Hello! My name is Tomis. I work with the Manhattan Free School – a newly formed democratic free school in the East Village of New York City.  The following is an exploration into a day at my school.  Hopefully, you find this helpful in shedding some light on the practical importance of Free Schools amidst the social revolution we all seek.

All of the names have been changed for privacy.

Today started somewhat familiarly.  I walked into the classroom and noticed Jane (the new volunteer) sitting at the lunch table and Jackson (staff member) on the “research only” computer in the back right corner of the room.  As I took a step forward to approach the “sign-in” table, I noticed a dark, mouse-sized rodent scurry under the wooden-framed couch. Max, the black-haired and boldly adventurous gerbil had escaped for the umpteenth time.  Jane helped me trap Max in between two closet doors.  The past three or four times this has happened it took at least twenty minutes to finally capture the gerbil, however, this time I think we had him in under ten.  I am awful with the gerbils.  To me, they are rats that are just a bit cleaner, as a result of their domestication.  Jane did the dirty work for me this time.

Elise, one of our new students, arrived with her father and one year-old brother.  She gave me a tutorial on how to use her Leapster – a hand-held electronic learning device for kids.  A few minutes later, I found myself in the Studio (the name of one of our classrooms) writing letters on the chalkboard with Jamie (5), Rachel (6), and Nicholas (5).  Jamie had written Nicholas’s name on the board, but missed a couple of letters, so we began identifying capital and lowercase letters to each other. Eventually, we spelled Nicholas’s name correctly, and then each of their names next to his.

By this time, most of the students had arrived and we were about to begin our “morning meeting.”  The morning meeting takes place at 9:30, (or when a significant majority has arrived at school), and is spent making announcements, whether general or pertaining to the day’s activities.

After the meeting, I stayed to meet with Rachel (6) and Nicholas (5).  These two have been quarrelling and physically fighting on and off since the beginning of the year.  Last week it got so bad it was voted they would be sent home for the day and in the future would have to meet with a staff member at the beginning of each day.  These two are especially rebellious for a five- and six-year-old, and appear to need a significant period of time before being fully effected by the fruits of a free school environment.  I am positive that if I were a teacher in a traditional school, there would be no hope for helping these two “get along.”  Not only because there would be much more coercion involved in my relationship with them, but also because I would have no support from their peers.

Part of the free school “curriculum” is community and cooperation.  One aspect of this curriculum concept is what we are currently calling the “complaint committee” (I may propose a new name at a future school meeting).  Staff and students call meetings regarding individual behavior, rule breaking, or disputes between students.  Each day, a rotating group of students and staff meet as the complaint committee, and are responsible for resolving complaints that people have written. The committee reviews the complaint and involves whomever necessary to ensure that everyone is understood, and that a solution is being worked towards.

Daniel (11), Charles (17) and Jackson (staff) joined me for the meeting with Rachel and Nicholas.  Some five- and six-year-olds love to talk about how they feel and what they’re thinking, and those kids generally enjoy the school meetings.  Nicholas and Rachel, though, are generally uninterested in the meetings and are quick to get distracted.  It would appear that this renders the meeting powerless, but I have witnessed just the opposite.  When the child realizes that his or her behavior could result in a boring meeting where they must retell the event and contribute towards finding a solution – they tend to be more willing to work it out amongst themselves.

This is often the case with Nicholas and Rachel, and I am convinced that today’s improvement had something to do with the painfully long (probably fifteen minute) meeting they had to endure before they were free to play.  Whether brought on by the meeting itself, or the threat of the meeting, the goal is for them to be able to work through a dispute and fully understand the other person, in order to establish genuine cooperation.

By this time, the students had scattered and were all involved in one thing or another.  I noticed Steven (12) and Jackson (staff) were about to begin a game of chess.  Sadly, I had never played chess growing up and still had yet to learn.  I asked them to teach me how to play, so they turned their game into a tutorial.  I picked up the basics from watching them play one game, but the strategy involved still seemed hazy.  They were satisfied to only play once, so I announced that I would want another lesson the next time a game took place.

In the relaxed atmosphere at a free school, it is common for students and staff to teach and learn from each other, rather than perpetuate the absurdity that adults know everything and have nothing to learn from children.  The largest obstacle I must overcome to be an effective teacher is to suppress a history of complacency and cultivate an increasing desire to continuously learn new things.  The scars from my compulsory schooling are slow to fade.

After the chess game, I helped Jamie (5) and Rachel (6) identify a feather that they had found on the ground near the gerbil cage.  It was small and brown and I suspected it had come from one of our pillows that were stuffed with feathers.  The girls were concerned (and a bit excited) at the prospect of a bird having been inside the classroom.  We used the Internet to find that pillows are commonly stuffed with duck feathers, and then found some pictures of what they look like.  We compared them to the photos and realized the feather was most likely from our pillow.  The girls seemed satisfied.

While I ate my daily bowl of spinach and Italian dressing, a Journalism graduate student from Columbia University sat down and interviewed me.  She was visiting the school to gather information for an article she is writing on democratic education.  As lunch began to break up, a large group of kids made plans to go to the roof to play a game involving Nerf guns.  After being harassed for breaking the “no Nerf guns inside” rule, they decided to take them to the roof where they would be free to use them in their full capacity.

I stayed with the few kids that did not want to go to the roof, but soon everyone had chosen to make their way up there.  I joined the Nerf-gun-capture-the-flag game midway.  A series of strict rules were already established and agreed upon by both teams – it wound up being a combination of freeze tag, Capture the Flag, and Nerf gun melee.  I cannot speak for the rest of the students involved, but I certainly learned that despite my slender physique, I am out of shape and in desperate need of more cardiovascular exercise.

Soon after we returned to the classrooms, a parent of a new student came in to give a demonstration on how to play a didgeridoo.  He told us about his time spent in Australia, how he became interested in the instrument, and some of the culture of the aboriginals responsible for the didgeridoo.  As you would expect, some students were fascinated, some listened politely, and others could care less.  One student suggested we start a didgeridoo band and perform to raise money for the school.

The last half hour of each day has been voted to be set-aside for “quiet library time.” This is to help everyone wind down before the school day ends, and allow for total silence for any activities that require it.  The rule was created at our democratic meetings, which are held each Wednesday morning.  These meetings are in place to foster social democracy and allow for the staff and students to collectively create the rules and structure by which we agree to live.

Unlike the monotony of compulsory schooling, each day at a free school is expected to be different, vibrant, and fresh.  That is not to say there are not any daily structures or activities that carry over into consecutive days, weeks, or months, however, we are at liberty to evolve as seen fit by the group.  Most importantly, each student learns how to be responsible for him or herself and to the rest of the community.

The education of the young cannot be isolated from future society it will inevitably create.  If we want to see a world that values solidarity and social democracies, we must first give them a reason to – we must turn alternative theories into tangible realities.  The State approved curriculum does not stop with reading, writing, arithmetic and standardized tests, but becomes a full-fledged system of indoctrination – breeding high levels of cognitive complacency, spiritual insecurity, and political impotency.

Demonstrated in their ability to walk and talk without any external prompting, we know that humans are innately curious and natural learners.  An education of empowerment recognizes this reality and creates an environment that promotes self-knowledge and allows students to discover themselves free from fear.  It is fear that causes one to feel unsafe or insecure – acting as a cancer on their psychosomatic state.  Accepting and affirming people for who they already are, not who you wish for them to become, is the only way to fully eradicate the poison of fear from one’s development.

