I wrote this post a few months ago. I’m reposting it. Seriously though. If you want to win a new world, read The Art of War by Sun Tzu. And study strategy. Study your opponent. Study the art of winning.

“It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle.” - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The Art of War, written in the 6th century BC by Sun Tzu (Master Sun), is a 13 chapter Chinese treatise on military warfare and strategy. When read metaphorically, its a brilliant addition to those studying political strategy, and especially for those seeking fundamental social transformation.

Steve Bucknum posted an article called “George Lakoff vs. Sun Tzu” two years ago on BlueOregon where he recommended the ancient text to those interested in building progressive political power. Referring to text in the context of Oregon he said:

“Study of the ‘Nine Terrains’ (a chapter in the ‘Art of War’) is a good metaphor for having political strength in one part of the State, but not others — and how to maximize our strength and minimize the power of the other side. (If we attack their homelands, and cause them to defend their base, then they will not have enough strength left to attack our base. — Makes you want to spend more time/effort/money in Eastern Oregon!) There is a lot of good advice for strategy in these works — ‘When you are committed to employing your forces, feign inactivity. When your objective is nearby, make it appear as if distant; when far away, create the illusion of being nearby.’ These works have stood the test of thousands of years, in fact that some of it has risen to the level of ‘common sense’ in that we have heard parts before.”

Its a short book too, depending on the version & translation you get, the actual text is about 60-75 pages - and well worth every page. The translation I have can be bought here.

The following is an article by Clare Bayard posted on Left Turn Magazine’s website, and in the April / May issue of Left Turn Magazine. Its incredibly powerful in illustrating what the war means, or at least should me, to all of us. It brought me to tears. Here it is:
—-

Last night, I stood over a thousand candles on the lawn in front of San Francisco’s City Hall. Veterans for Peace had organized a vigil to mark the official 4,000 U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, which technically happened Sunday, March 24th. As people began reading the last 1,000 names aloud, my whole body suddenly wracked with mourning. My chest was exploding and I knew it wasn’t a coronary or panic attack, but grief saturated me so thoroughly I could barely stand. Loved ones held me up as we mourned together; I could hardly let go of a former Marine friend who chose military jail instead of Iraq, and I had never felt such frantic, choking relief to have him standing alive beside me. I can’t imagine the world without him now.

I say “technical count” because we don’t even have the numbers to do the math, which means the full picture is beyond our grasp.

4,000 official U.S. servicemembers killed

1-6,000 U.S. servicemember suicides- inadmissible as war casualties

over a thousand nonmilitary contractors, civilians, etc.

how many debilitating injuries?

Plus how many deeply affected partners, parents, family members, friends, lovers in the life of each one of these tens of thousands? the children they might have had, and the ones some already did?

…and, echoing in barely broken silence, the deaths of 650,000 to over a million Iraqis.

A Presbyterian minister, who participates a similar annual vigil for the deaths of San Francisco’s homeless people, began the ritual with a nondenominational invocation. She spoke of the tremendous loss of so many humans with all their talents and creativities, everything they might have brought to their communities.

I feel lucky to be alive today, walking in the spring sun and holding the fierce grief of so many deaths. I feel lucky that my father, a Vietnam Vet, is alive instead of a name on the black granite Wall in D.C., lucky that I was born.

But war doesn’t play duck-duck-goose, bypassing most people entirely and just taking a scatter of heads. No one in Iraq lives separate from the war, and in a dramatically different way neither do we in the U.S.

War defines daily reality in occupied lands. Where wars are being fought in the streets and skies, where depleted uranium underfoot rises in plumes of dust and a sudden noise might be the last thing you hear, war is everything from the toxic air to the mined soil. In the U.S. there is a myth that war is just happening “over there” where bombs are vaporizing houses and human bodies. As if war was not already here, and as if the multivariant violence of militarism does not return in the body of every veteran, alive or dead.

