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Category: Strategize!

  • Climate Change In The American Empire

    Here’s to 2022. A new year to displace one of the twenty previous warmest years globally since records began: the last twenty apart from 1998 with its strong El Niño. The summer of 2021 saw the Met Office in the UK issue what was its first-ever “extreme heat warning.” Over in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia, flash floods left more than 120 people dead.

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  • Movements And Leaders Have Seasons — It’s Important To Know Which One You Are In

    Over the last two years, social movements, organizations and leaders around the world have been thrust into a period of tumult, transition and uncertainty. These moments of crisis in our personal lives and in society can force sudden changes in our capacity to respond. What happens when we are not able to offer leadership like we used to? Or inversely, what happens when we do have the energy and capacity to respond, but our efforts don’t yield the results that are expected?

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  • Striking Massachusetts Nurses Outwait Corporate Giant Tenet

    Last year’s longest-running strike came to an end in early January when nurses at St. Vincent Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, overwhelmingly voted to ratify their new contract and return to work. Seven hundred nurses had walked out over dangerous staffing conditions last March—ten months ago. (See previous Labor Notes coverage from last April and August.) In a year of health care workers organizing amid Covid surges and staffing shortages, St. Vincent nurses stood out for their willingness to strike indefinitely and for the discipline the strikers showed.

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  • What Student Activists Walking Out Over Covid Safety Can Learn From Student Movements Around The World

    There is a long international history of student strikes. The recent student movements in Chile, Brazil, and elsewhere can offer ideas and inspiration to the thousands of K-12 students organizing school walkouts to demand remote learning and other safety protocols during the current Covid wave.

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  • An Interview with Kamau Franklin of Community Movement Builders

    The first year of the Biden presidency proceeds as one would expect from a man who always represented the most retrograde wing of the democratic party. The work of Community Movement Builders shows a way out of the political trap for Black people in this country.

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  • How Palestinian Hunger Striker, Abu Hawash Forced Israeli Concession

    A Palestinian political activist, Abu Hawash, 41, is a father of five. He was arrested by the Israeli army from his home in the town of Dura near Al-Khalil (Hebron) in October 2020. For the last consecutive 141 days, prior to the agreement, Abu Hawash a hunger strike, which will go down in the history of Palestinian resistance as one of the longest and, arguably, most consequential.

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  • Should We Disrupt The Democratic Party Or Try To Take It Over?

    When trying to figure out how they should interact with political parties, social movements face a common challenge: Should they push from without or seek to operate from within? Should they act as a destabilizing threat to all politicians, or should they work to build strength within a mainstream party?

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  • Martin Luther King, Jr., Internationalist

    We celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day not only to commemorate King’s historic role in overcoming racism and other injustice, but because his work and vision remain relevant.

    Today’s persistent racism in policing, health care, housing, and elsewhere, and attacks on voting rights — particularly for Black Americans — show that Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is not just about the past or the South.

    King got arrested in Alabama. He marched in Chicago. He spoke truth to power in Washington. He worked with countless activists and ordinary people to take action that transformed the Jim Crow South and impacted this whole country.

    But his outlook went well beyond our borders. Martin Luther King was an internationalist.

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  • Suicide, Indian Farmers, Indigenous North Americans . . .

    By explaining to mental health professionals and the general public that the root cause of suicide among their people is a sociopolitical one and not a brain disease, Roland Chrisjohn and Sudarshan Kottai do their part to foment rebellion against the sociopolitical status quo rather than—as most professionals do—enable it. There are other things professionals can do to help.

    Kottai offers Rachel Morley as one model. Morley, a clinical psychologist and a psychosocial practitioner for the British Red Cross, is the author or the 2015 article “Witnessing Injustice: Therapeutic Responsibilities” (in the Journal of Critical Psychology, Counseling and Psychotherapy). For Morley, when working with victims of social and political violence, therapeutic responsibilities include “bearing witness” to stories of injustice.