Today was the first day I woke up with the knowledge that my childhood hero is no longer among us. Yesterday, the fierce and beautiful light that was Howard Zinn passed away at the age of 87. I spent the night trying to figure out how one copes with a loss like this, when your hero dies, what do you do? I lit a candle and I went back to the amazing words he wrote, reading the gentle and urgent calls for action against injustice until I could almost believe he was alive again. I can still feel the shock that I know thousands, if not millions, are feeling right now as they realize that this beacon of goodness, strength, and integrity is no longer with us.

Professor Howard Zinn was born in NYC, the son of Jewish Immigrants whose fight for labor rights gave us a little more dignity and rights in the work place. Raised amongst the working poor (like I was), Zinn did what many of the poor do who want to make a difference, he joined the military to fight against the Nazi’s in WWII. When he came back the U.S. he laid down his weapons and said “never again,” deciding from that point to dedicate his life to peace. He worked a lot of hard jobs before going to college at the age of 27 and earning a doctorate in history from Columbia University.

During the Civil Rights movement, Zinn taught at Spelman, one of the historic black colleges whose student body was active in the movement. Zinn did everything he could to support and encourage his students activism. He became a leader in SNCC, attended all the rallies, spoke, organized, and fought along side his students. Alice Walker said he was her favorite professor and a source of great inspiration.

Zinn was active in the AntiWar movement, speaking out against Vietnam. He was active in the peace movement, the women’s rights movement, and just about every cause you could think of. He organized, he spoke, he acted. He taught until recent years at Boston University where he published numerous works that have inspired countless people around the world, particularly us History majors. Of his works was the famous “A People’s History of the United States,” and “A Power Governments Could Not Suppress.” He published plays, textbooks, and creative literature that was meant to shed light on the power of the ordinary citizen to make the world a better place. He called on us from the pages, asking us to not give up, providing stories of those who have changed the world. His life was poetry, he truly embodied what Gandhi said: “My life is my message.” Unlike many leaders in our world today, he lived his truth completely. There were no scandals, no drama, no reasons to doubt his conviction at any point. He was strength and integrity personified.

I remember the day I picked up, “A Power Governments Could Not Suppress.” I remember reading it absolutely enthralled, every nerve in my body lit by the truths of histories that have been forgotten. The histories of the people, the poor, the marginalized, who invisible as they may be do what is right simply because it is right without knowing that this action would in fact alter the course of history forever.

I remember activists passing the book along from hand to hand, a light in the darkness. When you are starving, when you are wondering why on Earth you thought you could make a difference, this book showed you all that you needed to know. The stories of those who fought for a better world simply because it was the right thing to do. Endless stories, numerous stories, like waves in an ocean, declaring over and over again “you are not alone, you are not alone.”

Professor, you have changed my life. May you find peace, at long last. Thank you for the gift of your light.

“TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
— Howard Zinn

You can also read this on the AmeriCorps VISTA blog I cowrite:
http://rushmorevistas.blogspot.com/

“They were under the heel of the French, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said ‘We will serve you if you will get us free from the prince.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Ok it’s a deal.’ And they kicked the French out. The Haitians revolted and got something themselves free. But ever since they have been cursed by one thing after another,”

Pat Robertson doesn’t know it, but he’s right. Haiti is involved with a devil of sorts. That devil is eternally cursing Haiti; sweeping in when the country is at its most vulnerable and working against its best interests. That devil is the United States.

The United States has been interfering in Haitian affairs since the very beginning. First it was a State Department supported move by American investors to take over Haiti’s national bank. Then Wilson’s subsequent nineteen year long occupation of Haiti with the sole interest of protecting those investors under which the US basically ran Haiti’s government for them. This was followed by a road building system, crafted by the US, which amounted to indentured servitude. Peasants would build roads in lieu of paying a tax. When the United States finally left Haiti, we left them with a $40,000,000 debt to us. Let’s break this down. We take over their national bank. When social unrest starts hurting American investment in the country, we invade and take over their government. Our officials acting as their government take a loan from us for them and we leave them with the debt.

This debt, continuous social unrest and overall lack of true independence put Haiti in a never ending unstable position. This worked out perfectly, though, for the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which preys on unstable third world countries to globalize the reach of multinational corporations and foster market/state relations which advance corporatist agendas and undermine democracy and the common good. Is it any wonder that corrupt leaders took structured IMF loans? The United States can hardly keep tabs on where Pentagon money is being spent. How easy do you think it is for Haitian leaders to cut some favors and pocket the cash?

How do the global capitalist elite win? The IMF tells Haiti that they can receive “aid” (loans) if they drastically change up their economic policy. Haiti agrees not to subsidize their farmers (despite the fact that their agricultural sector is enormously important to their economy). They agree to open up their borders to foreign investors. They agree to drop tariffs on imports. So, what happens?

Well, first world countries aren’t held to the same standard as third world countries. They can subsidize the heck out of anything they please. They can set tariffs, close borders, tighten health and safety standards and even embargo countries they disagree with. So, when the US subsidizes rice (a former cash crop in Haiti) it can sell it way below it’s actual value. This is called dumping and other countries aren’t allowed to do it, so says the IMF. Haitian farmers (lacking subsidies) are now entirely exposed to the foreign rice market. They have to compete with US agribusiness but can only do so with what’s in their pockets. They’re not backed by a wealthy state. Naturally, they go out of business. It becomes too costly to even maintain their farms and so they sell their property to foreign investors. While all of this is going on, US corporations are setting up sweatshops in urban centers across Haiti. Farmers, now jobless and likely homeless, flock to these urban centers to find work (think of the Industrial Revolution). The only difference is that Haitians can’t afford to purchase the products they’re making in these sweatshops due to abysmal wages and living conditions. The majority of what is produced is exported to first world nations and the profit is pocketed by foreign investors and maybe, just maybe, a handful of Haitian elite. Haiti doesn’t benefit. Period.

If I may, I want to talk a little bit about the multiplier effect which is present in first world urban centers but missing in countries suffering under neo-liberal colonialism. When you work in your community, you create value. This value is measured in money. Normally, the goods you help produce and sell go to people within the community and the money comes back to you and your co-workers who, in turn, spend that money within the community. This creates a circulation of capital in which the community becomes a real market place where independent businesses can thrive as well as services. You’ll find everything from coffee shops to law offices in most communities and these types of businesses are able to remain afloat due to the local circulation of capital. This doesn’t happen in Haiti for exactly the reasons listed above. Haitian sweatshop workers are making less than enough to actually survive. They can’t afford legal advice or coffee shops. They can barely afford to live. They don’t live paycheck to paycheck, they live penny to penny, hour by hour. There is no community. Only slavery.

So, in the wake of this current tragedy, is it any wonder that the IMF is swooping in with $100,000,000 in structured loans for Haiti? This is stacking debt on top of debt with the sole purpose of maintaining control of them. Some of the stipulations for receiving the loan? Freeze public service sector wages (y’know- doctors and nurses. People you don’t really need during a crisis). Raise the price for electricity. Hold down inflation (this means less government spending… During a crisis).

Aid is aid. Loans are loans. Loans are not aid. I really don’t have much to say here. There is no strategy short of dismantling institutions like the IMF and dethroning the corporate elite. This is not to say that all hope is lost but rather that it’s going to take a complete overhaul in how we view politics and economics before we can take out the trash and rebuild the world as we see fit. Oh, yeah, and Obama’s an IMF cohort. Don’t be fooled.

As the UN Climate Talks  wound down with little progress made to address the most unique of crises in this time of global crises, Bolivian President Evo Morales wondered aloud that “if the leaders of countries cannot arrive in an agreement, why don’t the peoples then decide together?”

