Organizing – P2P Foundation

Book of the Day: Joyful Militancy: Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times

P2P Foundation — Fri, 29 Jun 2018 07:00:00 +0000

Joyful Militancy by carla bergmanand Nick Montgomery. Foreword by Hari Alluri, published by AK Press, in collaboration with the IAS.

The following is reposted from JoyfulMilitancy.com:

Joyful Militancy by carla bergmanand Nick Montgomery. Foreword by Hari Alluri, published by AK Press, in collaboration with the IAS.

Why do radical movements and spaces sometimes feel laden with fear, anxiety, suspicion, self-righteousness and competition? The authors call this phenomenon rigid radicalism: congealed and toxic ways of relating that have seeped into radical movements, posing as the ‘correct’ way of being radical. In conversation with organizers and intellectuals from a wide variety of currents, the authors explore how rigid radicalism smuggles itself into radical spaces, and how it is being undone. Rather than proposing ready-made solutions, they amplify the questions that are already being asked among movements. Fusing together movement-based perspectives and contemporary affect theory, they trace emergent forms of trust, care and responsibility in a wide variety of radical currents today, including indigenous resurgence, anarchism, transformative justice, and youth liberation. Joyful Militancy foregrounds forms of life in the cracks of Empire, revealing the ways that fierceness, tenderness, curiosity, and commitment can be intertwined.

Interviewees include Silvia Federici, adrienne maree brown, Marina Sitrin, Gustavo Esteva, Tasnim Nathoo, Kelsey Cham Corbett, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Sebastian Touza, Walidah Imarisha, Margaret Killjoy, Glen Coulthard, Richard Day, Melanie Matining, Zainab Amadahy and Mik Turje.

Includes full interviews of Silvia Federici and Kelsey Cham C.

All images by Pete Railand at Justseeds

*Visual description of the cover: A large red thistle or teasel flower head and stem takes up nearly the entire cover, slanting to the right, with motion lines going outward from the flower. The background is 3/4 yellow with a stripe of blue down the right side. The title of the book and the authors’ names are at the bottom right (Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times by Nick Montgomery and carla bergman; Foreword by Hari Alluri).*

Advance Praise for Joyful Militancy

“Yes, yes, yes! This book is so timely! Absolutely what we need in these days of spreading gloom. A very well argued case for joyful militancy, and against the dead hand of puritanical revolution. Read it, live it!”

—John Holloway, author of Crack Capitalism

“This wonderful book, infused and informed by activist experience, emphasizes the importance of the full range of political affects. Anger and rage rightly, inevitably drive militants, the authors argue, but we must also discover joy and friendship in struggle, which are our highest rewards. The book provides not only an antidote for anyone who has suffered the pitfalls of political activism but also a guide to a fulfilling militant life.”

—Michael Hardt, co-author of Assembly

“The resurgence of the reactionary right has led many on the left to feel overwhelming despair. Resisting the rising tide of dread, this unique, genre-bending book offers a spirited defense of a militant politics of joy—an affirmative theory of openness and experimentation, curiosity and questioning. This is a thought-provoking, morale-boosting, hope-inspiring tonic offered at the moment we need it most.”

—Astra Taylor, author of The People’s Platform and co-founder of The Debt Collective

“Combining humility, deep insight, and open, liberatory theoretical foundations Joyful Militancy asks hard questions and challenges the rigid culture within activism and social movements that need it. This book kicks ass!”

—scott crow, author, Black Flags and Windmills and Emergency Hearts, Molotov Dreams

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about Joyful Militancy and what is positive in the affective refusal of Empire, such people have a corpse in their mouth. Carla Bergman and Nick Montgomery help us to remove that corpse so that we can sing new subversive songs, which is precisely what is needed more than ever.”

—Stevphen Shukaitis, author of The Composition of Movements to Come

“Read this, my lovelies — it’s a lifesaver!”

—Uri Gordon, author of Anarchy Alive!

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Beyond Safe Spaces 2: Where Can We Take Our Togetherness?

