By Chris Crass

Excellent book on organizing and anarchism. Very practical and relatable examples.

• Organizing / leadership 
  • Supporting people to come together and overcome isolation and feelings of inadequacy is one of the key tasks of organizers, and we can do this by developing a systematic understanding of the problems we face, nurturing relationships of solidarity and respect, building up collective power through action, and working for social change in ways that also help us grow and live our values in the here and now.  
  • “Praxis” refers to a process of applying theory to practice, reflecting on the practice to draw out lessons, and then applying those lessons to improve both the theory and the practice. 
  • Ella Baker emphasized that the role of a leader is to develop other leaders 
  • Structure is the manifestation of decisions or lack of decision a group makes about how it will operate. Process refers to the ways that people then try to actually work together in those structures. The process is where ideas, structure, and people’s real experiences converge. Process is always happening regardless of what kind of structure or lack of structure houses it. In a condition of structurelessness, blame often falls on individuals for any problems or unhealthy dynamics, but once these individuals leave the group, others often end up in a similar role. This can lead to people thinking that inequality is naturally or unavoidable.  
  • “anti-authoritarian leadership” 
  • For many of us in the anarchist community, anarchist politics codified opposition to authoritarianism into a practical distrust and suspicion of anyone taking initiative. This often led to mediocrity celebrated as equality or a vicious culture of critiquing leaders. Furthermore, we lacked a culture of training and support to help people step up. Distrust of initiative, combined with fear of being perceived as authoritarian, led to an unsupported and memorializing group culture.  
  • We made badges shaped like black stars that read “Organizer,” and gave one to every coordinator and member of the planning committee to wear. We wanted people to understand themselves as organizers, to help them have confidence providing leadership, and for them to receive recognition for their work.  
  • For the first time, core members drafted an explicit plan for leadership development. This plan consisted primarily of meeting on-on-one with other members to encourage them to take on higher levels of responsibility in the group while offering them support, in addition to focusing on analysis and skill building. In the past we had often focused on passing on skills, but the new plan included the critical dimension of helping people overcome insecurities and self-doubts and replace them with an understanding of the tasks at hand and a belief in their ability to do them.  
  • [Baker] believed that good leadership created opportunities for others to realize and expand their own talents, skills, and potential to be leaders themselves.  
  • SNCC was committed to group-centered leadership, to mass direct action, to organizing in the tradition of developing people’s capacity to work on their own behalf, and to community building that was participatory and involved local people in decision-making with the goal of developing local leaders.  
  • Charles Payne: “Overemphasizing the movements’ more dramatic features, we under-value the planning and sustained effort, the slow, respectful work, that made the dramatic moments possible.” 
  • Organizing is about building collective power. The process of building collective power is also about developing the power that each of us has to act and engage with the world.  
  • Developing a leadership and building organization section p 168 
  • In my experience, asking someone directly to do something is far more effective than asking for volunteers in a meeting in terms of building the collective power of the organization as well as promoting the leadership of a broader base of people.  
  • In preparation for our retreats we reach out to allied organizations and movement elders to gather their perspectives on the state of the Left and strategic opportunities. We ask them about the work they’ll be prioritizing in the coming year and we factor this into our discussions. If we have worked closely with a group we will ask if they have feedback for us. We do this because we want to be accountable in our work to our allies and this helps each of us develop as more effective organizers.  
  • In Heads Up, all members are expected to take leadership and to do the work. For a long time, when we brought in new members, there was a very brief process and then they were expected to be able to do everything. Sometimes, this worked. Other times it didn’t, and it took us a while to realize that, even if the folks we’re brining in are experienced and have similar politics, there needs to be some sustained and deliberate work around developing their leadership.  
  • To foster the organizing work necessary to build the world we want, we continually develop new anti-racist leadership. Developing leadership is a slow and long-term process. It may take ten times longer to teach someone else to do something that you have done for years. It often takes time for people to accept they’re leaders, even if they’re already providing leadership. We encourage people to take on as much leadership as they can from the beginning while respecting the experience of people who have already been doing this work. We avoid the paradigm of perfectionism and encourage people to make mistakes, be accountable to them, learn from them, and keep trying.  
