
slew of anti-labor laws and deregulation, and corporate seizure of our
public and private institutions. This has left us nearly defenseless.
The corporate state ignores the suffering of the majority of Americans. It
rams through policies that make the suffering worse. This is about to get
turbocharged under Donald Trump. Institutions, the courts among them, that
once were able to check the excesses of power are slavish subsidiaries of
corporate power. And the most prescient critics of corporate power-Noam
Chomsky, Ralph Nader and others-have been blacklisted and locked out by
corporate media, including a public broadcasting system that depends on
corporate money.
We will have to build movements and, most importantly, new, parallel
institutions that challenge the hegemony of corporate power. It will not be
easy. It will take time. We must not accept foundation money and grants from
established institutions that seek to curtail the radical process of
reconstituting society. Trusting in the system, and especially the
Democratic Party, to carry out reform and wrest back our democracy ensures
our enslavement.
"Power is organized people and organized money," Gecan told me when I
interviewed him
(http://www.truthdig.com/avbooth/item/chris_hedges_talks_with_michael_gecan_
build_organizations_empower_20170109 ) in New York recently. "Most
activists stress organized people and forget organized money. As organizers,
we stress both."
"We think the issues are, in a sense, the easy part," said Gecan, who is the
co-director of the Industrial Areas Foundation
(http://www.industrialareasfoundation.org/ ;) , the largest network of
community-based organizations in the United States. He is also the author of
"Going Public
(http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/58847/going-public-by-michael-gecan
/9781400076499/ ) : An Organizer's Guide to Citizen Action." "When we go to
a place like East Brooklyn, or South Bronx, or the west side of Chicago, you
can take a ride around the neighborhood and see many of the issues right up
front. What we can't see is-is there a fabric of relationships among
institutions and leaders in those areas? We spend the first year, or two, or
three, building that. Identifying leaders. Identifying institutions that are
actually grounded in those communities. Doing training with leaders. Raising
money so that the organization doesn't run out of money right at the start."
"We don't take government money," he said. "We want independence. We want
ownership. We want people to have skin in the game. We want people to be
able to walk away from any situation they want to, to confront anyone they
want to, without worrying about having their budget being slashed or
eliminated. So we stress both. Organized people and organized money is
essentially building the foundation of the organization first. And then,
once that's fairly solid, we begin identifying issues through a real,
deliberate process of house meetings, individual meetings, soliciting to
people. And not just doing a poll in the community. [We find out] what do
you care about? What are you concerned about? By asking people what they are
concerned about and are they willing to do something about it."
This process of institution building permits organizers and activists to
eventually pit power against power.
"The decision-making in those situations is not about merit, how nice you
are, or how deep the need is," Gecan said. "It's about do you have enough
power to compel a reaction from the state or a reaction from the corporate
sector. When people say what are you building around, I say we're building
around power. People who understand power tend to have the patience to build
a base, do the training, raise the money, so when they go into action they
surprise people."
The corporate press echoes the pronouncements of the power elites. It is
blind to the undercurrents and moods of the wider society. It did not
anticipate the election of Trump any more than it did the financial crash in
2008. It does not report on the lives of ordinary men and women. It shuts
out their voices and renders them invisible. And it-like the power
structure-will be among the last to know that the bankrupt social and
political systems that sustain it are collapsing. Once the ruling ideology,
in our case neoliberalism
(https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/15/neoliberalism-ideology-proble
m-george-monbiot ) , is understood by the public as a tool for corporate and
oligarchic pillage, coercion is all the state has left.
I asked Gecan what characteristics he looks for in identifying leaders.
"Anger," he shot back. "It's not hot anger. It's not rhetorical anger. It's
not the ability to give a speech. It's deep anger that comes from grief.
People in the community who look at their children, look at their schools,
look at their blocks, and they grieve. They feel the loss of that. Often,
those people are not the best speaker or the best-known people in the
community. But they're very deep. They have great relationships with other
people. And they can build trust with other people because they're not
self-promotional. They're about what the issues are in the community. So we
look for anger. We look for the pilot light of leadership. It's always
there. It's always burning. Good leaders know to turn it up and down
depending on the circumstance."
If we are to succeed we will have to make alliances with people and groups
whose professed political stances are different from ours and at times
unpalatable to us. We will have to shed our ideological purity. Saul Alinsky
(http://www.cbsnews.com/news/who-is-saul-alinsky/ ;) , whose successor, Ed
Chambers
(http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/edward-chambers-community-organizin
gs-unforgiving-hero ) , was Gecan's mentor, argued that the ideological
rigidity of the left-something epitomized in identity politics and political
correctness-effectively severed it from the lives of working men and women.
This was especially true during the Vietnam War when college students led
the anti-war protests and the sons of the working class did the fighting and
dying in Vietnam. But it is true today as liberals and the left dismiss
Trump supporters as irredeemable racists and bigots and ignore their
feelings of betrayal and very real suffering. Condemning those who support
Trump is political suicide. Alinsky detested such moral litmus tests. He
insisted that there were "no permanent enemies, no permanent allies, only
permanent interests."
