Movements, imagination, and politics + The grooviest music of the 20th century
+ Mongolian eagle hunters + this montoreme’s coveted endorsements in NYC elections
This issue of The Platypus is characteristically eclectic. In reading recommendations, we feature several pieces on social movements including a new, timely interview with our favorite movement theorist, a sparkling conversation between two leading thinkers and practitioners about the state of the art in linking short-term struggle to long-term vision, a profile of a visionary movement organizer for the abolition of the criminal punishment system, and a provocative look at a year of insurgency for racial justice in America.
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In our “Delights and Provocations” section, we travel across wide terrain: from the grooviest music of the 20th century . . . to the very strange behavior of the hoopoe . . . to the eagle hunters of the Mongolian Steppe.
Also, we’re thrilled that Community Change is leading the hugely important fight to make the refundable child tax credit permanent. The tax credit is that provision in the American Recovery Plan that promises to cut child poverty in half — and it has taken decades of organizing to bring us to this point. For the backstory, watch the great 8-minute video below in Community Change’s new “Briefly: From the Ground Up” series. The video features brilliant activists Dorian Warren, Kate Kahan, LaDon Love, and grassroots leaders past and present who have fought for a guaranteed annual income to end poverty. It also includes an interview with Deepak — as well as footage of him from younger days — and lots of footage of demonstrations that Harry shot in the early 2000s.
NYC Endorsements!
The Platypus is excited to endorse Maya Wiley for Mayor of NYC and Brad Lander for Comptroller. We can vouch for their commitments, effectiveness, and integrity. This city needs and deserves leaders who are committed to racial and economic justice rather than to personal ambition. It’s rare that The Platypus has decades of personal experience with people running for offices like these. We rarely stick our bills into local politics. But monotremes do not lie: Maya and Brad are 100% the real deal. (Also, if you are voting for Andrew Yang, please unsubscribe immediately! You are really laying an unfortunate, smelly egg by doing that, and The Platypus knows a thing or two about eggs.) We’ve contributed to Maya and Brad, and we urge you to do that, too!
A few compelling events and offerings of note . . .
Stephanie Luce and Deepak will again be offering their class “Power and Strategy” this fall through CUNY’s School for Labor and Urban Studies. The class is intended for experienced community and labor organizers, campaigners, and other social-change practitioners. We will explore different forms of power and methods for developing winning strategies from diverse movement and organizing traditions. We also consider “strategy from above” including strategic methods in politics, Silicon Valley, and the military. You can apply here. The class will take place 100% online, so you can join from anywhere in the country.
Deepak will be joining Megan Ming Francis, Jamila Michener, and Connie Razza for a panel discussion organized by Harvard’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation: “100 Days of the Biden Administration: What’s Next for Immigration, Health Policy, and Economic Justice?” on Wednesday, May 12th from 2:00-3:00. Register here.
The National Partnership for New Americans will be hosting a conversation about “OUr Vision for A Just Immigration System,” moderated by Nicole Melaku and including contributors to the book Immigration Matters: Movements, Visions and Strategies for a Progressive Future Angelica Salas, Marielena Hincapie, and Deepak on 5/20 at 1 pm EST. You can register here.
ICYMI: You can watch a recording of an intense and provocative discussion about immigration, racial justice, climate change, declining population growth, and more with Cecilia Munoz, Niambi Carter, Sergio Garcia-Rios, and Deepak. The panel took place on 5/4 and was sponsored by Cornell University’s Politics of Race, Immigration, Class & Ethnicity Initiative (priceinitiative.org).
Reading Recommendations
Listen to the revelatory conversation between Steven Pitts and Maurice Mitchell on Steve’s brilliant Black Work Talk, an Organizing Upgrade podcast. They discuss crucial topics like the intersection of race and class and how to connect short-term campaigns to long-term vision. It’s a masterclass on social change.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s luminous profile of abolitionist Miriame Kaba in The New Yorker is a must-read.
To approach harm systemically is to imagine that, if people’s most critical needs were met, the tensions that arise from deprivation and poverty could be mitigated. And when harm still occurs, because human beings have the propensity to hurt one another, nonlethal responses could attend to it—and also to the reasons for it. To be sure, these are lofty aspirations, but they are no more unrealistic than believing that another study, exposé, commission, firing, or police trial is capable of meeting the desire for change that, last summer, compelled tens of millions of ordinary people to pour into the streets. Indeed, the trial of Derek Chauvin could not even conclude before a Black man was killed at a traffic stop . . .
Our current criminal-justice system is rooted in the assumption that millions of people require policing, surveillance, containment, prison. It is a dark view of humanity. By contrast, Kaba and others in this emergent movement fervently believe in the capacity of people to change in changed conditions. That is the optimism at the heart of the abolitionist project. As Kaba insists in her book, “The reason I’m struggling through all of this is because I’m a deeply, profoundly hopeful person. Because I know that human beings, with all of our foibles and all the things that are failing, have the capacity to do amazingly beautiful things, too. That gives me the hope to feel like we will, when necessary, do what we need to do.” Abolition is not an all-or-nothing proposition. . . .