  • There is often a hierarchy implied with leadership development. It’s important to be real about the fact that people are in different places with different skills and experiences, and everyone has something to contribute. For example, when projects come up, people can take leadership on them and work closely with others to learn from one another. Beyond the core, we are always looking for effective ways to give roles to and further engage people in our broader base.  
• Systems change / movements / strategy 
  • What would it look like for white people to develop anti-racist consciousness that unites them with communities of color working for justice and helps white people decolonize their minds from internalized white superiority? What would it look like for men to develop as feminists in a way that helps them decolonize their minds from internalized male supremacy as they become more effective and powerful activists working for an overall justice agenda with feminism at the center? What would it look like for middle- and upper-class people to decolonized their minds from capitalism to work in solidarity with working-class and poor people for an economic justice agenda with socialist values?
    If systems of domination are interconnected, then systems of liberation are also interconnected. If systems of liberation are interconnected, then we must help white people, men, and middle- and upper-class people create and win these systems and go through a transformative process of change while working for systematic change. 
  • we do not want to provide services and maintain the status quo by helping it deal with its worst excesses. We want to highlight the misery created by the system and build social justice movements for systematic change.  
  • “Get angry at the problem, attach blame for the problems and create shame until you see change.” A more effective approach would have been: “Understand the problem, formulate a different vision, and develop proactive strategies to get there.” 
  • One of those strengths was FNB’s ability to be a gateway for thousands of people in rural areas, small towns, suburbs, and cities to engage in social justice work and become part of a larger movement of systematic change. FNB had the ability to change lives, and so the role of an FNB organizer was to support people in their political development, help them gain skills, help them see themselves as in it for the long haul, and encourage them to go on into other groups and campaigns when they were ready. However, we also believed that while people were in FNB, the group should engage in strategic and effective work to win real changes and build large-scale movements for justice. This became our focus.  
  • Prefigurative strategy: one that developed a vision of how society should be organized while also taking concrete steps to move in that direction. People’s immediate needs were central, but they were also firmly situated in a bigger-picture strategy of working-class self-management of society. 
  • Through MAC (Mission Anti-Displacement Coalition), SF FNB members also came away with a clearer understanding of the importance of both leadership development and building left organizing through struggles. This meant focusing more on building power over the long haul than on winning on particular issues. While MAC fought to win concrete victories, many of the organizations involved talked about the importance of “base building,” which meant both developing the leadership of their members and getting more people in the community involved. The primary goal, in this approach, is not whether you win on a particular issue; rather, it prioritized the process of building a community’s power so as to equalize the fundamental power relations in society. While SF FNB had engaged in numerous campaigns over the years, we rarely focused on building anyones power to change society. We wanted to stop something from happening or demand that something must happen. We focused on building the power of our group to be effective, but we weren’t thinking about whole classes or groups of people in society. The key piece missing from our strategy was: how would power shift? We would talk about the need for massive actions and look to general strikes as a key revolutionary tactic, but we were unclear about how we would get from our small groups to the revolutionary change we knew to be necessary.  
  • [Baker] argued that strong people do not need a strong leader; rather, they need an organization that can provide mutual aid and solidarity.  
  • For Baker, direct action was about achieving immediate goals, but it was also deeply connected to developing a sense of power in the people involved. It is this sense of power that would change people far beyond winning the immediate goals and help build a sustainable movement with long-term commitment and vision. It would also hopefully impact people’s perceptions of themselves in relationship to the world and open up greater possibilities for happiness and satisfaction.  
  • The Freedom Schools prioritized political education informed by daily reality to connect day-to-day experiences with an institutional analysis and focused on building leadership and training organizers.  