Uncomplicated and to the point, President Morales effortlessly put his fingers on the main tension that plagued the COP 15 talks last month. Mr. Morales directly spoke to the conflict between the delegates in Copenhagen whose approaches to climate change tended to be gradual in nature, and those whose strategies in tackling climate change addressed the urgent nature of climate change.

One could assume that when Mr. Morales speaks about “the peoples” coming together, he is referring to that latter group, people like Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed. Long considered to be one of the international community’s most outspoken leaders in speaking about the devastating impacts of climate change, Mr. Nasheed’s message at Copenhagen was clear. If drastic steps are not taken to reduce carbon emissions in the near future, the Maldives population faces great danger. With 80% of its geographic territory resting three feet or less above sea level, the Maldives people will likely be part of an estimated 200 million environmental migrants by the year 2050.

A member of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the Maldives and the 41 other members of AOSIS delivered a clear, concise message in Copenhagen. They argued that while their environmental impact has been minimal, small states face disproportionate challenges in the face of increased carbon dioxide emissions into the Earth’s atmosphere by the world’s leading polluters.

“The peoples” also likely referred to vocal critics of the way that the talks were organized, such as Lumumba Stanislaus Di-Aping. Chairman of the Group of 77, a group of the world’s developing – and poorest – countries, Mr. Di-Aping responded furiously to a leaked draft of a text crafted by a group of individuals representing the US, UK, and Denmark and other developed – and wealthiest – countries known as “the Danish text.” Mr. Di-Aping, Sudanese by birth, reportedly reacted to a proposal that would grant $10 billion to Africa as part of the text by declaring that $10 billion “is not enough to buy us coffins.” He characterized the proposal as asking the G77 to “sign a suicide pact.”

Also seated at Mr. Morales’ hypothetical negotiating table would likely be young people. Arriving in Copenhagen with large numbers, youth delegations stepped to the forefront of the debate both inside and outside of the talks. Permitted entry into the Bella Center – where the talks themselves were held – young people made themselves extremely visible during the two week long event. Ascending on Copenhagen from every corner of the world, the young people in attendance had a simple, yet powerful message to their elders: their futures, and the future of unborn millions, were truly at stake in the negotiations.

The more than 1,000 young people attending the talks from over 100 countries gathered as part of an emerging international youth climate movement. Demanding an ambitious, binding, and equitable treaty following the conference, they injected the talks with a healthy amount of urgency.

Among the attendees at Mr. Morales’ alternative “peoples” conference would certainly include Morales’ longtime ally in the region, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

Critical of the organizing of the conference, which saw developed nations meeting in closed door meetings at the expense of a more transparent approach to this worldwide problem, Mr. Chavez spoke eloquently to the COP 15 general assembly about the need to not only change the climate, but also about changing the system.

The system, Mr. Chavez argued, is one that precludes those most affected from the devastating effects of climate change from participating in the discussions to the degree that the world’s leading polluters control the conversation.

This gap in equitable participation is at the heart of climate justice, another theme from the talks more visible in civil society organizations rather than inside the conference itself. Climate justice is an approach to avoiding global climate catastrophe that pushes to strengthen the voices of affected people (indigenous people as well as people in developing nations in the global south living in areas that face an exponentially higher risk of displacement) in the dialogue surrounding climate change.

Unfortunately, the COP 15 talks ended with no binding treaty. Instead, the world is left with a vague accord that promises only the continuance of the same inadequate UN Convention on Climate Change. While more committed attempts to solve this most unique of global problems – one that truly requires an approach from the global community to identify itself as interconnected people rather than as competitors – were largely ignored, hope is not lost.

In the United States, a country that has arguably been the world’s leading stumbling block on the road to sustainable climate solutions, there has been slight progress. Last year, the House of Representative passed the first ever climate bill in American history. However, when it mattered most, the US again showed that it has much to learn from its less developed partners.

New alliances and voices from around the world were not only visible during the negotiations, but were audible as well. Delegates from historically underserved communities seized the opportunity to inform the world about the potentially devastating effects of climate change while collaborating together to magnify their intersecting struggle. Young people, people from Africa, South America, Asia and small island states were in many ways the focal point of the conference pushing solutions and proposals to literally save the human race from self-destruction. Indeed, this approach, moving towards international and equitable cooperation is no less than is needed at this point in our world’s history.

In 1971 a group of Philadelphia-based activists formed the Movement for a New Society, a network of collectives dedicated to radical pacifist, feminist, and libertarian socialist politics.  Over the next 18 years the organization grew to a peak of approximately 300 members in more than a dozen U.S. cities and made important contributions to anti-nuclear, radical ecology, and gender and sexual liberation struggles.  The Movement for a New Society (MNS) sought to combine organizing campaigns that utilized direct action tactics with a commitment by its members to “live the revolution now” by transforming themselves and their social relationships, as well as by living collectively and establishing alternative institutions such as food co-ops.  Many movement norms and forms of activism that contemporary anti-authoritarians often take for granted—the consensus process, the use of spokescouncils, internal anti-oppression work, and a focus on prefiguring in daily life the world one hopes to win—were either pioneered or heavily promoted by MNS.  In 1988 the group dissolved due to the inhospitable political climate and to conflicts and challenges that arose out of MNS’ own innovative group process and strategy.  (Read an historical account of Movement for a New Society here.)

Though its experiences are directly relevant to challenges facing radical organizers today, MNS remains relatively unknown.  In the summer of 2008 Andy Cornell and Andrew Willis-Garcés interviewed founding member George Lakey as part of an effort to begin evaluating the MNS experience and drawing out lessons for contemporary social justice struggles.

Movement for a New Society advocated nonviolent revolution.  What makes someone a nonviolent revolutionary versus a pacifist?

GL: Pacifism is hugely influenced by conflict aversion. It really shows its middle class-ness in that way, I think. There is a tremendous level of a yearning for harmony because many pacifists see conflict itself as the problem.  On the other hand, nonviolent revolutionaries welcome conflict, depend on it, and see polarization as absolutely essential. Whereas most pacifists hate polarization, we welcome it as long as polarization happens in such a way that we’re on the winning side!  [Laughs]  And then, of course, lots of pacifists are okay with capitalism and nonviolent revolutionaries are not. They are strongly anti-capitalist and often anti-state.

Why would someone who believes in non-violence naturally oppose capitalism and the state?  What’s the linkage?

GL: I think Gandhi said it best: “Inequality is a form of violence, and requires violence to defend it.”  On the political front that implicates certain types of states and that certainly is the nature of capitalism—to create inequalities.

MNS placed a lot of emphasis on “process”—on the way in which the group made decisions and carried out its work.  One of the abiding influences of MNS on contemporary anti-authoritarian movements is the importance placed on consensus decision-making processes.  How did process become central to everything MNS did?

GL:  Well, there were a number of influences.  Some of us had been involved in Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964. So we thought, “Of course, participatory democracy!”  Yet, even though we yearned for community and experienced it in fleeting moments during the 60s, a lot of our nature was very individualistic.  So we named it. We said, “Look, we have not been brought up to be communitarians, truly collective beings.”  We realized that the price of survival with all the ego-maniacs [in the group] was going to be an explicit process.  Also, some of us were influenced by A.J. Muste, who had had a really bruising experience with [authoritarian decision-making structures] even before the 1960s, especially during his time in the Trotskyist movement. So we also had some lore from elders to help us realize we were going to need a big process renovation to be able to cohere at all.

