Organize!

Whether we are engaging in acts of resistance or creating new, alternative institutions, we need to create sustainable, democratic organizations that empower their members while also protecting against disruption. This section provides articles about effective organizing, creating democratic decision-making structures, building coalitions with other groups, and more. Visit the Resources Page for tools to assist your organizing efforts.

Organizing Against Militarism From Israel To Europe

September 2, 2021 Jonathan Hempel, ROAR Magazine. Organize! Europe, Israel, Middle East, Wars and Militarism

By the end of 2020, a total of 82.4 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced from their homes according to the UNHCR. The number of forcibly displaced persons globally has doubled since 1990 and is likely to increase significantly in the coming decades due to a convergence of factors, including armed conflict and other forms of violence, as well as climate breakdown, which will compound pressures to migrate. Displacement occurs in the context of a capitalist economic system in which profits are made both through the sale of arms that are instrumental in causing conflicts and wars, and through the militarization of migrant routes and borders. Alongside the steady increase in the value of the arms trade and the spiraling number of forcibly displaced persons, the market for border security is growing with an expected worth of US$65-68 billion by 2025.

Buffalo Starbucks Workers Say They Will Unionize One Store At A Time

September 1, 2021 Hamilton Nolan, In These Times. Organize! Starbucks, Union Organizing, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

The fast food industry, one of the most ubiquitous low-wage employers in America, has been notoriously immune to unions. For nearly a decade, the Fight For $15 campaign has been successfully working to raise the industry’s wages — but despite its slogan of “$15 and a union,” has not produced any actual unions. Now, an unrelated group of Starbucks employees in Buffalo, New York, are poised to move forward with something that has rarely been seen before: Union elections at individual fast food stores. Starbucks is America’s second largest fast food chain, with more than 15,000 stores nationwide. Their only unionized stores are a small number run by subcontractors in places such as airports.

The Radicalism Of ‘Race Today’

August 30, 2021 Tabatha Vaughan, Tribune Magazine. Organize! Journalism, Media

In 1974, former Black Panther Darcus Howe became editor of Race Today, transforming it from a formal academic journal, run by the institute of Race Relations, into a campaigning collective whose activities extended far beyond journalism. Race Today morphed into the Race Today Collective, forging a holistic approach to activism that weaponised journalism as a powerful campaigning tool. This symbiosis, coupled with the Collective’s consistently global and intersectional outlook, pioneered a new form of anti-racist campaigning as well as a new era of radical journalism, reaching a pinnacle in 1981 with the Black People’s Day of Action. Darcus Howe’s Race Today emerged directly out of the British Black Power movement. Members of the Collective Farrukh Dhondy, Leila Hassan, Mala Sen, and Jean Ambrose had all been part of Black Power groups, from the Black Panther Party to the Black Unity and Freedom Party.

Education Shouldn’t Be A Debt Sentence

August 28, 2021 Nick Marcil, In These Times. Organize! Capitalism, Debt, Education, Student Debt

When you look at a student like myself, you don’t know that I am working multiple jobs, that I have gone without health insurance at some points, that I’ve been living at home with my parents for more than a year. You also do not know about my family’s medical debt, or about my father’s periods of unemployment, or that my mother’s job as a preschool aide isn’t enough to cover the gaps. Even though I have mowed my former mailman’s lawn for eight summers to help afford school, even though I secured two “free” years of campus housing through my job as a resident assistant and received numerous scholarships, awards and assistance, I still graduated from a state school with $17,000 in debt. I carry this debt from my bachelor’s degree as I go into my second year of graduate school.

On Remembering Stanley Aronowitz

August 27, 2021 Steve Early, New Politics. Organize! Democracy, Labor Unions, popular power, Worker Rights and Jobs

Brother Stanley Aronowitz was always ahead of the curve, with his criticism of the shortcomings of old labor and his envisioning of “a new workers movement” that might replace it. During the 1960s, campus radicals turned to him, as a former factory worker and staff member of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers, for advice about the student left’s much debated and then still pending “turn toward the working class.” Late in life, while well embedded in academia, he remained a teacher union activist and successful reform caucus member. In a series of incisive books like False Promises, Working-Class Hero, and From the Ashes of the Old, Stanley always took “slumbering mainstream unions” to task for their lack of militancy, diversity, internal democracy, and progressive politics.

