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Educate, agitate, organize [1]
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Date: 2025-04-14
Two articles I stumbled on in the Guardian today inspired me to write this diary. Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix express my thoughts better than I can, and I posted excerpts and links to the articles below.
(Astra Taylor collaborated on an article with Naomi Klein published yesterday in the Guardian that is also good — The rise of end times fascism. That is how I happened onto her other articles.)
Electoral politics is not the entire or even the most important response to this crisis, it is not “the only way out” as someone posted today after they ran through a list of everything that works against us — the media, SCOTUS, etc. — and telling us why every course of action people were considering was impossible. “Our only hope is the midterms!” Hope of what? Hope of avoiding facing the crisis?
The people in the Abolition movement, in the organized Labor movement, the Women’s Suffrage movement, the Civil Rights movement, and on and on, did not sit around waiting for any midterms. They didn’t waste time lamenting how all of the odds were stacked against them. They got busy.
Social and political change is driven through militant action by groups operating outside of the electoral process. That then brings pressure on the politicians. Elections are more of an effect of social change than a cause of change. They tell us where we have been, not where we are going.
And just where have we been? We have been in a fantasy world, the “we are better than Republicans, just look at these charts, so vote for us and send us money, and if you don’t you are a stupid ignorant POS” fantasy world. That is where we have been and the election results reflect that. MAGA beat us long before anyone stepped into a voting booth. Yet we fall back on voter registration, GOTV, and donations, on “swing” districts, on catering to a narrow upper middle class white demographic, on traditional media buys, on advertising rather than educating; on pandering rather tha agitating; on marketing rather than organizing.
Voter registration, GOTV, and donations are necessary, but not sufficient.
Voter registration, GOTV, and donations is what we have been doing. It has failed, and failed massively. How do we know that? Read the news. We lost, and we have lost at the most critical time in the US since the Civil War. We lost in spite of massive voter registration, GOTV, and donations efforts. Of course, we can say “well, if only people would vote Democratic we wouldn’t have these problems” and slide back into the comfort zone of aloof, disengaged complacency (ironically, while we lambaste others for not voting or for not being informed.) "Don’t blame me I voted for Harris" and "FAFO time for MAGA voters!" If only, if only. Yes, if only things were not the way that they are, why, then they wouldn’t be the way that they are!
Voter registration, GOTV, and donations? Yes, of course. But not just that. First educate, agitate, organize. Election results will follow.Educate, Agitate, Organize
Educate, Agitate, Organize
Rising to the Clarion Call of Dr. Ambedkar
By Dadasaheb Tandale Since the year 1999, I’ve been on a journey to discover a call that transcends political necessity and, instead, calls on our inner humanity. In my oral history of the Ambedkarite community, I have been able to explore the significance of one such clarion call, expressed by Dr. B.R. Ambedkar at the All India Depressed Classes conference in July 1942 in Nagpur, India. His call to his followers was: Educate, Agitate, Organize. www.saada.org/...
Courage is needed. Discipline and determination are needed. If the children in Birmingham in 1963 had the courage to take direct action in the face of horrific opposition, then certainly we can now.
The Children's Crusade On May 2, 1963, more than one thousand students skipped classes and gathered at 16th Street Baptist Church to march to downtown Birmingham, Alabama. As they approached police lines, hundreds were arrested and carried off to jail in paddy wagons and school buses. When hundreds more young people gathered the following day for another march, white commissioner, Bull Connor, directed the local police and fire departments to use force to halt the demonstration. Images of children being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses, being clubbed by police officers, and being attacked by police dogs appeared on television and in newspapers, and triggered outrage throughout the world. Despite the violence, children continued to march and protest in an organizing action now known as the Children’s Crusade. The crusade ended after intervention from the U.S. Department of Justice. The event moved President John F. Kennedy to express support for federal civil rights legislation and the eventual passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. nmaahc.si.edu/...
It is now a matter of life and death for so many people. We just can’t keep doing the same things over and over and expecting different results. Everything is at risk now.
Must read articles:
Solidarity and strategy: the forgotten lessons of truly effective protest By Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix excerpt: Yet history has shown time and again that even a proportionally small number of people, if they are well organised, can have an outsized effect. People getting organised is what brought down slavery and Jim Crow, outlawed child labour in the US and elsewhere, and overthrew the legal subjugation of women. If it wasn’t for people acting in concert, universal suffrage would not exist, and neither would the eight-hour workday or the weekend. There would be no entitlement to basic wages, unemployment insurance, or social services, including public education. It would still be a crime to be gay or trans. Women would still be under the thumb of their husbands and at the mercy of sexist employers, and abortion would never have been legalized, however tenuously. Disabled people would lack basic civil rights. The environment would be totally unprotected and even more polluted. Without collective action, colonized people would never have ousted their oppressors, Indigenous people would not have survived attacks from genocidal settlers, and apartheid would not have been overthrown. Often, the powerful like to take credit for social change after the fact, portraying progress as the inevitable result of economic development and enlightened, beneficent leadership. We praise President Franklin Delano Roosevelt for forging the New Deal, with its wealth of social programmes and labour protections, instead of paying tribute to the militant labour movement that forced his administration’s hand, inflicting real costs on bosses and investors through thousands of work stoppages, picket lines and strikes. Similarly, the civil rights legislation of the 1960s did not come about because of Lyndon B Johnson’s bravery, but rather because a militant and well-organized minority fought boldly against a hostile and often violent majority, pushing them to shift their behaviours, if not their beliefs. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the labour movement and the civil rights movement had a complex relationship, but ultimately collaboration strengthened them both. The 1963 March on Washington was a march for “jobs and freedom”, and many of the signs held aloft during that historic gathering bore the stamp of the trade unions that helped fund the event and provided critical logistical support. In the decades that followed, there was a steep decline in the membership bases of unions and civic associations, as the right wing began a concerted campaign to undermine their legal ability to organize. Scholars have since documented the way the late 20th century was, for the activist left, characterized by a shift to a shallow, professional and often philanthropically funded model of “advocacy”, one that elevates self-appointed leaders and elite experts to speak on behalf of constituencies to whom they are not directly accountable. Rather than organising people to fight for themselves, these groups promote professionals who attempt to exert influence inside the halls of power. Instead of protests, they publish white papers; in place of strikes, they circulate statements; instead of cultivating solidarity, they seek access to decision-makers. www.theguardian.com/...
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