I’d like to direct people’s attention to two on-going issues currently being discussed in California. The first is the battle to overturn Proposition 8, the homophobic initiative which was meant to end marriage equality in California. The second is efforts to embrace a sane approach to drugs and legalize marijuana statewide.

There is a very good argument to be made that if Proposition 8 is overturned and marijuana is legalized, that similar efforts might succeed in other states. For example, while other big states like New York have yet to legalize same sex marriage, they have passes measures saying they will recognize marriages from other states that do allow them. A victory for marriage equality in California will send ripples throughout the country and be a significant blow to the rightwing cultural agenda. It will be, similar to the Obama campaigns shift away from overtly oppressive and demonizing language, a significant blow to patriarchy in the United States - both culturally and institutionally.

Similarly, the legalization marijuana will be a significant win in the battle against racism and elite cultural supremacy. Over 60,000 marijuana arrests were made in 2001, over 60% of them being of people of color. Lowering this number essentially to zero (taking into account that some of those arrests probably had other charges as well), would be a tangible win that all progressives and anti-racists should celebrate. Like the precedent that would be set by overturning Proposition 8, it would undoubtedly being a cultural and institutional shift around the country.

Race will play a significant role in both struggles. Undoubtedly the Right will wage a racist campaign to prevent the legalization of marijuana and other substances. Progressives will need to position themselves to counter these claims and lies. Specifically, our message must be positive, accessible, and relevant if we are to overcome the rightwing anti-drug narrative.

The marriage equality movement will also need to transcend reactionary myths around the racial character of the “Yes on Prop 8″ vote. Intentionally planted and promoted by the Right, they would like nothing more than to see white advocates of marriage equality attack people of color who might be neutral or passive opponents on the question instead of reaching out to move them leftward and speaking to their progressive values on other issues. They would love to see a white-dominated anti-prop 8 movement which ignores, alienates, and refuses to elevate the voices of LGBT people of color. And finally, the Right would love to see a LGBT rights movement which sees marriage equality as its only issue, which ignores larger issues of patriarchy, heterosexism, and transphobia. Only justice-minded progressives, well-trained in messaging, effective strategy, and a vision of a post-patriarchal society can lead this movement in the direction it has to go. Will they take up the charge?

Over all I’m quite excited. While I haven’t heard enough about either issue to have any reasonable guess about where they’ll go, I’ll blog more on this issue as things develop.

“You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed, and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.” - Morpheus offering Neo the choice in The Matrix

In the movie The Matrix, Redpills are those whose minds have been freed from the Matrix. When you take a red pill, those who are waging a war against those who run the system (the “machines”), unplug you from that virtual world and allow you to see the truth for the first time in your life. You might have known that “something” was wrong with the world around you, but you never made the deeper connections as to how the whole system actually operated. And you certainly didn’t see an alternative to the world around you or any way to change it.

As organizers for social change, we are constantly faced with the question “what will be the ‘redpill’ for large numbers of people?” What will be the final piece of evidence, story on TV, book, event, or personal experience that finally makes someone start to radicalize? Its different for every single person. Some people radicalize due to personal experiences. Some people radicalize from education. Some people radicalize because of empathy for others and perceived wrongs going on around them. We can’t possibly know when a person is willing to step down the rabbit hole, but we can provide them with lots of opportunities to do so. Those opportunities need to be predicated on efforts that will actually make them more likely to take us up on our offer.

In The Matrix, one of the main characters, Morpheus offers Neo the choice between the two pills. But before Morpheus offered Neo the choice to be freed (we’d call it a “radicalizing experience”), Neo was selected for this opportunity because he was a computer hacker. He was actively seeking out “answers” and wanted to know more about the Matrix (a.ka. “the system” in our terms). If Neo hadn’t previously been a hacker - someone who didn’t exactly follow all the rules or buy into the official story of how things worked in the world - he quite possibly could have taken the blue pill and called it a night. A hacker is an example of one such person who might take the red pill. It doesn’t ensure they will, but it does increase the likelihood.