My perspective on this is profoundly shaped by being raised by a veteran father; the war on Vietnam lived in my house every day when I was growing up. I was lucky enough to be born. To be housed. 1 in 4 homeless people in my city are veterans. My dad’s class and race privilege and my mom’s waged and unwaged work kept us housed and together, even though war has never let him go. And in a way, I have come to understand myself as lucky to be the child of a war veteran, in the ways that it helps me to keep my heart alive during the crushing numbness of this “endless war.” I cannot see, or feel, myself as disconnected from war—either from those murdered by U.S. occupation, or those within the ranks of our military who are struggling to stay human.

War comes into homefront communities in many ways. It is the wartime economy, where every bomb explodes twice: once shattering lives in Fallujah, Karbala, Basra; then burning up our schools and universities, healthcare, levees, social system. It is the racist dehumanization of Arabs and Muslims that inflames hate crimes of street violence and hate crimes of state legislature. It is where “security” means genocide, and none of us are made at all safer by U.S. empire expanding. And war comes into our families, our neighborhoods, our workplaces and social spaces, cloaked in the silent roar of a taboo topic: how veterans return from war carrying the violence of militarism. Some kill themselves quickly, with a bullet or a rope, and even when these deaths occur on a base they are not part of the official tally. These 4,000 recognized deaths are the tip of the iceberg of U.S. war casualties. Domestic violence murders, almost entirely women, don’t qualify even when under the clearest circumstances. Other vets die slowly, self-medicating with drugs or alcohol, often on the streets. Many strain enough healing through gritted teeth to put their life back together, supported by their loved ones, not by their government, not by the drivers of SUVs decorated with yellow ribbons, and largely not by the peace movement.

I do not mourn these 4000 deaths (and the other invisibilized U.S. deaths) any more than the uncounted Iraqi lives, nor any less. The judgment that some lives are disposable is part of what we are struggling against, in demanding justice and peace. I don’t hold these 4000 accountable for engineering this war, nor do I excuse them for participating. To do so would remove their agency in the situation, and dishonor the choices that many U.S. soldiers are making every day to refuse orders, resist compliance with occupation. I won’t devalue the choices that the majority of young people in this country are making to not enlist at all, despite the outrageous lack of options facing them, especially working-class kids and youth of color. Every day, people act to resist the U.S. military, from around the world, from within its ranks. And how do we know how many of those names read out last night belong to resisters? How many were carrying an unloaded weapon, like Agustin Aguayo did for a year while the Army denied his conscientious objector status? How many were considering going AWOL? How many were pursuing, if they knew the option existed, a conscientious objector status? How many had done something recently to stand up to racism, misogyny, or some random violence within their unit? Mostly we’ll never know because now their mouths are filled with dirt and their stories will be carried only by those surviving them. The singers among them, the writers, the kid who was so good at math, the girl with the fierce will, the boy who protected his best friend from queerbashers, the dreamers, the confused, the 20 year old with a 2 year old daughter, the one who died so homesick, the one who learned Arabic to talk to the neighborhood kids, all the ones you and I will never meet, who died in a country that’s losing millions of its people to death and escape.

We do not stop organizing. We can’t. But as we keep organizing, we do also need to mourn. It keeps us human to mourn, to truly recognize the grievous loss of millions of people, to stand with their loved ones in remembrance and in defiance—to spit in the face of war. We say: no more lives, war, we will not feed you. All of us are needed, and war, we shall starve you.

About the Author:
Clare Bayard heads the Anti-War program of Catalyst Project, organizing to connect work against wars abroad with domestic racial and economic justice struggles, and building the G.I. resistance support movement. Clare serves on the National Committee and Organizing Task Force of the War Resisters League, an organization that seeks to end all wars and the root causes of war.

Resources:

• Catalyst Project: www.collectiveliberation.org
• War Resisters League: www.warresisters.org, www.notyoursoldier.org
• Check out the brand new Iraq Veterans Against the War’s Winter Soldier hearings archive at: www.ivaw.org — Iraq Veterans Against the War
• Servicewomen’s Action Network: www.servicewomen.org
• Courage to Resist: www.couragetoresist.org

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Whether this if the first time you’ve come to my site, or you’ve been here a few times before, I’d love to hear your feedback, see where people are reading my site from, learn from what you’re doing in movements, political organizing, activism, the academy, work and more.