Although the demand to defund the police may have had its specific origins in Minneapolis, Kaba understands that the growing curiosity about abolitionist politics is rooted in something much broader. She said, “People are frustrated by the way that the welfare state has completely been defunded. People don’t have what they need to survive. And yet the military and prisons keep getting more and more and more.” Contrary to the beliefs of their critics, abolitionists are not impervious to the realities of crime and violence. But they have a fundamental understanding that crime is a manifestation of social deprivation and the reverberating effects of racial discrimination, which locks poor and working-class communities of color out of schooling, meaningful jobs, and other means to keep up with the ever-escalating costs of life in the United States. These problems are not solved by armed agents of the state or by prisons, which sow the seeds of more poverty and alienation, while absorbing billions of dollars that might otherwise be spent on public welfare. The police and prisons aren’t solving these problems: they are a part of the problem.
In an interview with Mark Engler for The Nation, “Frances Fox Piven Wants You to Raise Hell,” The Platypus’s favorite social movement theorist talks about the relationship of social movements and electoral politics. Evergreen truths here.
We have to start by realizing that the dynamics of electoral politics and movement politics are very different. If you have a two-party system and you want to win elections, you need a majority. And to create a majority, you have to build coalitions and alliances between different groups. The magic of the politician is the ability to bring these groups together by finding the issues, the rhetoric, and the mood that will unite them.
The dynamic of movement politics is division and polarization. In movements, agitators identify issues and raise hell over them. They drive groups into action—and some groups they will drive away. For them, that’s OK. They don’t expect to build majority coalitions by raising hell. So in that sense, movement politics and electoral politics are very different.
Often when movements win, we win because politicians want to stop divisions that are being caused by the disruptive behavior of the movement. For example, let’s assume that we have massive rent strikes in the big cities of the United States, because people don’t have the money to pay the rent and there are evictions threatened. This will create divisions between landlords and tenants, obviously, but also between people who side with the tenants and people who think that the landlords have to be supported and can’t be allowed to go bankrupt. So these divisions will leave politicians to try to stop what’s going on.
Politicians don’t like divisions. They especially don’t like divisions within their coalition. To fend off the splintering of their coalition, they will try to propose reform. And that’s how movements win.
In n+1 magazine’s “Magic Actions: Looking Back on the George Floyd rebellion,” Tobi Haslett goes beyond the sanitized story of protest to reveal the reality of seething discontent and uprising.
LEST WE FORGET. The fear, the weeks of waiting, the vivid force of the eyewitness testimony; the replaying of grisly footage and then the shock of the conviction: the whole drama of the Derek Chauvin trial—its obscenity and thin catharsis—would not have taken place at all were it not for last year’s riots. Police trials are rare. So is national uprising: looting, acts of vandalism, and the nightly carnival of torched police cars are what vaulted George Floyd’s death from single cruelty to American crisis, as the fires of Minneapolis swept through every major city. It feels both near and far now.
It’s been a year: long enough for the events to be flattened and foreshortened; long enough for the authorities to paint their account over the true one. Last month’s statements by Nancy Pelosi et al. exposed the hope that a guilty verdict for Chauvin will be enough to end this episode, sating the popular fury and killing the memory of the rebellion. We shall see. Even now, an official narrative has yet to emerge from the chaos of last spring. But it was stunning to watch the corporate media try to summon one and fail, confounded by the images they flashed in the public’s face. At the DNC last fall we saw how the uprising may be remembered: a sunny, noble blur of soaring rhetoric and “peaceful” crowds—a fabulous alternative to the rawness on the ground.
But certain facts remain; some things can’t be wished away. Too much was born and broken amid the smoke and screams. The least we can do is remember—to try, after the riots, after the speeches, after the backlash and elections, and after this latest (live-streamed) liturgy of American “criminal justice,” to recall what really happened, extracting and reconstructing the whole flabbergasting sequence. Last year something massive came hurtling into view and exploded against the surface of daily life in the US. Many are still struggling to grasp what that thing was: its shape and implications, its sudden scale and bitter limits. One thing we know for sure is that it opened with a riot, on the street in Minneapolis where Floyd had cried out “I can’t breathe.”
Delights and Provocations
What’s the grooviest music of the 20th century? A controversial topic, to be sure. The Platypus contends that it’s Ethiopian music from the 1960s and 70s, showcased in the first several installments of Ethiopiques, a set of albums (that we originally heard on CD) that now includes 30 titles. It’s a unique, joyous, complex, and layered sound rooted in centuries of history. Amha Eshèté, the record producer who did so much to bring this music to a wide audience, died recently, and our friend Bill Dempsey (a.k.a., DJ Dempsey), himself a brilliant musician, paid tribute on the super-groovy radio show Bill hosts: “Divino Maravilhoso.” Here are the links for hour one and hour two. And here’s what Bill wrote on Facebook:
Amha Eshèté, the legendary record producer, the first Ethiopian independent record label owner, the founder of the very first full scale Ethiopian restaurant in DC, and the first promoter to bring a big band from a socialist country to the US, passed yesterday. There is so much to celebrate about this man's life, and the countless sacrifices he made - being exiled from his country multiple times, having family and friends imprisoned, all his work seized - and despite it all, his relentless courage, creative vision and constant reinventions brought our world so much tremendous music. The two hours on tonight's radio show won't come close to scratching the surface of the earth-shaking music he's responsible for, but we'll begin an excavation, drawing from the reissued Ethiopiques series that turned me upside down when they washed up at Milwaukee's Exclusive Company back in the '90's.
