While politicians on both sides of the aisle have it out over divergent policy solutions it is important for class struggle organizers to consider non-policy solutions. The basic premise for this type of organizing work is that eviction is only one possible outcome of foreclosure, in fact, a really bad outcome, and that collective power could enable alternative outcomes to become a reality. Historically, tenants have initiated rent strikes to force bad landlords to respond to demands such as safer housing. While foreclosure is different than lead piping, I don’t think it is impossible to imagine some sort of collective action in the form of a fighting defaulted homeowners union.

Let’s just forget for a minute the class contradictions of a fighting union of defaulted property owners in order to recognize that the mortgage crisis is one of the central economic concerns of workers in the US—though, to be clear, I am not certainly not claiming that a union on behalf of property rights is politically unproblematic. This union would be defined simply as an organization that seeks to alter the balance of power between defaulted homeowners and lending institutions by direct action against the latter. The idea is not all that new and is currently being circulated by some class struggle anarchists in the northeast (who will remain anonymous for the time being).

There are, of course, many different forms of direct action…none of which, I would add, necessarily add up to violence or outright illegality. For example, a tactic could be to deploy actions that withdraw efficiency from the bureaucratic machines that are contemporary international banks. But hey, this is a thought experiment, use your imagination!

I offer the following testimony from folks on the picket line (majority women, by the way), describing what it is that they do:

I work in dental dispensing, handing out instruments and supplies for specific procedures. Dental students won’t be able to do their job without me. I also clean and sterilize the instruments.

I unlock the door in the morning an lock it at night.

I purchase and catalog books and materials for the libraries. Materials for course reserves won’t be bought, won’t be available without my work.

I enter the payroll for student workers and research assistants.

I ensure that all aspects of faculty recruiting visits and job talks go smoothly so that the best faculty in the world will want to work at the U.

I create and distribute on-call schedules for all of the doctors in our department. I determine the places calls should be directed throughout the department and write and disseminate information about the department and direct medical messages.

I make sure they pull the right tooth.

The list goes on and on…

Since the strike began, the administration has refused to negotiate with the union and has taken a hard position of offering only a 2.25% settlement deal. But the workers are standing strong and are offering a lesson in real life to students of the University.

We have learned how important workers are to the daily flow of university business and knowledge production. Many university functions have shut down. Our healthcare clinic is only accepting emergency appointment, the Bursar office has shut down, the 911 emergency phone dispatch office is closed, the veterinary clinic is closed, union trucks are not delivering supplies to facilities management loading docks, and hundreds of classes are being held off-campus or down at the picket lines. Last Friday members of YDS, the IWW, Socialist Alternative, SDS, and many other students participated in an action that shut down the University of Minnesota Board of Regents meeting. Today, a group of students committed themselves to going on a hunger strike next Monday if the administration still refuses to offer the workers a fair contract.

The event has provided a unique opportunity to reflect on the interconnection of all of our struggles. Neo-liberal policies turn civic institutions into corporations and force those least capable to bear the burden of market ideology. The president of the U gets a 17% raise while the workers who actually run the university have to choose between groceries and prescriptions. Students at this public land-grant university are forced to go into extreme debt in order to have a future that is looking increasingly bleak. As young democratic socialists, engaged in this fight, we understand that capitalism and the concomitant policies of neo-liberalism are the problem. We stand for a world in which education is right of all people and not a privilege of the wealthy few. We recognize and stand shoulder to shoulder with the workers at all institutions of higher education who provide a valuable and even indispensable service to us as students and members of university communities.

Historically, coalitions of students and workers have been revolutionary. Today, the university is becoming an increasingly visible site of battle over what kind of world we want to live in. It is here among this energy that we re-affirm our commitment to organizing for a world beyond capitalism, a world that values education, a world that values civic engagement, and a world that values the day-to-day work required to keep our universities functional.

Former YDS Co-Chair Matt May can be seen here (in red YDS shirt) at a student demonstration shutting down the University of Minnesota Board of Regents in support of the AFSCME workers: http://democraticgunslinger.blogspot.com/2007/09/blog-post.html.

More information about the strike can be found at www.uworkers.org.