Do you like the site? What could make it better? What would you like to hear more about? What isn’t clear enough? What could I clarify? Do you know of any resources that I might want to read or might help improve the content of my site?

I’d especially love to start communicating with more people (seriously). Post a comment on this page (even if you view if months from when I’m writing this), or send me an e-mail at brian (at) walkingbutterfly (dot) com. Lemme know where you’re from (city/state/country), what you for for a living/school/political organizing, and what you think of the site!

Can’t wait to hear from you!

Brian Kelly

brian (at) walkingbutterfly (dot) com

“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far,… go together.” - African proverb

Conversations around revolutionary change almost always unearth concerns about issues of violence, repression, police, and imprisonment - and for good reason. Most obviously, these concerns are central in the minds of those who believe that a violent revolution is necessary in the United State. For those who see revolution differently, especially those who believe that a mass, popular, and largely-nonviolent revolution is possible, the questions stem from a different concern. From what I’ve seen so far, revolutionary democrats often ask: “could we really win?”

Its an important question to explore.

The Battle of Seattle

My friend Michael is a staff member at ZNet & Z Communications, which is an independent progressive media and political education organization in Massachusetts. He recently told me about what news coverage in relation to the resistance to the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle in 1999 looked like. First, for anyone that doesn’t know, the protests against the WTO were held in November of 1999, in response to the WTO’s role (along with the IMF and World Bank), in pushing countries in the Global South / Third World, into even greater poverty through “liberalizing international trade” (i.e. giving countries loans they can’t pay back, at high interest, in return for them opening up their markets to multinational corporations, cutting progressive national/regional regulations against pollution, worker/human rights violations, etc…).

What Michael explained to me, is that for the months leading up to the demonstrations, ZNet (and most left media outlets), received increasingly more news reports, calls-to-action, proposals for new organizations, photo/audio/video submissions, analysis articles, visionary proposals for the future, ideas about movement building, and so on, that people wanted to publish on ZNet. These continued to be submitted to ZNet in ever greater numbers as November 30th approached.

People were excited about building popular, democratic power. They were determined to shut down the WTO meeting and all it symbolized. They were talking about hope, change, democracy, feminism, racial justice, solidarity, and the future. Movement building was framed in positive, compassionate, and creative ways.

But when the meetings begun, something very different happened. Almost instantaneously, the talks about “peace, democracy, hope, change, vision, strategy, and a better world,” Michael said, “turned into nonstop submissions what the police were doing.”

The state repression that was brought down upon many of the protesters, caused many to allow their actions, their hopes, their story, and their message, to be silenced. Not only was the state violence harming protesters and leading to arrests, it allowed the greatest uprising against a meeting of world capitalists in history be portrayed as an ineffective mob of unruly, stereotypical leftists/protesters in the corporate media, and allowed revolution to be framed in terms of “opposing the cops” and “stopping repression” (as our main goal), in our own independent media. The Government didn’t just attack the Left, it got us to forget what we really were fighting for, it got us to slip off message, it got us to stop talking about our vision.

Could We Really Win?

Back to the question in the first paragraph I said I hear repeated a lot: “Could we really win?”

Seattle and its aftermath didn’t mark some dramatic break from a visionary, relevant, and strategic progressive movement that existed before November 1999 - that would be an exaggeration. What it did represent is a clear example of how large segments of that movement which are on-message, and talking about relevant things, can be thrown off-message, and made to lose the clarity of their focus.