Richard D. Bartlett — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 08:00:00 +0000

I want to learn how to do more effective political organising, so I’m exploring how social change happens in spaces that don’t look much like meetings. I’m thinking of the punks in the 70s, or the hackathons I visited in Taiwan as 1000s of young people successfully rewrote the political logic of their nation. Not a meeting in sight!

In Western progressive political spaces we talk about “safer spaces”, a formula for including a diversity of cultures in our organising. I explore the context and theory of safer spaces in part one of this article.

I’ve been dreaming lately, what comes after safety? I’m motivated by utopias, so I imagine: if we were all safe, where could we take our togetherness? Can we grow comfortable spaces, thriving spaces, therapeutic, energetic, sensual, creative, hospitable… even erotic spaces?

While I’ve been contemplating this question, a few parallel experiences have come to mind: guests at a party, foreigners invited onto native land, and lovers opening up to each other. Maybe in considering these examples we’ll get some new ideas to bring back to our organising.

Diversity and inclusion through hospitality

You can think of hospitality as one way to include different cultures in one space. When you’re in my house, I expect you to make an effort to conform to “how we do things around here”, and in return, I will make an effort to make you as comfortable as possible. I’m concerned with the needs of your distinctive, dignified human body: are you hungry, can I get you a drink? Does the lighting and music create a convivial atmosphere or is it getting in the way? My concern starts with the physical experience of bodies in proximity. I don’t want to discuss ideas until all the bodies in the room are feeling okay.

When we start on those terms, then I can very quickly get into a relationship with you. We don’t need to know a lot about each other; almost immediately I start to trust you. The more trust we share, the more intimate and vulnerable we can be together. Within these intimate spaces, I’m most able to change, to heal from trauma, to learn from different experiences, to let go of out-of-date ideas, to imagine a different world than the one I know.

I went to a lomilomi massage class and the instructor told me, “In Hawai’i, massage is just basic hospitality. When you come to my house, I offer food, drink, massage.” That’s the culture I want us to grow in our organising spaces: an abundance of touch, care and intimacy. Yes of course, boundaries, consent, safety comes first. And then: let’s be ambitious!

Hospitality resolves a lot of social complexity by naming clear roles: host and guest. This is counter to the prevailing logic of many progressive organising spaces, where the focus is on “co-creation”, as if we can arrive with a blank slate and then all show up as equals to negotiate how we are going to be together. Hospitality operates on a fundamentally different logic. Instead of the blank slate and complex negotiation, we have just two factors: “how we do things around here” and “what you need to be comfortable”.

Ahhh, there’s the rub. “How we do things around here” presumes there’s a “we” who belongs “here”. So this is how we get to indigeneity. You see, my understanding of hospitality is not just about parties and shared meals, it’s also about how native people welcome others onto their land.

Diversity and inclusion through ceremony

Because I come from Aotearoa New Zealand, I know how it feels to be welcomed into indigenous territory. I understand the pōwhiri (Māori welcome ceremony) as an intricate sequence of steps for manuhiri (guests) to meet with tangata whenua (people of the land) and make peaceful, mutually beneficial exchange. Whatever your background, when you’re on the local marae (meeting grounds), you adopt local tikanga (the correct way of doing things, locally defined). Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) I know is not closed: it is open to trade, so long as we prioritise right relationships.

Colonisation is still hugely damaging to Māori, don’t let me understate that: I’m just saying that I’ve seen Māori techniques for negotiating between cultures that seem to be safe and productive. And it feels good.

So there’s one path for folks looking for a more straightforward way to include diverse cultures in your organising: submit yourself to Indigenous leadership and follow the protocols of your host. (I profoundly regret touring political spaces all across the US without visiting any Indigenous spaces — next time I’ll do different.)

For many organisers, that’s not a realistic option, at least not in the short term. So I wonder if there are other lessons to learn from this “inclusion through ceremony” lens? I think of the Māori welcoming process as a sophisticated technology to bring groups together in preparation for some exchange. Even in informal settings, you always meet Māori people over food. By comparison, our European methods feel rudimentary, ill-equipped for bringing difference together safely.