Now, how do we make decisions?  From the get go, as we created a community of people interested in exploring the idea of living together and practicing the revolution, I don’t even remember it being explicitly discussed.  I remember it being a shared understanding, and that was probably the Quaker influence.  There were a whole bunch of Quakers involved and it was just assumed that whatever we’d end up with we would have arrived at by consensus. (The thing that is tricky about that is that we were in formation, which means anybody that could see the direction that we were going and didn’t like it could just not come to the next meeting. So that’s like attrition rather than consensus!)  But then, I think we formally decided that would be our process of decision making in our first National Network Meeting which was in Madison, Wisconsin. And the Madison people who invited us there were the Center for Conflict Resolution, whose specialty was consensus.  They were saying, “Consensus is the way to go, the feminist way to go.”  Another formative influence in the ‘70s was the federation of intentional communities. They were heavy into consensus and many people flowed through them and were influenced by them. So that was another standard setter maybe.  There was a sense that, if you were really radical, really willing to leave the capitalist cutthroat world, then consensus was part of the package—that’s what community really means.

Many contemporary activists now believe consensus and affinity groups to be crucial forms of organization, but they don’t believe in nonviolence. Did you see those things—consensus and nonviolence—as integrally linked?

GL: Well consensus is a structural attempt to get equality to happen in decision making, so it’s very much about equality. So again, back to Gandhi: where we are pushing equality, we are pushing nonviolence. Where we are allowing or encouraging inequality, there is a violent back-up there somewhere, even though it might be masked. Affinity groups speak to the question of hierarchy. The more affinity group proliferation (plus other stuff being true), the less we need hierarchical, top-down, control of social movements, the more nonviolent those movements are likely to be, I believe. That is, I think hierarchy promotes violence internally in order to maintain itself.  Like, sooner or later Hugo Chavez will probably live out the nightmare that the Beltway is trying to create for him. Despite all the populism, hierarchy has this influence, I think. And hierarchs end up using violence as a way to try to keep themselves in power.

Today, a lot of activists of our generation see consensus as the only legitimate way to make decisions, no matter what task or what kind of activity they are working on. Likewise, decentralized affinity groups and spokes councils are often viewed as the only valid way of organizing for revolutionary change. What do you think the lesson of MNS should be about the uses and the shortcomings of those forms?

GL: I think that one of the reasons that MNS isn’t still around is the downside of consensus. I was never a fanatical consensus person because I thought there was a big difference between my Quaker practice and political practice.  I thought there were times where consensus would be just right and other times when it wouldn’t be.  But I was charmed by Seabrook [a successful mass direct action campaign against nuclear power that took place in 1976 which was organized using affinity groups, spokescouncils, and consensus process] in the sense of, “Hey, let’s see how far we can take this.”  MNS was a lab.  We thought, “Let’s try it here and try it there and see how it serves and how it doesn’t.”

But eventually people started getting rigid about it.  The metaphor I used to use was: we fitted out a pretty good ship, and launched it in the direction of someplace.  But the rudder was fixed. So long as we were going in a direction we wanted to go in and there weren’t a lot of icebergs cropping up and so on, we could just keep doing that.  However, what about when we needed to make really big changes, like the Titanic would have benefited from?  We weren’t able to do it because the ability to block consensus was available to, really, anybody. I got really frightened about this when I heard some of our newer members explaining the main benefit of being a member of MNS was, “You get to block consensus!”  By the late 80s a huge shift had happened in the movement to make it the way to make decisions. So I think in the 70s it was cutting-edge, and in the 80s it was settling in to the way and people had to argue for parliamentary procedure if they wanted to do it.

How do you think that shift happened, so that in some sectors of the left consensus became hegemonic and came to be what made you a radical or not a radical?

GL: My first thought would be a combination of the women’s movement and the anti-nuke movement. The anti-nukes movement proved its viability amongst people who weren’t ideologically on the same page. And the women’s movement brought righteousness, as with everything they did.  It was the correct way to make decisions…to liberate the voices of all.

Let’s talk about the idea of “living the revolution now” or what today is often called “prefigurative politics.” How did MNS decide that was important and what were some of the benefits?

GL: Well I think there were several impulses that lead to it. One that weighed heavily with me was a sense of demoralization that came out of the ‘60s.  Many felt it was all over and we’d failed. So how do you start something new in a largely demoralized bunch of activists?  We needed confidence building measures. We needed to know that we could do something now, as well as project a vision and a strategy.  Another impulse was making a living. We didn’t picture being a fundraising organization with that subsidizing the activists. Activists had to provide their own income. But, by living communally, the costs go way down.  So some people said, “We love the idea of printing, so how about we start a collective print shop?” And that was employment for a lot of people. And a couple other people said, “The cheaper we can get quality food, the better, so let’s start a co-op.” Cheap food, that’s great, and livelihood for the people who’d be managers. So we had a chance to create something and make it work and provide some benefit to the neighborhood. So I think several agendas came together around prefigurative politics.

So one aspect of MNS was building alternative institutions.  But there was also the idea of living your life differently, according to different values—including living collectively, not just working collectively.  And this seems to be another legacy of MNS.  Was there an assumption that by living in new ways, other people would see the value and change their own lives in accordance?

GL: This is a great question because this was the parting of the ways between those of us who stuck and many people who had MNS on their list of egalitarian communities to go around to.  I don’t know how many people I talked to who said, “We’ll I’ve just been to Acorn, I’ve just been to Twin Oaks, and here I am. What do you got?” And I’d say, “Well probably not something you’d like. Because the cutting edge of our understanding of revolution is not lifestyle change. We think of it like ashrams in Gandhi’s ideas—the ashrams that he set up, which were base camps for revolution. So what do you do in the base camp for revolution? You get ready to go on the barricades. You’re getting ready to go to jail on the ashrams. And that’s what we are doing.” And so a lot of people would say, “Thank you for not wasting my time, I’m out of here.” Because they wanted lifestyle to be the leading edge of change, and we clearly were not doing that.

For us the cadre model was really important.  Our role in the neighborhood safety group, our role in the food co-op, our role in anti-nukes movement was not to get people to buy our lifestyle. That’s not the point.  Now if they happen to see that we’re doing effective work side by side with them and they say, “Its funny, we’re in this very discouraging period and I’m feeling it’s all over and your not feeling despair,” maybe that’s an opening. You can talk about why you don’t come to the meetings in despair.  So it’s not that we are closed or closeted about it, but you have to figure out how to be accessible enough to connect with other people.

Another former member, Betsy Raasch-Gilman, claims MNS had “a positive allergy to leadership.” For many young radicals today leadership is still anathema. When MNS was founded, what was the understanding of the role of leadership and of leaders within the group?  How did that change over 17 years?

GL: My recollection of the early days of MNS was not allergy to leadership, but a growing weariness of male leadership. So I think the questioning of leadership in early MNS was much more coming from a feminist place. And very often when criticism of leadership behavior happened, it would be of masculine styles.  Some members wrote a wonderful article called, “Speaking in Capital Letters.” It argued that the way men in mixed groups tend to prevail, or try to prevail, is that they say everything very emphatically as if its been thought about for months, even though they’re making up in the moment!  So there was a lot of criticism of leadership behaviors but it was put in a feminist context. Which implied that we need strong women leaders who will have different styles some times.  And this lead to some amazing things happening.  A group of women got together and requested-slash-demanded that I give them a seminar on political theory because that was an arena they felt like they needed to catch up on with male leaders of MNS.  And we didn’t talk about the fact that I, a male, was giving a seminar to women on political theory.  In a lot of circles that would sound terrible.  But we just saw it as skill transfer or knowledge transfer.  Five years later I wouldn’t have been able to do it because, in addition to being weary about George, Bill, Dick, and so on, on the grounds that we are all men, the criticism had shifted to the fact that we were providing leadership at all. Who needs leaders?