Whatever keeps people in line (i.e. prevents them from taking red pills), is called “hegemony”. Its the collected set of laws, processes, rules, regulations, and norms which keep people from making the connections needed to see themselves as people capable of leading free lives. How do you determine what are some of the major barriers to people changing their minds? Well, you can usually start by thinking of things that annoy the Right.

Rightwing positions which seem irrational or absurd are usually quite intentional. They are rational in that conservatives hold those positions for a reason. They know that their power is based on people following certain rules, without which other areas of their power would be challenged. When conservatives say that drugs, divorce, separation of church and state, free speech, free press, reproductive freedom, socialized programs, and gays will lead to the downfall of “Western civilization[sic]” they aren’t just serious, they’re quite right. They mean that the form of society in which they are on top will cease to exist if these things happen in increasing numbers.That’s because freedom is, well, addictive. Once you get some, you’re gonna want a lot more!

They only care about our sex lives insofar as keeping us (especially young people) scared of sex & sexuality will keep us obedient and allow them to maintain their power. They understand that drugs, and sex, and good education, and cooperative workplaces, and grassroots citizen media will lead people to take the “red pill” and free their minds. Its why they are against it.

Its also why those of us on the left need to take cultural issues seriously. Sure sex education, same-sex marriage, and  reproductive freedom are all moral issues. But they are also cultural issues that maintain the dominant hegemony. Its our job to break that hegemony. Leading campaigns against backwards laws, opening youth centers and alternative schools, and educating young people about our vision of the future should all be at the top of our priorities list. The Right will push back on these things without a doubt. We should respond to this push-back with an article alternative worldview, rooted in progressive values. If we are strategic in our efforts, we will win battles and expose the hypocrisy of the Right while we do.

In particular, revolutionary education necessarily includes (among other things):

• Sex and health education;
• Accurate information about drugs and alcohol;
• Diversity education so people shed stereotypes about other races, cultures, genders, classes, and sexualities;
• Time and places for young people to form real community;
• Information and experiences that show how solidarity, equity, diversity, and self-management are the most morally-just and efficient ways to organize society;
• Information about how the world really works, alternatives to the current institutions of society, and ideas about how they can create change.

The Left needs to take battles around culture very seriously. If we do, people will start to beg us to show them just how deep the rabbit hole goes. I guarantee it.

Without any doubt my favorite quotation from Karl Marx comes from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. He writes:

“The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living, and just when they seem to be revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from the names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time honored disguise and borrowed language…. The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future.”

Such eloquent wisdom is unfortunately seldom taken to heart by his disciples. The statement is equally true today: the social revolution of the twenty-first century cannot draw its poetry from the past but only from the future. The theories, strategies, ideas, and methods of the past need to be critically analyzed and, where flawed, revolutionized and not merely amended. A vision of a democratic society must be central to our message to add inspiration to our programmatic demands.

In order to win the war, those who seek victory must organize to build a new revolutionary left in the United States. The tasks of such a Left will be widespread and will require much debate, but some of these tasks can be easily summarized. There certainly might be other things, but a new revolutionary left will necessarily include among its focuses:

Humanism: learning from oppression that exist within past social movements, a new revolutionary left in the United States will seek to fundamentally transform the defining institutions and ideas in the realms of economics, kinship, culture, and politics. It will take each of these areas equally seriously, knowing that victory is impossible without a holistic and comprehensive revolutionary transformation of society.

Vision & Hope: understanding that our generation is overwhelmed with feelings of hopelessness, a new revolutionary left will formulate, discuss, debate, and refine, a vision of what a participatory society could look like, outlining the core defining institutions and social relations of what a participatory economy, feminist kinship relations, egalitarian inter-community relations, participatory democracy, international solidarity, and environmental justice will look like. It will bring this message of hope and positive alternatives to every community in America.

Organizing: actually making the change we want to see, a new revolutionary left is made of organizers, not merely activists, the latter being those who take action while the former being those who organize ever greater numbers of people to take action with increasing commitment and effectiveness. Such a Left understands that change can only occur if progressive forces are intellectually, institutionally, and politically ready to lead humanity to liberation.