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  • The Indigenous Grandmothers Who Stopped A Pipeline

    Alton Gas, a subsidiary of Calgary-based AltaGas, had abandoned a project that would have pumped 10,000 cubic metres of brine into the mouth of this river each day for as long as a decade, leaving behind subterranean caverns where the company planned to store natural gas. It has been seven years since Maloney and a handful of other Mi’kmaq grandmothers had painted their first picket sign saying “Stop Alton Gas.”

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  • When Revolutionary Moments Arise Again — And They Will — What Will We Do?

    The world is in a prolonged period of global unrest. Since the financial crisis of 2008, every region of the planet has experienced levels of mass protest unprecedented in recent history, from the Arab Spring in the Middle East and Black Lives Matter in the U.S., to the farmers’ protests in India and the recent upheaval in Kazakhstan.

    Yet decades of social movement struggle haven’t produced a break from capitalist domination, and in most places they have failed to even accomplish the more modest aims of reform. Meanwhile, the global climate crisis has added another layer of urgency to the task of social transformation.

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  • Building Communities For A Fascist-Free Future

    We are now entering a period when antifascism has to remain ever present, not just to force back the encroaching far-right, but also to protect the left-wing social movements that are under constant threat of state violence, redirection and infiltration. At the same time, there is always the risk of revolutionary content being channeled into upholding electoralism or other reformist aspirations. The question, then, is what will it take to build an antifascist movement that can actually meet this challenge rather than collapse with the ebb and flow of the opposition?

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  • What Are The Lessons From The Trump-Backed Insurrection Of January 6?

    A year ago today, a fascist mob took over the US Capitol building in Washington, D.C., stunning the country and the entire world. Called to action by Donald Trump and instigated by his false accusation that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, the mob stormed the building and briefly stopped the certification of the electoral college votes. The attack would not have been possible without collusion from high-level military, police and security officials. Yet, none of them have been brought to justice. At the same time, Congress formed a special committee on January 6th which has no legal authority to persecute the people responsible for it.

    The insurrection was a historic attack on one of the most fundamental tenets of US democracy – the peaceful transition of power between the two ruling class parties.

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  • Using Pressure To Settle Grievances

    What ultimately settles grievances? More often than not, it hinges on the union’s ability to pressure management to settle. When managers look at the steward and the grievant across the table at a grievance meeting, they must clearly understand that they are dealing with more than just two people. They are dealing with the entire union. Management must also go to the grievance meeting feeling some immediacy, so they don’t drag the grievance out through all the steps.

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  • How The World Went From Post-Politics To Hyper-Politics

    Ten years and a decade of populist turmoil later, Ernaux’s testimony reads both familiar and unfamiliar. The rapid individualisation and decline of collective institutions she diagnosed has not been halted. Barring a few exceptions, political parties have not regained their members. Associations have not seen attendance rise. Churches have not filled their pews, and unions have not grown precipitously. Across the world, civil society is still mired in a deep and protracted crisis. On the other hand, the mixture of diffidence and apathy so characteristic of Ernaux’s 1990s hardly applies today. Biden was elected on a record turnout; the Brexit referendum was the largest democratic vote in Britain’s history. The Black Lives Matter protests were mass spectacles; many of the world’s biggest corporations took up the mantle of racial justice, adapting their brands to support the cause.

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  • In Conversation With Clayton Thomas-Müller

    Indigenous climate activist, writer, and filmmaker Clayton Thomas-Müller was raised in Winnipeg, a city named after the Cree word meaning “muddy waters.” His memoir, Life in the City of Dirty Water, published in August 2021, recounts his early years of dislocation growing up in the core of the Manitoba capital—from the domestic and sexual abuse he endured to the drugs he sold to survive (his first job was managing a drug house for the largest Indigenous gang in the country).

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  • The Radical Legacy Of New York’s Winter Rent Strike

    From 26 December 1907 to 9 January 1908, 10,000 tenants, predominantly Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe living in New York City’s Lower East Side, took part in a historic rent strike. During an economic depression causing mass unemployment and grinding poverty, landlords tried to hike rents by thirty-three percent. With their cry to ‘fight the landlord as they had the Czar’, the tenants won a partial victory, with rents significantly reduced for 2,000 households. The movement established a tradition of militant working-class housing campaigns that eventually contributed to winning vital rent controls that still protect millions of the city’s tenants today. But as the Covid crisis continues, New York City renters are again organising against rapacious landlordism.