Reflecting on my experience at Web of Change, all of my best learning moments came immediately after the exchange of gifts. Someone offered me a coffee, then they helped me see how my cisgender bias was confusing my understanding of patriarchy. I prefer this quiet, gentle exchange far more than having my ignorance announced in public, where someone reminds everyone that I’m “just another typical White male saviour!”

Another time: I offered someone a smoke, we settled in and relaxed, and then I learned about the mostly unrecognised surge of First Nations organising in Turtle Island. Again, it was a gentle exchange of stories, a bonding experience. Easy. Compare this to other experiences I observed, where people’s ignorant questions triggered a facilitation crisis. There is so much trauma associated with First Nations activism in Canada, because the enormous damage of colonisation has not even stopped, let alone healed. So just asking questions can bring up a lot of pain. This is the point: bringing different people together can be extremely painful, we need more than just good intentions to make these meetings safe and productive.

I wonder if we can design our events to put the exchange of gifts before the exchange of ideas? Can we trade stories before we make theories out of them? Can we design our eating and drinking to be the central activity, rather than marginal “fuelling up” time? Maybe we can start our gatherings with many small connections: peer-to-peer spaces where intimacy can grow quietly, rather than pouring everyone into one big noisy group?

I want to make one more analogy, another way to think about diversity and inclusion: I’m thinking about love and sex.

Lovers opening to each other, knowing the risks.

I started writing this article in Vancouver Airport and finished it in Buenos Aires. My first night here, I had an epic dream, one of those dreams that feels like switching into a vastly more creative intelligence than the one I carry in my waking mind. All at once, I saw an unbroken chain of lovers all the way from Argentina to Canada, a network ten thousand miles long, weaving profound tenderness and intimacy. And between each of these lovers, there it was, that fragile careful space where our stories transform from trauma to healing to bonding to courage to joy to peace.

I’ve spent so much time wondering how on earth there can be enough healing for all the people wounded by all the awful injustice in the world? I woke up from this dream feeling/knowing there’s more than enough, there’s more than enough. Maybe I’ve shown up to meetings looking for a kind of therapy that I could find in the arms of a lover.

We could hurt each other. You can say all the right words, but I’ve heard the right words before. You can approach me with respect and consideration, you can charm me with flirting and flattery, I can be intoxicated with desire, and still a part of me knows that you could hurt me. If I let you in here, you could hurt me. So most of the time, I decide to stay closed. Maybe I’ll open the front rooms, invite you into the foyer, but I’ll keep the valuables locked up further inside.

But sometimes, sometimes I open all the doors, let the light and the air in: occasionally I’ll give you an all-access pass. And wow! when you and I meet there, we learn so much, feel so much, play so much!

Allowing someone into my space is risky. But the pay-off is so good, I’m going to keep doing it regardless of how many times it goes badly.

How does eroticism fit into our organising? A lot of people want more love and more sex. When we gather for conferences and retreats, there’s usually a hidden undercurrent of people hooking up with each other. What might we learn if we designed our events intentionally for people to find new lovers? What structures would we need to make that good for everyone?

This is what I mean, beyond “safe”, even beyond “satisfied”, I want to take our togetherness all the way out to “delighted”, and further still to places I’ve not been yet.

So what?

I want to hear what comes up for you when you read this article. Do you feel like you basically understand intersectionality and we just need new methods to embody it? Or are you operating on a different understanding of oppression and liberation than what I’ve described here? Do you have great experiences of trans-cultural negotiation you want to share?

I can anticipate a certain number of White men taking this as an invitation to complain about being prevented from dominating organisations or gatherings. If that’s you, please read this article I wrote for you before commenting on this one.

Everyone else: please point me to your stories, your resources, your insights and intuitions. I’d love to exchange with you.

❤️

p.s. This story is licensed in the public domain, no rights reserved, i.e. do what you want with it. Html, pdf, and markdown formats available.

p.p.s. These stories take days to write. I get a lot of encouragement when you hit that button on Medium! If you want to free up more of my time for writing, you can support me on Patreon.

Photos in this story are from Klahoose territory: Cortes Island in British Columbia.