Strategy: seeking maximum effectiveness, a new revolutionary left will study the art of strategy, learning from successful progressive social movements as well as from military, business, and rightwing strategy. It will train a generation of critical thinkers and thoughtful strategists.

Study: not wanting to replicate past mistakes and seeking to learn from past lessons, a new revolutionary left will be articulate, well-educated, and committed to on-going study, both of historical and current events. It will build programs of internal education for existing members and programs of external education to break down the dominant ideology.

Critical Thinking: loathing dogma, a new revolutionary left will train itself in the art of intellectual self-defense, emphasizing critical thinking, logic, reason, critical self-reflection and collective reflection, and summation of experiences. Instead of following old formulas and strategies, it will analyze the current situation and formulate appropriate strategies and methods relevant to the present day.

Numbers: in order to maximize participatory democracy and ensure eventual victory, a new revolutionary left will seek to build both a growing core of revolutionary organizers and a vibrant majoritarian progressive coalition aimed at breaking the rightwing domination of society. It understands that in order to win a new world, we will need tens of millions of people on our side committed to transforming society.

Raising Social Costs: understanding that hierarchical institutions are built upon the consent of the governed, a new revolutionary left will create dilemma situations whereby elites must choose: give into our demands or lose legitimacy and, as a result, aid in the growth of the Left. It will raise the social costs that elites must pay to carry out unjust policies, forcing them to give into our demands or pay infinitely more than they had expected.

Counter-Hegemony: since it has its fingers on the pulse of the nation, a new revolutionary left will seek to do everything in its power to break through the dominant culture and ideology. It shall seek to build a counter-hegemony, taking serious the task of education, cultural revolution, and revolutionary leadership.

Liberatory Practices: with its commitment to actively combat internal movement oppression, a new revolutionary left will develop thoroughly liberatory practices which develop and elevate the leadership of every individual in the movement, combating past oppressive norms of sexism, racism, heterosexism/homophobia/transphobia, class inequality, and authoritarianism. A new left will seek to embody the seeds of the future in present to the highest degree possible.

Effective Communication: embracing the power of language, a new revolutionary left will carefully craft its message so as to communicate effectively and precisely to the constituencies we want to win over. It will understand that our actions, words, slogans, and attitudes all convey a message to the public and that these messages are vital to our success.

Democracy and Participation: because it can’t win by using undemocratic means, a new revolutionary left will maximize democracy and participation within all of its organizations. It will understand that democracy and participation are dependent on access to knowledge, equal distribution of empowering work, and liberatory practices which level the playing field in a world which thrives on vast inequality. It will involve an ever growing number of people and, eventually, being to build new institutions based on democratic values, especially workers’, neighborhood, and kinship assemblies which will be the nuclei of the new society.

Leadership: following its commitment to democracy, a new revolutionary left will understand the responsibility of leaders to pass on their knowledge, skills, and lessons to an ever expanding core of revolutionary leaders. It will be a left that trains thousands of new leaders each year, preparing them for the challenges they will face as political organizers.

Relevancy: being in tune to the concerns, hopes and aspirations of large numbers of people, a new revolutionary left will orient its efforts towards being relevant to diverse communities who don’t yet identify as progressive, left, or revolutionary. It will build its program based on what the majority of the population cares about, what will most strengthen, expand, and prepare the movement for future gains, and what will make the most tangible difference in people’s lives.

Beloved Community: because it knows it can be better than the world outside, a new revolutionary left will be a warm, welcoming, and empowering Left. It will seek to embody all of our values to the highest degree possible. It will empower its members to grow. It will take seriously our internalized oppression and the need for each of us to heal the wounds inflicted upon us by the authoritarian society, by racism, by sexism, by homophobia, by gender binary, by alienation from work, by exploitation and oppression, and by detachment from our natural world. It will be a Left of love, of hope, and of compassion.

These are just a few tasks. When learning from the past, its useful to practice STORM’s principle of “take the best, leave all the rest.” We should take the best of theory, strategy, vision, and organizing methods, while leaving all the irrelevant stuff behind. In analyzing our own efforts, we should not merely seek to tweak what needs revolutionizing.