What is fairly generalizable on the revolutionary left is when we talk about social transformation, we give the State much more credit than its due. That is, we make it seem more powerful than it actually is. While the United States Government is certainly one of the most violent institutions ever created, and American capitalists control some of the most concentrated institutions of wealth imaginable, the progressive movement overestimates how hard it would be to bring them down. What I mean is this: if you see revolution as a pitched (or surprise) , violent, insurrectionary battle between “The State” and “The People”, then of course you think that revolution is some impossible task (or worse, your ideology and dogma blind you from how ridiculous this idea sounds and the fact that no sane person in the U.S. will listen to you - let alone the millions necessary to win).

However if you define a revolution as a fundamental change in the defining institutions and social relations of society. If you think that to achieve that transformation you need to engage in careful, patient, yet urgent, organizing - slow, intentional growth. If you believe that if we are to attain desirable ends, we must use desirable means. If, after looking at revolutions in the past, you see that to avoid undesirable ends, we need to talk about and plan what desirable ends would look like - that is, we must think about, talk about, write about, and experiment with, visions of what a future society could look like. If you think that we need to relate to millions of people, that indeed our revolution will be a popular and widely-waged one. If you think that our revolution needs to be of the mainstream, and not against it. And if your central concern is the number of revolutionaries in the United States (let’s say 100 million people), and not the number of cops and national guard who might oppose you, then your ideas about what a revolution in the United States would look like change significantly.

You begin to see what is plainly obvious: that institutions - including those that make up the United States Government and U.S. corporations - are built consent and cooperation, much more than on than violence or repression. When asked with the question of how could a revolutionary movement possibly defeat the United States Military and urban police forces, the obvious answer surfaces: by organizing them.

I’ll end with a Gene Sharp quote, which I saw in one of his speeches on Google Videos. I’ll take the direct quote from Aaron’s blog post “On The Shaking of Governments” (brilliant post title) since he’s been reading a lot of Sharp’s stuff. Here it is:

“Is shaking a government to the point that they disintegrate and nobody is left to surrender naivete and weakness? … There is nothing weak about a technique of struggle which can take the legitimacy away from a repressive government, which can produce a defiant population uncontrollable by the police and military forces sent to repress them.”

Finally, two great readings on nonviolent revolutions:

Globalize Liberation, George Lakey

From Dictatorship to Democracy, Gene Sharp

Two SDS members - Beth Slutzky and Christa Hendrickson - were interviewed on The Joy of Resistance: Multicultural Feminist Radio on WBAI (an independent radio station in NYC) this morning at 11am. You can listen to it online here! When listening, you can find their interview (its 19 minutes out of the 1 hour show) by going to minute 13:20. It ends at minute 32:32.

In capitalism, owners together with about a fifth of the population who have highly empowered work decide what is produced, by what means, and with what distribution. Nearly four fifths of the population does largely rote labor, suffers inferior incomes, obeys orders, and endures boredom, all imposed from above. As John Lennon put it, “As soon as you’re born they make you feel small, by giving you no time instead of it all.”

Capitalism destroys solidarity, homogenizes variety, obliterates equity, and imposes harsh hierarchy. It is top heavy in power and opportunity. It is bottom heavy in pain and constraint. Indeed, Capitalism imposes on workers a degree of discipline beyond what any dictator ever dreamed of imposing politically. Who ever heard of citizens asking permission to go to the bathroom, a commonplace occurrence for workers in many corporations.

Capitalism’s ills are not due to antisocial people. Instead, capitalism’s institutions impose horrible behavior even on its most social citizens. In capitalism as a famous American baseball manager quipped “nice guys finish last.” More aggressively: “garbage rises.” Witness Washington’s White House.

Participatory economics is an alternative way to organize economic life.

It has equitable incomes, circumstances, opportunities, and responsibilities for all participants. Each participant in a participatory economy has a fair share of control over their own life and over all shared social outcomes. Participatory economics eliminates class division.

It produces solidarity. Even an antisocial individual in a participatory economy has no choice but to account for social well-being if he or she wishes to prosper.

It diversifies outcomes and generates equitable distribution that remunerates each participant for how long and how hard they work as well as for harsh conditions they may suffer at work.

It also conveys to each person a say in what is produced, what means are used, and how outputs are allocated, all in proportion to the degree he or she is affected by those decisions.