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5 Reasons to Build a Network of Small Groups, Rather than a Mass Movement of Individuals

Richard D. Bartlett — Wed, 03 May 2017 08:00:00 +0000

We’re currently touring through the US, meeting with activists: from urban neighbourhood organisers, to black bloc anarchists, back-to-the-land communalists, and progressive mega-campaigners.

So much of the lefty US political discourse is focused on a huge scale. Environmentalists want to save the planet. Progressives want to mobilise millions of people on the #OneTrueHashtag. In preparation for this trip, one of my first meetings was with an organisation who are doing great work locally, but they’re freaking out about how they can possibly expand their efforts to encompass a national scale. My advice: don’t waste time growing a nationwide bureaucracy, just stick to what’s working, and publish everything so folks can copy you.

I know Americans are going to keep building huge movements, but for what its worth, I wanted to share my reasoning for focussing on the tiny scale. This is a snapshot of my current thinking — my intention is to come back in a few months and learn how wrong I was, rather than to convince you that I’m right.

An increasing mass of people agree that long term human survival depends on us replacing the status quo with a fundamentally different set of behaviours and structures. I believe the root of that challenge is essentially cultural, and the best place to grow culture is in small groups. And until we’ve got a critical mass of activists that are embedded in a new way of thinking, relating and communicating, any mass movement is going to replicate the errors of the past.

So here goes… 5 reasons to focus on the small groups.

Reason 1: A Place to Learn New Habits

I was raised a boy in a patriarchy. Before I could even speak, I was learning epically stupid lessons about gender. Some of them are pretty harmless, like boys don’t wear nail polish. But most of them were toxic, like men don’t show vulnerability, and it’s not important to listen to women.

I was also raised White, working class, straight, cisgender, Protestant, monogamous, right-handed, English-speaking, neuro-typical, able-bodied, and carnivorous. Each of these different dimensions formed a multi-faceted container that I grew into: they all left an impression. Some of those impressions were pretty harmless, but a lot of them result in profoundly shitty behaviour.

For a long time I went through life expressing my shitty behaviour and having shitty relationships as a result. It was only once I found small, committed groups to work in, that I learned to unpick the patriarchy from my masculinity.

One example: in Loomio, we made an explicit agreement that all the work should be shared fairly, nobody should be forced to do stuff they don’t want to, and everyone’s contributions should be acknowledged. It was only after we made that agreement that I slowly started to notice a whole class of work that I didn’t even know existed: emotional labour. In the same way I was trained to not look for toys in the pink section of the toy store, I was trained to not see the work of caring, supporting, soothing, adapting, preparing, inviting, gathering, and cleaning up after. I only learned about this labour because the feminist men and women in our co-op drew my attention to it, and taught me how to do my fair share. Now we have structures that systematically distribute emotional work around the team.

In a small committed group you can choose the behaviours you want to encourage, and you can choose how much energy you want to spend helping each other learn new habits.

As I’m learning to detoxify my masculinity, I have a hunch that the same method will help me undo some of my other shitty biases too. And I have another hunch: that the same method will work for others.

So if you’re organising with people raised within oppressive structures: do you think you can design protocols of interaction that bring people out of their old toxic habits?

Reason 2: A Place to Practice Tolerance

A lot of lefty folk love to talk about tolerance, but frankly most of us are pretty crap at doing it.

I was at a co-op last week where someone corrected me for saying “illegal immigrant” when I meant “undocumented worker”, but then literally in the next sentence dismissed all Trump supporters as “crazy”.

I agree, “illegal” is a dumb thing to call people, but so is “crazy” — the point is, most of us say dumb stuff all the time! If you’re highly educated and sufficiently careful, you can learn how to purify your vocabulary, but that is no guarantee that you’re not a jerk. We need to learn how to work together, even before we are fully sanctified.

When you work in a small, committed group, you have an opportunity to prove to each other that you’re all fairly decent human beings, all trying your hardest, all willing to get better educated and to be more considerate with your language… and still occasionally say a stupid thing that hurts people.