"We have to listen to people unlike ourselves," Gecan said, observing that
this will be achieved not through the internet but through face-to-face
relationships. "And once we've built a relationship we can agitate them and
be willing to be agitated by them."
The homogenization of culture in the wake of the death of the local press
and local civic, church and other groups has played a large part in our
disempowerment, Gecan argues. We have lost connection with those around us.
We do not fully understand the corporate structures of power that wreak
havoc with our lives both nationally and in our communities. And this is by
the design of the corporate state.
"Over seventy-five years the process of community dissolution that took
place in Back of the Yards has been mirrored in thousands of U.S.
communities," Gecan wrote of Alinsky's first community organization, Back of
the Yards Neighborhood Council
(http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/100.html ;) , founded in
1939 in Chicago. "Everywhere the tightly-knit worlds of a dozen or so
blocks-where workplace, church, neighborhood, recreation, tavern, and
political affiliation were all deeply entwined-have given way to exurban
enclaves, long commutes, gathered congregations, matchmaker websites, and
fitness clubs filled with customers who don't know one another. A world
where local news was critically important and closely followed-often
delivered by local publishers and reporters and passed along by word of
mouth-has been replaced by the constant flow of real and fake news arriving
through social media. A world of physically imposing and present
institutions and organizations has morphed into a culture of global economic
dynamics and fitful national mobilizations built around charismatic
figures."
"You have to organize who is in front of you," Gecan said. "Not who used to
be in front of you. In places like Chicago, Cleveland or Baltimore, the
congregation used to be very robust. Congregations that were strong are
weaker. We're still organizing with them but still looking at different
institutions. Schools are institutions. They're more complicated, but
they're institutions in those neighborhoods. We're recruiting schools in
many places; sometimes it's housing groups. Sometimes we build new
institutions called East Brooklyn Congregations or United Power for Action
and Justice. We're recruiting the best of the existing, we're working with
the existing to reconnect with people and expand. And we find new
institutions. It has to be institutional in some way."
Gecan concedes that America's future under a Trump presidency, and amid
democratic institutions' collapse and climate change, is bleak. But he
warned against falling into despair or apathy.
"In 1980 in New York, all the liberal establishment, the entire
establishment, was saying New York would never be as strong as it once was,"
he said. "It was called benign neglect. They wrote off parts of New York
permanently in their minds." But community groups, including Brooklyn
Congregations, which built 5,000 low-income homes, organized to save
themselves.
"Our organizations and our leaders simply didn't accept that judgment from
the elites," Gecan said. "Things are tough, hard, but we're going to build
an organization. We're going to identify things we can correct and correct
them-with government if we can, or without it. We'll raise our own money.
We'll figure out our housing strategy. We'll hire our own developer and
general manager. It's about being more flexible and plastic about solutions.
It's not relying on what the state or market says is possible. It's creating
your own options."
Institution building is possible only if you "engage institutions or create
newer and better ones-whether it's churches or civic unions," he said.
Without these, the power in the other two sectors-corporate and
governmental-dominates.
The state, he said, has learned how to manipulate familiar protest rituals
and render them impotent. He dismisses as meaningless political theater the
kind of boutique activism in which demonstrators coordinate and even
choreograph protests with the police. Activists spend a few hours, maybe a
night, in jail and then assume they have credentials as dissidents. Gecan
called these "fake arrests." "Everyone looks like they've had an action," he
said. "They haven't."
He called the choreographed protests sterile re-enactments of the protests
of the 1960s. Genuine protest, he said, has to defy the rules. It cannot be
predicable. It has to disrupt power. It has to surprise those in authority.
And these kinds of protests are greeted with anger by the state.
No movement will survive, he said, unless it is built on the foundation of
deep community relationships. Organizers must learn to listen, even to those
who do not agree with them. Only then are organization and active resistance
possible.
"Three things have to be happening in great organizations: people have to be
relating, people have to be learning, people have to be acting," he said.
"In many religious circles, there's some learning going on, there's a little
bit of relating going on, but there's no action. There's no external action.
And it's killed many institutions. In a lot of activism, there's a lot of
acting but there's not much relating or learning, so people make the same
mistakes again and again."
"I was in Wisconsin during the [Gov. Scott] Walker situation
(http://www.occupy.com/article/protesters-descend-madison-rejecting-gov-scot
t-walkers-anti-union-law#sthash.2xjY28Ft.dpbs ) and the reaction to it," he
said about the 2011 protests by union members and their supporters. "They
did 23 major demonstrations. Fifty [thousand], 70 [thousand], 100,000
people. After the second or third I said to those people, why are you doing
all this? Because as you do these, you can't be building relationships in
local communities. And you don't know what your own members are thinking
about this situation. It ended up being unfortunately the case."
"Can we rebuild unions?" Gecan asked. "We can. It takes time. And we're
doing it in some parts of the country. Can we rebuild civic life in our
cities? We have and will do more. Can we take these people on? I know we
can. But it will take different tactics. It will take some very
unconventional allies that will surprise people."
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