(Part Four coming soon…)

My friend Noah from Columbia University directed me to an article in today’s Los Angels Times:

“WASHINGTON — New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, campaigning for president in a neighborhood of Philadelphia so rough the mayor said, “Osama bin Laden wouldn’t last here,” pitched a $4-billion-a-year anti-crime package today that would put 100,000 new police officers on the streets and help stem the tide of repeat offenders back into the country’s prisons.”

A Surge didn’t work in Iraq. It won’t work in American cities.

Here’s what will: start addressing the roots of the problem, instead of putting band-aids on them. In his new slideshow presentation given at TED on the climate crisis and necessary urgency of addressing it (which is great by the way), Al Gore pointed out that when an addict’s veins collapse in their arms and other parts of their body, they finally start injecting themselves in their toes. The American economy and government, he posited, are at the point where we’re injecting ourselves in the toes - we are clinging to old ideas, old norms, and old frameworks. We’ve reached the end of the era where our innovation can actually lead to progress within existing frameworks of social organization.

We need new forms of social organization. The veins of society’s current institutions are collapsing - like the veins of a dying addict. The era of capitalism and its poverty, authoritarian government and its tyranny, and racial, sexism, and homophobia and their vast inequalities - economic, political, and social - are coming to an end.

Margaret Thatcher, the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, is well-known for infamous quote about global capitalism: “There is no alternative.”

If that were indeed true, I would have to admit that revolutionaries would do well in enjoying the rest of their lives, and doing something a little less stressful than trying to dismantle the dominant institutions of oppression.

But Thatcher’s claim doesn’t hold to more than a few minutes of careful and creative scrutiny.

We’ve seen that there are alternatives to market capitalism. The problem is that we just haven’t yet seen many good alternatives to it. So Thatcher’s claim that “there is no alternative” (TINA), was actually a claim of “there is no better alternative” (TINBA). While this seems small, it isn’t.

I re-posted Michael Albert’s essay “There Is An Alternative” a few days ago. If you want to see a (very) brief description of an alternative, just, democratic economy, I’d encourage you to read the post and explore more (it has links to where you can read more about participatory and democratic economics)s.

In term of poverty (and the “crime” poverty causes), the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, and many environmental justice groups propose, some variant of “green path ways from poverty to prosperity” (green pathways out of poverty, green pathways to prosperity, green collar-jobs, solar cells not jail cells, etc…). Here’s the idea: global climate destabilization and environmental crisis are a planetary problem that require planetary solutions. We need to embark on a generational quest to save humanity and the planet. As Al Gore said, “we need another hero generation.” So what can we do about it? Well, we need a green economic revolution. We need an Apollo Project or Manhattan Project scale program, and a Civil Rights Movement scale struggle to bring it about.

And we can learn from the past too. We can wage our struggles for a clean, green economy in such a way that it uplifts those currently under-served by our society. Green Pathways From Poverty to Prosperity can be the defining attitude of a new movement which is fighting for a new social contract, on our way to an entirely new society.

Finally, I should add one more point, that I haven’t said explicitly enough, often enough.

An environmentally-sustainable, participatory, democratic, just, and poverty-free economy, is a democratically-planned economy. Market competition discouraged the type and level of innovation (I’ll be elaborating on this more soon, but copyrights, patents, and trade-secrets are some of the most common “innovation spreads rapidly in a market economy” myth-debunkers) we need to bring about a sustainable society. And the drive to accumulate and make profit/power is directly at ends with the drive to protect humanity and the world we live in. A democratic economy is a planned economy.

I was recently at a dinner with some friends in New York’s East Village. Two of them, Matt and Madeline, started explaining a concept from social movement theory, namely that before periods of great social upheaval, unrest, or organized social movements, there is often a period directly preceding it where the expectations of the public are raised. In other words, people begin to have a sense of entitlement, which then can’t be met by the system, and they make the connections and rebel against the system which made those false promises (i.e. raised expectations can lead to politicization and radicalization). The example they used was the Civil Rights Movement, and the period directly beforehand when blacks had helped fight fascism in the Second World War for a country that segregated them at home - a country they had to return to after the war. As you would rightly expect, they weren’t too happy. An increased sense of entitlement, and raised expectations for progress, were shattered by the system of racial apartheid at home.

