The Rev. Will Campbell was forced out of his position as director of religious life at the University of Mississippi in 1956 because of his calls for integration. He escorted Black children through a hostile mob in 1957 to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School. He was the only white person that was invited to be part of the group that founded Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He helped integrate Nashville’s lunch counters and organize the Freedom Rides.
But Campbell was also, despite a slew of death threats he received from white segregationists, an unofficial chaplain to the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
In early 2009, as Barack Obama prepared to move into the White House, a particular historical anecdote rapidly gained in popularity, repeated in dozens of talks and articles as a parable for how supporters should respond to the new president taking office. The story related a New Deal-era encounter between Franklin Delano Roosevelt and a group of activists, usually said to have been led by A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. In the meeting, the advocates laid out a vision of bold action for change that the president could advance with his bully pulpit and his executive power. FDR listened to their position and considered the demands they presented. Then he replied, “You’ve convinced me. I agree with what you’ve said. Now go out and make me do it.”
In recent years, this tale has often been used to encourage social movements to maintain pressure on elected officials, even sympathetic ones, once these politicians assume power. There’s only one problem: The story isn’t true. Upon examination it has all the markings of an apocryphal legend, and it is highly unlikely that the meeting in question ever took place. Yet because the parable raises one of the most crucial issues of our current political moment — how those who voted against Trump should interact with the new administration — it is valuable to consider what the story gets right about the relationship between movements and presidents, and what it gets wrong.
The long experience of organizers shows that politicians, as a rule, do not like being pressured by movements they cannot control and often lash out.
As Joe Biden begins his first term in the White House, the stakes of this discussion are considerable. Far from welcoming outsider pressure, politicians committed to insider dealmaking have a long track record of dismissing and disparaging critics who push them to do better — and they have often preferred to demobilize the supporters who got them elected rather than face heat from potentially unruly movements. Organizers committed to stopping such demobilization must accept that it will likely earn them the ire of the White House.
In other words, social movements can play a critical role under the new administration. But Biden isn’t going to like it.
The makings of a myth
In terms of provenance, the FDR legend rests on shaky ground. Those who cite the story invariably do so anecdotally, and historical documentation of the incident is suspiciously sparse. Journalist Martin Berg scoured several different biographies of A. Philip Randolph but could find no mention of the supposed encounter. As Berg explains: “Now, I’m from Detroit and Randolph was part of the civil rights story I grew up on, and I never heard that story until the 2008 election.” Peter Dreier, Professor of Politics at Occidental College, related the anecdote in print severaltimes in the Obama era, but in some tellings he did so with the caveat that it “has never been documented.” Activist and entertainer Harry Belafonte stated in an interview that he heard the story from Eleanor Roosevelt herself, and this might be as close to a verification as anything on record. But even his was a second-hand retelling, vague on details, passed on many decades after the fact.
As the tale has been repeated, the setting and the characters sometimes shift. FDR is often said to have been talking with Randolph, but other versions place figures such as the labor unionist John L. Lewis in the room instead. Still others turn the story into 1960s parable, with Lyndon Baines Johnson as the president doing the talking and Martin Luther King, Jr. the listening. Saul Alinsky biographer Nicholas von Hoffman has written that the famed community organizer was fond of using the same story, but in Alinsky’s account the politician who tells constituents to “make [him] do it” was former New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner, Jr.
There are important things that the “make me do it” narrative gets right. It tells us that politicians can only be counted on to push forward controversial steps toward progress when they are forced to do so. As writer Ta-Nehisi Coates describes the moral of the story, “[P]oliticians respond to only one thing — power. This is not the flaw of democracy, it’s the entire point. It’s the job of activists to generate, and apply, enough pressure on the system to affect change.” Or as movement strategist Jonathan Matthew Smucker puts it, “We don’t persuade them morally. We persuade them with power.” The story is an injunction to keep the pressure on: It emphasizes that insistent demands from the outside continue to be essential, even when voters put the “right” people in office. For this reason, the anecdote reliably resurfaces among progressives in times when Democrats take power after periods when they have been in the opposition.
What the story gets wrong, however, may be just as important as the valid lesson that its tellers intend to impart. The tale suggests that elected officials are apt to agree with social movements — that they respect and sympathize with those who pressure them, and that they might secretly welcome the nudge to do better. In fact, the long experience of organizers shows that politicians, as a rule, do not like being pressured by movements they cannot control and often lash out at those who demand that they take more principled or politically risky stands. The anecdote leaves out the indignation and contempt that inside-game players feel when their deal-making expertise and political hesitancy are called into question.
Rather than directing constituents to take to the streets, it is far more common for elected officials to fear the disruptive possibilities of a mobilized base.
In August 2010, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs went on a well-publicized rant against progressive critics of the Obama administration, deriding them as members of the “professional left” who would never be satisfied with any legislative compromise. Political scientist Larry Berman noted at the time that the administration preferred its voters to be far more deferential: “From Gibbs’s perspective, and the White House perspective,” Berman explained, “they ought to be able to catch a break from people who, in their view, should be grateful and appreciative.” Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, who later became mayor of Chicago, used more pointed language against those who sought to make the president and other members of his party pursue bolder policy positions. He condemned those who attacked conservative Democrats for failing to support a public option for health care reform as being “fucking retarded” (a comment for which he was later compelled to apologize to the head of the Special Olympics).
A similar contempt for organizers who dared challenge the expertise of veteran lawmakers was on display in the Bay Area office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein in February 2019. There, the senator rebuffed a group of school-age advocates from the Sunrise Movement who prodded her to support Green New Deal legislation. In the viral video of the incident, Feinstein chided the young activists, saying “You know what’s interesting about this group: I’ve been doing this for 30 years, I know what I’m doing.” Subsequently responding to a 16-year-old, Feinstein snapped, “You didn’t vote for me” and then proceeded to dismiss the group by saying, “Well, you know better than I do. So I think one day you should run for the Senate and then you do it your way.”
A history of contention
A look at past presidents shows that irked and dismissive attitudes are hardly atypical. LBJ’s relationship with the civil rights movement was more often characterized by conflict than cooperation. For his part, FDR was often enraged at unions who tried to force his hand in demanding stronger action on behalf of striking workers. This tension surfaced in his interactions with John L. Lewis — the president of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, and a character in some versions of the “make me do it” legend. Years before their public break during FDR’s 1940 reelection campaign, the relationship between Roosevelt and Lewis was already characterized, in the words of one biographer, by “resentment for each other approaching hatred,” which generated “ever increasing hostilities.”
During some of the most famous labor conflicts of the New Deal era, when the president would have preferred to avoid taking a stand, Lewis issued statements suggesting that the unions had the White House’s backing. This put FDR in the awkward position of having either to publicly disavow support for struggling workers or to remain silent and give credibility to Lewis’s position. Such maneuvers “repeatedly incensed the president.” In early 1937, FDR likewise grew irate when Lewis refused to accept a compromise he was brokering with General Motors executives to end the sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan. Lewis held out for a better deal, and the union ultimately won one — but only after Roosevelt blasted Lewis for his arrogance and short-sightedness. In other words, on the occasions when organized workers effectively “made him do it,” FDR was rarely pleased. Rather than colluding with movements, the president repeatedly sought to dissuade them, calm their disruptive actions and bargain them down from their demands.
The same pattern held when it came to civil rights. A transcript survives from an actual White House meeting between FDR and A. Phillip Randolph on June 18, 1941. Randolph and other civil rights leaders were planning a March on Washington to demand that the government require defense contractors to hire Black workers. As journalist and author Warren Sloat explains, the rapid expansion of war production was priming the economy, and “factories and business offices were hiring millions of workers. White workers, that is. The vast majority of Afro-Americans remained marooned in permanent unemployment. They were barred from defense plants and federal employment rolls. Labor unions banned Black people from membership.”
Instead of seeking to make unions or other social movement groups partners in governing, they look to them as just another constituency to be appeased.
Randolph’s planned march would decry this injustice, much to the dismay of the president. Roosevelt was concerned that, as biographer Jean Edward Smith writes, “A Black march in segregated Washington could easily provoke violence and at the very least would antagonize the southern leadership of his preparedness coalition.” FDR enlisted his wife Eleanor and New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to talk the activists out of their plan. When that failed, he summoned Black leaders to the White House to speak with them himself.
Having won recognition of the country’s first African-American union and having once been called “the most dangerous man in America” by President Woodrow Wilson for encouraging Blacks not to fight in World War I, Randolph possessed an imposing organizing résumé. He and other leaders believed they could mobilize 10,000 people for their march, but in their meeting with FDR they were willing to bluff by projecting more.
“Mr. President,” Randolph said as the discussion reached its climax, “our people are being turned away at factory gates because they are colored. They can’t live with this thing. Now, what are you going to do about it?”
FDR offered to call and talk with heads of defense plants, but the civil rights leaders wanted something stronger than informal persuasion:
Philip Randolph: We want you to do more than that. We want something concrete, something tangible, definite, positive and affirmative.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: What do you mean?
Randolph: Mr. President, we want you to issue an executive order making it mandatory that Negroes be permitted to work in these plants.
FDR: Well, Phil, you know I can’t do that. If I issue an executive order for you, then there’ll be no end to other groups coming in here and asking me to issue executive orders for them, too. In any event, I couldn’t do anything unless you called off this march of yours. Questions like this can’t be settled with a sledge hammer….
Randolph: I’m sorry, Mr. President, the march cannot be called off.
FDR: How many people do you plan to bring?
Randolph: One hundred thousand, Mr. President.
FDR: Walter, how many people will really march?
[NAACP President] Walter White: One hundred thousand, Mr. President.
A week later, FDR signed Executive Order 8802, banning discrimination in hiring in the defense industry and creating a Fair Employment Practices Committee for enforcement. Randolph agreed to call off the march.
From movement to movie
Rather than directing constituents to take to the streets, it is far more common for elected officials to fear the disruptive possibilities of a mobilized base. To some extent, national politicians recognize the utility of social movements during elections, as they seek to galvanize their core supporters and reach out to new voters. Certainly, most Democrats — Biden included — have relied on the muscle of grassroots groups, most notably those of organizedlabor, to propel their field campaigns.
As former Obama advisor and CNN personality Van Jones described the demobilization after the 2008 election, “We went from having a movement to a movie.”
But once in office, they cease to see their fortunes as being connected to these movements. With their focus on maintaining power, they often view concessions to their grassroots base as threatening to their wider coalition, particularly the business interests that support them. Instead of seeking to make unions or other social movement groups partners in governing, they look to them as just another constituency to be appeased. They do not understand their ability to operate as insiders as tied to movements that shape public opinion and set the parameters for what are considered acceptable and desirable stances by elected leaders.
Even when the policies these leaders promote are relatively good ones, the insider “I’ll take it from here” attitude promotes a dangerous demobilization. It reinforces the popularly accepted view of power that sees authority as resting solely in the hands of presidents, senators and CEOs. This sets up the perpetual return of a self-defeating cycle in which, between elections, activated constituencies are encouraged to become mere spectators in the political process. As former Obama advisor and CNN personality Van Jones described the demobilization after the 2008 election, “We went from having a movement to a movie.”