At Enspiral we’re seeing these little “livelihood pods” emerge, like this one, this one, this one, and this one. Each is a group of 3–5 freelancers who could make a precarious living on their own, but have decided they’d be better off working together. Members of each pod pledge to share some fraction of their income to smooth out the peaks and troughs of the gig economy.

In my experience, when you are forced to collaborate to meet your material needs, you get much better at tolerating difference. You quickly learn to distinguish “let’s agree to disagree” from “if this proposal passes I have to leave the group”. This is a skill I never learned anywhere outside of small, committed groups.

I believe that one of the side effects of individualism (by which I mean, the systematic training that individual effort delivers individual returns, and that all your needs can be met by impersonal transactions) is that we’re all pretty crappy at dealing with difference. If we’re not bound to each other in some way, why should I care if we disagree? There’s no incentive to learn from difference when you can always go out and make another choice.

So if you’re organising with people who are not all exactly the same, maybe it would be useful to ask: how can we increase our capacity for difference?

Reason 3: A Place for Amateur Therapy

I believe we can structure our working relationships to provide healing.

I think we’re all traumatised, just by being born to imperfect parents in an imperfect society. Then many more traumas and setbacks are layered on top of us, depending on how lucky you were in the genetic lottery.

So I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone needs therapy, basically. Some of us are lucky enough to get professional treatment from someone who suits us, but most of us won’t.

I have a pretty shallow understanding of therapy: I think it is some combo of intimate dialogue with a trusted partner, regular recurring reflection, asking, ‘how does that make you feel?’, listening to the answer with unconditional positive regard, looking people in the eyes, nodding, and saying things like ‘mmm… mmm… I hear you.’

Maybe there’s more to it than that, but the point is, it’s a game for two or more players. So some of us pay for a professional therapist, or expect a lover or close friend to do it. Personally, I’d like all my relationships to be therapeutic, including my working relationships.

So one focus of my work with Loomio and Enspiral is to design therapeutic organisational structures. This healing happens in 1-to-1 relationships, and in big transformative events like festivals and retreats, but for sustained, reliable, ongoing treatment, I’m a huge fan of the small group.

I’ve observed that when people find a small group of people to commit too, they can grow enough trust and intimacy to become amateur co-therapists. We practice talking about our feelings in just about every group meeting. We learn from each other’s experiences. We remind each other to be careful with ourselves and with others. In our little groups we practice showing up, messing up, forgiving each other and going on together.

So if you’re organising with traumatised people, maybe it would be interesting to ask: how can you structure the work to be therapeutic?

Reason 4: A Place to Produce Living Proof

It is much easier to demand ethical behaviour from institutions, than it is to demonstrate it in our own organisations.

We’ve spent the last 5 years at Loomio proving that it is possible to manage a small software company without a hierarchy. I know our context is unique: we are an ultra-privileged little tiny bubble in the South Pacific. But by sharing our methods, we are adding credibility to the claim that it is possible to coordinate people without using coercion. I’m proud to say that more than 50,000 people have read our co-op handbook in the past 6 months — that’s maybe not “proof” on its own, but a good contribution to a growing body of work that demonstrates that the commons doesn’t always have to be tragic.

Enspiral is composed of co-ops like Loomio, and other livelihood pods learning how to organise non-hierarchically at a tiny scale. But we also are learning how to connect the small groups together and grow our self-governance practices to accommodate the next order of magnitude. We’re currently about 250 people, with a pretty robust, highly adaptive, increasingly distributed system for sharing ownership throughout the network (read about it here). With the trans-regional experiments currently underway, it’s reasonable to imagine we’ll expand this pool to include thousands of people over the next year or two. And many of us have an appetite for much bigger scale, like the Scuttlebutt crew, who are quite seriously building a social network for the Galactic Council.

So if you’re organising to end oppression, how can you demonstrate equality and respect in the way you work together?

Reason 5: A Place to Prepare for the Worst

Maybe our experiments in decentralised leadership, commons management, and self-governance are too little too late. Maybe we won’t stop the mega-deaths of WWIII or climate catastrophe. I know plenty of clear-thinking people who expect to out-live this current iteration of civilisation. From time to time I ask myself, if we’re approaching Apocalypse, what it is the best use of my time? I keep coming back to the same answer: learn how to work together, and learn how to grow commons. Maybe I’m delusional, but I gotta tell you, it feels pretty good to try. And while we’re on this tour of US activist spaces, I want to test the hypothesis that it feels good for other folks too.