So that changed in five years?  What were the roots of that change?

GL: Well, I think that’s really complicated.  There were a few things.  I think it was the communitarians, in part.  Because there were communitarians that went off to Twin Oaks or whatever, but there were actually others who thought, “Yep, this [MNS] is a great set-up. And we don’t mind going to demonstrations now and then.”  So, people were coming to MNS that weren’t that involved in strategic political work.  [Their idea of] “living the revolution now” was their big draw.

Another issue was each wave of “ism” that we responded too.  Feminism was the first one, then homophobia was the one we tackled, then classism and racism.  Each one of those raised more personal growth issues for each of us. There are the men and the women saying, “Oh my god, I had no idea how sexist I was. Oh, but look how homophobic I am!” So the personal growth dimension constantly got refreshed and had a sense of urgency for us, living in community, by our increasing awareness. So we had tons of work to do.  And that was important work, but it was different from organizing campaigns that require a different kind of leadership.

And another thing that was going on was this consensus principle, which at first was very much about a seeking. Another of our catch phrases was, “The wisdom of the whole is wiser than the wisdom of the wisest member.”  We were going after the wisdom.  It’s really different when a group is seeking wisdom through consensus, and when a group is making a decision, and its like, “You’ve said enough. This is the third time you’ve spoken!” “Yeah, but he happens to have done co-ops for twenty years and we’re talking about the co-op now!” “It’s the third time he’s spoken!

It sounds like the formality of it, rather than the underlying motivation behind the process, took over.

GL: The culture just really shifted.  At one point, an organizational development consultant volunteered to work with MNS because it seemed as an organization we were getting sick.  She had us do an exercise where she said, “All of you who are leaders in the organization, you go over there.” So like three people, blushing, go across the room. And she smiled and said, “Ok, all of you who do covert leadership, you go over here.” And about a third of the room gets up, including me, and goes over there. So it turned out there was this group of covert older male leadership—and this is so traditionally male, too, like we’re holding the family together.  So that’s what we were doing, but not even talking to each other about it.  It was just so fucked up. So I got us to be a men’s group for two years and we cried a lot with each other about how we didn’t want to be covert and have to manipulate to keep an organization afloat because we can’t come out of our closets as resourceful people.  I kept saying, “What if we were to look at leadership as resources. And it depends on the issue.  Like, on this issue you know more and I know less, and on another issue it’s different. So we’re scanning constantly for the most resources we could bring to bear on this decision.

So, as someone at the heart of one of the groups that is perceived as one of the most anti-leader organizations in recent history, what would you say to young activists today who see having defined leaders as undesirable or reactionary?

GL: Our experience says it doesn’t pay to be anti-leadership. It does pay to believe in shared leadership and to look at leadership as a concept of resource rather than as the likelihood of domination.

A couple of co-founders of MNS had been on Dr. King’s national staff in the civil rights movement. So they saw, up close and personal, what it’s like to rely on a charismatic figure. Even though the founders of MNS were in love with Dr. King, we also saw the tremendous vulnerability that produces in a movement and realized we need to create a leadership understanding that does not rely on charismatic leaders.  But actually I think we went too far.  We went reactive to the point where, “Well, if you have charisma, don’t bother to come by here!”   I’m really glad that we understood that the whole question of leadership needs to be taken up.  I think we went real far on leadership issues in our laboratory experiments, and we also didn’t go far enough and that’s what did us in.

Looking back, one difference between the period of the 1970s and today is that we were still close to genuinely inspirational leadership in the 70s—that is to say Dr. King, Nelson Mandela, and some of the people around them. And that stirred our blood, however critical we were of structural weaknesses that went with that.  A lot of us activists yearn to be able to give our all in an exemplary way, to somehow live out our highest aspirations, and live them out in the political realm. And I think that when a figure like that comes along, it elevates the discourse and the aspiration of people. I think it’s easier for us to try to hold ourselves in a higher place.  I wouldn’t have predicted I would say this in response to this question, but this is what’s coming out.  It may be temperamental; it may have to do with that sector of the population like me, who respond to human beings being exemplary. Maybe other people are more inspired by books or by collectives moving in history or right now. But there is some batch of folks, like me, who toot some on the saxophone, but when we hear in a jazz club a group really getting down, we walk out of there somehow expanded.  I think that those of us who were close to the 1970s saw a lot of the expanded behavior, expanded performance, in the realm of political action.  That was part of the texture of our consciousness. And I don’t see that today. The quality of political leadership in the U.S. has just been so abysmal. I think on the radical side as well as on the liberal side. Abysmal is too strong a word.  But what I’m trying to point out is a lack of figures who rise above, that are like that jazz club performance group that got into the zone, that make us say, “Yes, maybe I can get into the zone someday.” And I don’t run into that condition culturally and I don’t run into activists very often who seem to resonate to that, who can tell me the last time that they’ve been to that jazz club and have been lifted in that way.

You’ve been involved in anti-authoritarian social movements for five decades.  Is there anything unique to you about the younger activists you’ve worked with recently or the political movements in which they are taking action?

There are some really positive, inspirational developments.  For one thing, all this awareness of oppression/liberation issues.  In the ‘70s, just taking on feminism was a huge, huge thing. And now we’ve got so many young people who understand a bunch of “-isms” and relationships among the “-isms” at some level in their cognitive map, if not all the way through.  Also in the ‘70s there were still a lot of young activists who believed that the U.S. wasn’t structurally corrupted to its core by imperialism. They could still hold on to a believe that Vietnam was in some way an aberration or maybe it was an extreme of tendencies that could be found the lower key in other ways in Latin America or whatever. But it seems to me that younger activists are far more ready today to make a sweeping analysis. And then of course the environmental picture. When we were starting in the 70s, very few people shared our view. And now, even Al Gore does! [Laughs] So there are some real plusses in the way people start out today.

George Lakey’s first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in and he has gone on to play activist roles in a number of movements.  He has authored seven social change books and has sometimes made his living teaching in college.  Facilitator of over one thousand workshops on five continents, he founded the movement education center Training for Change.

Andy Cornell is an organizer and a graduate student who is completing a dissertation on mid-20^th Century U.S. anarchism.  He has recently written about the labor movement in Left Turn magazine.

Andrew Willis-Garcés is a community organizer in Washington, D.C.

This interview is dedicated to the memory of George Willoughby, who passed away on January 5, 2010.  George Lakey writes, “George Willoughby, one of my most important mentors and a co-founder of MNS, died two nights ago at 95.  George worked closely with A.J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Dave Dellinger, and a host of others who experimented with nonviolent revolutionary approaches; for example, George was chair of the Committee for Nonviolent Action and was arrested on the high seas by the U.S. for attempting to sail into the nuclear testing zone of the Pacific.  He’s been an anchor for me my entire adult life and was a prime mover in starting MNS.  He was cracking jokes until a couple of minutes before his heart beat its last.”