Healthy Group Accountability: Learning How To Learn

August 24, 2021 Michael Strom And Joshua Kahn Russell, Organizing Upgrade. Organize! Accountability, Nonprofits, Organizing

A team of facilitators from our organization, The Wildfire Project, was invited to support a base-building group whose staff was absolutely burnt out. Our first workshop brought their staff together with a volunteer leadership team (from their base) who, until then, had been minimally engaged. Staff shared their overwhelm and laid out their workload. It was clear that unless the whole group took collective ownership and responsibility for the direction of the organization, it would collapse. We ended that first session together on the other side of that breakthrough: feeling grateful, connected, and on-purpose. But the more difficult work began when we came back together to make that vision of shared leadership real.

Debtors’ Unions: Indebtedness As A Source Of Collective Power

August 21, 2021 In These Times. Organize! Debt, Debtor Union, Finance and the Economy, Solidarity

That’s the idea. In 2019, more than three quarters of U.S. households were holding some type of debt. In the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, 1 in 4 adults are now struggling to pay household bills. But debt in U.S. culture is typically treated as an individual liability or a personal failure. The idea of a debtors’ union turns that experience on its head — reframing indebtedness as a shared problem and a source of collective power. Think of a saying attributed to 20th-century industrialist J. Paul Getty: “If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” Toppling the financial architecture of late capitalism is indeed a tall order. The most prominent organization of its kind, the Debt Collective, organizes on several fronts.

Not Everyone Wanted War In Afghanistan

August 21, 2021 Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies, FPIF. Organize! Afghanistan, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

America’s corporate media are ringing with recriminations over the humiliating U.S. military defeat in Afghanistan. But very little of the criticism goes to the root of the problem, which was the original decision to militarily invade and occupy Afghanistan in the first place. That decision set in motion a cycle of violence and chaos that no subsequent U.S. policy or military strategy could resolve over the next 20 years — in Afghanistan, Iraq, or any of the other countries swept up in America’s post-9/11 wars. While Americans were reeling in shock at the images of airliners crashing into buildings on September 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld held a meeting in an intact part of the Pentagon.

Black August, Letter Writing And The ‘Harm Reduction’ Administration

August 18, 2021 Erica Caines, Hood Communist. Organize! Black August, Joe Biden, Prison mail, Prisoner rights

There are four major components in the yearly commemorations of Black August: study, fast, train, and fight. People are encouraged to study the works and words of former and current political and politicized prisoners. People are encouraged to fast from sunrise to sunset. People are encouraged to train and become more physically active. People are encouraged to fight against the system. However, one of the lesser centered but equally important aspects of Black August is letter writing. Nearly a half-century ago, Gresham Sykes wrote in The Society of Captives: A Study of a Maximum Security Prison that, “life in the maximum-security prison is depriving or frustrating extreme”. Hardly anything has changed to alter that. The prison system thrives on the exploitation and over-policing of poor colonized communities.

We Cannot Rely On Courts To Protect Assange From US Vengeance

August 15, 2021 Morning Star Online. Organize! Extradition, Julian Assange, Legal System, United Kingdom (UK)

United Kingdom - Julian Assange's partner Stella Moris’s contention that we are seeing her husband “punished by process” is undeniable following the decision to allow the US to challenge January’s ruling against his extradition. Despite having won his case seven months ago, Assange remains in Belmarsh while Washington tries every trick in the book to exact vengeance for the mass exposure of its own war crimes by Wikileaks. It is clearer than ever that popular pressure like that exerted by protesters outside the High Court today is the best hope of defeating an extradition bid that, if successful, will have severe consequences for independent journalism and freedom of speech across the world. We cannot rely on the procedures of British “justice” to produce an acceptable outcome.