As it turns out, President Obama himself had an important role in spreading the “make me do it” story — possibly a tale he picked up in his days as an Alinskyite organizer. He recounted the anecdote on the campaign trail in 2008 and later deployed it as a response to LGBT rights organizers pushing him for executive action. But even as he ostensibly invited outside pressure, he was frustrated when he actually encountered it. Harry Belafonte, having previously shared the “make me do it” legend, testified to the disjuncture between myth and actual practice: In 2011, he recounted that he had been invited to White House events on a number of occasions in Obama’s first years in office, but never was able to interact with the president for long enough to engage in any genuine discussion. At one event, Obama approached him and Cornel West and asked when they would “cut me some slack.”
“What makes you think we haven’t?” Belafonte responded, ending the brief interaction.
Much more significant than his off-handed comments to veteran activists is how Obama managed the once-mighty electoral movement that propelled him to the presidency. Obama’s 2008 drive had defied the rules of typically top-down presidential campaigns, empowering a vast range of grassroots activity by supporters. By deploying both ground-breaking social networking technology and mass trainings in community organizing, the campaign allowed hundreds of thousands of local boosters to take independent initiative to rally neighbors, plan their own campaign events and energize small donors. By the time Obama was elected, the campaign had amassed some critical assets: a battle-hardened core of volunteers and an email list of 13 million supporters, 4 million of whom had donated money and 2.5 million of whom had registered on the campaign’s online organizing platform. Rolling Stone reporter Tim Dickinson quoted longtime Republican strategist Ed Rollins — Ronald Reagan’s national campaign director in 1984 — who marveled at the possibilities: “This would be the greatest political organization ever put together, if it works,” he said. “No one’s ever had these kinds of resources.”
Early on, Obama promised that the energy of the campaign would continue and the infrastructure it built would undergird a new grassroots organization; progressive planners within the campaign had envisioned it as an independent-minded operation that could hold up transformative legislation and pressure politicians to enact it. This, however, was not to be. In a February 2017 New Republic article entitled “Inside the Fall of Obama’s Grassroots Army,” journalist Micah Sifry, using previously unreported insider memos and e-mails (including documents from advisor John Podesta that were released by Wikileaks), documented that, even before Obama was elected, party insiders managed to squelch the idea of an autonomous organization.
In the wake of the election, advisors convinced Obama to hand over the entire grassroots apparatus to the Democratic National Committee, or DNC. “The move meant that the machinery of an insurgent candidate, one who had vowed to upend the Washington establishment, would now become part of that establishment, subject to the entrenched, partisan interests of the Democratic Party,” Dickinson would write. “It made about as much sense as moving Greenpeace into the headquarters of ExxonMobil.”
In the crucial months immediately after the 2008 election, the “movement moment” rapidly dissipated as supporters were left without direction about how their energies would be institutionalized. When it did launch, Organizing for America, or OFA, as the DNC-managed group became known, was a shadow of what its original advocates had imagined. With a stated goal to “mobilize supporters in favor of Obama’s legislative priorities,” it did not aim to influence the president’s agenda or “make him” take on positions more resolute than he might have otherwise preferred. To the contrary, it was designed to be a safely on-message cheering section.
“[T]he organization was mainly known for asking people to donate online and to make phone calls to Congress people,” Van Jones would later remark. “It was confined by the insider strategy, which the DNC and the White House pursued. Rather than mobilizing the people and then cutting a deal with opponents from a position of strength, the White House tended to seek a deal first and then use OFA to mobilize people to fight for the pre-compromised position. This approach may have made sense inside the halls of power, but it left many grassroots supporters cold.”
Crucially, as an arm of the DNC, the group would not challenge Democratic officials themselves, even conservative members of the party who refused to back ideas such as a “public option” for healthcare reform (which itself was a compromise position that fell far short of comprehensive “Medicare for All” proposals). Given that the Democrats had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate through Obama’s first year — and therefore had a once-in-a-generation chance to pass major legislation without Republican obstruction — this was a fatal shortcoming.
Marshall Ganz, a former United Farm Workers organizer who helped engineer the campaign’s community organizing trainings, mournfully noted that Obama’s White House seemed to be “afraid of people getting out of control,” and that the president’s inner circle had been quick to neuter the campaign’s grassroots base. His feelings were echoed by others who had worked on the campaign but grew disillusioned by seeing establishment advisors with little interest in outside organizing take over. “They don’t give a crap about this e-mail list and don’t think it’s a very useful thing,” one former campaign staffer told the website TechPresident. “They want to do stuff the delicate way — the horse-trading, backroom talks, one-to-one lobbying.”
As it turned out, over the course of the administration’s first year, career insiders such as Rahm Emanuel would find themselves out-organized by right-wingers who channeled discontent into Tea Party groups that were unafraid to deploy disruptive protest and to target even Republican leaders they found insufficiently responsive. As Sifry concludes, “Instead of mobilizing his unprecedented grassroots machine to pressure obstructionist lawmakers, support state and local candidates who shared his vision, and counter the Tea Party, Obama mothballed his campaign operation, bottling it up inside the Democratic National Committee. It was the seminal mistake of his presidency — one that set the tone for the next eight years of dashed hopes, and helped pave the way for Donald Trump to harness the pent-up demand for change Obama had unleashed.”
Biden’s relationship with social movements could be significant in determining how long his mandate endures, whether he will pursue more far-reaching reforms, and if a midterm reversal should be regarded as an inevitability.
Christopher Edley Jr., a policy adviser to the Obama campaign who had pushed for a robust and independent organization argued that the Washington, D.C.-minded political hands closest to the president adhered to a theory of change focused on insider deal-making. Therefore, they did not see how cultivating a base of outsider energy could be critical in reshaping the landscape in which elected officials operated and thereby make more substantive change possible. At the same time, they were fearful that a mobilized base could turn on powerful Democrats, or even the president himself. “If you’re not really that committed, as a matter of principle, to a bottom-up theory of change, then you will find it nonsensical to cede some control in order to gain more power,” Edley concluded. “To me, real movement building had to be about defining and advancing progressivism, not a communication strategy from the West Wing basement costumed as faux movement. The kind of movement we wanted would have helped Obama a great deal, without making it all about him.”
In a December 2010 op-ed for the Washington Post, Sam Graham-Felsen, who had been Obama’s chief blogger during the campaign, argued that the president’s supporters “were inspired by Obama’s promise to upend Washington by governing from the bottom up. ‘The change we need doesn’t come from Washington,’ Obama told them. ‘It comes to Washington.’ Yet at seemingly every turn, Obama has chosen to play an inside game. Instead of actively engaging supporters in major legislative battles, Obama has told them to sit tight as he makes compromises behind closed doors.”
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There is a price to the demobilization engendered by this approach to governing. It is taken as conventional wisdom that the majority party will lose seats in midterm elections, and this was certainly the case in 2010. After Obama’s first two years in office, Republicans energized by the Tea Party gained 63 seats in the House of Representatives, and Democrats at the state level faced the most sweeping loss of power since the Eisenhower era.
Elected officials see themselves as indispensable servants of the public good. They want their constituents to be appreciative, and they are rankled at encountering people who are not.
Unlike Obama, Joe Biden did not present himself in his election campaign as the head of a transformational movement that would unsettle Washington norms, and so he has taken office with considerably different expectations. In recent weeks, Biden’s determination to “go big” in pursuing economic stimulus, along with his success in taking swift action to reverse some of the most repellent abuses of the Trump administration, have amounted to a substantive early agenda. Nevertheless, his relationship with social movements could be significant in determining how long his mandate endures, whether he will pursue more far-reaching reforms, and if a midterm reversal should be regarded as an inevitability.
On this front, there are ample warning signs. The Trump years saw the emergence of some of the largestmass mobilizations in American history. Yet Biden has not sought to identify himself with these grassroots energies. Instead, he has defined his style as one of “insider competence” and masterful deal-making. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, he “put his ability to forge compromises at the center of his quest for the White House.” Should social movements reject seeing politics as a movie and seek to pressure the administration as well as its Republican rivals, they can expect that Biden will bristle, just as he did when confronted by progressives on the campaign trail.
Even when the active engagement of their base in ongoing political advocacy enhances their ability to succeed, it is foolhardy to believe that politicians secretly welcome pressure or that they will pay tribute to those who, on select occasions, are able to force their hands. Having invested their faith in their talent for insider maneuvering, these elected officials see themselves as indispensable servants of the public good. They want their constituents to be appreciative, and they are rankled at encountering people who are not. “Cut me some slack,” is how Obama put it. “Give me a break, man,” Biden has already exclaimed. These are just other ways of saying, “Don’t make me do it.”
Those pushing for transformative changes to our society should expect to hear nothing different. And the ultimate success of the current administration may rely on them not listening.
Research assistance for this article provided by Akin Olla.
Members of Atlanta DSA backed by the national organization conducting an anti-Republican turnout effort in the Georgia runoffs tied to the Green New Deal and other policy outcomes that would only be possible under a Democratic-controlled Senate. Photo: Atlanta DSA
By David Duhalde
Since the 2020 general election, the Democratic Socialists of America – locally and nationally – have been moving towards a coalition politics that puts the organization and its chapters in a unique niche that is differentiated from the Democratic Party, from mainline liberal-left organizations, and from marginal tendencies in U.S. left-wing politics. As socialists, we must hold Democrats accountable to the base that elected them, and also avoid returning to the obscurity in which DSA spent the years before Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential bid. To do so effectively, the DSA must avoid self-imposing many of the constraints that limited its work in the 2020 presidential race after the end of Sanders’ candidacy.
The Bernie or Bust resolution of DSA’s 2019 convention exemplified such a voluntary foreclosure on political possibility. The delegates overwhelmingly voted for DSA to refrain from endorsing any Democrat besides Sanders in the 2020 general election. At the event, I spoke against the proposal on the grounds it would limit DSA’s potential to help Sanders leverage support at the 2020 Democratic convention (DNC) such as coordinating actions by DSA members serving as DNC delegates should he back another candidate.
To be clear, affirmatively throwing DSA’s support behind any candidate besides Sanders would not be a particularly viable or likely outcome. As I wrote in The Nation, DSA had only endorsed two Democratic presidential candidates – John Kerry and Barack Obama in his first race – since 2000. I was also heartened to see the lukewarm reception across the organization to the handful of chapters who encouraged DSA to actively back Howie Hawkins’ Green Party candidacy. Despite my critiques of the resolution binding DSA outside of any coalition politics that involved Democratic presidential candidates, the socialist organization did avoid hitching our political capital to a marginal, but socialist, campaign too — one which ended up receiving only one quarter Jill Stein’s 2016 vote total despite 25 million additional ballots being cast.
SELF-IMPOSED ISOLATION
My real concern, which I then saw validated, was that the resolution would close off DSA to allies. While DSA convention delegates in 2019 reached a clear consensus on only endorsing Bernie — the same could not be said for membership’s orientation towards the general election — particularly as the election consumed more and more of the public’s political imagination. While people knew DSA was “not endorsing Biden,” it was unclear what the largest group of socialists in the country would do. It also was the only group in the People Power for Bernie coalition to opt out of its follow-up, the United Against Trump coalition to coordinate activism to defeat the now-former president.
