Reverse Cassandras by Tim Horras

For those of you who haven't read your Greek mythology, Cassandra was a prophet who is said to have lived during the Trojan war. The gods gave her the ability to predict the future, but doomed her to be ignored by everyone and made powerless to change anything.

Today we're faced with a glut of Reverse Cassandras.

What's a Reverse Cassandra? A Reverse Cassandra is somebody with the power to change things and who everybody listens to and heeds, but really this person doesn't have a clue and is promoting an innaccurate, rosy view of the future.

Emissaries from the global ruling classes have been telling us that we've hit the bottom of the economic downward slide. Fed Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said as much yesterday, President Obama has been talking for weeks about "glimmers of hope", the EU says we're no longer in freefall - the latter even going so far as to send the French minister of finance to that red-white-and-blue bastion of mainstream American liberalism, The Daily Show, to tell us that, indeed, we may have reached the bottom. Even the usually dour (neo)liberal talking-head Paul Krugman is seeing the "green shoots" of new growth!

But on what basis are they making these claims?

Now, I'm no trained economist, and I certainly don't have Cassandra's prescience, but I'd like to explain my reasons for thinking that these people are wrong.

Firstly, these people are career liars whose sole purpose is to mislead and keep down the working class.

That's an opinion, of course, but it's an opinion based on evidence. These folks bought into the neoliberal lie -- hook, line and sinker. In 2002, Bernanke said thanks to the guiding influence of that godfather of free-market fundamentalism, Milton Friedman, we would "never again" have another Depression-like economic crisis. As for Krugman, who is portrayed in the media as the far-left alternative to the status quo, you should remember that this was the same guy who thought that US monetary policy would solve all employment problems, and that folks who thought the financial and economic problems of the 1930s would repeat themselves were not "sensible people". [1]

From a more evidential perspective, having gone through the reports these bodies have published -- looking with all my little heart of hearts for the glimmers of hope -- I've found very few positive signs.

For example, the EU had to revise their predictions this month, because economic contraction has been shown to be twice as bad as they had expected. However, measures like consumer confidence are high. Well that's just great! Unfortunately, confidence has little to do with reality -- wages are likely to continue declining, meaning less purchasing power for workers, meaning even lower demand, etc. The only good news these days seems to be coming out of China, which even before the crisis was producing massive surpluses (literature on China is extensive, but David Harvey has the best analysis out there for my money).

So while the Reverse Cassandras tell us the sky is not, in fact, falling, the situation continues to get more and more dire.

If I haven't already made this clear, the existing ruling class in the US is incapable of getting us out of this mess. They're already preparing us for permanent, mass unemployment, as remarks by former Fed Reserve Chairman and current Chairman of the President's Economic Recovery Board Paul Volker indicate. According to Volker, the new, "natural" rate of unemployment will be much higher. If this indeed does come to pass, this will mean a jobless recovery which is even worse than those we've experienced before.

I'd like to end on a somber note. I'm currently reading Jeffry A. Frieden's Global Capitalism: Its Fall & Rise in the Twentieth Century, which is a flawed but comprehensive overview of global economic history from the late nineteenth century til 2000. I'm getting to the part right now where World War I has just ended, and the new postwar economic order is coming into being. This proves to be disastrous, and a young John Maynard Keynes goes on to write a best-selling polemic outlining its failures. The important thing here is this: the ruling classes of Europe failed miserably. They led their societies into a maelstrom of destruction and horror which lasted almost forty years, leading from world war to hyperinflation, to depression and world war all over again.

I leave it to the reader to draw any contemporary parallels.

After all, the only thing worse than a Reverse Cassandra is the genunine article.

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[1] The reason I'm so adamant about pushing socialism to the forefront of the public debate, is that there needs to be another set of alternatives in the discussion about our collective futures. Our current range of options leave us with little room to maneuver -- from the psuedo-Keynesianism of Paul Krugman on the "left", to the "centrist" policies of the Geithner-Summers banking elite - fully backed by the administration of Barack Obama (policies which amount to a massive robbery of public coffers to pay off the bad investments of the financial class), and on the right, the Alice In Wonderland/living-in-a-fantasy world economics of the Tea Baggers and the Republican Party.

Thug Life (Tim) by Tim Horras

One possible scenario as to what the future will look like in the coming years (which is gaining increasing popularity) comes from Russian blogger Dmitry Orlov. I would highly recommend anybody interested in the future of this country read some of his essays, for example, his "Social Collapse Best Practices". Essentially, Orlov's thesis is simple. In fact, it's almost facile in nature and lacks a solid theoretical basis. [1] At the same time, it offers to me a much more persuasive vision of what sorts of situations the course of events than I've seen from any mainstream media sources, who still stubbornly refuse to imagine a world in which an advanced capitalist economy ceases to function. For this reason alone, it merits attention. [2]

Orlov's premise is that the United States as a superpower (he seems to shy away from using the term "imperialism") is in a place analogous to Russia in the late 80s and early 90s. He enumerates some of the similarities: "a severe and chronic shortfall in the production of crude oil, a severe and worsening foreign trade deficit, a runaway military budget, and ballooning foreign debt", etc.

Right now I have neither the time nor the energy to fully dig into this article. Read it for yourself. The resurgence of interest in post-collapse societies (obviously previsaged by a revivified horde of new zombie movies) is very real: Fallout 3, anyone? [3] The questions which surround social collapse are serious questions and deserve more lengthy analysis and exegesis.

One aspect of social collapse which I'll finish this post talking about is the rise of organized crime.

As the protective power of the state recedes, the functions which were once handled by the state (waste disposal, physical protection, etc.) either get done by somebody else, or they don't get done at all. Into this power vaccuum steps anybody who is organized. In Berlin of the 1920s and 30s, the Communists provided services such as housing to people. However, it's rare that organizations spring up with a fully-formed political agenda. Usually political awareness is one of the later stages of organizational development. More likely are enterprises that organize around a more primitive (in the orthodox sense) forms of organization -- such as the feudalism of the crime "family".