In the midst of hundreds of cable channels, a full dial of radio stations, and maybe billions of webpages, investigative journalism and thoughtful cultural and political analysis still thrives more in small magazines and newspapers more than in any other medium. I’m thinking of magazines from In These Times to The Nation to Bitch to the International Socialist Review . Yes, blogs too can be good spots for analysis but not much yet in the way of investigative journalism and blog posts (like this one) are usually whipped out with much less care than a well-written magazine article (not that speed is always bad, but it has its disadvantages for sure).

Whether such magazines, or newspapers, are in danger of becoming obsolete in an Internet age, I really don’t know. Certainly, such a dodo bird trajectory is not imminent. But there’s a new threat on the horizon for small magazines in the United States: a proposal for post rate hikes that will hit small publishers especially hard. The cruel irony is that the postal service initially proposed a plan for an across-the-board rate hike of 11.5% for all magazines. Many small magazines had been anticipating and preparing for such a hike. But then instead of accepting this plan proposed by the postal service itself, the Postal Regulatory Commission (a separate entity in charge of determining rates) decided to accept a modified version of a proposal put forward by media giant Time Warner. Time-Warner, coincidentally, happens to own Time and People, two of the highest circulating magazines in the U.S.

The Time-Warner plan is very complicated and has all the smacks of neoliberal paternalism, rewarding publishers for good behavior aimed at economic effeciency, like bundling mail to be sent in particular areas, generating their own special labels, etc. But what these rewards end up doing is none other than providing further advantage to corporatization and large-scale operations. The complexity of the calculations makes it hard to know exactly what the hike will be for each magazine, but a study by McGraw-Hill estimated that many small magazines would see a 20-30% hike instead of the 10-12% that that they expected (see a press release from Sen. Sanders: http://www.commondreams.org/news2007/0501-03.htm).

Presumably, Time and People would do rather well under the new plan. Small magazines had very little time to comment on this plan before it was accepted by the regulatory agency, and now it is set to go in effect July 15th. Magazines across the political spectrum from the National Review to The Nation are banning together to fight this hike. Many are saying these rate hikes could force them to stop publishing. The best site for information about this issue and ways to get involved is the Free Press’s page: http://action.freepress.net/freepress/postal_explanation.html.

As media activism and historian Robert McChesney reminds us, it’s important to remember than from the beginning of the U.S. postal system, postal rates for small magazines and newspapers have always been subsidized. The need for this is to foster a public sphere and the circulation of diverse views and information. Let’s not give up on print culture just yet!

II. My sense is that democratic socialists have always had a somewhat uneasy relationship with mass convergence organizing strategies. Is it even accurate to describe mass convergence organizing as a strategy? Democratic socialist politics are driven by a desire for purposefulness and pragmatism. To me, that has always meant that we think very carefully about the organizing practices we engage in. Too many well-intentioned (usually privileged) young leftists do not consider organizing from the perspective of strategy, perhaps because the stakes are low for them. The key to organizing from the perspective of strategy is to have a solid power analysis. That our organizing practices should depend upon an analysis of power is perhaps the touchstone of democratic socialist politics—from the early days of Eugene Debs to the more recent work of Michael Harrington, Cornel West, and Barbara Ehrenreich. Organizing without a power analysis is to beat to a fast track of irrelevance, burnout, and wasted resources. Our historically significant leaders, and also our hard-working chapter activists, have demonstrated time and again that it is incumbent to engage in activism where power takes place and therefore at the site of possibility for change, for difference. In this sense, we have always insisted on a visionary critique of capitalism—which we understand as a common source of planetary misery—and pragmatic approaches to working within (and often enough against) the actually existing systems, institutions, and policies that shore up the status quo. As Daraka Larimore-Hall has argued, democratic socialists place emphasis on working for change to “alter the balance of power within society and bring things under more democratic control, [which] differentiates us from liberals who wish only to use the state to make mitigate, or lessen, the negative effects of capitalism.” Unlike liberals, in other words, we have an explicit ideological agenda that quite literally depends on an analysis of the interconnection of systems of oppression. Too, unlike some (and only some) anti-authoritarian-oriented groups, we do not shy away from getting our hands dirty in the often mucky waters of electoral politics, policy-making, and representative procedural arrangements…if those sites are effective places to mobilize for effective change—which brings us back to mass convergences.

III. If there is a specific political strategy involved in mass convergences, it is unclear to me what it is. In some sense, I think we have something to learn from this. I’ll attempt an explanation.