The National Political Committee (NPC, or DSA’s elected leadership) debated but voted down a proposal at its May 5 meeting to turn out anti-Donald Trump votes in swing states. They agreed to provide guidance to chapters in the short term and prioritize defeating fascism through social movement work. The NPC issued a statement a week after their vote expressing opposition to Trump and solidarity with Sanders’ call to defeat him — but did not provide open guidance for what members and chapters could do to specifically engage with the presidential election beyond broad calls to build the socialist movement. By September, the NPC gave internal guidance to chapter leaders on strategy and messaging, an action kit focused on a united front of the left, and guidance on incorporating the urgency of the moment in the recruitment drive.
DRIVING TURNOUT WITH DOWN-BALLOT RACES
In the absence of any public direction, I and two comrades – former Bernie 2020 labor staffer Jonah Furman and NPC member Maikiko James – organized a letter for individual DSA members to state their support for organizing as socialists to defeat Trump by driving turnout for progressive down-ballot candidates. Several hundred people signed and volunteered throughout the fall. During the Bernie or Bust debate, advocates of the resolution repeatedly assured delegates that individual members could support the nominee on their own. And while our letter never endorsed electioneering for Joe Biden, even if we had, we would be doing so in our individual capacity, respecting the letter and spirit of our convention’s democratic decision for DSA as an organization.
Others did not see it this way. Our open letter faced public pushback from fellow DSA members who did not share our urgency in taking specific action to remove Trump via down-ballot work. They did so not because they viewed Trump favorably, but out of a firm conviction that socialists shouldn’t support neoliberal candidates and that the convention resolution mandated that DSA and its members do nothing – direct or indirect – that would advance Biden’s candidacy. The contention, taken to this logical end, meant DSA members ought to be bound against formally endorsing any effort to stop Trump even as his mismanagement of a nationwide pandemic and failure to deliver relief immiserated millions of working families.
Luckily, Biden defeated Trump, in no small part due to mass organizing by UNITE-HERE and other grassroots movements to fill the gap left by the Democratic Party’s refusal to canvass voters door-to-door. Though U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib was a shoo-in for the general election, her campaign echoed my proposed fall strategy by driving up turnout in her heavily Democratic district to increase the vote for Biden in Michigan.
POST-ELECTION PIVOT
While DSA hadn’t backed these actions and played no formal role in them, the NPC issued a statement immediately following election day that praised the work of UNITE-HERE and Bernie Sanders to defeat Trump. In that missive, DSA did not celebrate the victory of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Instead, the organization explicitly criticized the incoming administration and put them on notice. But for the first time in 2020, national DSA was uplifting the popular front work that defeated Trump. More importantly, the next day, the national and chapter leadership called for members to join the November 7 demonstrations with other allies to demand democracy from Trump and condemn the public attempts by him and his followers to steal the election by overturning the Electoral College results in swing states.
Many of the pro-democracy gatherings that day became victory celebrations as news networks officially called the election for Biden-Harris that afternoon. In New York City, I marched alongside hundreds of DSA members and thousands of other Big Apple residents as we took the streets of Manhattan. Across the country, there was a sigh of relief that Trump at least would be removed from office. None of us knew what would happen nearly two months later in the Capitol. But we did know the Senate balance fell onto Georgia.
Across the country, centrist Democratic Senate candidates substantially underperformed their polling, losing races in states like Maine, North Carolina, and Iowa. Trump’s surprising ability to bring out new voters kept at least 50 Senate seats in Republican hands. But now, control of the Senate, and with it, any hope of the Biden Administration delivering on the commitments that Sanders and DSA’s allied groups had fought for rested on the Georgia runoffs.
Fortunately, DSA took a different stance in the Peach State than it had in the presidential race. Instead of abstaining, DSA chapters in Georgia (with support from the national infrastructure) conducted an anti-Republican turnout effort. DSA’s four Georgia chapters didn’t — and didn’t need to — endorse either Democrat to do that, especially given Jon Ossoff’s anti-Medicare-for-All stance. Instead, the chapters collaborated with the national DSA and the Ecosocialist Working Group to tie the results to the Green New Deal and other policy outcomes that would only be possible under a Democratic-controlled US Senate.
ISSUE-BASED ELECTIONERING
Georgia DSA members coordinated out-of-state volunteers to text and phonebank Georgia voters with an issues-driven turnout message. Marquita Bradshaw, a DSA-aligned activist and 2020 Democratic-nominee for the Tennessee US Senate race, emceed a volunteer call to rally grassroots energy. In addition, they canvassed with flyers featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the progressive agenda she and DSA back, urging Georgians to cast their ballots with those issues in mind.
This strategy wasn’t universally embraced — meeting many of the same critics as our anti-Trump letter. Still others felt it wasn’t vocal enough in supporting the Democrats. This time, absent the chilling effect of a Bernie-or-Bust-style resolution, the NPC was able to back up the work of our Georgia comrades to defeat incumbent GOP senators. This issue-based electioneering paid off as both Republicans lost their seats, tilting the balance of the US back to Democratic control. Without the presidential race’s self-imposed constraints, the organization’s leadership and membership were able to join active struggles required to defeat the far right — which take place regardless of DSA’s actions, and do not require our positive endorsement of neoliberal Democrats to engage with.
January 6, the day after Ossoff and Warnock’s victory, thousands of Trump’s most reactionary supporters stormed the US Capitol in a bizarre and extremely dangerous gamble to overturn the election results. Their putsch failed, sparking a huge backlash across the political spectrum. DSA jumped further into coalition politics at this moment, joining the racial justice-oriented Frontline’s full-page advertisement in TheNew York Times calling for Trump’s removal. The next day, the national leadership issued a statement in both English and Spanish urging both trade unionists to pass resolutions in support Trump stepping down alongside uplifting of Reps. Cori Bush’s call for an investigation into the insurrection and Ilhan Omar’s resolution for Trump’s impeachment.
DEMANDING DEMOCRACY
Furthermore, the leadership explicitly called for chapters to join coalitions to “demand democracy.” I attended one such event that night outside of Brooklyn’s Barclay Center. New York City DSA leaders called a rally with the city’s Working Families Party, Sunrise chapter, and an SEIU local to stand together against a fascist attempt to violently overturn a democratic election. The cathartic gathering was for democracy in both the short and the long term. “As democratic socialists, we recognize that in the long term, the only way to beat the forces of reaction is to build a multiracial working-class mass movement rooted in justice, solidarity, and liberation,” said New York City DSA Co-Chair Chi Anunwa.
“And so in addition to our demands for impeachment and electoral reform, we are also committed to fighting for a more just vision of American society that puts people over profit and where the entire working class can experience true democracy in our government, in our workplace, and in our economy,” she added. Anunwa, myself, and nearly 1,000 others marched on December 7 from the arena to soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s house to demand he act decisively to defend democracy and hold the Republicans who attempted to throw out millions of votes accountable.
The quick action by DSA and the coalition politics of early January stood in stark contrast to the fall, when individual members could only coordinate amongst themselves — in a way that could not build power for DSA or strengthen its coalitions — as Election Day drew near. In a hypothetical world where DSA had also passed a binding resolution, over a year in advance, for the DSA to refuse any engagement in the Georgia Senate race, we would have missed this opportunity as well. But instead, we were able to assess the political situation in the moment and act appropriately. Importantly, we were able to do so without moving towards the Democratic Party or even formerly endorsing. Instead we functioned as an independent socialist organization working to mobilize voters to defeat the far right.
DSA will be most effective by keeping its political options open — carving a niche that is apart from the Democratic liberal-left, but that is also separate from the margins of left politics. We cannot solve our political problems through pre-emptive, binding resolutions. Rather, we need collective struggle marked by continued debate in response to the political opportunities before us. I am happy to see the socialist organization to which I have dedicated my adult life returning to its coalition roots- albeit in an updated fashion. That’s the DSA that will change this country and the world.
The COLA strike picket at the base of the UC-Santa Cruz campus in early 2020. Photo Credit: Jane Komori
The working class in the United States has not been quiescent during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. The field of social struggle has included strikes, walkouts, sickouts, fights against evictions, grassroots-led union drives, and a host of other labor actions (including the rebellions this past summer).1 Most encouraging have been the direct confrontations with non-union employers and battles waged outside established syndical structures, like those that have already occurred among farmworkers, meatpackers, warehouse pickers, gig workers, municipal employees, education workers, and grocery workers, as well as at countless other worksites. While self-activity and close bonds of comradeship between co-workers have and will be the vital factors in these conflicts, there is always a place for networks of communication and defined strategic courses that show new paths forward. Militants are constantly gathering knowledge and insights to share with other workers beginning to mobilize. The 2019-2020 wildcat strike for a cost-of-living-adjustment (COLA) at UC-Santa Cruz was in many ways a precursor to the types of organizing that have taken root among labor activists since last March. In this article, Jane Komori, a participant and organizer in the COLA strike, examines the ins and outs of running a strike fund (especially difficult when the action is taken while under contract), an often overlooked yet essential task in strike logistics.
In the early months of 2020 it became clear that the University of California, Santa Cruz graduate student worker wildcat strike for a cost of living adjustment (COLA) was part of a wave of strikes erupting across the country. In our first days on strike we were in touch with organizers from the 2018 West Virginia Teachers’ Strike, the 2019 LA Teacher’s Strike, and CUNY Struggle, seeking advice and encouragement. But after only a few weeks other graduate student workers, themselves demanding COLAs or trying to unionize began reaching out to us for support. When wildcat strikes were launched at other University of California campuses including Santa Barbara, San Diego, Davis, and Berkeley in February and March, I began to get calls about how we started our Gofundme fundraiser and how we were managing our strike fund. I received even more of these questions as workers from a host of industries began to organize in the face of unprecedented unemployment with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. I spoke to baristas in New York organizing a fund to replace lost wages and strippers in LA fundraising for mutual aid. As our fund grew and workers all around us began their own strikes, we used our fund to support striking workers in City Waste Union, striking graduate student workers at Columbia, and most recently to workers fighting for a union at Bookshop Santa Cruz, among others. I often included notes about how grateful I was to the fellow fund organizers, because handling our own strike fund has been an ongoing, ever-developing challenge, not to mention a critical dimension of the COLA struggle as a whole.
Part of the difficulty was, and continues to be, a lack of resources and advice for workers about how to start and manage their own strike fund or fund for labor organizing or mutual aid.2 Particularly challenging was the fact that a strike fund for a wildcat strike is a strange beast, in the eyes of the IRS and every accountant and tax attorney I have talked to. It also presents unique challenges to workers, who have a lot of other things to do when organizing a labor action, and who, like me, might have no experience handling large sums of money or dealing with the vagaries of tax code. For the UCSC wildcat, on top of figuring out the technicalities of accounting, it has meant coming up with a whole system for prioritizing, allocating, and dispersing funds. As the de facto treasurer for the movement for the last year and the foreseeable future, I still have many questions and am often doubtful about how to proceed. But I have also learned a lot about matters I did not realize could have any bearing on labor organizing. The following is therefore meant to be a practical, albeit imperfect and incomplete, account for anyone considering starting a fund like ours. It is also meant to offer some insight into how a strike fund, especially where you would not usually find one, (as with a wildcat strike or other organization of workers not represented by a union with deep pockets) can shape the form and capacity of labor actions. While there are a number of critical ways to narrate the development and conclusion of the UCSC wildcat strike, I have in no small part come to understand the COLA struggle through our strike fund.
