My journey from protest to organizing

How millions in the streets can move to millions of organizers

This is not another piece about No Kings. I won’t talk much about how 7 million+ people flooded the streets across the country, that’s not the focus here. What I will talk about is the massive wave of protest in 2020, mutual aid, and you. I’ll talk to you, specifically, because if you’re reading this you’re interested in change, in politics, in defeating fascism. If you’re reading this you’re probably among the growing majority of the US population who thinks we’re on the wrong track. Or, you might live elsewhere and think our species is on the wrong track in a few key ways. Most importantly, you probably want to do something about it.

Seven million people turned out to the No Kings protests for a whole bunch of reasons. The biggest one, naturally, is that people are furious at Trump and the fascist power grab he’s leading. We’re furious at ICE terrorizing communities, at the many forms of escalating repression, at the relentless attack on all forms of democracy, and at the brazen oligarchs colluding with the fascists to make this all happen. But there’s one more reason for such a large turnout that I want to discuss today, and that’s that protest is easy.

Before you jump ship, protest being easy doesn’t mean protest is bad. I’ve attended hundreds of protests, I would guess; I lost count a long time ago. Some of the first political activity I participated in was anti-police brutality protests in 2014. I had done a little environmental organizing before that, but the first long-term work I did began with Black Lives Matter, during the Ferguson inspired protests of 2014. For a month straight a group of us in Washington, DC marched night after night. I’m sure there were other folks doing other organizing, but I was young and didn’t know much and just hit the streets again and again and again, with crowds big and small, in weather ranging from mediocre to freezing our asses off.

I wound up doing virtually the same thing once again in 2020. There had been a little political activity and organizing in between, but being unemployed in the summer of the George Floyd uprising afforded me the opportunity to be in the streets day after day, march after march. At first there were 100,000 of us every day, and several months later there were maybe 100 of us at some of the protests. By the middle of that fall my friends and I were largely burnt out. People had gotten assaulted by the cops too many times, cops who got more violent the smaller our protests got. And so our numbers dwindled further, and most people I knew, myself included, eventually realized that relentless protest simply wasn’t working. We took a step back.

Photo by Alex Radelich on Unsplash

When we gave ourselves time to reflect, many of us began to read a little more. We had all come into the world of protest and politics hungry for justice, wanting fairness, angry at inequality and the violence of policing and generally feeling that this system wasn’t right. Some people had far more developed political ideas already, of course, but a lot of us didn’t have a whole framework at that point, we just wanted cops to stop killing people.

I know now, looking back, that my understanding was limited then. My anger at the system was legitimate and necessary, looking at the world told me that unchecked power and massive inequality made for bad governments and unhealthy societies. These ideas still hit at the heart of my politics, but something more was needed. Protesting to little effect day after day came to feel like banging my head against a wall, and something had to give. It wasn’t enough to vent, it wasn’t enough to briefly feel empowered, it wasn’t enough for me to march and march and not see change.

So in the winter of 2020 leading into 2021 I read, talked with friends who knew more than me, and thought about what could have more of an impact. It felt vital to move toward concrete change. It felt vital to win a better world, not just protest for one. So, one night, a few of us decided to start a mutual aid group. Not long after that, a bunch of us were in a park every week, one with a large homeless population, serving food and hosting teach-ins and distributing clothing.

It was a beautiful thing. For over a year we fed one another and built community and learned from each other. It felt tangible, it was tangible. Here was concrete good being done. Here was community and education and providing for people’s needs. And, to be clear, that group is still going strong. Wonderful people are still holding it down. But, after a year and a half, something shifted for me. We were serving food to the same people week after week. It was, undoubtedly, helpful to numerous people. But what about changing the conditions that made these folks homeless in the first place? What about making our little mutual aid group unnecessary? That’s what I found myself wanting — to move toward a society where people’s needs were already met, and where our work wasn’t even needed.

Photo by Mike Erskine on Unsplash

So my shift continued. What I hope is growth continued. I moved into community and city-wide organizing instead. These changes came out of a desire to build power, to build institutions that would allow us to care for one another and actively shape a better society, instead of just responding to the ills of the current system. My politics now are rooted in the slower and steadier work of building power in my neighborhood, and in my city.

Moments of rupture, moments of sustained mass protest or general strikes or uprisings will surely come. But to be ready for those moments we need millions of people to be organized, to be politicized, to have the tools to pursue systemic transformation. Today that means supporting and bringing people into the labor movement. It means community organizing, political education, building institutions that can help us do this work for the long haul. It means building quantifiable power more than it means feeling powerful.

Some of this stuff isn’t sexy. I might sit at a community center for five hours and in that time I’ll get four people plugged into our email list or into the events that are being hosted there. I might sit in an organizing meeting for an hour and a half and feel like it wasn’t that productive some days. But then I’ll be at a block party surrounded by great people I know, who are bringing politics into my community in a really effective way, all while having fun, and it’ll feel worth it. Or a collaboration with the local library will bring tools to hundreds of people, and it’ll feel worth it. Or a grandma I never thought would get politicized is suddenly helping out with a community event, and it’ll feel worth it.

More than feeling worth it in any particular moment, I know that the longer trajectory of growth and change in my politics is taking me where I need to be. That growth, I hope, is far from over. I know that I can be more effective in the future, and that there are a lot of fights in the days ahead that we’ll all need to be ready for. As the fascist regime tries to consolidate power, effectiveness is demanded of us. Symbolism won’t cut it — we need real, material victory over the far-right. Nothing less will do.

Because of these stakes, which are as high as they’ve ever been, a whole lot of people are on edge. Some folks lash out under stress, a natural response. But effectiveness doesn’t mean berating those who you think are ineffective. Effectiveness in the fight against fascism means figuring out how to bring millions and millions of people into this work. It means remembering that all of us once knew less, were less politicized, were less radical. It means helping people on their own journeys rather than mocking those who aren’t yet where you think they need to be.

Photo by John Cameron on Unsplash

Virtually none have ever been motivated to change for the better, to develop better politics, by being made fun of. And we all know that intellectually, but sometimes in the nonsense of social media that truth seems to be lost. It’s easy to resort to just belittling people, and their politics, and forget that what we need is to move people, to bring them into the work of organizing. What we don’t need is a fleeting feeling of superiority that gets us nothing, and might cost us a lot.

If you already do leftist organizing, the question is how can you bring more people along. If you have protested but aren’t yet organizing, the question right now is how you can get more plugged in. We need you, the fight against fascism needs you. I hope that in seeing one trajectory from protest to organizing your own journey can be slightly truncated. My journey from marching and catharsis to being determined to build real power took years, and we just don’t have those years to spare right now. I hope that reading this can save you a little time, can help you shift toward being more and more effective in this crucial moment. Godspeed. - JP