On the path to reclaiming selfhood and power, we must take back our histories and our memories. In doing so, we will dispel many disempowering and caging cultural myths. One such myth is the belief in the invisibility and negative reality of whiteness. We define race currently by its relation to whiteness, the hegemonic myth of absolute sameness that labels all else as other.  This is untrue, the repression of the indigenous is not just a struggle of color, it is a struggle over reality and power. Who has the power to write history? Who has been silenced? What do you know of your history and your indigenous ancestors? Why were they silenced? What truths did they hold that threatened the established order? Together we can reject absolutly the colonial mindset which seeks to define our reality and shorten our memories. What if we all remembered the struggles of our ancestors? If we all realized the responsibility we have to the planet and to each other as children of the Earth? What nation are you from, from before there were flags and ideas of ownership? Can you remember?  Will you take this journey with me as we struggle to remember, reclaim, and renew our past?

 

Here is an article about one culture my blood ties me to as a strong Irish woman. I relish the love of the cow and honor the sacredness of all life, even life beyond my own species.

Enjoy:)

Be here now.

 We must stop running from the chaos of this moment in history, from the collective pain of unsustainable systems breaking apart at their seams. How can we cope with all that is happening? How can we come to terms with the fact that we are destroying our beloved Earth and each day we wait for solutions is another day in which the poorest among us are forced to live with the results? To deal with this, we just have to feel.

Feel the cries of the Earth, the tears of the starving, the hands of the child who made your shirt. Feel them, don’t look away, don’t turn on your t.v. Don’t buy anything. Stand still, hold my hand, reach for each other and comfort each other. Pain ignored will not wilter but manifest into more terrible demons of violence, rage, and retribution. We must listen and in this listening let our hearts break open and expand to the truth of life, that we are all connected, that a strangers pain is your pain, and that we must depend on our Earth Mother to live. Let us love with abandon and feel pain without reservation. Love what we love and let this force guide us. Feel what you feel and do not hestitate to share. In a world in which emotions are degraded and ignored for efficent, material living made easy, the truth softly spoken is more revolutionary then any man made weapon. Please speak your truth, don’t numb yourself. You can not numb yourself without numbing your whole being.

Be here now. In this great adventure of life as it unfolds to a new human chapter. The phrophets say this is the time when we will choose as a species to move towards a life sustaining vision or to crumble from within. Stay awake, feel. Be here, with me.

 You will not be alone.

(Disclaimer: I am not writing a well-organized, carefully researched essay– these are just thoughts, and I want input.)

Lately I have been doing a lot of thinking about the Left (specifically in the U.S.) and our use of violent/nonviolent tactics in fighting capitalism, imperialism, oppression, etc.    I am certainly no expert when it comes to arguments for or against the use of violence, but I think I have a decent understanding of the mechanics of the most basic arguments for and against.  And this is where I find myself torn a little bit.  I am a proponent of nonviolence– nonviolent direct action, etc.   I am largely opposed to the destruction of property, unless it has some great strategic value in advancing the aims of the egalitarian Left.

This is my fear, though. I am certain that I do not want to live in a society, post-capitalism, that has been brought about through the use of mainly violent tactics.  But I worry that the machines of imperialism, capitalism, oppression, etc. cannot be brought down through the use of largely nonviolent means in a timely fashion.  (Do I think that, in time, the Left could win the hearts and minds of the millions of people necessary to bring down the our oppressors?  Absolutely.  Do I believe that we have enough time to do so– before it is too late to save our planet, to save each other? I’m not as certain.)

So this is my worry, and I’m writing this because I want to know what other people think. Can we on the Left achieve our aims without the use of violence?    Do we want to achieve our aims without the use of violence?  Thoughts?

by John J. Cronan Jr.

(This is an edited version of an essay that appeared in Real Utopia: Participatory Society for the 21^st Century. ed Chris Spannos (AK Press, 2008 )).

We seem to face a serious class crisis within our movements and organizations that has taken two forms: 1) the issue of class has fallen off the list of priorities, and 2) those that do spend adequate attention to it, have the wrong class analysis, rendering it useless.  This pamphlet seeks to briefly, but succinctly, tackle and address these problems, beginning with the latter. The traditional Left’s two class analysis will be scrapped in favor of introducing a third class—the coordinator class; and after identifying this new class, I will discuss the ramification it has on our movements and organizations. It should be noted that class is going to be examined in a more simplistic nature than it should; however, keep in mind that the author believes that class can never been defined as an individual oppression separate from other oppressions that stem from community and cultural, kinship, and authority relations; but rather, each is actively entwined with one another (what is often called “complementary holism”).

What is Class?

Class is defined as a group of people that has shared interests, circumstances, and powers by virtue of its on-going position in the functioning of the economy; though income may be a factor due to a class’ increased bargaining power, it is not as essential as the liberal notion of class makes it out to be. Furthermore, a class must be able to, at least potentially, develop a consciousness that gives it the ability and will to act autonomously. The position of a class results, as well, in it forming its own psychology and culture distinct from other classes. Moreover, class can be defined by its role in social production.  Now, the controversial question is, what positions and roles are the basis for determining a class?

The traditional Left’s answer to this question is that class antagonism is solely based on the relationship to the means of production.  A small group of people, capitalists, own the means of production, and workers are those people who must sell their labor for a wage to the capitalists, because they do not own the means of production. Based on this definition of class, we can agree that capitalists and workers both, indeed, constitute two classes. The capitalist class has shared interests in maximizing profits and increasing control over the production process—at the detriment of the workers, of course. To help ensure so, they organize business organizations, political parties, clubs, etc.  Capitalists also develop a culture and mentality of greed and superiority, as well as in many cases, thinking of workers as mere statistics and instruments of their wealth.

Workers, on the other hand, have an interest in extracting the highest wages possible for the least amount of work, the exact opposite of the capitalists’.  And again, to pursue this, workers form unions and other workplace organizations, sporting clubs, political parties and organizations, etc.  The fact that workers must sell their labor, even if they do not want to do the work, results in an alienation from one’s labor. And given their economic position, workers are obviously going to pursue and live within different cultural conditions. This is the basis of the traditional Left’s class analysis, and the root of its conception of class struggle (Of course, there are more nuanced analyses, but these features remain at the core of most of them).

The Coordinator Class

This analysis held by the Left—including multiple tendencies with in it—however, is wrong. Though we do accept that the relationship to the means of production is a criteria for class division, a very important one, it is not the only one.  It is not only theoretical wrong but historical examples prove otherwise, also.  There is a third class that lies in between workers and owners, labor and capital—the coordinator class.  It arises from the hierarchal division of labor, giving coordinators the relative monopoly of empowering knowledge and skills, and as a result they have considerable say over their own jobs and the jobs of workers below them. These are the waged and/or salaried high-level managers, engineers, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals.

Coordinators defend their skill, knowledge, and authority against workers below them, and fight to gain more wealth, autonomy, and bargaining power from the capitalists above them. They see capitalists as obnoxious impediments to reason and believe that their technocratic solutions to economic and social production are superior.  Conversely, coordinators occupy economic positions which generate feelings of self-worth and capability, and in turn, view workers paternalistically with a great sense of elitism and just rewards, often adopting conceptions as “workers are intellectually incapable or psychologically ill-equipped to administer their own lives without our compassionate aid.” They also form their own organizations to protect their class status—such as professional associations like the American Medical Association (AMA), for doctors, and the American Bar Association, for lawyers[i]—or, even, create organizations to help them ascend to the position of new ruling class, which we have seen done under the guise of a “vanguard” party. The latter point, that the coordinator class could have the desire and ability to become a new ruling class, is key to solidifying it as a class.  It also allows us to better understand the so-called “socialist” or “communist” revolutions of the past, where in fact they were “coordinatorist.” In other words, the coordinator class can be explicitly anti-capitalist but not be for workers self-management, or they could have a commitment to workers self-management but not support institutions and arrangements conducive to such ends.