1. Set your fundraiser up yourself and consider the language you use to describe it carefully.
A really generous and thoughtful comrade at another university started our Gofundme for us when we first went public with our wildcat grading strike on social media and some smaller news outlets in December of 2019. I am so grateful that she did, because it started getting attention right away, and I do not know when it would have occurred to us to create one ourselves. I would however advise any other group to have the person who is going to act as treasurer start the fundraiser. Gofundme restricts access to certain functions to the creator of the fundraiser, and it is easiest if whoever is overseeing the fund can add other users, manage withdrawals, post updates, raise the fundraising goal, and most importantly, carefully write up the description of the fundraiser.
Our comrade named our fundraiser “Support Fund for Striking Workers at UCSC!” This is descriptive and correct – for the most part. While we used the bulk of our strike fund to replace lost wages, we used about a third of it feeding and providing first aid, toilets, sunscreen, and picket signs to thousands of picketers for an entire month; providing bail money and support with legal fees and tickets; covering medical co-pays for those injured on the picket line; and donating money to other workers, student groups, and community organizations on our campus and across the country. Not everyone will need to do all this, but when creating your Gofundme, try and think expansively and carefully about what you might do with your fund. How you define it at the outset will determine, in part, how you administer it and how you report it to the IRS about it later.
2. Consider scale.
The nature of grassroots labor organizing can mean that the scale of actions and their outcomes are difficult to predict. Our strike certainly was – we had no idea that we would raise nearly $300,000, or that we would need it when eighty strikers were fired. Nonetheless, I think considering the size of the action (how many workers are involved?), the potential risks (do you think you are going to get pay docked? For a day or a week?), and other costs involved (how much is the pizza that you like to have at your meetings, and are you going to be having a lot more of those soon?), is something that should be done ahead, even if you end up being totally off the mark. If your answers to the questions above indicate that you only need to fundraise $1000, then you probably do not need to read the rest of this guide, and Venmo is a great tool for you! If it is more, this will help you anticipate the kind of infrastructure you’ll need to build. It might also help you think about a timeline for fundraising and how to set fundraising goals with your Gofundme. (I am not a fundraiser, and we never had a set fundraising goal or a plan for reaching it. When we had considerable media attention, we bumped the goal on our Gofundme page up by $10,000 every time we got close to meeting our previous goal. Frequently linking to the Gofundme page on social media and in press coverage was helpful.)
3. Start thinking about banking, accounting, and taxes right away.
There are a lot of mixed messages about whether or not Gofundme will issue tax forms to beneficiaries of fundraisers and whether or not money paid by Gofundme’s third-party payment processor, WePay, is taxable income (the tax question here is, is the money received “personal gifts” or taxable income?). This is a really crucial consideration for scale: how much is the beneficiary going to receive from the fundraiser, and how much are they going to pay others from it? While Gofundme states on their (bewilderingly limited) taxation information page that they will not issue tax forms, this does not match up with the advice of the accountants and tax attorneys I have talked to. Plenty of sources suggest that even if Gofundme does not issue tax forms, WePay will issue a form 1099-K to any “payee who receives more than $20,000 and has more than 200 transactions during a calendar year. A copy of this form will also be sent to the IRS.”
Whatever amount you are planning to raise, open a separate bank account for WePay direct deposits, even if it is still the treasurer/beneficiary’s personal account, to help keep things organized. Gofundme and WePay will not hold donations in the fundraiser for more than 30 days, so you need to be prepared to do this quickly once you have launched the fundraiser. And, if you are planning to raise $20,000 or more, consider getting in touch with an accountant right off the bat about what you are doing. After having an accountant with experience working with nonprofits salvage some information from my chaotic Google Sheets ledger, we are now using QuickBooks Online. We have also been advised to save all physical receipts for purchases made from the fund for ten years, which we did not start doing soon enough. In short, to make sure that you can convince the IRS that this is not income that your beneficiary can be taxed on, you’ll need to have good records.
4. Consider a fiscal sponsor or another structure to hold and administer the fund
Or, to make things even more complicated (but ultimately to make things less complicated), consider having some entity other than your beleaguered treasurer hold the fund in trust and administer it. This will help you ensure that the fund remains tax-exempt and relieve you of some of the burden of handling the fund by trusting it to an organization that already has systems in place to manage it. This should be a non-profit organization with tax-exempt status. But, this is also where things can get tricky, and where I am still not sure what the best path to take is.
A typical fiscal sponsor is a charitable organization (501c3) that will hold and distribute the fund for a cut of the funds raised, usually around 15%. This amount is to cover their own staffing, accounting, and other associated costs, but here scale is important again: if you think you’ll raise $100,000, then spending $15,000 to not worry about money and get back to the organizing work you want to be doing seems pretty reasonable. But if you think it is realistic that your fund will be larger than that, the amount spent on the sponsor (however wonderful a sponsoring organization you find) starts to look more significant and other options become more appealing. It is notable that a comrade of the West Virginia strikers used their non-profit organization to administer their strike fund for free, which sounds like the best possible arrangement, if a rare one.
In the second week of our picket, our strike fund swelled to $100,000, and I started to panic. I had never contemplated having that much money in my bank account, and I had no idea how I could explain this all as personal gifts to the IRS when I got my 1099-K, even if, as an accountant initially advised me, I was only a “beneficiary” who aggregated and redistributed further “gifts” (for smaller funds, those are your keywords for your tax filing if you do get a 1099-K that you need to report). I also desperately wanted a better structure to handle the fund in a transparent and collective way. So, we formed an ad hoc strike fund committee (another thing I wish we had from the start) to oversee decisions concerning the fund, communicate them to the rest of the strikers, and to figure out how to get the money out of my personal bank account.
When it became clear that our strike fund would reach $200,000, and then nearly $300,000, the $45,000-$60,000 we would spend on a fiscal sponsor pushed us to consider other options. Further, potential fiscal sponsors we talked to had good questions and concerns of their own. For some, our fundraiser dwarfed their annual operating budget, so they did not really have the structure necessary to handle it either, and for others, they were not sure that a strike fund, typically held by a labor organization (501c5) could be held by a charitable organization (501c3) without jeopardizing their tax-exempt status. It seemed at the time that we could actually more cheaply establish our own non-profit organization. With filing fees ringing in at around $20,000, we could have rescripted our fund as a charitable fund, that is, one for a population in need, like poor graduate students. This would have created a foundation, or something of the like, rather than a strike fund (which is for a specific group of workers engaged in a labor action, and not considered a charitable fund for tax purposes). Or, we could seek out a sympathetic labor organization to hold our fund. Of course, our union, UAW 2865, would not do it because we were on a wildcat strike and the university had already filed an Unfair Labor Practice charge with the Public Employee Relations Board against them for not doing enough to stop our strike. Local labor councils and other unions were also unwilling to support us – a lot of them just never wrote me back or returned my calls. And so, in wondering where we might find a labor organization that would actually want a wildcat strike fund, we finally arrived at our structure: we established an industrial union branch for education workers with the Industrial Workers of the World.
The process of assembling and chartering a branch, and then opening a branch bank account and establishing dispersal guidelines for it, took about two months, which is around the same as the timeframe for establishing a new nonprofit organization, but it cost next to nothing, which was a huge perk. We spoke with IWW headquarters, assembled the requisite ten members in our industry (education), and drafted and ratified bylaws, which provide for a graduate student worker committee with sole discretion over the spending of the strike fund. We wrote the first checks for lost wages from the Santa Cruz Education Workers Local Industrial Union Branch 620’s bank account in May. (We used Chase Bank because they had a business account with lots of benefits for the amount we were opening an account with. There are also banks that offer accounts specifically for non-profit organizations – it might be worth spending some time comparing banks and accounts when you open one.) We now have monthly meetings where we vote on strike fund spending as well as other business. It is worth noting that we were not trying to get people to rescind their union membership or even to get everyone dual-carding by forming a branch of the IWW (this has been bandied around as an idea by student-worker organizers in the UC for yearswhen our union has disappointed us, but has never caught on). As per the IWW’s constitution and industrial labor organizing ethos, any education worker, including students, in Santa Cruz County can join our branch by taking out a membership, and my hope is that eventually our branch will serve as a useful structure for other education workers in the region, too. It does take work to keep up with reporting and organizing for the branch – we have had to collect W9 forms for all recipients, and we will have to issue them all 1099 forms for the 2020 tax year. We will pay our accountant roughly $10,000 over the next two tax seasons to help issue these forms and file our taxes.
5. Set up priorities for how your strike fund will be distributed.
In late February 2020, eighty strikers were fired from their spring quarter (April to June) teaching appointments. Before they missed their first paychecks, we had to establish a system for distributing funds to them. Initially, we were able to have a needs-based system for distribution. People reported how much they would need from the fund, with a lot of people reporting modest amounts and drawing on faculty and department support, other jobs, savings, or family support to reduce the use of the strike fund, so that everyone got what they asked for. We spent roughly $140,000 supporting around forty people for three months, with the rest finding fellowships, research jobs, or other support.
We realized later that our needs-based model for supporting fired strikers is actually not how a conventional strike fund held by a 501c5 runs, and this became an important problem in terms of taxation later on. Usually, a union pays a set wage to workers spending days on a picket line or replaces precisely the amount of wages lost. I tried to debate the difference between straightforward wage replacement and our needs-based model with our accountants when I later learned that income from a strike fund of over $600 is subject to tax asself-employment earnings.This means an additional 15.3% of taxes paid on the income, on top of the federal and state taxes paid for the recipient’s specific income tax bracket. In other words, if we had run our strike fund through a non-profit organization, defined and termed it differently, or taken other steps to avoid its tax classification as union-paid wage replacement – because it really was not straightforward wage replacement, after all – we might have avoided the heavy taxation of strike fund recipients. I wish we had calculated for this from the outset, because in many cases it will mean that the IRS nets roughly 25% of our strike fund, which might all have been considered tax-exempt if we had been able to define it as personal gifts or support funds from a charitable organization. This is a crucial way to consider the question of an organizational structure to hold the fund and your funding priorities: you’ll likely end up losing a big chunk of your money to taxes, so what structure and priorities will best help you minimize that loss?
Nevertheless, after covering lost wages and other needs for spring, we had roughly $75,000 left in our fund. After holding aside $10,000 for accounting, $5000 to donate to other wildcat strikes taking off all around us, and $5000 for an operating budget, we decided to use the remainder towards summer funding, as 41 strikers were not reinstated until August, and so lost their summer employment as well. It goes without saying that alternative employment options for many of these strikers also evaporated. With a more limited fund for this round, we had to actually set up priorities for allocating funds to strikers. We were still aiming for a needs-based system, yet there the concern lingered that we would not be able to fully meet everyone’s needs. The priorities we settled on for providing funds for summer were basically:
Those at risk of deportation
Those facing housing or food insecurity
Parents and caregivers
Those with less support from their departments
Those without other jobs or familial sources of income
We created a Google Form to circulate with questions like “Have you already received support from the strike fund?” “Do you have other financial support for the summer?” “What is the minimum amount you can request from the strike fund for summer support?” and “What is the maximum amount you would request from the strike fund for summer support?” There were also questions about what people were making requests for (rent, childcare, debt, etc). Again, we were fortunate to be able to fill most of the requests to nearly their entirety. Having clear priorities that we circulated in advance helped us to make decisions about how to stretch the remainder of the fund in a transparent and fair way.
