Base and Superstructure

Thoughts on production, alienation, and ideology

Category: Activism (Page 26 of 29)

These are posts on activism from the blog Base and Superstructure. This takes many forms. The focus here is on political activism, above all on activist organizing and base-building. One concern is how to build effective movements. There’s also a need to create solidarity with fellow members and build coalitions with other groups. The main aim of good movements is to work together to advance material interests. This section also includes critiques of electoral work, and discussion of how and when to use elections to advance activist goals. Navigating the balance between grassroots work and electoral work is difficult for everyone.

Tenants Unions and Public Speaking

October 11, 2019 /

Hi all – I’ve got a couple of upcoming public speaking events on tenants union activism! First, a brief talk with a college class. That’s not a public event, exactly. Second, a brief chat during a breakout session this Saturday at the Quad Cities Socialism Summit, hosted by the Quad Cities DSA. It’s this weekend.

Public speaking isn’t exactly my favorite thing to do, but I’ve gotten comfortable enough with it over the years.

As I’m sure some of you are aware, I’ve written about tenants unions here before. And I’m a board member of the Iowa City Tenants Union. We held our first meeting back in June, and now we’re hard at work on various issues related to security deposit theft, maintenance, discrimination, direct action, utilities justice, and housing policy.

DSA Caucuses: What’s the Deal?

August 19, 2019 /

dsa caucuses

The Democratic Socialists of America recently held its 2019 National Convention, and I wrote earlier about its preconvention event in Chicago. You probably know the DSA grew from maybe 6,000 members to about 55,000 members around and after the 2016 US presidential election. Over the course of that time, the group moved significantly to the left. I’ll say more about this later in a post on the DSA itself, but it transitioned from an organization of liberals and progressives to one of social democrats-to-socialists. It endorsed John Kerry in 2004 and BDS in 2017. You know, that kind of change. The DSA Caucuses make up much of the group’s politics.

Some of you might not know much about the DSA Caucuses, especially those of you who aren’t part of the largest chapters or social networks. Here in Iowa, our DSA Chapters build working class and tenant power via tenants unions. As well as other local and regional projects. By contrast, the DSA Caucuses mostly focus on national issues or national structure. They’re not obviously relevant to our work. As a result, many of us don’t know much about them.

In a similar boat? This post is for all of you.

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Two Concepts of White Privilege

July 3, 2019 /
white privilege

Source: Philip Cohen (https://www.flickr.com/photos/philipcohen/38444249116)

The concept of white privilege is central to contemporary social justice movements. And though there are disagreements, there’s a broad consensus on what white privilege amounts to. Roughly, white privilege is a set of benefits one gets merely in virtue of being white. Society confers these benefits not due to wealth, effort, or any other feature, but merely from whiteness. These benefits might be economic, political (e.g., citizenship status), or something much less tangible.

But this idea that white privilege is a benefit to whites was not always central to the concept. There’s an older concept of white privilege complicating this picture. On that older concept, white privilege often had short term benefits for whites. But those came at the expense of long term harm to working-class organizing that hits both whites and non-whites.

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How to Handle Conflicts With Fellow Activists

May 16, 2019 /

conflicts leftist

Leftist activists disagree with one another. In other news, bears shit in the woods, the Pope is Catholic, etc. This disagreement is the cause of Twitter conflicts ranging from polite discussion to dumpster fires. How should we handle these conflicts? Should we try to get along? When? How can we tell when we’re taking conflicts too far?

Without knowing precisely what the danger is, would you say it’s time for our viewers to crack each other’s heads open and feast on the goo inside?

I’ll address some of these questions in this post. Probably not the one from The Simpsons.

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Antifa: Its Success, Limits, and Future

May 13, 2019 /
antifa

Source: Wikimedia Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Antifa_logo.jpg).

Writing about Antifa is incredibly difficult. Writing about it well, anyway. But the topic came up at the DSA’s Chicago regional preconvention meeting in a group discussion on how to fight the far right. The relationship between fascism and Trumpism was a related topic of discussion.

I’ll set that latter topic aside, since I’ve already addressed it on this blog. But that leaves us with Antifa. What is it? Has it succeeded? What are its limits? Is it useful to leftist organizing?

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