As we can see, coordinators have their own shared interests, circumstances, power, psychology and culture, and ability to become a new ruling class; therefore it fits our definition of a class.

Another Look at the Working Class

In addition to recognizing a whole other class, the existence and definition of the coordinator class can help us better define the working class.  Now instead of not owning the means of production and merely working for a wage being sole criteria for the working class, we can say that the working class is comprised of wage or salaried workers who do mostly rote, onerous, and disempowering tasks, and have their work defined for them by coordinators and/or capitalists. This is a result of having been systematically denied access to the skills, knowledge, time and energy, and decision-making power to have it otherwise. Subsequently, in the United States and nearly all other industrialized countries, the class breakdown goes like this: 1-5 percent capitalist, 15-25 percent coordinator, and 70-80 percent working class (keeping in mind that there are various strata within the each class, but right now, we are just trying to get a basic understanding of a three class outlook).

Class and Students/Young Adults

Using a three class analysis, we can also better understand where college students and young adults fall on the whole class map—something that will be important to grasp with the growing student movement and the need for working class students to have a self-managed role within them.  Classism definitely exists within student and young adult movements, but if some are not workers and some are obviously not capitalists, or children of capitalist, then what are they?  The class identity of a college student largely depends on their family background and their expected job placement once they get out.  If a student is working class by upbringing and working class by job or likely job, then they should still be considered and will most likely identify with the working class. If a student is coordinator class by upbringing and coordinator class by job or likely job, then they are still part of the coordinator class.  The student or young adult, graduate or not, will stay in that class slot until there own circumstances overcome it. Let me give two examples.

First, say there is a coordinator class student working a low-wage service job while in school. They would not all of the sudden be lumped into the working class. They still have the familial ties and experiences, culture and psychology, of a coordinator class upbringing that will greatly distinguish them from a working class student, whether that student has a job at the moment or not.  However, their experience could lead them to be more sympathetic to the issues of working people.

Second, say there is a coordinator class student who has recently graduated but has been completely been cut off from their parents, either by choice or not, and is forced to get a working class job. Again, it does not make them working class because they do not lose their background and higher bargaining power, connections, etc; however, over time, if they continue to be in a working class slot, they may come to identify, rightfully, as working class—but not immediately or in the near future.

As a result of this analysis, I hope that students will rightfully identify as working class when  appropriate and create forums where they can discuss concerns with others who have the same prior experiences, life situations, and probable futures, based on their class, such as caucuses; and I hope that coordinator class students will not wrongfully take up space in these forums because they lack a class analysis that fails to understand that not all wage laborers are working class; and conversely, that many students are working class.

Coordinator Class and Organizing

I believe that the failure for most activists and organizers, especially those that would consider themselves revolutionaries, to embrace the concept of the coordinator class is highly detrimental and will hurt in the long run if not remedied.  We see already in major coalitions—addressing a broad rang of issues—that a coordinator class has taken control of them, whether intentionally or not.  Many claim to represent working people and have internal democracy; usually this is not the case. The fact that groups on the “Left” suffer from this problem comes to no surprise to anyone that understands the dynamics of the coordinator class.  Moreover, even proclaimed “anti-authoritarian” groups and collectives have fallen victim to coordinator class control. Besides the fact that some organizations’ structure is already somewhat top down on paper and that others are supposedly not, let me give an example of how hierarchal class relations could be reproduced in a situation where voting was done by one person, one vote—even in an organization dedicated to participatory democracy..

Say there are ten people who are part of an activist organization on campus, anywhere in the country, and each person is guaranteed an equal vote on all the issues concerning them. Also, let’s say that all ten are highly active and dedicated. However, at the same time, only three people were doing empowering work like taking care of the chapter’s finances, writing all of the press releases, and speaking at all of the events.  The other seven just hand out fliers, attend events, paint banners, etc.  When it comes time to vote on issues, the seven people not doing the empowering work technically have the ability to out vote the three doing the empowering work, on paper at least.  Ninety-nine percent of the time, however, this will never happen because the seven people won’t know enough about what the hell is going on to make an informed decision, or not feel confident enough to speak definitively and challenge the word of the other three; and even more likely, they might be too worn out from doing rote and onerous tasks to even show up to the meeting. What we have now is a minority  monopolizing decision-making, as well as missed opportunities at developing the potentials of the other seven. This will happen because the corporate division of labor still exists and those with the most initial knowledge, experience and skills will occupy these positions, thereby the structure that allows for the coordinator class to rise is still in tact[ii].

So what do we do to remedy this class division within our own movements and organizations? Well, first, we need to recognize there is a problem—so far, that has not been easy. Second, we need to incorporate the idea of balanced jobs into our movements. Basically, we rearrange the tasks that make up jobs and institutional positions, so that there is a relatively equal amount of empowering and disempowering tasks. For example, speakers at events and those that write press releases should be rotated, as well as each time pairing a more experienced member with someone less experienced. This way, the latter can learn and not feel on their own, and next time they will be the experienced one paired with a lesser experienced person, and so on.  This should be done wherever possible, and in cases where delegation of tasks and/or authority might be needed for periods of time, those positions should have term limits, frequent rotation, immediate recall, and clearly set guidelines for responsibilities. Also, to tackle the problem, in general, of unequal development, study groups and other such activities should be held within organizations and their local chapters, so that members can gain the knowledge and skills needed to bridge any gaps. Third, our movements need to incorporate and struggle for reforms that positively affect working people and perpetuate a trajectory of change that challenges the root of class society; for example, fighting for green jobs and health care for all .  Fourth, we need to recognize the need for and right to form strictly working class organizations, allowing them their right to self-management, just as we now recognize the necessity and right of people of color, woman-identified, queer and trans folk, and other oppressed groups to do so. Finally, we need to actively combat classism within our movements and address it head on.

Classism

The problem of coordinator class domination not only violates participatory democratic decision-making within movement institutions; it is also a problem because working class people are not idiots, contrary to coordinators’ beliefs, and will be weary to join coordinator class dominated movements and organizations. Why? Because they tend to be classist.  Would a person of color want to join a racist movement and/or organization? Probably not, and we have seen the ramifications of this, also.  In fact, working class people tend to have more visceral reactions towards coordinators because most of them have never actually met a real capitalist before.  The coordinators are the ones who hassle them at work, discipline them at school, and betray them in their unions

Classism can take many forms structurally by the mere fact that a movement and/or organization has coordinator leadership/majority membership, but it can appear structurally also in the form of extremely long meetings, and no money to fund working class people’s transportation to important events,  Then there are the actual interactions between working class people and coordinators. Many organizations have seen both kinds of classim within their ranks and have been consciously combating it, but more attention definitely needs to be paid.

Here is a list of The Top 10 Mistakes of Middle-Class Activists in Mixed-Class Groups, from the ClassMatters.org website. What they refer to as the Professional Middle-Class is quite similar to what I call the coordinator class (however, in the end, our class analyses and specifications are different).

1. Overlook necessity
2. Overlook intelligence
3. Romanticize working-class people
4. Impose inessential weirdnesses
5. Hide who they really are
6. Think they know it all
7. Think they know nothing
8. Focus on education more than organizing
9. Focus on goals and tasks more than people
10. Take over

I would also like to show some examples of  what they call “inessential weirdness”:

• Herbal tea and no coffee at an event
• Waving hands in the air instead of applauding
• Holding hands or chanting at a meeting
• Elaborate, ritualized consensus decision-making processes
• Nudity at rallies
• Property destruction at rallies
• Speaking in acronyms or jargon
• Serving tofu as the only main dish at a coalition event
• Sitting on the floor; providing no chairs, only cushions
• Unwashed hair or clothing
• Bandana facemasks

If you would like to a more in-depth look at inessential weirdness, go to www.classmatters.org . However, for now, people might get the idea.