The great socialist literary critic Frederic Jameson has written extensively that the fascination with the crime film genre has at its root a way of understanding and fantasizing about "primitive accumulation" i.e. the first stage of capitalism. [4] Anyone who's seen movies like the Godfather or Scarface (or played Grand Theft Auto) can tell you the basic narrative: young punk rises to the top of the cartel (capitalist enterprise) by brutally killing off rivals, taking over other people's businesses and turf, then living the high life at the top (until, presumably, they themselves are taken out by a young upstart). Myself, I have found it interesting how the gangster fantasy has been appropriated and remixed, so to speak, for a younger generation. The new film Gomorra, which looks at mob activities in Naples, has a sequence where these kids are acting out their fantasy of being Tony Montana. One could look at the appropriation of this imagery in hardcore hip hop for an analagous example.

What Jameson pointed out was that the supposedly reprehensible criminal enterprises such as gangs and the mafia were in fact capitalist enterprises no different than the robber barons of the 19th century. For example, in 1868, when American financer "Jay Gould was fighting Vanderbilt for control of the Erie Railroad, Gould and his men were forced to flee across the Hudson River in a rowboat, and barricaded themselves in a New Jersey hotel". Jay Gould would later bring the United States and Canada to the bring of war. That is to say, capitalist enterprises are just criminal enterprises writ large.

Even though the state marks certain areas as off-limits to capitalist enterprises (e.g. prostitution, drugs, etc.), enterprising capitalists get involved anyway -- if there is a profit to be made. The logic of capitalist development goes like this: after a phase of primitive accumulation (see above), there need to be some kind of game rules in order to prevent a cycle of continued violence. Thus, when the state begins to referee and regulate these enterprises, it cuts down on the level of competitive violence between corporate entities (crime "families", syndicates, etc.).

But if the state refuses to step in and regulate an industry for the capitalists, it becomes stuck in a repetitive pattern of primitive accumulation. This was (is?) something of the case in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Ordinary business ventures became dangerous because the state had completely stepped back (or was rendered powerless) from many of its traditional roles.

If we are likely to witness a further tidal withdrawal of the state (as has already been forced with the attack on and diminution of the welfare state since the 1980s) in the coming months or years, we are also likely to see a correlative rise in criminal activity and specifically organized criminal activity.

Sure enough, Alternet reports that collusion of "illegitimate" criminal enterprises and "legal" business enterprises is increasing. Business owners are increasingly looking to organized crime to fill in the credit gap. A Mexican drug lord made the Forbes list of the world's richest human beings, while our southern neighbors face continued violence which threatens to both consume their government and spill over into US territory. The Mexican Economy Secretary even went so far as to speculate that if the government loses the current battle, "the next president of the republic would be a drug dealer"!

There are a whole bunch of other examples of this, but I don't have the time to list them all. Hopefully I can take on the issue of social provision in a blog post sometime in the near future; as I feel that leftwing organizations have a moral duty and a political imperative to begin setting up alternative economies of social provision to aid people in this period of economic contraction.


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[1] I find a systemic, materialist analysis to be the most persuasive method of interpreting history. However, one should always be on guard against orthodoxy. I grew up around religious fundamentalists, and I have come to find that fundamentalist tendencies (e.g. the need to "go back" to the "original" texts or figures in a movement) cut across ideological boundaries. One should approach with great caution those who insist we ascribe to "what Marx said" or some other such nonsense.

[2] As a caveat, the progressive left-leaning techno-utopian James J. Hughes, author of Citizen Cyborg: Why Democratic Societies Must Respond to the Redesigned Human of the Future, writes of the need for healthy awareness of and skepticism toward the millennialist tendencies which arise when contemplating the future, and apocalyptic threats such as global climate change or social collapse. His essay is without a doubt the best short piece on millenialism and utopianism (and I should know, having read many of the studies he cites). We should take seriously his warning that when thinking about and discussing the future, we are prone to couldn't agree more, having witnessed firsthand the folks who stocked up on guns and bibles, thinking that Y2K was going to end civilization as we know it, as well as the folks on the other end of the spectrum who thought that casino capitalism would last forever.

[3] Regarding zombie-related puns, I will say only: *groooooan*

[4] These stages are not necessarily chronological. Long story. Read something like David Harvey's Limits to Capital.

Student educate themselves at Rutgers Iraq War Teach-In (Tim) by X.

When Tent State University/Students for a Democratic Society held a Teach-In on the Iraq War, we attempted to make the form of the event correspond to our core principles. Previous teach-ins at Rutgers, dating back to the 1960s, were set up much like a typical college lecture: a variety of experts (often professors) would sit at a panel and explain their views about the war.

Most antiwar events on the Rutgers campus, even those held within the past few years, have followed a consistent pattern: organizers would pick and invite an "expert" on some aspect of Iraq, then raise the requisite amount of money the speaker demanded. The speaker would come to campus, lecture the students, often be feted on the organizers' tab, and then with a hearty thanks would be on his or her merry way.

This arrangement (of course, very convenient for those making their livings off the public speaking circuit!) was justified by the rationales that 1) only a speaker with celebrity status would attract student and/or media attention to the event, 2) students would only listen to speakers who had "authority", and 3) said speakers were speaking from a position of authority.

At some point, organizers with Tent State/SDS became aware that this arrangement was in apparent contradiction to our egalitarian and democratic principles. We sat down together and thought of how we could make our event more participatory, democratic and populist, and we arrived at a few innovative ideas:

The first element with which we sought to infuse revolutionary democracy into the Teach-In was through the use of surveys. The surveys asked students to prioritize what they most wanted to know about the conflict in Iraq, by asking open-ended questions such as: "In particular, what would you be most interested in learning about the history or economic motives about the invasion of Iraq?" Students' answers were then to be compiled and used as a guide to prioritize the research and the presentation to be done.

The use of the questionnaires was a highly successful way of engaging with students. Using the survey went hand-in-hand with our motto of "organize everywhere", which we took seriously, surveying students wherever we could find them: in the dorms, in the lecture halls, in the cafeteria, in the lounge – anywhere organizers could reach their classmates. We felt that we would be remiss in our duty if as student organizers we were not engaging with other students in discussions about the occupation of Iraq every single day. "After all," we thought, "organizing students is sort of what we're supposed to be doing!"