6. Be prepared for the long haul
Even with our strike fund exhausted, the Santa Cruz Education Workers Local IUB 620 will continue to remain active for a long time. I am still wrangling receipts, filing monthly reports with IWW GHQ, writing checks, collecting W9s, and communicating with our accountant about how to manage all this. And I’ll be doing this well into 2022, and possibly longer.
***
Our strike fund shaped the capacity of our movement and the form of our labor action. At crucial moments workers made decisions about their involvement in the strike based on the availability of the strike fund. For instance, when our number of strikers in the winter quarter had dwindled after the mass firing, and when workers who had not previously participated were considering withholding their winter grades, I had many inquiries about whether they too would be covered by the fund. I noticed myself feeling an acute responsibility to express, again and again, that the fund was limited, and that people should not count on it. At the same time, it was not how I thought strikers should be calculating strategy and risk; indeed, it was a very different calculation than the one that had moved us to strike in the first place, before the idea of a strike fund had occurred to any of us. Rather than, “Will there be enough money in the strike fund for me?” being the question that preceded strategic decisions, “Will withholding my grades at this moment help us win a COLA?” should always have been the guiding question. But granular conversations about how much money was in the strike fund, how quickly it was growing, and how rapidly it was being spent happened at every general assembly, organizing meeting, and in nearly every conversation I had on the picket line, especially when people were feeling vulnerable in committing to actions. It indexed to me just how difficult it was for most workers to take collective action without also calculating it through personal considerations of risk.
We also had plenty of internal conflict about who had control over the fund and how it was being spent, particularly at the height of our picket line when thousands of undergraduate students and allies from the surrounding community were joining us every day. There was considerable frustration about how quickly we could move money, and to whom. As the fund grew and as new groups of students and workers organized themselves at our picket line with related but unique agendas, different demands on the fund and conflicting priorities for it often sparked larger conflicts about what the money should do for students and workers, and what it could mean for our movement. From my view, we never really resolved those conflicts, because as much as people expressed legitimate frustration about the strike fund, very few people (there were a few, and I continue to be very grateful to them) were interested in being on a committee that would devise spending plans, let alone in researching the details of a viable accounting system.
The problem of a general unwillingness to become involved in the minutia of accounting among organizers of a militant labor movement is related to a larger problem to do with funding and wildcat strikes. The problem is essentially the one I sketched out in parts 4 and 5 of this guide: grassroots labor movements that receive and redistribute more than roughly $20,000 in a calendar year are pressed into one of two structures. These are non-profits (501c3) and labor organizations (501c5), which are both structures ill suited to the ad hoc, fluid nature of wildcat and other militant, spontaneous labor movements. And the fact that these structures are so difficult for wildcat strikers to navigate is by design. There is considerable literature on the repressive function of non-profit organizations, which have grown exponentially in number since the 1960s. Dylan Rodriguez and Ruth Wilson Gilmore both point out how the “non-profit industrial complex” is a soft power twin of the prison industrial complex. Rodriguez places “restrictive tax laws on community-based organizations” on a spectrum with “arbitrary enforcement of repressive laws banning certain forms of public congregation” to emphasize the link between the increasing bureaucratization and professionalization of political movements and more spectacular forms of repression and state violence.3 Gilmore points out that the enormous transfer of wealth to the baby boomer generation has allowed for new fundraising schemes, such as crowdfunding platforms like Gofundme, and that these have
Encouraged grassroots social justice organizations that otherwise might have continued their work below the Internal Revenue Service and formal-funding radar to incorporate as non-profits to make what they have consistently hoped to be great leaps forward in social justice. In other cases, unincorporated grassroots groups receiving money under the shelter of existing non-profits have been compelled to formalize their status because auditors have decided that the non-profits who sponsor them have strayed outside the limits defined by their mission statements.4
This is almost a perfect description of the problem for the administration of our crowdsourced wildcat strike fund: in order to continue to collect the money we came quickly to need, we had to establish an organization where we never intended or wanted to have one, especially when it became clear that working with a fiscal sponsor to avoid those circumstances would be financially and legally untenable for both parties. But in the case of a Gofundme strike fund, we have two further considerations: first, the practical and political difference between a non-profit and a labor organization, and second, the understudied but rapidly emerging prevalence of Gofundme fundraisers for labor movements and workers at large.
Erica Kohl-Arenas’ analysis of the changes in the United Farm Workers’ position on outside funding is enlightening. Kohl-Arenas describes how in its early iterations, the National Farm Workers Association drew on Mexican traditions of mutualistas, not unlike the mutual-aid networks and organizations that have bloomed across the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic and the George Floyd rebellions. Even after embracing a labor union structure and forming the United Farm Workers alongside the Delano Manongs in 1965, Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and other organizers maintained a heterogeneous set of means by which they fought for self-determination for their communities, including considerable “self-help” operations. Nonetheless, Kohl-Arenas charts a pivot from a refusal to accept outside funding and a commitment to a member-funded organization to the incorporation of non-profit organizations to carry out the movement’s service work – organizations that could capture the philanthropic dollars of the Ford Foundation and other formidable funders who eagerly sought to exert influence in civil rights movements and other militant political organizations of the day. In conclusion, Kohl-Arenas writes:
Working under a professionalized and privately-funded model, the staff of the new non-profits became preoccupied with fund development and administration. Originally inspired by the alignment between civil rights and the struggle for farmworker justice but unwilling to address change in the economic sphere, funders set up untenable institutional structures. Consumed with developing his new organizations, Chavez ultimately accepted a translation of farmworker institutions that required philanthropic charity – but not a movement in struggle for self-determination and collective ownership among workers.5
The inability for a robust movement-oriented union like the UFW to maintain a multiplicity of organizing structures, strategies, and principles in the face of taxation and funding related pressures continues to be an issue for militant political movements today. But, contemporary labor movements are not necessarily contending with the restrictive reporting requirements of the Ford Foundation. Instead, they are navigating the vagaries of crowdfunding and the proliferation of fundraisers hosted on Gofundme.
The use of Gofundme to raise funds to support labor movements is not entirely new – much like for the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike, the 2019 LA Teachers’ Strike was supported by fundraisers to feed them at labor actions, and the platform has seen traffic from labor organizers and unions as well as non-profits since it launched in 2010. However, in contrast to other crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter, which are targeted at entrepreneurs and consumers of their prospective products, a full third of fundraisers on the platform are for individual medical expenses, while others raise funds for suffering animals, churches, honeymoons, voluntourism travel, and so on. What is new is the proliferation of fundraisers initiated for and by workers, unionized, self-organized, or otherwise, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The boom in these fundraisers (with 22,000 of them already drawing in $40 million by March 20, 2020), has spurred Gofundme to introduce a new category of fundraisers (“Fundraising for Coronavirus Relief”) which it promoted heavily on its home page in 2020. Aside from these fundraisers, often launched by the bosses of laid-off workers, being radically insufficient stopgaps for social and economic crises, their proliferation makes them increasingly competitive, pulling in smaller and smaller amounts for only the wealthiest and most well-connected. And, if a few lucky groups of workers do rake in much-needed funds on Gofundme, how to handle them is preeminently confusing. What should be non-taxable, personal gifts from some workers to others quickly forces a host of questions about organizational structure that make a profound difference not only for how much of these gifts the workers get to keep for themselves, but also for if and how their militant actions might be reshaped and disciplined by the organizational structures that they are forced into.
***
Some weeks after our strike concluded, I realized that the total amount that our fundraiser pulled in ($291,900, or $281,614.80 after WePay fees) was just a few thousand dollars shy of the monumental $300,000 that UCSC’s administration spent per day to police our picket line. While the UC’s $300,000 budget bussed in police from UC San Francisco, Berkeley, and Irvine, as well as California Highway Patrol and the National Guard, equipped them with military surveillance equipment, sheltered them in local hotels, fed them, and paid their overtime wages for a single day, our $281,614.80 fed thousands of picketers several meals a day for four weeks, and housed, fed, and often paid some tuition for, roughly forty strikers for about six months. The comparison of these numbers has had, of course, a special resonance since the George Floyd rebellions.
All of these considerations have caused me to reflect on what we might have done differently with our fund, not only in terms of the practicalities of its administration, but in terms of how we spent and shared it. It is a meager sum when held up against the UC Police Department budget, but still an amount that you can do a lot with. It has also pushed many of us at UCSC to think differently and more creatively about funding moving forward. Some workers created a system to redistribute the ten percent raise that we did win during our strike so that those who are benefitting now from the strike can share it. By directly exchanging funds between ourselves, we might also dodge the constrictions of the IRS this time around. And, by continuing to take account of the COLA movement, we might figure out how to keep fighting, with or without funding.
Since drafting this article, Michael Haber has published a useful document, “Legal Issues in Mutual Aid Operations: A Preliminary Guide,” which covers financial issues and considerations for mutual aid funds and funds raised through crowdfunding platforms. For those administering mutual aid funds, Haber’s guide might be more useful than this one, and is a useful resource for anyone receiving any funds from Gofundme.
Dylan Rodriguez, “The Political Logic of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex,” in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 26.
The inauguration of Joe Biden arrives with the liberal establishment proclaiming the need for unity. But unity is not what we want.
Biden’s inauguration was a paean to national unity. “To restore the soul and secure the future of America requires the most elusive of all things in a democracy: unity.” The president used the word “unity” seven times in his address, urging us to “come together” and “renew the nation.” Speaker after speaker sounded the same note.
But unity is not inherently good, and division is not inherently bad.
Of course, there are certain “divisions” that we need to oppose. The ruling class wants to divide working people along lines of race, sex, gender, nationality, etc., in spite of the interests we share. These divisions hurt working people and help the ruling class maintain their power over us. In company with Marx we should say, “Workers of the world unite!”
But there are other “divisions” within our society that cannot be met with calls for unity. The divisions between the exploiters from the exploited, and between the oppressors from the oppressed, need to be underlined so that everyone can pick a side. These divisions were not created by us. Conflicting class interests exist whether we recognize them or not. Those who own the means of production or who do their bidding (billionaires, CEO’s, hedge fund managers, big pharma, the police, etc.) have material interests that are antithetical to those of the rest of the population. What is good for them is not good for us, and what is good for us is not good for them.
Liberal cliches about unity obscure our situation. They suggest that the problems of this country are somehow the result of people failing to work together to resolve shared problems, and therefore that the solution is to find common ground. But we share no common cause with the bosses, the billionaires, the exploiters, and oppressors. The police should be abolished, the nazis should be run off the street, and the billionaires should have their wealth stripped from them. Racism, inequality, and the politics of Trumpism are not unfortunate aberrations of the system but belong to its core functioning.
In the face of a global pandemic, an economic crisis, and the growth of racist far-right extremism, what we need is not more unity, but sharper division, properly drawn.
Call from the Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement (RAM) for the creation of a network of self-defense groups. Our communities are under attack. We have fought and defended ourselves against a complex, multi-faceted and growing onslaught from the forces of white supremacy and capitalism. As the United States continues its descent into a failed state and a… Read Full Article
In November, Pennsylvania permitted the resumption of utility shutoffs during the pandemic. In advance, the local Debt Collective, which helps people dispute their debts and fight back against predatory fees, protested. The group helped organize a gathering of between 20 and 30 protesters in Philadelphia to demand the moratorium continue. “We are tired of this,” Pennsylvania Debt Collective organizer Lauren Horner told CBS. “We are tired of the greed displayed by these organizations.” Horner was referring to the Philadelphia Gas Works, the PECO Energy Company, and to what some in the Debt Collective regard as the negligence of the Public Utility Commission.