It has been argued, I think somewhat persuasively, that mass convergences offer a glimpse of what a more democratic and egalitarian world might be like. I admit that I have been moved, deeply moved, by the sense of goodwill and solidarity among convergence attendees. I admire the spontaneous production of practices of resistance and ways of being together that emerge out of convergence organizing. I permit myself to participate in direct action with affinity groups and find the kaleidoscope of divergent modes of protest imaginative, thought-provoking, poetic, and powerful. There is a sense in which new modes of collective being are indeed made, at least, imaginable, through the deployment of practices of resistance and solidarity. The general theoretical term that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) have used to describe this type of collective is “multitude.” Unlike “the people,” which are constituted in a discourse of rights, positive law, and moral responsibility, the multitude refers to the ontological force of the coming together of inventive practices of resistance and affirmation through things like the general strike, non-statist/non-capitalist cooperation, and mass convergences. I admit to being taken in by the idea of the multitude, perhaps as a reaction to the identity-oriented politics of the New Left (which have not spared democratic socialism, by the way) that influenced my own coming of political age.

But look, I don’t think anyone needs to understand postmodern philosophies of sovereignty in order to get the point about multitude. There is a very strong sense in which participating in any kind of action against the forces of exploitation and oppression permit a certain intersection of creative energies that reveal, at the level of experience, a feeling of the power of invention and care for others associated with the concept of the multitude. New practices of resistance and collective association emerge out of mass convergences in ways that challenge our emphasis on strategy. It would be impossible to predict, for example, the long-term effects of building networks of activist groups, across the globe, to fight in the streets for a more democratic world. In the semi-chaotic realm of global communication technologies the very idea of a “long-term” strategy is a bit like forecasting next year’s weather.

In a very real sense, I think that democratic socialists have lessons to learn about the ever-flowing lines of invention and creative practices of resistance at play in mass convergence style organizing in order to adapt to a part of the real movement of the energies of resistance to global capital. We have to admit that we don’t have the strategy today to defeat capitalism tomorrow. Therefore it is incumbent upon us to organize with allies in order to be part of the real movement towards a world beyond capitalism—outside of which, it would be impossible to even imagine how things could be different. And yet, we must also insist on our irreplaceable role in developing and defending strategic political intervention. We must, insist on organizing mass convergence AND organizing in local communities on specific issues AND organizing workers AND spreading democracy where we find ourselves in everyday life. I have long ago given up on dialectical thought and do not see any contradictions here but rather different modes, each of which may be called upon as reservoirs of potentially important political resources as circumstances demand.

IV. Here’s the catch: if democracy looks like a bunch of white male faces self-righteously proclaiming moral superiority over our union brothers and sisters in the St. Paul police department, we have a serious problem. The profound whiteness of mass convergences has been noted, and I think, inadequately dealt with by the anti-authoritarian left in the U.S. Clearly a privileged demographic has been largely responsible for organizing the mass convergence mobilizations and I am not sure why anyone is surprised that they often end up looking like the same. The point is this: I want no multitude if it looks like the white college student activist ghetto…just bigger. Furthermore, we must constantly put the hardest question to anti-capitalist activists: do our organizing practices contribute to a re-composition of the productive forces (e.g. workers) of the world? As socialists, we must insist on an articulation between the politics of an anti-capitalist left and our working brothers and sisters (especially those in leadership positions in business unions). I see a very fruitful conversation between, say for example, the Young Democratic Socialists, the Industrial Workers of the World, and the AFL (all of which map onto each other at some level).

…And this is where we come in. By all means, I would suggest that democratic socialists involve themselves in the planning and organizing stages of mass convergences. Rather than play armchair quarterback and blame the convergences for not being diverse enough after the fact, why not become involved directly and provide a tenacious and thorough-going critical analysis of the politics of privilege as they play out in the early stages of organizing? For example, it might be useful to help provide language for “points of unity” with initiatives toward diversification and principled coalitional outreach. Rather than bemoan the fact that mass convergences aren’t actually going to hit the nerve centers of global capitalism where it hurts (as if we ever have), why not work, as we always have done, to build new kinds of networks among our general membership and other organizing institutions—particularly those institutions such as unions, LGBTQ allies, people without papers, and others that are traditionally (if not ironically) marginalized in radical left campus-oriented activist circles? Finally, along with the analytic and political suggestion above, there is much other work to be done that we may make a meaningful contribution to.