The questionnaires functioned as a useful organizing tool all of the following ways: 1) it gave organizers an excuse to engage students in a conversation about the war, 2) it allowed them to discuss the war in a very non-threatening, non-confrontational manner, 3) it created a perception of Tent State/SDS organizers as friendly, approachable, and actually concerned with the students' opinions, 4) it put to lie once and for all the hoary canard, a mantra of bad activists everywhere, that young people are apathetic.

Organizers followed up on the good will of the student body by taking into account the many different questions students asked, which were used to shape the content of the Teach-In. Using the questionnaires created a more participatory, responsive Teach-In as, 1) students who could not attend the Teach-In were still able to shape the content, 2) for those students who were able to attend, the information presented was geared toward their concerns, and 3) in the true spirit of democracy, it gave a voice to the opposition.

This was an object lesson in the concrete practice of revolutionary democracy – instead of taking the individualist approach and asking: "What can I do to end the war?", we posed the question from a socialist or collectivist point of view: "How do we involve as many people as possible in actively shaping the antiwar movement?"

As we analyzed questionnaires, we learned more about Rutgers students' perceptions of the war. We found respondents knowledgeable, willing to admit ignorance, and eager to learn more. This should have hardly surprised us, after all, these are (or ought to be) the hallmarks of good students everywhere!

Organizers met once a week to code the results of the surveys into a statistical form – tough work which was both onerous and tedious. However, using meeting times to actually get work accomplished was essential to the Teach-In happening. When we surveyed student responses, we found that the vast majority of students were opposed to the war.

Some examples of our findings were:

18% of respondents wanted to know more about the economic motives behind the war.

10% were curious about the role of Iran in the conflict.

20% wanted to know the effect a U.S. withdrawal would have on the stability of Iraq.

This sort of knowledge was useful not only in shaping the Teach-In, but by providing an empirical basis for our understanding of antiwar sentiments among the student body at Rutgers, will provide us with invaluable insight into the deep level of sympathy we can expect to encounter from students as we organize for the upcoming 2008 Rutgers Antiwar Walkout. It confirms our motto of "Assume support" which you can read more about in the Walkout Organizing Guide available at piratecaucus.blogspot.com.

Once we had figured out the questions students had, we had to go about figuring out the answers. When we started the school year and began organizing for the Teach-In, we realized that our team was made up of less than half a dozen activists with any experience organizing whatsoever. The majority of people who would research and present their findings at the Teach-In were first-year students and first-time organizers, the majority of whom were recruited in the run-up to the Teach-In.

In this situation it would have been much easier for us to raise some money, invite a guest lecturer and focus on agitating for the event. But while collective research and participatory planning made our event in line with our democratic principles, refusing to have outside speakers and focusing on the teach-in being student-researched and student-led made the event radically populist. We said we didn't need pundits, experts, administrators or politicians to educate us. In fact, these people had failed us, and we had to start taking matters into our own hands and practicing democracy ourselves. We told our fellow students that we don't have to feel powerless or passive when faced with circumstances not of their own choosing. We weren't experts. We were a group of ordinary students just like them, but together we came up with more than we could have on our own. We got together and started researching, taking action, and that taught us we had power collectively.

The route we had decided to pursue meant that in addition to raising money to book a cool space (we chose to take over our university's chapel, a beautiful nineteenth century building on campus) and agitating for the event, we would also be spending a lot of time surveying and talking with students, compiling their responses, researching about the occupation and synthesizing our findings into a flashy, gripping presentation, then practicing it and delivering it to our peers.

What we decided to do was to go ahead and do it the hard way. It is a testament to the gumption and collective confidence of our team, as well as to our revolutionary democratic ideals which told us to trust in the abilities of our newest organizers, which allowed us to succeed.

Needless to say, all our hard work paid off. Over a hundred people attended the Rutgers Iraq War Teach-In. We succeeded in gaining significant media attention (campus, local and regional), educating ourselves and empowering our fellow students. Half a dozen new organizers were recruited from the event, and soon got to work on the Antiwar Walkout as well as the many other campaigns we're running. Students were attracted to a message of mass empowerment through the practice of democracy, without relying on the use of outside authorities, which we hold to be the greatest lesson of the 2007 Rutgers Iraq War Teach-In.

A Guide to Organizing a Mass Walkout (Tim) by X.

A Guide for Organizing a Mass Walkout

So you’re planning to organize a mass antiwar walkout? Awesome!

Here are some tips from an activist who was involved in organizing the Great Rutgers Antiwar Walkout of 2007. If anything here is useful, use it. What’s not useful, discard. Good luck!

Planning for the Walkout

Take the radical populist approach

The first and most important rule is: Be friendly! Be friendly toward sympathetic students, be friendly towards hostile students. Be friendly towards neutral or apathetic students and be friendly towards faculty, staff, administrators, press, etc. Be friendly even towards the cops!

Being friendly does not mean backing down from exerting your freedoms. Be friendly as you assert your right to march wherever you intend to go and do whatever it is you intend to do. Be firm but friendly when you tell the administration: there will be no class today because the students are walking out!

Be prepared for hostile reactions among a tiny (but highly vocal) segment of the student population as well as outsiders. Train yourselves to prepare to handle conflict creatively. Train yourselves in deescalating conflict situations. If people yell at you, don’t respond in like. Be prepared to have organizers in the crowd to calm people down and prevent provocation. Do not let the reactionaries get you off balance! Don’t lose your cool! That is exactly what they are hoping for. Don’t allow them the satisfaction.

Assume mass support! That’s the radical populist way! J If you’re organizing on a college campus, odds are that most of the campus opposes the war. Assume the support of the campus and keep this in mind when you approach students or talk to the press. Most Americans oppose the war, and your campus will probably be no different. In fact, odds are that antiwar sentiments are likely to be more pronounced. This means you should be bold in your activities, but remember that this does not mean your job of gaining active support, sympathy or at least friendly neutrality from the student body will be any less demanding.

Expect ALL students to walk out, and organize like you’re trying to walk out everybody. Individuals can choose to walk out or not for themselves, but expect them to walk out and don’t make excuses for people who don’t want to walk out. Do not implicitly encourage students who have made the choice not to walk out by finding special ways to participate if they are not walking out. You have boldly called for a student walkout. You owe it to the students to take yourselves seriously.

Important: Be friendly!