Participatory economics, in other words, has completely different values than capitalism and to further its different values participatory economics incorporates different institutions.

It has workers and consumers councils where workers and consumers employ diverse modes of discussion, debate, and democratic determination. In a participatory economic, there are no corporate owners and managers deciding outcomes from the top down.

It has balanced jobs in which each worker does a fair combination of empowering and rote labor, so that all participants have comparably empowering circumstances instead of 20% of the workforce monopolizing all the empowering tasks and 80% doing only subordinate labor. In a participatory economy there is still expertise. There is still coordination. Decisions still get made. But there is no minority monopolizing empowering information, activity, and access to decision making positions while a majority is made subservient by doing only deadening daily tasks with no decision making component.

In a participatory economy, each and every job, which means each and every person’s work, involves a mix calibrated so that each participant has essentially equally empowering conditions. A participatory economy has no owning class. It has no technocratic, managerial, or coordinator class. A participatory economy has only workers and consumers cooperatively creatively fulfilling their capacities consistently with each participant having a fair share of influence.

It has remuneration for effort and sacrifice, which translates to remuneration for the duration, intensity, and harshness of the work people do. It rejects remuneration for power, property, or even output. Instead of gargantuan disparities of income and wealth, a participatory economy has a just distribution of social product.

It also does away with markets which pit each actor against all others, destroy solidarity, impose class division, mis-price all public goods, ignore collective effects beyond direct buyers and sellers, violate ecological balance and sustainability, and have many other faults as well. In place of markets it utilizes a system of workers and consumers, through their self managing councils, cooperatively negotiating inputs and outputs for all firms and actors in accord with true and full social costs and benefits of economic activities.

In a short article it is impossible to make even a quick much less a compelling case for an entirely different economic system. I can only offer a brief list of participatory economics’ values and institutions. I know such brevity is vague and hard for unfamiliar readers to give substance to. But here we have no room for clarification, supporting argument, or detailed discussion. My apologies.

What I hope, however, is that readers who know from their own experience that capitalist economies routinely cause us to fleece each other, deny us having a say over our own lives or force us to dominate the lives of others, distribute massive outputs to those who do the most pleasurable or even who do no work at all and distribute meager outputs to those who do the least pleasurable and the overwhelming volume of work, will hope that participatory economics is a real alternative.

I can hope, in other words, that instead of quietly accepting rich people’s passivity-inducing mantra that “there is no alternative,” we will all seek something better, beyond capitalism, and that, moved by our aspirations we will carefully consider participatory economics on its merits. One place that you might begin, if you don’t accept that humanity is forever doomed to suffer gross inequality and hierarchy via capitalist ownership, corporations, and markets, is at the Participatory Economics website.

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!”

So you wanna change the world? Great! I’d love to chat with you if you want more information on starting out as a political activist and organizer. You can reach me at brian@walkingbutterfly.com, or call me at 845-649-2146 or add me on Facebook or Myspace. You can send me a message on AIM or Google Chat at one address: butterflywalking (at) gmail.com (its my AIM Screen name too). For more information about me or walkingbutterfly.com click here! Like Diary of a Walking Butterfly? Consider subscribing by e-mail!

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That being said, becoming political active is a process that takes years of learning and growing - its best to enter social movements with that knowledge in mind. Building mass movements to take on the systems of exploitation, to stop rightwing policies, or to bring down repressive dictators doesn’t happen overnight. It takes the careful, patient organizing by lots of diverse people organized into political organizations.

Here are some links, books, and so on, that can help you get involved…

What some ideas about what might replace our current economic system? Visit the participatory economics website for more information on a democratically planned alternative to both market capitalism and centrally planned socialism. If you are feeling cynical, or you buy into Margaret Thatcher’s claim that “There Is No Alternative” or “TINA”, its definitely something to check out. What she really meant was “TINBA” - “There Is No Better Alternative”. Participatory economics is that better alternative. But don’t take my word for it, if you want an economy based on solidarity, diversity, liberty, equity, justice, democracy, and efficiency, check it out and judge for yourself!

