Maurice Mitchell diagnoses internal conflict in our movements
+ Fascism Still Looms: warnings from Francis Fox Piven and Maria Ressa + 1/6: a graphic novel asks “What if the attack on the U.S. Capitol succeeded?”
In this issue, we feature a brilliant and important new article by the national director of the Working Families Party, Maurice Mitchell, who diagnoses the current wave of conflict inside movement organizations and prescribes critical interventions. Mitchell talks about 10 common trends that are weakening our movements’ ability to meet this moment — trends like neoliberal identity politics, maximalism, anti-leadership attitudes, anti-institutional sentiments, and a tendency to fight “the small war.” It’s a must read piece. Maurice will be talking about his piece, in dialogue with other movement leaders, at an event sponsored by Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice on December 13, from 2:30-4 EST. You will be able to register for the event at the LDSJ website early this week. We’re glad that Convergence and The Forge will be publishing a number of pieces responding to Mitchell’s over the coming months to continue the dialogue on these issues.
We also bring you a few items about the continuing threat of fascism:
First, a great interview from The Guardian with movement scholar and activist Frances Fox Piven “‘The US can still become a fascist country’: Frances Fox Piven’s midterms postmortem”;
Second, a lecture by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa and an excerpt from her new book How to Stand Up to a Dictator; and
Finally, “What if the January 6th Insurrection had been successful?” To answer that question, our friend Alan Jenkins, a Harvard Law School professor, has collaborated with NY Times Bestselling author Gan Golan and illustrator Will Rosado to create a four-part graphic novel series entitled 1/6. It’s due out early next year and is sure to be a sensation. More details below and at OneSixComics.com.
Maurice Mitchell, courtesy of the Working Families Party
Excerpt from Maurice Mitchell, “Building Resilient Organizations,” published simultaneously in The Forge, Convergence, and Non-Profit Quarterly.
Executives in professional social justice institutions, grassroots activists in local movements, and fiery young radicals on protest lines are all advancing urgent concerns about the internal workings of progressive spaces. The themes arising are surprisingly consistent. Many claim that our spaces are “toxic” or “problematic,” often sharing compelling and troubling personal anecdotes as evidence of this. People in leadership are finding their roles untenable, claiming it is “impossible” to execute campaigns or saying they are in organizations that are “stuck.”
A growing group of new organizers and activists are becoming cynical or dropping out altogether. Most read their experiences as interpersonal conflict gone awry, the exceptional dynamics of a broken environment or a movement that's lost its way. A “bad supervisor,” a “toxic workplace,” a “messy movement space,” or a “problematic person with privilege” are just some of the refrains echoed from all corners of our movements. Individuals are pointing fingers at other individuals; battle lines are being drawn. Identity and position are misused to create a doom loop that can lead to unnecessary ruptures of our political vehicles and the shuttering of vital movement spaces.
Movements on the Left are driven by the same political and social contradictions we strive to overcome. We fight against racism, classism, and sexism yet battle inequity and oppression inside our movements. Although we struggle for freedom and democracy, we also suffer from tendencies toward abuse and domination. We promote leadership and courage by individuals, but media exposure, social media fame, and access to resources compromise activists. We draw from the courage of radical traditions but often lack the strategy or conviction to challenge the status quo. The radical demands that we do make are so regularly disregarded that it can feel as if we are shouting into the wind. Many of us are working harder than ever but feeling that we have less power and impact.
There are things we can and must do to shift movements for justice toward a powerful posture of joy and victory. Such a metamorphosis is not inevitable, but it is essential. This essay describes the problems our movements face, identifies underlying causes, analyzes symptoms of the core problems, and proposes some concrete solutions to reset our course.
Excerpt from “‘The US can still become a fascist country’: Frances Fox Piven’s Midterms Postmortem,” by Ed Pilkington in The Guardian:
Frances Fox Piven has a warning for America. Don’t get too relaxed, there could be worse to come.
“I don’t think this fight over elemental democracy is over, by any means,” she said. “The United States was well on the road to becoming a fascist country – and it still can become a fascist country.”
The revered sociologist and battle-tested activist – an inspirational figure to those on the left, a bogeywoman for the hard right – is sharing with the Guardian her postmortem of the 2022 midterm elections and Donald Trump’s announcement of a 2024 presidential run. While many observers have breathed a sigh of relief over the rout of extreme election deniers endorsed by Trump, and his seemingly deflated campaign launch, Piven has a more sombre analysis.
All the main elements are now in place, she said, for America to take a turn to the dark side. “There is the crazy mob, Maga; an elite that is oblivious to what is required for political stability; and a grab-it-and-run mentality that is very strong, very dangerous. I was very frightened about what would happen in the election, and it could still happen.” . . .
“There’s going to be a lot of vengeance politics, a lot of efforts to get back at Joe Biden, idiot stuff. And that will rile up a lot of people. The Maga mob is not a majority of the American population by any stretch of the imagination, but the fascist mob don’t have to be the majority to set in motion the kinds of policies that crush democracy.”