Start planning early!

As soon as possible, sit down with organizers and begin drafting a plan of action. It’s likely that you will be writing the plan as you are already in the midst of organizing. That’s okay! But the more time spent planning your action the more smoothly it is likely to go.

Try to set realizable goals which can be evaluated after the event so you can measure your success with some objective levels. For instance: set a number of participants to aim for at the rally, e.g. “between 100-200 students.” Keep your goals concrete. For instance, don’t have as a goal “get everybody excited?” (though this should be a priority!).

Meeting, exceeding or underperforming vis-à-vis the goals you’ve set will allow you to more critically analyze the action after the fact, and will serve as a guide for the next time you try to hold a mass event.

Propaganda by the leaflet

Write agitational literature. While incorporating the bigger picture of US imperialism, capitalism, etc., make sure your literature isn’t too abstract or jargon-y. Try to succinctly convince readers why immediate US withdrawal is preferable to a lengthy, bloody and immoral occupation (something that even otherwise sympathetic folks may not be totally convinced about).

Explain your strategic reasons behind the Walkout; students deserve to know why you are asking them to walk out. Give them concrete reasons for them to consider walking out (example: “Consider your responsibility to get your peers out of Iraq”). Think up the Top Ten Reasons to Walk Out! Take questions from non-organizers about the Walkout and include frequently asked questions (FAQs) in the lit, or incorporate answers to students’ questions in some other way.

If you are organizing for March 2008, you should consider how the US government has attempted to keep Iraq quiet during the election by whatever means necessary, including increased aerial bombings and cutting deals with some nasty people. It is your job as an antiwar organizer to put the occupation back on the agenda, back in the debate. Even while most students oppose the war, they may not consider it a priority right now. Your literature (and your interactions with students) should try to get across that Iraq is still a problem, that it still merits attention, and that the only resolution will come about through a total withdrawal of US forces.

Create a “web page”

It’s the 21^st century. Instead of informing everybody about the Walkout via Morse code, try creating a website. You will of course want the website to look as professional as possible, but don’t worry about perfection. Even if you can just get a blog up which lets people know when your meetings are, that’s a start. However, if you can get a spiffy web address, such as www.walkout.org or whatever, that’s great. Just be sure to rank website creation in terms of other priorities, and to devote an amount of time, money and effort commensurate to its use value.

Meeting management

Plan meetings in advance! Nothing can drain your revolutionary zeal more rapidly than sitting through a rambling discussion that leads to the heights of abstraction or the empyrean realms of the hypothetical. Remember that while activist-types find long and arduous meetings a matter of course, many students have jobs, classes and lives which take precedence over sitting through an argument about whether the press release should specifically mention the military occupation of Haiti or not. Poor meeting management is a major reason otherwise interested people drop out.

Try empowering a few people to write up an agenda before each meeting. Remember that even the bullshit parliamentarian Roberts Rules of Order allow for rudimentary democracy by giving groups the opportunity to approve or alter the agenda at the beginning of the meeting, or add additional agenda items.

Having a basic structure, far from stifling democracy, actually enhances the ability of people to make informed decisions (which is the key component of democracy!). If people have a problem with one or two people writing all the agendas, the answer is simple: ask for more participation in writing the agenda! The more people willing to meet in advance to write up an agenda, the more representative it will be of the organization’s wishes.[1]

Preparing for the Walkout

Build momentum among organizers and anticipation among the student body

People need to expect that the Walkout will happen. They should not be thinking “Will this Walkout really happen or not?” or “What Walkout?” (especially not that!) We want them to be thinking “What am I going to do when students start standing up and walking out of class?” Anticipation should build on campus, heightening as the day of the event approaches, finally building to a crescendo at “zero hour” of the Walkout.

Organizers should plan only actions preceding the Walkout that build and generate momentum and leave the movement refreshed and amped up. This means don’t get swept up into another campaign in the crucial month before the Walkout, unless it is A) monumentally important, or B) will contribute to the Walkout.

So how do you build momentum and anticipation? Here are some suggestions:

Tabling

One typical tactic for agitation is setting up a table and handing out literature for the walkout. Be friendly! Try to think of creative ways to get students interested. Be prepared to encounter hostility and/or unsympathetic response.

However, keep in mind that tabling is time-intensive and low-yield in terms of outreach. Your group may decide that tabling should be set as a low priority. The most important thing that tabling does is show an antiwar presence on campus. Everyone will recognize “the Walkout kids” that sit at the same table in front of the cafeteria every day, even if they pretend to ignore them when they go in to get lunch.

Tabling can also be demoralizing, and encourages an anti-populist or elitist mindset (“I don’t understand why nobody stops at our table! Students must not care!”) The question becomes whether simply having a presence is worth your limited time as an organizer. Some of us feel that tabling in school-approved spaces (which are often saturated with people tabling for other “causes”) is not an effective use of time. For this and other reasons, it’s a good idea when organizing for the Walkout to privilege “active” outreach (dorm-storms, handbills, class raps) over “passive” outreach (tabling, flyering).

Flyering

The perfect flyer or handbill will be catchy, smart or funny. It will have the necessary information about the Walkout (who, what, when, why) as well as contact information of a person via telephone, email or a website (or best yet, all three). Optimally it will be easily printable by students at computer labs.

Consider building anticipation for the event by creating flyers which count down to the event, especially during the crucial week prior. Try to get a large group of people to wake up early at least once a week and wallpaper the campus with flyers. This is especially critical on the day of and the day before the event.

Handbilling

Organizers have a limited amount of time and energy. Focus handbilling efforts on the class periods before, during and after the Walkout will take place. For example, if the Walkout is on a Tuesday, handbill during class changes every Tuesday of the month leading up to the Walkout. This will ensure that these classes won’t be able to forget about the event. When handbilling, as with any other outreach activity, remember to make it personal! Try to relate to people on a real level when interacting.

A lot of times new organizers (sometimes even veterans!) are uncomfortable with talking to their fellow students. Remind everybody that they’ll be handbilling for an event which will have serious support from the majority of students. Maybe before you send teams out, your group will want to organize a role-play. This can be a lot of fun, and a great way to hone your canvassing skills. Have a volunteer take on the role of the unreasonable intransigent fun-hating party-pooping anti-Walkout student. Take turns having organizers approach and talk to this person. Remember though that this is just an exercise, and in reality most encounters will be friendly or neutral in tone. Reinforce this by role-playing friendly and neutral reactions too. Don’t forget: assume mass support! J

Storm the dorms!