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  • Government Action, Not Consumer Action, Will Stop Climate Change

    Pointing the finger at individual consumers has been the default strategy of powerful corporations since the 1950s. Deflect blame for smog or litter or polluted waterways or carcinogens or gun violence away from manufacturers and onto John Q. Public. Make the issue about personal responsibility. Which brings us to climate change. Once again, it is individual consumers and not the fossil fuel industry who are being blamed for the potential destruction of our planet. Only this time it isn’t just powerful corporations and their trade groups wagging the finger at individuals for not doing enough to halt global warming. It is also many climate change activists, who continue to press individuals to do more, to, for instance, purchase expensive solar panels for their homes.

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  • Former Hunger Strikers Reflect On Their Experiences

    The huelga de hambre has been used for thousands of years. It has won many struggles,” said Ana Ramirez, 42, who fasted for 24 days this spring to demand that undocumented people and other excluded workers in New York receive stimulus and unemployment money. “Esther the reina won a battle with the hunger strike.”

    Ramirez is referring to Queen Esther of the Old Testament’s Book of Esther. The queen and her supporters fasted for three days in advance of going to ask her husband, Persian King Ahasuerus, for permission to have her enemies — who were trying to wipe out all Jews in the empire — killed. She prevailed. Mahatma Gandhi used the hunger strike. So too Cesar Chavez. South African political prisoners hastened the end of the apartheid era with their hunger strike.

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  • The Pendulum Swing Of Black Liberation

    What I can see is this — Black people have always ridden the pendulum towards, and away from, liberation. This is what a lived dialectics looks like in my estimation — an understanding that the state will respond with additional force anytime movements gain speed, and, likewise, movements will push back. This might sound like a terrible feedback loop, or what Hannah Arendt called in The Origins of Totalitarianism a “bundle of reactions that can be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way.”

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  • Chile: Another Good-Sized Nail In Neoliberalism’s Coffin

    This brings us to a central political issue: what has the October 2019 Rebellion and all its impressively positive consequences posed for the Chilean working class? What is posed in Chile is the struggle not (yet) for power but for the masses that for decades were conned into accepting (however grudgingly) neoliberalism as a fact of life, until the 2019 rebellion that was the first mass mobilization not only to oppose but also to get rid of neoliberalism. The Rebellion extracted extraordinary concessions from the ruling class: a referendum for a Constitutional Convention entrusted legally with the task to draft an anti-neoliberal constitution to replace the 1980 one promulgated under Pinochet’s rule.

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  • Mutual Aid And Solidarity In Nigeria’s #EndSARS Protests

    On October 18, 2020, during the #EndSARS protests against police violence and state corruption in Nigeria’s capital Abuja, a photo was shared on social media that quickly drew nationwide attention. The image showed passionate protesters with their fists pumped in the air, mouths wide open singing songs and chanting slogans. Some were holding placards that read “Our Lives Matter.”

    What drew the attention of the public, however, was the woman right at the center of the image. With a small Nigerian flag in her left hand and missing her right leg, the woman who was later identified as Jane Obiene stood out because of the defiant spirit she embodied by joining the protest march on crutches.

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  • Why Activists Need Art To Create Social Change

    “The Art of Activism: Your All-Purpose Guide to Making the Impossible Possible” by Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert compiles knowledge the authors have gleaned from training hundreds of activists and artists around the world over the last 12 years. Their main message? Because today’s political terrain is one of signs, symbols, stories and spectacles, activists must learn to operate in that cultural space if they hope to change the world.

    Although a free companion workbook is available for those looking to sharpen their practical skills, “The Art of Activism” is more than a nuts and bolts “how-to” guide. Duncombe and Lambert also deliver thought-provoking discussions on the theoretical underpinnings of artistic activism, drawing on fields as diverse as marketing, cognitive science and pop culture.