The Pennsylvania Debt Collective had some wins: for households whose incomes fall within 300 percent of the poverty level, or $78,600 per year for a family of four, the moratorium still holds. On January 4, the Debt Collective and other community organizations will protest outside Biden headquarters in Philadelphia, demanding an end to all federal student loan debt. These groups want the debt cancelled on day one of his presidency. As with the utility shut off, the Pennsylvania Debt Collective has been very active around this issue.
Unpaid utility bills have long burdened American families. The U.S. has become a nation of debtors since the 1970s, people yoked into serfdom by educational or medical debt or into jails by cash bail, fines and fees. And then there are the millions who live month to month, on their credit cards, racking up charges for necessities like food and utilities, which they may never be able to repay.
Now also, during the COVID-19 pandemic, renters have gone into debt and face eviction. “I am currently working on an anti-eviction tool, eviction defense,” Debt Collective organizer and national member Dawn Lueck told Truthout. “We’re in a coalition. I’m just working on the tool side, to get it into people’s hands. There’ll be a massive eviction wave on January 31 when moratoriums expire, so we’re trying to get this tool ready.”
Lueck says that the tool is an online form that takes a tenant through the questions that need to be answered to deal with an eviction notice. It generates all the necessary forms. Some jurisdictions like Los Angeles require a fee to apply for an eviction waiver, and the tool helps the user see if they are eligible for an eviction waiver before they apply and pay the fee. “We’re in a coalition connected to tenant unions,” Lueck says, “so this tool currently for L.A. will later be expanded to other cities — we hope. Fingers crossed, we can scale this through California and then maybe nationwide.”
Another huge reservoir of financial insecurity is medical debt, which is the number one cause of U.S. bankruptcies — 66.5 percent of them. Before the pandemic, medical debt was roughly $81 billion. Student loan debt stands at $1.7 trillion. And those too poor to pay their debts to the criminal court system are sometimes locked up in jail.
But as Lueck and the Pennsylvania Debt Collective show, some people drowning in debt fight back. The Debt Collective has roots in Occupy Wall Street and launched officially in 2014. It boasts 9,000 members on its online platform and a strong presence on social media. It started forming chapters in early fall and has 11 of them so far. Since the chapters are in their infancy, membership is small and some just have a few organizers.
The Debt Collective has a small staff of a half a dozen organizers. Spokesperson Astra Taylor told Truthout via email that the collective’s activities are expanding: They’ve published a useful book, Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay, and their combined efforts have succeeded in “the elimination of $1.8 billion in debt [over $1 billion of that was educational debt] to date,” Taylor told Truthout. “That has happened through a range of strategies, including our various dispute tools, legal efforts and the Rolling Jubilee Fund, which we have used to extinguish debt portfolios we have purchased and that we have acquired through other means.”
The Debt Collective operates as a debtors’ union that provides useful tools for debtors to dispute any debt in collections, errors in a credit report, wages or a tax return being taken, and tools to defend against repayment for federal student loans.
The Debt Collective operates as a debtors’ union that provides useful tools for debtors to dispute any debt in collections, to dispute errors in a credit report, wages being taken or a tax return being taken, and tools to defend against repayment for federal student loans. The group’s first debt strike was in 2015. “We have thousands of people in our network and are moving toward a dues-funded model with regional hubs or chapters,” Taylor said.
Meanwhile, the group is also building an app to dispute bail bonds in California. “‘Cash bail’ is a misnomer,” Taylor says. “It should be ‘credit bail,’ because most people have to borrow to post bail, and they borrow from predatory bond companies.” According to Taylor, the median bail debt is $50,000 in California, and even if charges are dropped, people who post bond “are still stuck with the bill,” from those predatory lenders. The Debt Collective’s app will help people dispute their debts by invoking various consumer protections, while also recruiting users to join the Debt Collective to fight for structural reforms. Taylor foresees expanding this work to other states besides California.
“The starting point for debtor organizing,” writes Debt Collective co-founder Hannah Appel in a 2019 Dissent article, “is to ask what would happen if we saw the staggering $13.5 trillion in total household debt as a source of collective leverage, rather than aggregate individual liabilities.” Appel argues that debtors’ unions can leverage mass indebtedness “through the threat of collective nonpayment…. Debtors’ unions could demand mortgage write-downs, an end to racist lending practices, a cap on ballooning adjustable interest rates, student debt discharge, truly free public education, single-payer health care or an end to money bail and extractive criminal justice fees.”
In his organizing, Jason Wozniak of Philadelphia’s Debt Collective chapter focuses on the problem of “predatory inclusion.” That means fighting against a neoliberal economy in which members of marginalized groups are provided with access to the housing market or education market or any other market on predatory terms. “The last housing crisis in 2008 was an example of that,” Wozniak says. “So’s the current student debt crisis.” He observes that with $1.7 trillion in educational debt it means roughly 45 million people owe student loans. Wozniak argues that it was a conscious decision by Ronald Reagan Republicans and many Democrats to hike tuition, in part to quell campus protest, so that now students can only access education by going into debt. Indeed, while governor of California, Ronald Reagan was the first really to boost tuition and cut funding at state colleges and universities. Other governors followed his lead. That was the beginning of the end, in the 1970s, of affordable higher education.
In the past year, Wozniak reports, the Debt Collective has launched jubilee schools — three- to four-week classes — with debtors across the country, which include a history of where debt comes from. This popular education effort encourages debtors not to feel ashamed and isolated because of what they owe. These jubilee schools have become popular fora, leading to new Debt Collective chapters in Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; New York; Los Angeles; the Chicago region; Northern California and Massachusetts.
“I’m not a credit counselor. I’m a debt disputer. We agitate over why people shouldn’t have this debt.”
The Debt Collective educates people about their options. Some of these, the government simply fails to inform debtors of, says Jenny Lezan, coordinator for the Chicagoland chapter: things like income-based repayment options or the Borrower’s Defense to Repayment application. She says that volunteers walk people through the process, work with student debtors and call servicers. The Debt Collective was behind the Corinthian 15’s debt strike which resulted in a group of students having their student loans cancelled.
Lezan was the first in her family to graduate high school and attend college. She says she grew up in a single-parent household in poverty on the west side of Chicago and was recruited to the Art Institute directly in high school with what she now knows are unethical sales and recruiting practices. Forced to take out student loans to cover tuition, Lezan has maintained a minimum of three jobs at a time since college, but says many of the jobs she has had to take are contract-based and don’t offer benefits like insurance. Lezan went back to school in 2009 for an MBA and now carries roughly $175,000 in student debt. This spurred her to fight back, so she organized the Chicago debtors’ union. “We are on strike,” Lezan says of the current national effort. “I don’t want my loans ‘forgiven,’ I want them CANCELED.” She says she is fighting for a better future for her two daughters, for them to have an education without a debt burden like hers.
Taylor, Lezan and Wozniac say the Debt Collective does not back specific politicians. “We are ORGANIZING, and we are based in social justice and reparative reforms,” Lezan writes. “We are not backing politicians, we are not making back-door deals like some of these other student debt organizations, who are connected to big money … our movement is fueled by regular, every day, working-class people. We are actively pushing for change in legislation.”
Lueck, the organizer working on the eviction tool for tenants, recounts how a life-threatening car accident at age 18 led her to declare bankruptcy, because she had no health insurance. She later helped run debt clinics in New Orleans. “We had free health fairs. Democratic Socialists of America partnered with the Debt Collective and provided health screenings. Other cities picked up the health fair idea from New Orleans. COVID-19 interrupted these fairs. Now it’s a hybrid debt clinic online,” Lueck tells Truthout. In the clinics, debtors fill out an intake sheet to determine how comfortable they are with discussing their debt. “Some people would bring their collection notices, and we’d help them cope with that. And we’d mail certified letters and continue to follow up. I’m not a credit counselor, though. I’m a debt disputer. We agitate over why people shouldn’t have this debt.”
“Always dispute the collectors,” Lueck advises debtors. “The collection industry is so unregulated. We find predatory collection all the time, where collectors don’t have correct documentation and operate outside the statute of limitations.”
Regarding nationwide goals, the Debt Collective is urging President-elect Joe Biden to cancel all student debt, according to Wozniak.
“The big push now is our Biden Jubilee 100 campaign, to push him to erase student debt, which he can do, when he takes office” without congressional approval, Wozniak says. “Now is the moment. We want to turn up the heat for Biden to abolish student debt. All of it. Because it’s the moral thing to do.”
Amazon doesn’t fit comfortably within the free-market fable of how capitalism is supposed to operate. We are, in theory, supposed to get freedom, competition, the reward of innovation, the elimination of all-powerful centralized bureaucracy. But consider this recent Wall Street Journal report on how Amazon destroys its competitors. Essentially, because Amazon is gigantic and has vast sums of money at its disposal, it does not need to “innovate” the same way smaller companies do. It can simply lift the innovations of others, and because it can undercut their prices, it can put them out of business. The Journal cites a number of examples.
We read and reviewed David Ranney’s “Living and dying on the factory
floor”, which was about his decision to put his academic career on hold
and his subsequent experiences as a factory worker. [1] The following
thoughts relate to this decision, which used to be widespread within the
left. Today taking on working class jobs for political reasons is
either ridiculed as an artefact of political militancy or criticised as a
potentially manipulative act of privileged and educated middle-class
politicos who try to convert the workers.
I want to look at my own decision to remain a low-paid manual worker
from various angles. The text is not strictly biographical, but looking
at the subjective side of the decision is personal. It is not an account
of experiences in five dozen or so jobs, although it contains
descriptions. The text is not a ‘salting’ or organising manual, it looks
more broadly at aspects and difficulties of material survival,
intellectual satisfaction, political strategy and revolutionary morale,
including the danger of self-righteousness.
The text picks up issues raised at the end of the article “Profession
and Movement”, an article that looks at the wider consequences of
professionalisation within the left e.g. in terms of pursuing an
academic career or becoming a professional organiser of one sort or the
other.
“You cannot simply proceed in a professional career and be
‘revolutionary’ in your free-time. We need our own structures as a
material alternative to the ‘profession’; we need commonly organised
living arrangements, collectives and (social) centres which would allow
us a different way to approach ‘work’: to kick a shit-job if necessary;
to work for a low-wage, because the job is politically interesting; to
stir up a workplace collectively.” [2]
It is difficult to create such a social and political environment for
a working class existence because, in the end, for most of us,
‘becoming or remaining’ a worker is less of an active choice, but an
outcome of a social process. I would argue that instead of being
individual victims of this process who try to struggle for individual
niche-solutions we should try and find collective ways to deal with it.
The aims of such a conscious and collective effort would be to share and
discuss more of your decisions about work and life with a clearer
political strategy in mind.
I started working in construction in my teens and continued to work
in what is generally labeled as ‘unskilled’ or ‘semi-skilled’ manual
work until today, around three decades later. I left school out of
choice, though not as a result of an elaborate political decision. It
was a mixture of general anger towards the system and self-preservation.