Dorm storming is one of the most effective ways to reach students. Judge the amount of people and time you have and determine what you’ll be able to do. If you can, hit every dorm on campus, knock on every door, tell students about the walkout and start a dialogue with them about the war. If time is more limited, talk to people with their doors open (who are probably begging for a study break!) and slip small handbills under the closed doors. Sign people up to commit to walking out.

If people are interested, get their contact info and send them OCCASIONAL emails about key events such as mass meetings. If someone is REALLY interested see if they have a class on the day of the walkout, get their contact info and help them coordinate with other sympathetic students in their class. If a few people agree in advance that they are walking out at the same time, it can make a significant difference in whether the class walks or not.

Sometimes dorm authorities are cool with this tactic, sometimes not. If you can talk to any RAs before going into a dorm, awesome. In any case, it’s best to have contacts in every dorm if you run into trouble. At a more advanced level of organizing, you might solicit people in dorms to help you organize a dorm-wide or even a simple floor-wide meeting about the Walkout. Try to allow the dorm denizens to really shape the meeting and respect that the dorms are (even if only temporarily) their home.

Class Raps

When you’re organizing in the dorms and on the quad, don’t forget that most important of school locales: the classroom! Write up a form email and send it to professors asking for the opportunity to address their classes about the Walkout. Many sympathetic professors will allow you 1-3 minutes to make a pitch.

At mass meetings with your group, coalition or interested people, get a list of professors and faculty who might be down. If possible, have people with a personal connection to a faculty member do the asking.

Make sure that the issue of taking up class time during the Walkout is approached sensitively. Faculty should be made to understand that this is not a slight, but at the same time student organizers will retain their autonomy and students can make up their own minds on whether or not to attend class or walk out. There are many creative ways to do this: start the brainstorming process early!

One way, for instance, to include faculty participation in the Walkout and also to infuse the Walkout with revolutionary democratic character would be to ask if participating faculty would like to vote on which faculty member(s) will be on the speakers list. If you want faculty to be involved, it will need to be their event too, which means they will have a say in the decision-making process. It also means though that (if we follow the principle of “Those who work together decide together”) faculty will actively be involved in the organizing in whatever capacity. Any coalition must be built on mutual aid which means people who are not working with others should not be making decisions which impact those who are.

Remember: you are (probably) a student, so your job should be to organize students. Faculty should organize themselves (it’s often called a “union”). Make sure your event reflects your message of student power!

As you garner faculty support, maintain a list of supportive faculty. Use your contacts with sympathetic professors to build stronger ties between the student movement and allies in the faculty. Use the walkout as a way of introducing your organization to faculty – a way to begin the conversation. The conversation should continue with ways that students and faculty can start having more of a say in university decisions.

At Rutgers, for example, there are no popularly-elected voting students or faculty members on either the University Board of Governors or the Board of Trustees. As a result of lacking even the most rudimentary democratic oversight, these bodies often make decisions widely unpopular with the students and workers. Eventually faculty and students will want to work towards taking democratic control over the major decisions of their own university. But the discussion has to begin somewhere! Why not take the opportunity presented by the Walkout to do this?

Banner drops

Any way you can remind people about the Walkout is a good thing. Get people together and hold a banner-making party! Unfurl large banners in key locations announcing the Walkout. Banners can be hung on trees, dropped from lecture halls, etc.

Banner drops are cool, but mass banner drops are more revolutionary! Instead of working just on 2-3 large banners, get a bunch of old blankets, some stencils and spray paint “Walk Out!” and the date. When you’re dorm storming, if people are sympathetic, get their contact info and ask if they would be willing to hang a banner from their dorm window on the day of the Walkout. Make it easy for them by telling them you will provide the materials.

Get creative!

Experiment with creative methods of outreach. Write short messages on classroom chalkboards (make sure the date is writ large!). If you have a website up, write the name of the website. You may find that flyers have a longer life-span when posted in bathroom stalls and other out-of-the-way locations.

Hold a stomp jam or invite people to “Make Art Not War” on the quad. Provide materials for students passing by to make music, make noise, paint or make banners.

A side note: stencils, spray-paint or wheat-paste can grab some attention, but for some tactics the payoff is not worth the risk. This is something best left for your coalition to decide, as it will reflect on everybody organizing for the walkout. For similar reasons, there should be a degree of adherence to the message which the coalition has endorsed.

Party for your right to fight!

Throw a party! You can try to organize a fund-raising party, get some bands to show up and take donations at the door, or you can make it simply a promotional party. Make sure to plan adequately for the party (where it will be located, who is buying the “refreshments”, whether the coalition is fronting the money or not, what to do if the cops show up, etc.). This way you can try to avoid any embarrassing mishaps. Be sure to provide a variety of music which reflects the highly diverse coalition which is putting on the event! Not everybody likes riot-folk (Lord knows I don’t!) so include some hip hop, punk, salsa, whatever people want to listen to.

Hold a Teach-In on the Iraq War

In the course of organizing, you may encounter some of the following criticisms: “Students don’t know anything about the war, they just want to yell and get angry” or a similar one, “The best thing you could be doing is learning. Why are you walking out when you should be studying?”

To the latter, your reply will be that involvement in mass political activity ought to be an aspect of the education of any citizen. Emphasize that you are asking that students take ONE day out of their lives and take action to show their opposition to the occupation.

Regarding students being ignorant, there is one proven way to combat ignorance: education.

One of the ways Tent State University/Students for a Democratic Society at Rutgers – New Brunswick furthered the education process was by holding a Teach-In on the Iraq war. This was a student-researched, student-run event which found activists educating themselves and their fellow students in innovative, democratic ways. For the whole story on what we did, see the article [?] which can be found at piratecaucus.blogspot.com. [Coming soon!]