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  • Our Age Of Uprisings: We Are A World Remaking Itself

    The global pandemic unfolds amidst a world of uprisings. Some have seen huge numbers gather in the streets and become ungovernable, including the victorious farmer’s strike in India, the efforts to expropriate the landlords in Berlin, the mass refusal of anti-Black police violence in the US, and the mobilizations against the neoliberal regime in Chile.

    Elsewhere, in Chiapas, Kerala, Rojava and an archipelago of smaller “zones to defend,” the uprisings take more sustained forms as people reinvent or reclaim life in common. Indigenous people around the world are refusing to allow their lands and lives to be sacrificed on the altar of extractive capitalism. The great global struggle against capitalism’s climate apocalypse is escalating.

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  • The Need For A Feminist Lens

    The Black Experience in the Americas has always been, by circumstance, design and by purpose, inextricably tied to the land and to forms of Resistance expressed through different peoples in different territories throughout the Americas. Climate change affects communities and regions differently, even within the same country, depending on their cultural, economic, environmental, political and social context. But climate change also affects people differently within these same communities and regions depending on their race and genders, both at an individual and collective level.

    For Black communities, an underspoken issue that is usually left out of organizing spaces related to climate change is migration.

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  • The climate response cliff

    Climate change is only one symptom of a broader ecological crisis; the rapid loss of wild life is equally critical. Most species other than humans and our livestock, (and pets and pests) have had horrifying drops in population within the last 70 years or so, even if they are not yet threatened with extinction. We and our livestock are now 96% of the mass of land vertebrates, leaving all wild creatures together to comprise a mere 4%. At this rate within another generation there may be virtually nothing left but us and our coterie—and we would not survive that, as we depend on a network of life more complex than we can imagine.

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  • Understanding And Resisting The New Cold War

    We are constantly bombarded with messages telling us that if our country and our way of life are to survive we must weaponize, weaponize, weaponize… We must recognize this as Cold War messaging to be resisted, and help others do the same.

    The first thing to understand is that the Cold War is psychological war waged by the US and its allies. It is carried out on a worldwide basis and especially in the United States against the public. These operations are aimed at conditioning people to accept war preparations and war operations. They involve the joint efforts of what Ray McGovern (a co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) has called the MICIMATT Complex — the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academic-Think Tank Complex.

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  • People Centered Human Rights and the Black Radical Tradition

    International Human Rights Day is December 10. On that day in 1948 the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was promulgated as the first in a series of covenants, treaties, and legal interpretations that would make up the post-war human rights framework. However, the history of struggle that produced the UDHR, beginning with the 1945 convention in San Francisco that created the United Nations, is one that can only be characterized as contentious. It is not possible to cover all of that history here. However, it is important that the historiography of Black activism that saw Black activists as central players in UN processes and debates between 1945 and 1951 is well known . Suffice to say that the contentious ideological character around the concept of human rights is still being played out today.

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  • How to counter the growing threat of agent provocateurs

    As awareness of racial injustice, climate crises and sexist violence grow in multiple countries, activists are responding in greater and greater numbers. We have this in common with earlier periods in history that birthed large social movements: activists “upping the ante,” increasing the power of their action. One-off protests become sustained campaigns, short actions like parades become long marches, a union’s token stay-at-home becomes a prolonged strike, law-abiding demonstrators turn to civil disobedience. It’s easy, however, to overlook a key activist vulnerability that accompanies these moments of increased passion and determination — namely, the increased chance that our opponents will try to lure us into violence by secretly using “agent provocateurs.” Such individuals are planted among us to masquerade as activists, but are actually paid to coax us into using violence. This is a good time to be wary of that possibility.

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  • How To Picket Stores That Sell Your Employer’s Products

    Picketing stores that sell an employer’s products can publicize a strike and hurt earnings. It is also a good way to generate community support. Although the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) usually bars unions from picketing secondary (i.e., “neutral”) employers, a narrow legal exception applies to retail stores and distributors—provided the union does not interfere with operations, only asks the public not to buy struck products, does not ask customers to stop doing all business with the retailer (unless the store only sells struck products), and does not demand that the store stop buying products from the struck employer.

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