More recently, I was reading Greg Wilpert’s book called “Changing Venezuela By Taking Power“, where he explained some of the factors that lead Venezuela to where it is today on a road to possible genuine liberation. He talked about, in more detail than I will include here (it’s definitely worth the read if you want an honest account of what’s going on with the Bolivarian Revolution; the point of view you won’t get in the corporate media), how the Venezuelans had their expectations raised around the systems of capitalism and representative democracy, both of which failed them miserably - as those systems will consistently do to the people at the bottom of the social ladder. The result? This allowed room for President Hugo Chavez, and members of the Venezuelan Left to organize a movement, and use governmental power to push for new systems: Participatory Democracy and Socialism for the 21st Century.

And then, as a final example, last weekend, when I was returning to Brooklyn with Kate and Pat, the subway train paused longer than usual in the subway at Borough Hall. The station manager came on the loudspeaker and announced that due to a problem with the trains we’d have to take bus. So we existed the station and walked, along with a hundred to two-hundred people, to the nearby bus stop.

When a train stops running in New York City, its customary for passengers to get a free transfer to the bus (a one-ride metrocard/subway ticket costs $2.00 normally - and if you don’t get a transfer, you have to pay another $2.00 for the bus) or another train. When hundreds of people get off a subway train though, they almost never give out physical/paper transfer tickets to those passengers. And since the MTA’s (subway authority) communication isn’t always the best, there is no way the bus driver would know that all of this is going on in the middle of the night.

So when there are 150 or 200 people all lined up to get on a train, in the middle of the night, in a mass of people (not in a line), you can imagine that some people will get upset when the bus driver asks some questions about the train being stopped. In other words, when people feel like they have been wronged and are entitled to compensation or justice, they are very willing to fight for that justice (even when “justice” is just a free transfer ticket).

As I was at the back of the crowd chatting with Pat, Kate, and Daniel (who we’d randomly bumped into at the bus stop), I couldn’t help but be amused by a thought that had entered my mind. Suppose there was a crowd of people, who didn’t get kicked off the train. Instead they were waiting like normal for the bus. Imagine that you then make an announcement, that you can all rip off the MTA by simply saying that the train had stopped, and you all were forced to get off. Well, while I was standing there watching dozens of people forcefully piling into a cramped bus, I couldn’t help but admit to myself that very few people would ever go along with such a plan. I thought immediately back to Matt and Madeline’s comments about social movement theory around people feeling entitlement. If you raise expectations to the point where people feel entitled to some service or social norm, they will fight like hell to make sure they have it - and will be furious if they don’t.

My mind switched to the big picture, in thinking about what that means for social movements. Since I study communications and human thought processes, I couldn’t help but think about what implications the Metrocard Transfer Thought Experiment had for the dominant stories that run through our society. If that phenomenon exists when people feel entitled to something, and often not when they don’t, what does that mean for GOP/Rightwing narratives like “Pull Yourself Up By Your Bootstraps”, and “Trickle Down Economics”, and the demonization of programs of social welfare (and the word “welfare” itself - as if human welfare is somehow bad). The implications kinda knocked the wind out of me. They must debilitate chances for social change. In short, those narratives must be destroyed. We need new, progressive narratives about what is right and wrong in society.

But realizing these things also should give us hope - we can change these them. We can build movements which empower people, and give them a sense of entitlement about what rightfully theirs.

With the last remnants of the New Deal on its deathbed and with a looming environmental crisis about to wreak havoc upon our world, our generation - raised in the age of information technology and expecting to have the same basic social safety net that previous generations had - will soon come to the conclusion (if we help them out a bit), that their reasoned disillusionment with change, will be minute compared to the consequences of not fighting back. As a movement we must seize the opportunity presented by our current political moment.

Our demands should be simple: “we want the world!”