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Photo by Marcos Fernandez Diaz Vj Catmac

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Project Of The Day: City Repair Project

Nathan Slater — Wed, 09 Mar 2016 23:47:09 +0000

Mark Lakeman

I first learned about place-making from Mark Lakeman at his office in Portland. In addition to running an architecture/design business, (Communitecture) Mark co-founded City Repair Project.

City Repair takes a hands-on approach to placemaking by sponsoring the Village Building Convergence (VBC).

Hands-on placemaking programs like VBC provides three benefits:

A live project brings together organizations. (see #1. North Tabor Mandala project, below)
A live project attracts people. (see #2. Beech Street project, below)
A live project motivates action. (see #3. Right To Dream, Too project, below)

City Repair’s mission page explains their philosophy of placemaking:

City Repair facilitates artistic and ecologically-oriented placemaking through projects that honor the interconnection of human communities and the natural world.

City Repair’s history page cites placemaking program:

Our biggest annual program is the Village Building Convergence. Over the past 15 years we have facilitated 1000s of community members in their placemaking journey.

City Repair’s Intersection Repair page feature many of their live projects.

Here are three examples:

1. North Tabor Mandala

Extracted from http://www.cityrepair.org/north-tabor-mandala

2015 Description:

North Tabor Neighborhood Association in conjunction with South East Uplift was overjoyed to bring an intersection mandala into the heart of the neighborhood. In the spirit of their long term goals to bring life, culture, and vibrancy to the community, they worked with the local Portland Montessori School, whose upper elementary school children produced a design of geometric shapes, angles, and patterns.

2. Beech Street Project

Extracted from https://www.facebook.com/BeechStProject/?fref=nf Beech St. Project

December 2, 2014

Hi Neighbors! In case you missed it our little street made international news. The project and the story are inspiring community builders in Japan!.

January 23, 2016

Japanese group tour PDX Placemaking

Extracted from http://www.cityrepair.org/blog/2016/1/23/japanese-group-tour-pdx-placemaking

On 1/16 and 1/23, workers from a Japanese factory visited The City Repair Project and Propel Studio to learn about our design work to serve communities.

We presented on our work and then toured placemaking sites including the Hawthorne Hostel on SE 31st and Hawthorne and the Dialogue Dome/Cob Oven/Grazing Gardens of Portland State University.

3. Right To Dream, Too

Extracted from http://www.cityrepair.org/calendar/2016/2/4/support-right-2-dream-too-at-city-council

Calendar of EventsSupport Right 2 Dream Too at City Council!

Thursday, February 18, 2016
2:00pm 5:00pm
Portland City Hall1220 SW 5th AvePortland, OR

City Council will be discussing an item titled “SE Harrison Street Vacation and Karl Arruda Zoning Confirmation Letter and Use Agreement for SE 3rd & Harrison” which is to make way for Right 2 Dream Too to inhabit a new space. Please come out to support our villager friends!

Extracted from http://www.portlandoregon.gov/auditor/56674

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The Real Trouble with Disruption

Nathan Schneider — Fri, 28 Nov 2014 15:28:40 +0000

Young wannabes doing their thing at a Techcrunch Disrupt conference in 2012. Photo via Flickr user JD Lasica

At the Powell Street BART station in San Francisco, ads for Oakley sunglasses are everywhere. “Disruptive by design,” they declare—or, rather, #DESRUPTIVEBYDESIGN. Behind those words are gray images of blueprints and lasers and factories with big bolts like in Charlie Chaplin’s spoof Modern Times. Fittingly, the campaign is a collaboration with Wired, the foremost media enterprise devoted to the worship of all things new. In the Silicon Valley lexicon, disruption is such an overused incantation that it’s almost dull. Now even sunglasses can do it.