Coming from a family scarred by World War II and influenced by
generally socialist ideas, together with the increase in neo-Nazi
attacks post-1989 and the Gulf War in 1990/91, solidified the idea that
‘the system’ is still alive and killing. The system also killed in other
ways, as I lost three friends and lovers to heroin during that time. At
school the selection process, between those who were willing and able
to cooperate and those who were not, intensified. I felt that I had to
draw a line and guard myself against these forces that make us weak and
destroy our relationships: competitiveness, privileges, corruption, and
arse-licking.
As there was little chance to just ‘drop out’ where I lived, as there
was no big sub-culture in this small shithole of a town, I decided that
I would sell them my body, but not my brain, personality or creativity.
To carry building materials and sweep sites felt like self-defence and a
big ‘fuck you’ to those who want to get into your head. The refusal of a
career is not mainly a subjectivist act of politicos. Most of the
colleagues I met refused to advance to supervisory positions or
white-collar jobs – while many dreamt of a way out through
self-employment or the lottery ticket.
Although I worked with them, my co-workers didn’t actually figure
much on my political horizon – a lot of them were recent migrants from
East Germany or so-called Russian-Germans, most of them pretty
conservative and in favour of the war in Iraq. I quickly learned that
‘workers’ are no holy cows. Many of my local antifascist comrades were
car mechanics, brick layer apprentices, nurses or painter and
decorators, so unlike today it didn’t feel too weird to do manual
labour. And although we made a lot of jokes about the proletarian
culture of CP antifascism in the 1930s this was more of an excuse to be
rowdy and to take the piss, rather than a serious reference to the
working class as a political subject. Still, it felt good to be somehow
part of a tradition and historical class force. In 1992 we travelled
from the West to the East to demonstrate in Rostock [3] after the
fascist attacks. Apart from Berlin I had never been to the East before
and had never seen such huge and dismal concrete tower-block estates.
Local unemployment had just increased from virtually zero to over 20
percent. Thousands of mainly West-German black-block antifascists walked
through the working class areas and shouted ’Shame on you!’ to everyone
around. Something felt wrong to me in this situation. .
Apart from practical antifascism I was more into Tupamaros (a
left-wing urban guerrilla group in Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s and
Red Army Faction. However, even with all that teenage fanaticism and
despite RAF’s last and beautiful attack against the prison construction
at Weiterstadt in 1993 [4], it was clear that armed struggle doesn’t
lead anywhere. I started reading more about historical efforts to fuse
direct attacks on bosses and state with a mass base amongst ‘the
people’. I was impressed with the neo-Maoists of the Gauche
Proletarienne in France: they not only realised that the uprising of
1968 would have to spread from the universities deeper into society,
they even followed through on the personal implications to ‘go to the
people’, not to preach, but to learn from them. This seemed much more
radical and equal than what our local Trot group did, which is to stay
outside the class, to both idealise and patronise ‘the working class’.
But then there were no Maoists around, who would most likely have done
the same thing. Still, I felt that the revolutionary moral was right:
who the fuck are we to teach anyone? To be a revolutionary means to cut
your ties and to be on an equal level with the working masses.
I started looking for politics similar to the Gauche Proletarienne in
Germany and stumbled across groups like the Proletarische Front or
Arbeitersache [Workers’ Cause] which were active in the 1970s and
political writers such as Karl Heinz Roth. These groups, although there
were still flirting with Maoist jargon, were largely influenced by the
‘Workerist’ currents in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. ‘Class
composition’ replaced ‘the people’. I was intrigued by the concept of
workers (self-)inquiry: finally an approach that allowed you to combine
the subjective and moral attitude of ‘being with the people’ with an
intellectual and empirical effort to understand what the working class
really is and how we can organise struggle under specific conditions –
modern capitalist conditions, not Chinese mountain paths. All of a
sudden everything became interesting and relevant! My construction site,
the collaboration between local university, local industries and the
British army base – and the new migration from the East. As a local
group we were now able to target the construction of a local detention
centre not only with our hatred against the prison system, but with the
strategic insight that it serves to re-structure local class relations.
Migration raids on local construction sites could be explained as an
attack to divide and spread fear. We could draw links between the
prison, the raids and working conditions on site in our leaflets to
workmates.
The only group who shared the historical approach of Italian Marxism
of the 1970s and who expressed similar feelings towards the way the left
dealt with the phenomena of neo-fascism in general and the attacks in
Rostock in particular was Wildcat. To join the collective was important
on many levels: only as part of a collective effort can we reconcile the
existence as worker and the refusal of careers with the desire for and
necessity of intellectual work; only as part of a collective effort can
we stop material hardship and shift-work isolation from grinding us
down. In this sense the collective was my university and family.
After coming across the concept of workers’ inquiry and hanging out
with people who shared this perspective, ‘going to work’ changed
drastically for me. I left the construction job in the small local
company. I was curious to know what bigger sites looked like and how
things were organised in more modern industries. I signed up with an
agency and worked on shopping mall construction sites, suspension
bridges, in bike and carpet factories, in glass manufacturing plants.
Everything became illuminated. Where do my colleagues come from and what
do they think? What type of machines are used and why? How do the
bosses justify and enforce hierarchies? How do we cooperate with each
other and based on this, how can we stir shit up? What is the history of
the industry and how it is organised globally? Of course the question
of social change was the main driving force behind the curiosity, but
even on a solely sociological/scientific level I never got bored of
starting new jobs. It’s still my main hobby. The reasons and focus for
‘staying in the working class’ shifted. It was now less of a subjective
response to the system’s attempts to get hold of your mind and soul.
‘Working class’ became more of strategic location: let’s be in places
where potential mass power and social productivity clashes the hardest
with the collective experiences of impoverishment and systemic
oppression, either through personal bullying or through their mechanical
apparatus.
Another element is perhaps more spiritual. Physical work and having
to cooperate under shitty conditions brings the best and worst in
people. You meet a lot of arseholes for sure! But you also develop a
certain love for people and their fucked-up-ness. It means tons if a
tough guy full of toxic masculinity tells you about his worries about
his trans-daughter while sitting together in a maintenance dock under an
oily freight engine at 5:50am. Or when a face-tattooed welder talks
about the15 years he spent in an East German prison after his shift in a
hostel room that you share with five others. Of course there is a lot
of superficiality in relationships, as well, but it still means
something if, as in my current job, 500 sisters and brothers call you
‘brother’ every week. I am sure these things exist in better jobs, too,
but I guess the higher you go the more status and ambition gets in the
way.
There are a lot of things you learn over time even in un- or
semi-skilled jobs – basic construction skills, repairing things, driving
weird vehicles, using the right cleaning chemicals etc.. Working in
call centres, car factories, on refuse trucks etc. gives you an idea
about how real the threat or promise of ‘total automation’ is. It is
still easier for men to get into these jobs – or to not feel out of
place there. Still, the main thing you can learn is less about the
technical know-how, but more about how to cooperate with people you
don’t know and you might not even like. To get tuned into what is
necessary to do, to react to what others are doing without many words,
as the other guys might not even understand what you are saying. When
you live with people or work with them in political groups you can often
tell if people have learnt how to ‘cooperate’ without many words. Those
with working class experience tend to tune in better.
The other thing you learn on the job is how to understand the meaning
of what people are saying – and to assess the difference between what
people say, think and do. Unlike more professional and self-conscious
office or academic environments, in working class jobs, people say
outrageous things in particular when it comes to the relation between
men and women or racism. People use the wrong language and might have
weird or incoherent explanations for stuff. Over time I learnt how best
to respond and disagree without shutting things down (or to shut things
down if necessary). I would say that having mainly worked in manual jobs
also helped me to integrate more with workers in Delhi, where I stayed
in workers’ colonies for two years. Of course you’re still a privileged
whitey from the north-half of the globe, but knowing what it’s like to
sweep streets or stand at assembly lines means that you actually share
quite significant experiences, despite differences in conditions. It
felt easier to tune in.
Up to this point all this might just be existentialist bullshit and
just an individual way to cope under the current system, amongst a
million other ways to cope individually. I might as well have gone
straight edge. We all just cope, the question is whether our life
choices have a collective and strategical sense. The most joyous
collective moments I had was with comrades who shared a similar working
life, who worked in jobs where they wanted to organise themselves with
their co-workers. To come from work, to share experiences and
conversations you had with people at work, to plan next steps, to
discuss leaflets and newspapers for the workplace. To read some
theoretical or empirical stuff relevant to your work and discuss it. To
cook meals for comrades on the late-shift. To talk about the risks and
potential of bigger actions! That was always the most fun thing to do,
even if the outcome was often modest! There is a certain beauty and
holistic spirit when your work-life is part of your collective strategy.
I never really understood why all revolutionaries wouldn’t want to live
that way!
There are of course political differences: a lot of revolutionaries
would question whether there are (still) ‘strategic’ or particularly
interesting industries and workplaces and whether working there yourself
is the best way to interact and intervene. Others question whether
there can be something like a revolutionary morality and individual
agency at all – are we not all just part of the multitude? Fair enough,
that’s a separate debate. One reason why the ‘centrality’ of work is up
for debate is the fact that during the period in question – from the
early 1990s to the 2000s – the working class was pretty invisible as an
acting force. While working in large and often unionised workplaces for
nearly three decades, from car factories to railways to refuse
collection, I only took part in two token one-day strikes, one
consisting of a building workers’ march for social security, the other
one was a similarly boring symbolic picket about railway reforms. This
is a rather sad balance sheet, but I don’t think it is uncommon, at
least not for workers in western Europe and the US. Given this period of
defeat and restructuring it is not surprising that ‘joining or
remaining within the working class’ was not too attractive an option.
Then there are material and psychological constraints which might
prevent us from just taking any odd low paid job. Here things have
changed a lot over time. In Germany in 1991 you still got 100% sick-pay
and to go on the dole three, four months a year was no problem. In the
UK in 2019 things look different. Things are fine if you are young and
physically fit, but what about when you get older? Will academic or
better paid jobs not give you more time for the political and
theoretical struggle? I would say from the early 1990s up to the
mid-2010s even with minimum wage jobs I always had enough money to take
two months off a year, to travel or to spend more time on other stuff. I
felt that comrades who pursued a professional career either as
academics, journalists, ‘professional organisers’ actually had less time
for political (or other) activities, although they might earn more
money – perhaps because there is more fear of leaving a job temporarily
or to spend time on things that don’t add to your profile. Because in
the end the CV counts. I also felt that I had more ‘intellectual
freedom’ to write and research what I wanted outside of academia. Being
part of a bigger collective meant that we managed to have access to
similar sources as academic researchers had. Perhaps if you are
interested in researching stuff that requires spending a lot of time in
historical archives or laboratories you will have trouble doing this
while being a minimum wage manual worker – these spheres are actually
quite exclusive. Otherwise I still think that much of the stuff that we
managed to write as a collective or as ‘worker intellectuals’ was
actually better than comparable academic texts. If your day-job doesn’t
suck your brain dry, but only your muscles, you might have more capacity
and urge to write the stuff you want.