Based on the success of the Fall 2007 Rutgers Iraq War Teach-In, Tent State/SDS organizers decided to hold multiple Teach-Ins on different Rutgers campuses. These “mini” Teach-Ins will serve multiple functions: providing a way to reintroduce Iraq back into the public discourse, as a way to educate ourselves and other students, and as a mechanism to recruit interested students to organize for the Walkout.

Getting the message out: The Media

The vast majority of people who will be affected by the walkout will not be present during the rally. They will be reached through the media. The information they receive and even the tone of the story will make a great impact on how people perceive the event. Therefore, it is important that interactions with the press be handled professionally.

One of the important concepts to keep in mind when dealing with press is the idea of “framing.” A frame consists of carefully choosing the language you are using to define a debate and fitting particular issues into the contexts of a broader narrative.

When we pitched the Iraq War Teach-In, we had already tried to set up the discourse before we even talked to reporters. As a result, news coverage was very much in line with what we were hoping to get across. Our frame going into the Teach-In was that the invasion and occupation of Iraq was a result of a lack of democracy and transparency in our government, our media and our society. Thus, instead of talking in the negative, about the war and so on, we were talking in the positive, promoting our values of democracy and transparency.[2]

This segues into another concept: “message discipline.” Message discipline is simply coming up with what you want to express to the media, and reiterating it repeatedly (even ad nauseam). It means not allowing yourself to get distracted by reporters’ questions or comments or even your own thoughts or opinions.

The importance of message discipline can be explained in the following hypothetical situation:

Imagine you are talking to the press about the upcoming Walkout. You tell the reporter about all the diverse campus groups who are participating, as well as the massive amount of support you’ve encountered from regular students, the huge success of last year’s event, etc. Then the reporter asks you what you think of the war. Off-the-cuff, you respond: “I think it sucks.” The next day you pick up the newspaper to find that out of all the great information you were telling the reporter about the event, the only line you get is: “‘The war sucks,’ comments so-and-so from SDS.” You’re shocked! You’ve lost the entire essence of your discussion, and on top of it all the article makes you sound like an idiot!

This can be avoided rather easily by taking message discipline into account. Decide democratically amongst your group (or coalition) as to what the key points that everybody wants to put out about the event should be. Once these have been decided, make sure everyone is on the same page with the key points. You may even want to empower somebody to draw up “talking points” to be given to anybody with what the group has decided are the most important things to be talked about in any interaction with the press.

After doing this, your next step is to write up a press release. We don’t really have the space to go through this whole process, but it’s a good idea to go online to find some advice on how to do this. You could also check your local library for some guidance on how to do this. Just a few quick ideas: Follow the same guidelines as when you are talking to a reporter, but assume even less interest on the readers’ part. Your press release needs to grab an audience from its first 3 sentences.

Quotes are good! Ask everybody in the group to put the message you’ve collectively agreed upon into their own words, then pick out a few representative quotes to sprinkle throughout the piece. If you’re lucky (and the reporter is lazy), the quote go straight from the press release into the article. That’s what’s called perfect message delivery!

If you are able to, try to contact reporters personally; arrange a face-to-face interview with individual reporters and the person empowered by your coalition to be the press contact. While you should get in touch with local and regional press, one of the most important media to reach out to is the student paper. Student papers are staffed by student workers. They are your peers and this means that sitting down and having a full-on conversation about the Walkout with a student reporter is much easier than doing it with a professional reporter.

When meeting with reporters, make sure you pitch to them why coming to your event will be worth their time. You may get more interest if you point out that your walkout is part of a national effort. Certainly this is something important to mention when you’re talking to students. When the Rutgers Walkout Coalition approaches the press for our upcoming Walkout, we intend to present the following message: “Last year 300-400 students walked out of class to protest the war in Iraq. They rallied and marched onto a nearby highway. They’re all pretty upset about this war! Who knows what they’re going to do this year? They may decide to… you know… do something!”

Get people to commit to writing letters to the editor of the school paper. Even if a dozen people can write a simple paragraph, that’s enough fodder to keep the Walkout on students’ minds for the better part of two weeks. You may or may not want to set aside funds for putting advertisements in the school paper. Certainly the efficacy of this should be weighed in comparison to the cost as well as the other funding needs of the coalition.

Have a “press packet” ready to hand to reporters at the event. This might include the press release or any other documents of interest such as a “biography” of your organization. This latter might include what your group has been doing for the past year or two and your immediate plans, and your core principles.

You should consider doing a follow-up with reporters after the event. Zach Hershman from Philly SDS writes: “Follow up with your media sources. If the media came, check on the status of the article, and thank them for coming, tell them you're excited to continue working together. If not, tell them thanks anyway, you know they have busy schedules, that you will try and alert them earlier next time, and that you look forward to working together. Try to do this in person!”

Keep a database of reporters with whom your group has had contact with. This is especially important for sympathetic press contacts. If a reporter is cool, meet her or him for coffee and discuss the event. Let the reporter know that you will give her or him the “scoop” if something newsworthy is happening on campus. They will appreciate this, but this also means it is understood you will not contact them if an event is not newsworthy.

Treat reporters with respect but don’t delude yourself that they are on your side (even sympathetic ones). Remember that a reporter’s job is to get a juicy story. Perhaps this might have something to do with their being employees of unscrupulous profit-maximizing corporations? Regardless, the media has a huge amount of power and is not an institution to be ignored.

Escalating commitment

Think about creating “pledge sheets” that people can sign which show their commitment to ending the war, their support of the walkout and then have them take the next step and agree to walk out. THESE PLEDGE SHEETS SHOULD HAVE EMAILS AND PHONE NUMBERS!!! If you want to get really sophisticated, enter the data you have into a spreadsheet such as an Excel or a Google spreadsheet. This will be useful for contacting people for later events, but for now it’s absolutely vital because your group will be calling these folks to remind them about the Walkout on the night before the event! [see below]

Use technology as a tool not a crutch.

Remember that as Facebook becomes oversaturated, you may only have ONE or TWO chances to get people’s attention with the Event. Don’t set up a Group or an Event immediately. Be strategic about how you use Facebook. Take your time and make the web page look nice (avoid spelling errors!) then pick the optimal time to launch it in relation to how things are going on campus. For instance, you may want to launch the Group two months before the Walkout then create the Event in the three weeks prior to the Walkout.