Incidentally, one of Harry’s most ecstatic experiences as a cameraperson was shooting a concert at the D.C. Armory by the great Mahmoud Ahmed.
We were astonished by Claire Thomas’s photographs featured recently in the New York Times photo essay “On Horseback Among the Eaglehunters and Herders of the Mongolian Altai.” More amazing images from that journey and others are on Claire Thomas’s website.
The very strange habits of the lovely hoopoe are explored in The Atlantic’s “A Bird’s Stinky Egg is Actually a Humblebrag.”
In preparation for birth, some expectant human parents will build IKEA cribs or down prenatal vitamins. Female hoopoes douse their eggs in a pungent postcoital goo.
Shortly after laying their eggs, these delightfully zebra-striped birds will begin to paint the clutch with their beak. The pigment they use is made in-house—a brown, oily substance secreted by the uropygial gland, located at the base of the female’s tail. The eggshells start out cerulean, but with each coat of fluid, they transform into a mucked-up greenish-gray. Though subtle in appearance, the secretions are rank: Thanks to the bonanza of bacteria within, they reek like “a very strong and smelly cheese,” tinged with a putrid je ne sais quoi, Juan José Soler, a biologist at the Experimental Station of Arid Zones, in Spain, who has spent years working with the birds, told me. The first time Soler grew the malodorous microbes in the lab, they stank up his entire department.
Humans might recoil, but hoopoes don’t mind the stuff. They dollop it liberally into their eggs’ sponge-like pores, imbuing them with friendly microbes that protect the eventual hatchlings from pathogens—a sort of living antibiotic. The grodier and grayer the shell, the more likely the embryo within is to survive—a trend that male birds appear to have picked up on. In a paper published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Soler and his colleagues at the University of Granada report that male hoopoes will bring more food to females tending less color-saturated eggs, an apparent attempt to invest in higher-quality chicks. It’s a heartwarming display of fatherhood, spurred on by the intergenerational application of a stinky cosmetic.
This article on UB40, a brilliant band of our youth, took us back: “MI5 were tapping Our phones: UB40 on starting out, falling out and losing millions.”
Formed in 1978 by a nucleus of schoolfriends who grew up around Birmingham’s multiracial Balsall Heath, UB40 were once the authentic voice of informed working-class disaffection. Setting street-level grievances and global political protest to a stoned stepper’s beat, they made music for the feet, head and heart, tackling apartheid, Thatcherism, racism, global poverty and social injustice head on.
“We were the real deal,” says original singer Ali Campbell. “We were eight people who had been unemployed since school, trying to wade through Thatcher’s quagmire of shit and then sing about it. We were politicised, we were disenfranchised, and we had a lot to say.”
“I went through the same rigmarole as most black people in the late 70s,” says the band’s original co-vocalist, Astro, recalling the “sus law” that allowed the arrests of people deemed to be acting suspiciously, often on flimsy, racist pretexts. “It was a weekly occurrence. We found it harder to write love songs than militant lyrics, because it was a lot easier to write about stuff you had witnessed or read about. It seemed natural to us.”
Savvy Corner
Stephanie Luce and Deepak will be offering a class designed for mid- and senior-level organizers and campaigners this fall on “Power and Strategy” at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies. From the course description:
How do groups in society achieve the changes they seek? This course will explore how elites, labor unions, community organizations, political parties, and social movements organize, develop strategies and deploy resources to advance their interests and win major changes in society. To provide a shared framework, we’ll begin with an overview of classical and contemporary theories of power and cause and effect. We’ll look at elite strategies to wield power developed in the military, Silicon Valley, business, and politics. We’ll also consider five “strategies from below,” including building mass organization, disruptive movements, efforts to capture governing power, and “inside-outside” strategies.
In the eternal battle between David and Goliath, how and why does David sometimes win? We’ll examine a variety of case studies from the right and left, including the orchestrated rise of neoliberalism, and cutting-edge campaigns from contemporary racial justice and labor and other movements. The class will focus heavily on introducing applied tools for strategy development from a variety of traditions. We’ll review tools commonly used in campaigns like power analysis and strategy charts, but also introduce frameworks like “lean startup,” reverse engineering, OODA loops, emergent strategy, scenario planning, policy feedback loops, time shifting, and methods to harness and work with strong emotions. The class is appropriate for intermediate to advanced social change organizers and campaigners, as well as for graduate students. The class will feature guest faculty and practitioners with extensive experience building winning campaigns. You can apply here.