The truth, however, is that disruption is not boring at all. It impacts people’s lives every day—though much more often the lives of vulnerable working people, rather than those of the complacent fat cats all this talk of “disruption” is supposed to threaten. We need to be a lot more careful about how we throw that word around and, much more importantly, how we actually disrupt.

Jill Lepore’s recent essay in The New Yorker, “The Disruption Machine,” offers an important intervention. She questions the economic logic of the gospel of disruption being taught at business schools and startup accelerators—that forever disrupting the way of things means endless innovation, growth and progress. Lepore points out that this worldview overlooks the great bulk of the economy that rests on relative stability and rather marginal improvements. Compared to them, disruption is a bit of a sideshow. Even in tech.

A good way to start thinking about disruption is by asking questions like this: Who is being disrupted most? And who really benefits? 25-year-old startup CEOs—the people we hear talking about disruption the most these days—come and go. Some of them will manage to make a living on the basis of their disruptive ideas, and a few will get very rich, but most will end up going through cycles of boom and bust, disrupting themselves until they wind up working for someone else. The venture capitalists who fund them, and who so eagerly egg on their disruptive talk, hedge their bets and diversify their portfolios and will probably end up with plenty of money no matter what.

The most serious disruption of our economy in recent memory, the 2008 financial crash, is a particularly troubling example of this pattern. What caused the crisis? A financial industry gone recklessly amok, disruptively innovating complex instruments like derivatives and new ways of packaging mortgage-backed securities without regard for the consequences. Who suffered those consequences? Some well-paid bankers were laid off, but millions of people across the United States lost their homes, their jobs, or both.

A bailout arrived for the banks, and soon they rehired most of those who’d been laid off and kept—or even increased—their stratospheric executive bonuses. For people in other sectors who were able to get back to work, it was generally to lower-paying jobs. Foreclosed homes in many communities were acquired by big companies on behalf of Wall Street, rather than being bought back by individuals and families who lived in them. That disruption, in the end, only helped the fat cats.

No matter who causes a disruption—or, in some respects, even what kind of disruption it is—those who are best prepared to take advantage of it are the ones who win out. In 2008, the banks had lobbyists and PACs and their own former co-workers at the highest levels of government. The people left homeless or jobless, meanwhile, had little recourse but silence and a misplaced sense of shame. Disruption, then, tends to make our rampant inequality even worse.

Another kind of disruption is that of a resistance movement. We all watched, often with surprise and dismay, what happened in the wake of the 2011 uprising in Egypt. The initial pro-democracy wave created a massive disruption and forced a ruler from power. But the democratic forces were fairly marginal in Egyptian society, and that was just about the last we heard from them. Soon, the Muslim Brotherhood took power, having joined the protests only reluctantly. The group won elections not because its members sparked the unrest, but because for decades they had been building formidable networks throughout the population. Before long, they were crushed by the military, a vast apparatus fueled by billions of dollars in aid from the United States. Once again, entrenched power prevailed over the agents of disruption, and those who’ve suffered most have been working class Egyptians.

Disruption is essential, and a fact of life. This is a world rife with injustice and cruel inertia, and we should definitely explore creative ways of resisting those tendencies. We should be in the streets protesting when we need to, and we should be creating new kinds of organizations that push the boundaries set by old ones. But disruption, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a good thing unless those who are most vulnerable in society are poised to benefit.

There are ways communities can make that happen, or at least make it more likely. They can build strong, disciplined coalitions. They can organize workers and develop habits of self-reliance. An important recent conference in Jackson, Mississippi, for instance, focused on building resilient cooperative enterprises in black communities, which were especially hard-hit by the 2008 crisis. African Americans in the South know this lesson well. Decades earlier, the civil rights movement turned its disruptions into victories because of tight-knit networks like churches and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Disruption is not a word we should use lightly, or cynically, or in order to sell more eyewear. It is not a mere business model. Perhaps it should be treated more like a swear word, in the sense of being especially potent and rather seldom used. We draw our swear words from sexuality and religion—important things that can have dire consequences. Disruption is important and dire, too, and it’s time we talked about it that way.

Originally published in VICE

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