Finally, there is the issue of working class culture being looked down upon by the Left (more so, amongst what you could call the white Left). Working people are looked down upon for eating at McDonalds, but it’s fine for people on the Left to eat at a vegan restaurant, where the workers are no less exploited.  They are looked down upon for watching sports, even though they get some fulfillment out of it and it allows them to talk to their peers at work or at school the next day, Oh, but wait! It is fine to watch certain sports, like golf and tennis.  They are looked down upon for reading the New York Post, while the Left reads what they themselves call the lying, war mongering, New York Times; meanwhile, the working class person is reading the only section of the paper that tells the truth, the sports page. These are somewhat of generalizations but speak up if it does not resonate with you. The list could go on…

The Road Ahead

I have presented the traditional Left’s two class analysis and shown that it comes far too short of being sufficient in developing a framework for class analysis and struggle. In it’s place, I have argued that a third class, the coordinator class, should be recognized as a class between labor and capital. This new class arises not from the relationship to the means of production but from the division of labor. Additionally, I showed how our movements tend to be coordinator class dominated and classist, and I presented some possible solutions.  I could be wrong, but I think the proof is in the pudding. Take what I have said to a working class person and see how much resistance you get. Then, do the same with someone who would fall under what I recognize as the coordinator class. I am willing to bet that there will be many more coordinators denying that they exist than working class people saying coordinators do not exist. My purpose, however, is not to be right out of spite; but, instead, to bring the issue of class back to the forefront, side by side with issues of race, gender, sexuality, authority, environmental destruction, and others. I hope what I have presented can at the least fuel the ever growing discussion on the topic, and at best convince a few people.  Either way, my ultimate goal for economic relations is classlessness, and recognizing the coordinator class is the first step towards achieving it.

Recommended Reading

Albert, Michael. Parecon: Life After Capitalism. New York? Verso, 2003

Albert, Michael, and Robin Hahnel. UnOrthodox Marxism. Boston: South End Press, 1978.

—. Looking Foward.  http://www.parecon.org/lookingforward/toc.htm

Walker, Pat. Between Labor and Capital: The Professional-Managerial Class. Boston: South End             Press, 1979.

www.ClassMatters.org

www.parecon.org

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[i] One of the key roles of the AMA, for example, is to prevent nurses from doing the work reserved for doctors. That way doctors can justify the pay they receive and their status, at the same time disempowering the even greater pool of nurses, which ensures doctors’ economic position will not be challenged.

[ii] Again, remember that this is merely focused on class as a whole. Race, cultural, kinship, and other oppressions and factors are also at play. For example, if these relations are reproduced, it usually means that straight, white, men will benefit, give that they occupy many of the coordinator class positions in society and generally have more privilege.

by John Cronan Jr.

originally appeared on zcommunications last year. http://www.zcommunications.org/blog/view/1990

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A friend of mine recently posted a Facebook note discussing the entwinement of race and class.  In it he posted two quotes from two very different people. The following are some quick thoughts I had in response to the quotes.

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“What more do they have to complain about? Who can they blame but themselves? Slavery is gone, segregation has been gone for four decades, hell, affirmative action is still government policy. Perhaps they’ve been spoiled by all of the handouts. Regardless, there’s no helping a group of people that, for some reason beyond me, does not want to be helped.” –Former New York City mayor and Republican presidential candidate, Rudolph Giuliani

“The current baby-boomer generation of whites is currently in the process of inheriting between $7 trillion and $10 trillion in assets from their parents and grandparents — property handed down by those who were able to accumulate assets at a time when people of color by and large could not.” Tim Wise, excerpt from White Like Me.

What Time Wise said deserves much attention, for many reasons. First of all, we live in an industrialized capitalist country. That means there are three major classes: capitalist, coordinators, and workers. Subsequently, at all times, wealth is going to go concentrated in the hands of the capitalists–roughly 2 percent of the population–and then in the hands of coordinators–about 20 percent of the populations. And the concentration of wealth at the top tends to pass on to future generations without much, if any, actual work involved. Robin Hahnel in his book, The ABCs of Political Economy, stated:

”A study published by United for a Fair Economy in 1997 titled ‘Born on Third Base’ found that of the 400 on the 1997 Forbes list of wealthiest individuals and families in the US, 42% inherited their way onto the list; another 6% inherited wealth in excess of $50 million, and another 7% started life with at least $1 million.”

Hardly picking yourself up by your bootstraps.

This is not a new phenomena in American capitalism. Therefore, if our country was founded on slavery and the subjugation of black people, as it was, then obviously not many of them will have a stake in the wealth that was accumulated in a time when they were systematically denied the right to accumulate any.

Well, what about after all that Jim Crow stuff and slavery ended, as Giuliani asks? What about the social mobility that has happened since the second half of the 20th Century? What about the better off sections of the working class and coordinator class? Being in the working class doesn’t necessarily mean you are poor, true. Class is more about power than it is income; income is just a by product of your bargaining power. However, social mobility is not as easy as politicians and mainstream economists make it out to be, even for the white worker. There was a time, however, when it was easier. In “The Death of Horatio Alger,” by Paul Krugman, cites a “classic 1978 survey found that among adult men whose fathers were in the bottom 25 percent of the population as ranked by social and economic status, 23 percent had made it into the top 25 percent.” However, this was only the 30 years or so after WWII–only a fraction of this time was after Jim Crow segregation was outlawed, and racism still was rampant. So, again, most Blacks were denied the chance to benefit from these opportunities.

Since that time, social mobility has dropped for mostly everyone. It’s worth quoting Krugman’s article at length:

“Now for the shocker: The Business Week piece cites a new survey of today’s adult men, which finds that this number has dropped to only 10 percent. That is, over the past generation upward mobility has fallen drastically. Very few children of the lower class are making their way to even moderate affluence. This goes along with other studies indicating that rags-to-riches stories have become vanishingly rare, and that the correlation between fathers’ and sons’ incomes has risen in recent decades. In modern America, it seems, you’re quite likely to stay in the social and economic class into which you were born.”

This was in 2003. Things have gotten much worse.

This period of workers getting less and less of a piece of the economic pie, was marked by a crisis in much of the American manufacturing industry. One industry was hit notably hard–the Auto Industry–and Black workers were affected the most. A study recently released by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, “The Decline in African-American Representation in Unions and Auto Manufacturing, 1979-2004,” illustrates this fact. It says, in 1979, “2.1 percent of all African-American workers were employed in automobile manufacturing. By 2004, this share had fallen by more than one-third to 1.3 percent. By contrast, the share of white workers employed in auto manufacturing fell just 0.2 percentage points from 1.3 percent to 1.1 percent. The share of Hispanic workers also fell by 0.2 percentage points, from 0.8 percent to 0.6 percent.”

All of this coupled with rising rates of incarceration of Blacks since the 70’s, only begins to show that Blacks don’t merely suffer more so than whites in the economy and political system. Racism and white supremacy as a system of oppression has actually shaped the defining roles of our economic and political institutions–where Blacks are relegated to low skill, high intensity labor, low paid jobs in the economy (if any), and are criminalized for merely being Black. In times of worsening conditions for all workers, unless the right progressive measures are taken, it will only exacerbate racial socio-economic inequality. We are seeing this happen already with those affected most by the sub-prime mortgage debacle.