§1. Organizers have a problem of emotional disconnection. I saw people feeling the disconnection quite vividly, but I haven’t seen it spoken out. So here is a short attempt to give it a little more shape.
§2. We start doing politics in contexts that touch us personally. So our initial point is: what is good for me?. We can call this the action or base level, depending on which of the two words in “grassroots activity” you focus on.
§3. Then maybe we join a group or an organization. We start asking tactical questions: what is good for us?
What is the commonality that joins us? What kinds of actions can be relevant for all of us?
For instance, we might have gotten politicized through gender-based violence; meeting with other comrades, we might choose to focus on making care work more visible and less sexist.
§4. In our group, we quickly notice that we need many more people involved in this process. To do that, we reformulate our question into a strategic one: what is good for other people?
What touches them now? What is present in their minds nowadays? What would start a generative conversation with them? What would attract their interest? What would mobilize them? etc.
In this level, we already might have some degree of emotional distancing, particularly if the hot topics in the public agenda do not touch us directly.
I am not using a “privileges” frame. It’s just a mismatch between daily experiences versus current social agenda. Sometimes there is a youth unemployment crisis in a country, but the youth movement will have some people who have stable job contracts. Sometimes we will be activated through precarious housing conditions, but the government will announce a labor law that touches most of our base as well as other sectors of the society, while not making our own labor conditions much worse.
§5. As we organize political processes, campaigns and projects, we get a deeper understanding of the movement ecosystem. We get to know other organizations, we appreciate their strengths and contributions to the movement ecology as a whole. We also situate our contribution better in this context. Our questions become more abstract as we start thinking of movement-level strategy: What is good for the movement as a whole?
What kind of strategic intervention would improve the correlation of forces in favor of the working people? At this level of thought, we combine the strengths of our organization with the opportunities. It might make us do things we never did before, or focus on sectors of society we didn’t engage with so far.
This may become very abstract, but it can still be grounded on anger and injustices. At some point, core organizers of a housing movement may simply say to themselves “The US started bombing Iran, this will increase cost-of-living. We are a cost-of-living movement but there is no strong anti-war movement. So maybe we should initiate an anti-war coalition.”
§6. Finally, there is the geopolitical level: what is good for the global working class?
Many old school leftists are known to live in this level. It comes together with a world analysis. It involves much more manouvering and long-term thinking. And it can result in tough choices.
This level is not irrelevant. Supporting the (very weak) anti-war movement in Russia versus supporting the (very weak) people’s power movement in Ukraine causes a split of practical as well as political consequences.
We had such discussions during the Syrian civil war, which had four subjects: the Assad regime, Islamist groups, the Kurdish liberation movement, and the Syrian progressive forces. Supporting one of these would have different implications on the other three. Depending on what you think is more probable, your choices might give you terrible results (like the current status quo in Syria).
Similar debates emerged around the mass protests in Iran against the Islamist regime, during the US aggressions.
§7. As we go in the direction
action → tactics → strategy → movement-level strategy → geopolitics
we get increasing levels of abstraction and alienation.
The reverse direction gives increasing emotional connection to the cause and to the people involved in the movement.
This produces frustration for organizers, and tension among organizers.
§8. This tension cannot be resolved.
In order to make smart strategic choices, we need to think in terms of concepts, models and abstractions. In order to implement those strategies, we need to be deeply rooted in the base of the movement.
The movement, as a whole, must be able to think of its entire strategy in transversal and transnational terms. This is a requirement to win.
This movement-level thinking then has to have relevance and ressonance with the base. This implies serious translation, and this is political work.
Many times the abstract strategic priorities will have almost no translation to the base, or will have very little effectiveness. Other times, strategies arising from the base will build strong movements that have a natural ceiling on how wide and how deep they can reach.
Organizers on either sides of this spectrum will complain about the people on the other end.
§9. We have to simply hold the tension.
There is no appeal to moderation possible: there is no middle-way solution, we need people operating with dedication and competence at both ends of the spectrum.
The people on either end of the spectrum will advocate for contradictory positions, and they will both be right most of the time.
Holding this tension is not having patience and tolerance. It is mobility.
For those who spend most of their time in abstract levels, it means integrating concrete work into our regular praxis. One way is to go ultra-local and accompany a neighborhood organization, which can help with emotional connection. Another way would be to navigate in different local initiatives, which can produce a better overview of the movement.
For those who spend most of their time in grassroots activity, it means engaging with transversal and transnational practices. This might mean investing in skillshares, so that we carry over knowledge and experience across different parts of the movement. It might also mean bringing global discussions into our groups and ask ourselves what they mean for us, so that those considerations are present in our daily praxis.
In either case, it means letting ourselves be influenced by the other end of the spectrum, which is one of the most important aspects of having a movement ecology framework.