  • We need to work from a place of leadership, not distanced critique. The Wisconsin uprising was a complex picture of both transformative action towards liberation and the perpetuation of privilege and oppression. Instead of distancing ourselves to remain “pure,” anti-racist organizers need to engage in these movement moments.  
• Anarchism 
  • Bakunin: “Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice, and socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.” 
  • Emma Goldman argued that as people expand freedom through collective action, their ability to imagine what freedom looks like will also expand. 
  • Anarchists believe that people gain a new understanding of reality through exercising their individual and collective power. This happens not just because ideas are tested against reality and evolve, but because people begin to see themselves as agents of change who can influence the world around them. the educational experience of putting ideas into practice is therefore prioritized by anarchists, who see the revolutionary potential of fights for incremental change as opportunities for people to build their own power and see themselves as capable of winning larger-scale change. Since they believe that the ultimate goal is not to seize and exercise existing power but to radically redistribute and reorganize it, they insist that the more people experience their own power through struggle and begin incorporating revolutionary values into their daly practice, the more the movement could prefigure the society it is working to build.  
  • This is one of the reasons that anarchists have championed mass worker organizations and direct action, not because they believed that willpower alone could make a revolution but because they believed the struggle itself was the greatest teacher. 
  • We promoted anarchism as “a political theory and organizing practice which seeks to dismantle patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, and authoritarianism, and works towards ecological sustainability, self-determination, solidarity, and cooperation.” 
  • Defining anarchism as in opposition to not only capitalism and the state but also to white supremacy, patriarchy, and hertosexism is a move in this direction. The next step would be to figure out exactly what this shift means for the ways that we few an act in the world.  
  • The ways white privilege and male privilege have influenced anarchist politics – the focus, for example, on anti-power rather than building power. This goes deep. There are white anarchist men, for example, who say that there are no “power dynamics” in their organizations because no one has or wants power. Worse still, there are white anarchist men who say that there are no power dynamics because they don’t believe in organization anyway and everyone should just “act.”  
• Blame / Accountability 
  • Far too often, we were blaming individuals for the major problems the group was facing. this took the issues out of our larger social context and eliminated other people’s responsibility. Blaming individuals, as is typically the case, led to demoralization and meant that the group didn’t take responsibility for developing solutions.  
  • Elizabeth ‘Berita’ Martínez: “As organizers, we need to reject the definition of leadership as domination, but without denying the existence and need for leadership. Denial can lead to a failure to demand accountability from our leaders. That demand must be embraced, along with anti-authoritarian methods, and leadership development. Accountability takes the measure of a person’s responsibility; it means being accountable to one’s fellow organizers, to the goals of one’s collectivity and ultimately to the people one claims to serve. “ 
• The opposition 
  • [The Right] were seeking out wedge issues that would effectively divide working-class people from their own economic self-interests and encourage fear and the worst of human nature to create a vacuum that the Right would then fill with “moral” leadership and “family values.” Sounds familiar, right? By equating being queer with pedophilia and a list of evils, the Right was able to whip up homophobic fears of the mainstream on a non-existent threat, scapegoat a vulnerable groups of people, then enter the divide that they had created with anti-queer policies that would distract from the real focus of their platform – to create unfair tax structures, subsidize the rich, establish corporate welfare, and destroy the social safety net.  
  • In both these instances, perhaps it is true that working-class people are more likely to verbally express their homophobia or racism, but it is the wealthy, owning class that is exercising the power to keep these systems of oppression in place and ultimately use homophobia and racism to keep working people divided from one another. 
• Other 
  • Gentrification is the process by which an area of town (usually pretty rundown because of a previous period of divestment by capital) is physically changed so as to replace the existing residents with wealthier ones. Improving or revitalizing an area of town in and of itself could be a positive development, if done with and for the benefit of the existing community. However, the competition of capitalism creates a need for a constant increase of profit; in cities, a proven profit-making strategy is transforming neighborhoods from working-class to middle-class or upper-class communities. 
  • People can only support you if you make it clear what your needs are