Don’t expect just because people have RSVP’d on Facebook they will remember! Host a call-party the night before the Walkout to confirm attendees. Have members of your group call everyone who has signed the pledge sheet as well as anybody on the Facebook Group or Event who they recognize. When they’re done making those calls, have them call their friends and badger them to walk out, too!

Personal messages – emails, phone calls or conversations – will increase the likelihood that any given person will walk out. It is fair to tell your friends: “Not only is this important to the antiwar movement, but it is important to me personally that you show up. I am putting a lot of time and effort into this and it would mean a lot to me if you came out.”

Doing it with other people!

Doing it by yourself can be fun, but it gets old after a while. Doing it with other people always makes it more exciting! I think you know what it is I am talking about: mentoring! Take the opportunity to mentor new organizers as you’re doing the planning and grunt work of organizing. Pair up veteran organizers with newer organizers when you’re dorm storming or handbilling or anything else. This has the dual purpose of training a newer organizer and building friendships, which is the glue that holds any group together!

Be prepared to use the resources people are willing to offer. Don’t expect everybody to necessarily make meeting (especially if they are long or late at night), but if meeting attendance were an indicator of revolutionary practice, capitalism would have fallen years ago because of the combined might of the Left’s sheer meeting-hours! Realistically, people should be taking part in the work which will be most productive, and the work which will be most empowering, and the work they most want to do. There are many different levels of involvement and many different activities people will find themselves drawn toward. Make sure there is room in your organization for someone who just wants to flyer for one day a month, or just wants to design a poster. When we’re trying to create revolutionary democracy, the whole point is to get the involvement of everyone we possibly can!

Building a Coalition

Approaching other groups can sometimes be daunting, but it is essential to making your event as inclusive, diverse and successful as possible. Try to reach ALL students, not just your friends or people in the activist clique.

Consider specifically allotting spaces for representatives from coalition groups to speak at the rally. Imagine how much more likely you will be to get other organizations involved if you are not only inviting them but reserving them a space to make their voices heard! This also means though that while you should reach out to as many groups on campus, you will of necessity have to prioritize. Maybe you will prioritize some groups because they are highly committed, or because they are large, or because they are ideologically in line with you, or because they come from a community on the front-lines of oppression.

Coalition politics can be a sensitive affair. Your organization may want to empower some of your most tactful members to act as go-betweens or, if the coalition gets big enough, maybe even empower them to be delegates in coalition meetings. Having mass participation in coalition meetings can sometimes be counterproductive. For example, a smaller group may outnumber a larger one in meetings because the smaller group is willing to mobilize for a meeting. But attending a meeting doesn’t mean people are organizing! Allowing group to empower a few people to carry out the directives of the constituent groups may be the best way to go. [A sample coalition decision-making model is included below.]

Regardless of how your coalition chooses to proceed, listen attentively to your coalition partners and make sure communication is good and potential conflicts are resolved quickly, fairly and to the satisfaction of all parties.

Remember though that while it is important to reach out to other organizations, only a fraction of the campus identifies with a particular group. Make sure that while you are reaching horizontally out to the many already-organized groups on campus, you are also reaching vertically to the many students who are not affiliated with any particular organization. Don’t just go “broad”, go “deep” too. For instance, dorm storming is important, but don’t forget about commuter students! Make sure to include a flyering run in the parking garages as well as in the student centers.

Working with Working People at the University

Include into your plans for the event a working relationship with campus staff, especially grounds and maintenance. They’re the folks who are being paid to take down your flyers and clean up the mess a large crowd of people inevitably makes.

We found that, having supported the wage struggles of janitorial staff at Rutgers for years, the maintenance staff had the courtesy to scrape the ice off of the speakers’ platform on the morning of the Walkout! Show them some courtesy in return, and try to clean up after the event as much as possible.

When we were holding our Tent State University event in the weeks after the Walkout, maintenance workers even came out to support us when the police arrived to try to shut the event down. How cool is that? Get to know the workers at your school. Allies among the staff can be critical when holding any campus event; a friendly relationship between student radicals and university workers makes sense practically and politically!

Reconnoiter among the Student Governments

A great way to get some attention on campus is to have your student government pass a resolution supporting the Walkout. Remember: don’t spend too much time or effort on this; it’s far from the most critical challenge you will face. Student governments are rarely in touch with the sentiments of the wider student body, and the organizations often function as a nursery school for résumé-padders and other upwardly-mobile types. However, if the student government makes a public statement of any kind, the student paper will report it.

Obtaining a vote of support from the student government will keep the Walkout on the minds of the students. Even having such a resolution voted down will generate publicity, and give supporters an excuse to write letters to the editor expressing their indignation at the vote!

Walk out!

It’s finally here! The day of days! You’ll likely want to get started early in the morning, waking people up and putting together crews of people to wallpaper the campus with posters and dropping banners anywhere you can.

As the day progresses, send and encourage friends to forward mass texts with a simple message: WALK OUT!

If you’re planning a rally, hopefully your coalition will have already ratified the list of speakers which was put together. Try to pick speakers who will pump up the crowd. Don’t pick speakers who will lower the energy level with endless lecturing, citing sundry statistics, saying something which will embarrass everybody, etc. Remember: Keep it short & sweet!

Everyone who comes to the rally is most likely already opposed to the war, so they don’t need to hear for the umpteenth time that “This war is unjust, illegal and immoral!” Imagine that this may be the only chance you have to talk to hundreds of students all year! Sit down and think long and hard about what you want to say to them. Try to keep it down to 3-4 key points, and hit them again and again.

You must tailor your message to your audience or risk irrelevance or high-handness. Imagine that your audience is composed largely of folks who oppose the war, but may not be ideologically-driven like you are. What message would you have for this sort of person? For instance, you could emphasize that voting for the (putatively) Democratic Party is not the solution, or that the invasion of Iraq is actually indicative of a larger trend in US foreign policy (even if you don’t give it the scary-sounding name of “imperialism”).