Maria Ressa warns we may be in “the last two minutes of democracy”
Maria Ressa, the brave Filipino journalist who founded Rappler and won the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize, has just come out with a new book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator. And though she faces the possibility of a long prison term on trumped up charges, she’s traveling abroad and seizing many opportunities to get the word out about the global threats to democracy. On October 20th, Ressa delivered the Beatty Lecture at McGill University, warning that we may be in “the last two minutes of democracy” worldwide. (You can listen to the lecture on Spotify here or on the Ideas website.) In an excerpt from her book in The Atlantic, “How to Fight Fascism Before It’s Too Late,” Ressa explains that “Filipinos spend more time than any other country on the internet and on social media,” which made the country the perfect laboratory for the dictator Rodrigo Duterte to use social media as a weapon — honing disinformation strategies that would be duplicated in the U.S. and around the world.
We didn’t grasp that Facebook, the website that millions of people still believed fostered community and connection, had supplanted traditional media. We didn’t realize that those “content creators,” with their crude, sometimes lewd, manipulative posts, now passed as political pundits, even as journalists reporting “facts.” Those accounts were at the core of a propaganda machine that bullied and harassed its targets and incited its followers to violence. The same thing happened with “Stop the Steal” in the United States, anti-Muslim riots in India, the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, and many other events around the world. Facebook didn’t only provide a platform for those propagandists’ speech or even only enable them; in fact, it gave them preferential treatment because anger is the contagious currency of Facebook’s profit machine. Only anger, outrage, and fear led to greater numbers of people using Facebook more times a day. Violence has made Facebook rich.
I often tell people that what happened to me, and what happened to Rappler, is an early-warning system for the rest of the world. The year 2016 had been the target year for Rappler to break even—and we were on track to do that until we published our weaponization-of-the-internet series, and Duterte’s propaganda machine tore us apart. . . .
Without any real solution from the tech platforms, it would be easy to give up. But we can’t do that. Not when the integrity of our elections is at stake. So we do our best with what we have: We act, and each day we iterate. This, so far, is our only collective defense. The only way to find a solution is to act.
First, we must demand accountability from technology. This has to start with government action, because the social-media companies regard public pressure and outcry as something that can be safely ignored.
We also must protect and grow investigative journalism. One global initiative I’ve helped lead is the International Fund for Public Interest Media, an immediate short- and medium-term solution to the drop in advertising revenues—which have filtered away from news organizations and to tech platforms instead.
After funding, journalists need protection, starting with the law. Impunity must stop. I learned firsthand just how frail the legal protections are for journalists worldwide. In many ways, lawyers are also playing whack-a-mole, and just as with the official-development-assistance funds from democratic nations, there needs to be a concerted systemic effort for international law. It makes sense that if we don’t have facts, we can’t have law, and we have no democracy.
“The struggle of man against power,” the novelist Milan Kundera wrote, “is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” I have lived through several cycles of history, chronicling wild swings of the pendulum that would eventually stabilize. When journalists were the gatekeepers to our public-information ecosystem, those swings took decades. Today, they take months.
As for me, there are times I struggle. Because I refuse to stop doing my job, I’ve lost my freedom to travel. I can’t plan my life, because I still have seven criminal cases that could send me to prison. But I refuse to live in a world like this. We deserve better. I demand better. In the lecture I delivered to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021, I asked for a defense of our democracies—of our freedom, of equality—that begins at the individual level. In the long term, the most important thing is education; in the medium term, it’s legislation and policy to restore the rule of law in the virtual world—to create a vision of the internet that binds us together instead of tearing us apart. In the short term, right now, it’s just us: collaborate, collaborate, collaborate.
World War III won’t just be a conventional war. The fight for democracy requires a person-to-person defense of our democracies. Microtargeting means that this is hand-to-hand combat for all of us on social media. This is us—you and me and everyone you know—resisting dictatorship through our values not only in the public sphere but in our daily lives. That begins with trust.
1/6, the Graphic Novel Imagines A Future We Barely Dodged
Finally, we are really looking forward to reading the upcoming graphic novel series 1/6 by our friend Alan Jenkins and his very talented collaborators Gan Golan and Will Rosado. Check out the shocking cover below! Alan is a genius on the topic of narrative strategies (he’s been a big hit as a visiting lecturer in Deepak’s classes), and we believe this project could persuade many Americans that the forces unleashed by Trump pose a grave threat to our nation. Jenkins and his collaborators were already well underway when a major social scientific investigation suggested such a project is exactly the kind of cultural intervention we need. In September, a team of researchers from Stanford, MIT, Northwestern, and Columbia released as massive experimental study of 25 different approaches to strengthening democracy. They summarized their findings in a Washington Post Op-ed, "Here’s what persuades Americans to support democracy over party."
One of the most effective approaches showed respondents vivid images of societal instability and violence after democratic collapse in several countries, including Venezuela and Zimbabwe, before culminating in footage of the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot, with narration highlighting the potential for democratic failure in the United States. The success of this approach — which on average reduced support for undemocratic candidates by 4.5 points on a 100-point scale — suggests that Americans simply aren’t imagining what might happen to their own society if democracy were to fail.
So, . . . 1/6 should help with that! And if you want to help support the project or spread the word, here are links:
On Instagram at @OneSixComics
Online at www.OneSixComics.com
1/6 Kickstarter page is here.