Again, individual choice has an impact on groups and the left in
general. I remember that even in Wildcat there was a shift at some point
in the late 1990s when more people started to get computer-programmer
jobs, because they were better paid and allowed a more flexible
lifestyle. The collective might have benefitted from that, but the sprit
and direction of the meetings changed. When many of the comrades were
working in hospitals, factories or construction sites there was more
eagerness to make these experiences a central part of discussions and to
come to some practical conclusions. This is true for the left in
general: the atmosphere today is either pretty individualised (“I work
freelance”) or unconsciously competitive (“I just applied for this or
that grant/position/funding” – “Oh, me, too”) or instrumentalist (“You
are gig-economy workers? Great, I support your struggle (and I’m
researching you for my PHD”).). All this cannot be treated merely as
betrayal or expressions of corruption – the justified individual desire
to be acknowledged as an intellectual or political being has to be
addressed.
Did I ever doubt my decision or are there any negative results? I
mean the whole thing is no one-way ticket to proletarian hell, it’s not
necessarily an irreversible decision for life. Being part of a political
movement gave me skills which would still allow me, even without formal
qualifications, to sell myself for bigger money to academia, to the
unions, to the alternative lefty circus. Ex-militants are the most
highly skilled managers. But certain things can’t be undone. Let’s start
with the psychological impact. To slave away, get up earlier, lift
heavier and come home more knackered than most of your comrades, only to
go to the next political meeting where people seem to have all the time
in the world tends to make you a bit of a self-righteous bastard. I
definitely became too judgemental and subjectivistic: why would I expect
anyone to change their life quite fundamentally and go against the
grain of wider society during a historical period that gives you little
hope that fundamental change is coming anytime soon? Self-righteousness
and lack of time doesn’t make you the best friend. There is some
physical damage, too, things start to ache. There are some worries
materially, old age and all – after three decades of work there is
little money, no assets and little to expect in terms of inheritance. I
still feel that there will always be comrades to help out, though. In
the absence of collectives, working class life tends to encourage
couple-hood. You become dependent on your partner materially and
emotionally. Things can become pretty conventional, e.g. in terms of who
is taking on the main responsibility for child-care and stuff.
Despite having had the privilege to be part of a political collective
I think I missed out on the student experience: to be with loads of
other young people who were the same age, to start a new phase of life
together. Being in a concrete builder apprentice class is definitely
less interactive, flirtatious and sociable. And there might have been
certain things to learn at university which are more difficult to learn
yourself or with your friends. Musical theory, archeology, machine
engineering amongst other things. Perhaps my main doubt concerns the
wider political organisation. I feel that if there had been a form of
organisation which was neither purely syndicalist like the IWW nor a
pretty loose collective such as Wildcat, moving from job to job and
meeting interested workers could have fed into something more
structured. Although opportunities for ‘long-lasting organising’ were
pretty rare, I met dozens of workers interested in struggles and debate.
To engage them in a wider organisational process and to keep in touch
even after the job finished would have been great. But then
unfortunately there was and there is still no bigger political
organisation that I think would make a productive contribution towards
revolutionary change. Still, there is a melancholy desire for a
proletarian party in a living and unorthodox sense.
The current UK radical left is pretty middle-class, or rather
‘precariously professional’. This might explain the attraction towards
the Labour Party as a seemingly easy way to bridge the gap between
intellectuals and ‘the workers’. It would need a separate analysis and
article to address the limitations of this type of politics. To
re-ground revolutionary politics within the class will need more than
organising campaigns, food kitchens in working class areas or tenants
unions. It will need two main steps: a collective debate about where
tendencies of self-empowerment and unification are already existing
within the class – e.g. in concentrations dominated by migrant work –
and the decision of organised cores of revolutionaries to practically
engage with these tendencies as workers. Part of this debate must be the
question of our material, intellectual and spiritual reproduction as
workers.
We are currently writing a book about the last six years of working
class political experiences in west-London in which we hope to make all
this more concrete. Stay tuned!
Philadelphia is facing a housing crisis with little help from the Democratic city council, mayor, or governor. In the city, 5,700 people are currently unhoused. Almost a thousand sleep on the streets on a given night. But more than that, this year has already seen 4,400 evictions filed in Philly courts. Another 2,000 renters are facing the very real threat of eviction and becoming part of the unhoused. This multifaceted crisis of housing is taking place as the numbers of those infected with Covid-19 are skyrocketing in the city (reaching 100,000 cases and 2,500 deaths), as winter descends, and in the wake of a major snowstorm that just hit the city.
The Democratic City Council refused to advance a bill that would protect Philly renters. Instead, it’s falling over itself to cater to landlords. That bill was opposed by the Philadelphia Apartment Association (PAA), an organization to champion the cause of landlords demanding their money from renters and lobbying for much stricter rules about which evictions can be delayed as a result of the pandemic. Collecting rent matters more than protecting the lives of renters.
What’s more, the city right now is in the process of evicting the unhoused from the “Covid hotels” — emergency housing that was set up to protect the unhoused from infection and death. That housing option expired December 15th. Rather than extend it, the city government mandated that people be moved, such as into crowded shelters with little or no protections against infection. These “relocations” use police vans, and the unhoused are often given no information about where they’re being taken.
Meanwhile, the city has made absolutely certain to maintain the massive $727 million budget for a police force that attacks and murders Black Philadelphians with impunity. The police budget far outstrips next year’s $669 million budget for the Department of Public Health. In fact, Democrats sat and watched while Hahnemann, one of the city’s major hospitals that provided care for poorer Philadelphians, shut its doors permanently because it wasn’t profitable enough — during one of the deadliest health crises in city history.
The situation in Philly and beyond is poised to get much worse. The new stimulus bill that the Democrats and Republicans are wrangling over provides no new funds for local governments. The national moratorium on evictions — which has slowed the eviction crisis so far — ends on January 1.
Fighting Back
Nevertheless, Philly has been home to a powerful and growing housing movement.
This summer, in the midst of a massive citywide uprising against the police, unhoused activists and their allies took over a section of grassy field just off of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in center city Philadelphia. The encampment became known as Camp JTD, after James Talib Dean — one of its founders who died during the first week of the occupation. The movement quickly spread to the north and west, where organizers created another encampment — Camp Teddy — in a vacant lot outside the multimillion-dollar headquarters of the Philadelphia Housing Authority (PHA).
The coalition spearheading the occupations — Philadelphia Housing Action, which includes #OccupyPHA, Workers Revolutionary Collective, and the Black and Brown Workers Cooperative — leveled a series of demands at the Democratic mayor and government. These included defunding and disbanding the Philly police, transferring the Philadelphia Housing Authority and the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority to popular control, and declaring the encampments no-cop zones (such as the CHAZ in Seattle).
The city’s Democratic government fought to shut down the struggle for housing in the name of its “concern” for the health and safety of the occupiers — despite the fact that it has done little during a years-long housing crisis that has left nearly 6,000 people unhoused on any given night, and despite its repeated attacks and evictions on encampments of the unhoused for years. This pretend concern for safety is even more ridiculous given that the Philadelphia Housing Authority just finished its lavish $45 million headquarters.
In fact, the PHA works as a tool for gentrification, selling off thousands of its city-owned properties for next to nothing. All the while, more than a thousand empty houses sit idle. As Jennifer Bennetch, a founder of #OccupyPHA, puts it: “They are operating more like a private developer selling properties and trying to build commercial real estate. They want to do everything but their job, which is to house people.”
Again and again, the city tried to evict the camps, massing legions of cops several times to do so — only to be driven back time and again. The city’s goal was obvious: to clear away a “blot” on the fashionable and rapidly gentrifying Art Museum area, and sweep away attacks on the Democratic City’s support for gentrification and police violence. But organizers’ calls for support brought hundreds of defenders at all hours, taking shifts to keep watch against a police raid for days in a row. Occupiers erected barricades as the encampments swelled at times to 300 residents across both locations and as they leveled a lawsuit at the city to stop the eviction.
But the city Democrats tried other means, too — calling in a non-profit “anti-homeless” group, the Homelessness Advocacy Project (or HAP), to broker a deal. Not long afterwards, the Philadelphia Inquirerran a leaked story about HAP’s disdain for the encampments, with one HAP employee blasting the struggle for housing as “irresponsible.” Organizers then refused to work with the non-profit shill for the city government.
But the struggle for housing stretched well beyond the encampments. Dozens of people — primarily unhoused mothers and their children — took over vacant houses, transforming them into livable homes and fighting off the city’s attempts to remove them. The takeover was the largest of its kind in the United States in recent memory.
Ultimately the city backed down — a sign not only of the power and organization of the encampments, but also of the Philly ruling elite’s fear of the power of class struggle in the city, after tens of thousands of people filled the streets and burned cop cars over the summer during the uprising against the police. In the face of the revolt, the mayor agreed to allow the squatters to remain in the 15 homes they had taken over, and to place 50 houses into a community land trust under community control. The city promised to expand its support for the unhoused in a number of other ways as well.
These victories, while important, still carry new dangers. The land trust is a key concession, but it could serve as a tool to co-opt or defang a powerful housing movement in the city, And that power will have to be maintained and grow to keep the city at its word and face the challenges ahead.
What’s Next?
This movement for housing for the working class and oppressed has now extended into the fight to defend the unhoused against their eviction from the “Covid hotels.” Activists have been protesting the evictions of the unhoused for days, blocking the police vans and offering mutual aid in the form of food and other supplies — as the unhoused face the onset of winter that brought with it the recent snowstorm and freezing temperatures.
The struggle during the summer offers key lessons as the eviction crisis ramps up in Philly. First and foremost, the wins this summer show that the power to fight the landlords and city does not come from progressive elected officials. Many celebrated politicians, such as Kendra Brooks and Jamie Gauthier from the city council and Nikil Saval and Rick Krajewski from the state legislature, voiced support for the camps, with some of them visiting from time to time. And yet the power that drove the movement didn’t come from them. It started with and flowed from independent, active organizing of the working class and oppressed againstthe city’s Democratic government, and was given more force because it came on the heels of a massive summer uprising against the police led by Black youth, which showed the power of the working class and oppressed.
In fact, while Brooks and Gauthier were calling for a general negotiation and resolution with the city, it was the organizers who had the good sense to reject the “help” of the Democrat-aligned Homelessness Advocacy Project that was deeply hostile to their work and would have likely served to co-opt and badly weaken the movement.
But a more intense eviction crisis is looming, and has already been making itself felt in the thousands of evictions so far this year. In this situation, organized labor will be crucial to success. For example, Philadelphia’s public school teachers, represented by the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers (PFT), will likely be teaching many students who have been or will face the threat of eviction. The PFT’s left wing, the Caucus of Working Educators, is a natural ally in the housing fight and a toehold inside the union. More than that, the PFT will be renegotiating a contract in 2021. Once the old contract runs out, its “no strike” clause will be inoperative — which could make organizing for militant workplace actions a lower bar to reach.
Public transit workers of the Southeast Pennsylvania Transportation Authority (SEPTA) will also be negotiating a new contract in 2021. Transport Workers Union 234 isn’t known for its radical actions, but we saw over the summer the crucial role that public transportation unions can play in the struggle of the working class and oppressed. Drivers in Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, New York, and elsewhere stood in solidarity with the uprising against the cops, refusing to transport arrested protesters on their buses. And so targeting agitation at bus drivers could be an important tactic.
Philly’s housing movement has shown itself to be a powerful force over the summer. Bigger challenges lie ahead, and with them a chance to increase the class struggle to meet them.