V. Some pragmatic suggestions to get started:

–Fact Finding. Gathering information is going to be crucial to understanding how to deploy action in and around the convention center. For example, rather than mounting a mass protest at the police line guarding the center, why not organize around a model of dispersed action that has no specific center but rather a fluctuating system of creative resistances targeting media hotspots, convention hotels, sponsors, places where delegates will be other than the convention, etc. This type of action has the benefit of requiring no central leadership or specific criteria for participation. Based on some very preliminary research, here are some facts that I think will be useful to those interested in making this type of resistance party.

• The group responsible for much of the organizing against the RNC is called the RNC Welcoming Committee. They may be found at this location: http://www.rncwelcomingcommittee.org/ . A calendar of events and contact information is listed on this site. Maps of the convention area may also be accessed from this page.
• Dates of the convention: Monday, September 1 through Thursday, September 4, 2008 (City of St. Paul Official Site http://www.stpaul.gov/convention/#).
• Convention Site: Xcel Energy Center (City of St. Paul).
• Media Headquarters: RiverCentre Convention Center (City of St. Paul).
• Hotel rooms to be occupied: 20,000 clustered in downtown Saint Paul, downtown Minneapolis and Bloomington (City of St. Paul).
• Events: All over Minneapolis Saint Paul metropolitan area (City of St. Paul).
• Number of guests: 45,000 (City of St. Paul).
• Members of the international news media 15,000

–Communications. Our tradition and sensitivity to principled coalition work suggests to me that we may be quite able to work on establishing communication between democratic socialists, anti-authoritarian groups, and community organizing institutions and unions.

A. For example, it has recently come to my attention that the St. Paul PD has asked local unions to not support any mass convergence activities. Let us take them at their word. Clearly, this may be the strongest threat to the security operations at the convention: a composition of forces of resistance that includes actually existing organized workers. I strongly urge YDSers (particularly those with dual memberships) to actively defend the freedom of unions from political coercion by municipal authorities. I encourage democratic socialists to actively promote the need for a grassroots and worker led response to republican plutocracy and to make arguments for the need for union support and leadership in mass movements for change.

B. Almost all republican candidates advocated torture (“advanced interrogation techniques”) in the last national debate. We must reach out to the Minneapolis-based Center for Victims of Torture http://www.cvt.org/main.php . They operate a “healing center” in St. Paul that provides relief services and assistance to global victims of torture. They provide services to a network of constituencies that absolutely should be involved in organizing resistance to the RNC.

C. We may also host debates, teach-ins, online discussions, and develop online networks linking activists in different areas up with each other. For example, on my blog http://democraticgunslinger.blogspot.com/ I have begun a free-for-all space for activists to discuss the significance and consequences of mass convergence organizing. We need more of these types of exchanges that work around communication technologies oriented toward profit making.

–Resource Allocation. There is a strong DSA chapter in the twin cities that may be able to provide resources toward the RNC convergence. I imagine that things like paper for posters, places to crash, maybe food, etc., would be manageable requests if we are able to make them early. Let’s get on this one. I am happy to help out as I am on location.

–Procedure. As democratic socialists, we are interested in expanding democracy beyond the vitiated U.S. electoral system. For us, this means much more than adopting consensus-based model of democratic decision making at our chapter meetings. On the contrary, being democratic means addressing working folks where they are on their own terms. Being democratic means building a progressive majority among the constituencies that hold the power to make structural changes to our society. Nothing less. I imagine that we could do well to hold our anti-authoritarian comrades—and, no doubt, our own—feet to the fire when it comes to the democratic part of democratic socialism.

My analysis is too brief (despite itself) and the recommendations for positive action are only perhaps first steps in developing our relationship to mass convergence models of organizing. I deeply appreciate constructive criticisms, suggestions, comments, and arguments as we move closer to the RNC.

Center for Victims of Torture webpage. Accessed 5/23/07 at http://www.cvt.org/main.php .

Hall, D. (2002). A Democratic Socialist Appeal to Anarchists. A-Infos. Accessed 5/22/07 at http://www.ainfos.ca/02/oct/ainfos00190.html

Hardt, M. & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Harvard: University Press.

RNC Welcoming Committee webpage. Accessed 5/22/07 at
http:www.rncwelcoming committee.org .

St. Paul city webpage. Accessed 5/22/07 at http://www.stpaul.gov/convention/# .