Z Magazine and ZNet are great daily news sources for learning about how society’s dominant institutions currently work, and what people are doing to change them. Remembering Tomorrow: From SDS to Life After Capitalism, a Memoir is a great narrative about Michael Albert’s life as a visionary and strategic organizer for social change. I’d definitely recommend people checking it out if you want an overall introduction to various concepts, ideas and stories about what it would take to change the world. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell , though written for business people, can also be applied to social movements and activism.

Don’t understand how American history got where it is today? Check out Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States! Its the definitive introduction to social movements in the United States.

Want to get right into it and join a group? Here are some:

What to join a youth organization? Are you interested in fighting global warming? Consider joining the Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC). The Student Environmental Action Coalition or SEAC is a grassroots coalition of student and youth environmental groups, working together to protect our planet and our future. Through this united effort, thousands of youth have translated their concern into action by sharing resources, building coalitions, and challenging the limited mainstream definition of environmental issues.

As the title suggests, here are some ways that events can fulfill Organizing functions. Events might be considered organizing if they:1. help to increase and solidify the commitment of new or preexisting members.2. whenever possible, recruit new members, and get the contact information of all the people (especially the new ones) who join in the events - later following up with each of them, individually if possible.3. are well messaged/framed, with language and concepts used that help to lay the foundation for the construction of a new dominant narrative throughout society - a narrative about justice, peace, equity, democracy, liberty, human dignity, diversity, sustainability, and solidarity.For example, the conservative theme of “small government”, can be exposed for what it is: the destruction of good forms of government (programs of social uplift), and the expansion of bad forms (more money for the defense industry, the nationalization of corporate debt, tax breaks for the rich). We can show that theres an alternative to that - a participatory democracy where people control their own lives and country through a system of elected delegates - as opposed to unaccountable “representatives” who represent corporate interests instead of the interests of hardworking Americans.4. elevate sympathetic voices which people can’t ignore, and indeed, can personally and collectively relate to. These voices must cut through dominant narratives that largely isolate and atomize us, while causing people to have feel solidarity with other human beings - feelings solidarity which can later be translated into solidaristic action and organizing.5. expand democratic control by the people over society. Whenever possible, activist events can be used to organize for democratic popular power by allowing people to both participate in the event, and/or take social power into their own hands. While this power must be directed in a productive direction, it is fundamental to winning a new world that people begin to have ever more practice at what it would take to run a society, and how desirable that would be. Democracy needs to be made viral and contagious.We could list more, but the above are usually pretty crucial. I will add more as I think of them - or others suggest them to me.

Just like will.i.am’s first video for Obama, this one is super powerful.

If progressives want to build a mass movement of millions of people, we need to be this inspiring on a regular basis. That means vision and talking about hope and change - instead of complaining, criticizing, and talking about bad things constantly. In the current issue of Rolling Stone, in which the magazine endorsed Barack Obama, Jann S. Wenner, who wrote the endorsement, said that GOP strategists had refused to campaign against him calling him a “Walking Hope Machine.” Obama’s portrait was on the front cover which carried the words: “Barack Obama: A New Hope”. There were at least two articles in the issue - the endorsement entitled “A New Hope”, and a longer piece about Obama’s campaign called “The Machinery of Hope.” Th fact that the Left can’t yet do this on a regular basis, is a pretty good sign of our weakness. We should learn from Obama’s language and the tone of his campaign and supporters and then build a real mass movement which can implement lasting institutional change in America - and beyond.

Anway, here’s the video:

Check out this great post by my good friend Aric: “Election 2008: Why not just ignore it?” about seizing the opportunity presented to us by our current political moment and the political fault lines that mark it.

And here’s a video by Robert Kennedy that he recently posted on his blog. RFK challenging the nature of the GDP. Extraordinary inspiring.

“Some people see things as they are and ask ‘Why? I dream things that never were and ask ‘Why not?’” - Robert Kennedy