Amazon? There Has To Be A Better Way

August 14, 2021 Wade Rathke, Stansbury Forum. Organize! Amazon, Monopoly, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

This is an old problem, not a new one, but somehow, we continue to try the same things over and over again, no matter how poorly they are working. This new problem may be Amazon since they have now grown to more than one million workers and rising globally. In the USA, Amazon is the second largest private sector employer behind Wal-Mart, but Wal-Mart is a prime example of the old problem. The old problem, simply put, is that unions have not successfully organized a single mass employer with more than 100,000 workers in the US in the last fifty years. Or, 50,000 workers. Or, 30,000 workers. Think about any of the tech conglomerates. Think about any of the massive fast-food chains from McDonalds or Starbucks on down.

The Pentagon Is Killing Us — And The Planet

August 14, 2021 Marcy Winograd, Common Dreams. Organize! climate crisis, COP26, Pentagon, Wars and Militarism

The dog days of summer are upon us —and the record high temperatures killing hundreds in the Pacific Northwest and bringing 118 degree heat to Siberia serve as a harbinger of even hotter, more dangerous days unless we address the elephant in the room. The Pentagon. As the largest institutional consumer of oil and, therefore, the largest single U.S. emitter of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG’s), the Pentagon must reduce its carbon footprint of wars and weapons production as well as its bootprint—including tens of thousands of troops deployed worldwide at 800 overseas military bases and one under construction on Okinawa. To avoid the worst of the climate crisis, President Biden, Congress and the public can reject an interventionist foreign policy fueled by the drive for full-spectrum dominance of the air, land, sea and space.

Social Banditry For The 21st Century

August 8, 2021 Phil Wilmot, ROAR Magazine. Organize! Fundraising, nonprofit industrial complex, Organizing, wealth inequality

At least as early as the first century A.D., shiftas of the Horn of Africa renounced their allegiance to emperors, government and law, and took to the wild where — through their disruptions of the usual business and trade — they would manage to survive as outlaws. For centuries, the Balkan haiduks roamed their lands, stealing from their Ottoman occupiers. Yi brigands and others from across the Chinese frontier sustained their economies in large part through raiding during the early 20th century. From 1917-1937, Peruvian women led bands of sharpshooters by horseback to rob the rich and give to the poor. Despite limited research and the folkloric fictionalization of the Robin Hoods of our past, social banditry seems to be present wherever even the most primordial forms of civilization have offered class inequalities.

Indigenous Resistance In Guerrero, Mexico

August 5, 2021 It's Going Down. Organize! Indigenous Rights, Mexico, Solidarity, Zapatistas

Last week, Its Going Down and Radio Zapote carried out a collective interview with a member of the Popular Indigenous Council of Guerrero-Emiliano Zapata (CIPOG-EZ)—an Indigenous organization working from within various communities in the Montaña Baja Region of Guerrero, Mexico, who are struggling for autonomy and self-determination amidst an unbearable climate of capitalist, state, and narco violence. The interview covers the history and development of the organization, its organizational forms and political goals, its thoughts on political parties and the state, along with its relationship to other social struggles in the state and country. These topics are taken up from within a context of tremendous violence, where communities belonging to CIPOG-EZ live under a continuous narco-paramilitary siege, with the constant threat of arrest, disappearance, or assassination.

Amazon Interfered With Election; Workers May Have A Second Chance

August 5, 2021 Mike Spector, Reuters. Organize! Amazon, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

E-commerce giant Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) interfered with a union election by installing a mailbox to collect ballots and by distributing paraphernalia encouraging employees to vote against organizing, according to a report by a U.S. National Labor Relations Board hearing officer. The NLRB official on Monday recommended a rerun of the landmark Amazon union election in Alabama where employees overwhelmingly voted against making their warehouse the online retailer's first to organize in the United States. In the coming weeks, a regional director for the NLRB will decide whether to order the rerun based on the recommendation, said an official on Monday with the board, who asked not to be named.

«1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 »

assetto corsa mods

Daily movement news and resources