If you’re planning to march, try to make the march something which everybody can participate in. It’s a typical canard that the way to organize an antiwar action is to have a committed clique of hero-activists get arrested doing some sort of “direct action” (usually a misnomer, as these are almost 100% of the time actually militant nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, not direct action), while the mass of the protestors are placed by the activists into the role of spectator. This goes against the principles of Revolutionary Democracy and is an elitist, individualist strategy as opposed to a socialist, radical populist one. Remember that no matter how many direct action trainings you have had, your real power comes not from your ability to lie prone and take a beating from the cops, but from the social power of the masses.

Any action that is taken should involve as many people as possible, and should involve the attendees as much as possible in the decision-making process. During the Great Rutgers Walkout of 2007, the crowd was asked whether or not they wanted to march onto Route 18, which was greeted by cheers and applause. Many activists had simply assumed that the crowd would be unwilling to do this, and had written it off in advance on the crowd’s behalf. These “individualist” activists were shocked when they found that not only was the crowd desirous of taking militant action, but furthermore that the crowd got the support of the motorists on the highway, who honked in support at the marchers, and construction workers who flashed peace signs and pumped their fists in solidarity.

If you’re going to be taking militant nonviolent civil disobedient action, have a plan for interacting with the police. Make sure that your plan is considerate of the rank-and-file attendees of the rally and doesn’t prioritize the desires of the activists. At the same time, as mentioned above, don’t underestimate a crowd’s potential for rapid escalation of militancy.

Importantly, do not waste one of the best opportunities you have to reach people! Make sure members of your organization are in the crowd with clipboards, sign-up sheets and pens. Have organizers circulate in the crowd and ask them if they want to get involved with the organization(s) who made this event happen. A growing movement is the most important result which can come out of your rally.

Post-event Planning

First off, take a deep breath! Whew! You’ve had a great event. Everyone has worked incredibly hard and they’re all incredibly high-strung. All they want to do is let off some steam and share their experiences with each other. That’s awesome! Telling and retelling their stories is what will build real solidarity between members of your group and the coalition. However, everybody is too tired to throw an impromptu party!

Fortunately for you, you’ve already planned a post-Walkout party for organizers! J

After you everyone’s had the chance to relax and unwind a bit, you may schedule an official “debriefing” meeting post-Walkout. This may or may not involve members of the coalition (you may want to have separate meetings to discuss what went down within your own group as well as in the coalition). Evaluate the goals you had drawn up before the event and try to measure with some degree of dispassionate inquiry what the successes and failures of the event were. Make sure not to point fingers! Defuse blame amongst all organizers.

Check on the status of the coalition. What’s the next step? How can these groups work together in the future and support each other?

Zach Hershman reminds us to be thoughtful toward our allies in the staff: “Thank everyone who participated, particularly those who are staff at your institution and have to take down your fliers!” If someone in your group enjoys baking, make them some brownies or cookies! Cultivating a friendly working relationship makes not only smart practical sense, but also reflects our commitment to the struggles of working people at the universities.

Recruitment & Retention: Growing the Movement

After the Walkout, you should prepare for the huge rush of interested people. Your regular meeting room is filled to capacity. There are so many new people who’ve showed up, what are you going to do?

Have a room reserved and don’t expend so much energy that you can’t flyer for your next meeting. Plan your post-Walkout meeting in advance, have an agenda already made up, as well as a flyer.

Consider making this meeting a recruitment-oriented meeting. Instead of being geared toward current organizers, use the meeting to introduce your group, what you’re about and what you do. Have an already-scheduled event to plug people into. Most likely if folks have been recruited from an antiwar rally, they’ll want to go to more antiwar protests. Having potential recruits attend a large protest immediately after the Walkout can cement her or his identification with the antiwar movement.

A big problem with post-event planning is that groups recruit a lot but don’t retain people. Make sure to have veteran organizers talk to new folks and create an atmosphere which is friendly and inclusive for new people. Consider beginning the meeting with everybody’s favorite moment from the Walkout, allowing potential recruits to add their perspectives. Invite everybody to hang out at a pizza place or other nearby hotspot after the meeting to chill and get to know each other.

While protests are fun, in order to keep people for the long-term, you’ll likely want to have diverse projects for people to get involved with, because inevitably people get tired of protesting all the time. In New Brunswick, we are running a college prep program for local high school students as well as putting a referendum on the ballot to create more representational voting in the city. We also hold cultural events such as concerts and educational events such as classes during our annual Tent State University event, a week-long alternative democratically-run education.

Have a variety of opportunities for as many different types of folks as possible. We need as many people as possible to get involved in the process of creating revolution, so make sure your movement is inclusive enough to grow and expand while retaining its commitment to core democratic values.

Use the social capital generated by the Walkout to build a revolutionary democratic movement.

The number one criticism you will hear from students as you organize the Walkout is that it is “pointless”. What students mean by that is most likely that holding a protest will not change US policy in the Middle East. Before you scoff, take a moment to think about the truthful aspects of this critique. Will your protest have a direct impact on US foreign policy? The answer is no. So why are you spending such an enormous amount of time and energy to put on this event? There are at least a few answers to this:

1) You and everybody involved in organizing the event is crazy. If your chapter is anything like ours, there may be a kernel of truth to this theory. J

2) You want to express your moral outrage. This is acceptable, but the sigh of a beast of burden upon accepting a heavy load is not the same thing as throwing off the yoke. Speaking truth to power is not the same thing as having a say in a decision. Hopefully there is something more substantial to your protest than simply expressing your discontent.

3) The Revolutionary Democratic purpose to holding a protest encompasses the expression of righteous anger, but holds that its political purpose is to build power.

This guide is not the place to discuss even in the most cursory fashion the specifics of the Revolutionary Democratic approach to organizing (interested readers can check out piratecaucus.blogspot.com for the pamphlet “The Revolution Starts Today” for an extended discussion). Suffice it to say that there should be a commitment to using the social capital generated by the Walkout and the surge of new recruits to slowly build a multi-tactical, ideologically diverse movement for democracy which focuses on a variety of issues while being tied exclusively to none. Only a mass democratic movement has the ability to act as a countervailing influence against the overweening state and corporate power which rules directly or indirectly on almost every aspect of our lives.

Final thoughts

As way of a caveat, I would like to stress that this approach to organizing a walkout was based on the experiences of one person who actively organized for the Great Rutgers Walkout of 2007 and thus represents a college-oriented viewpoint. A short analysis of this event can be found at piratecaucus.blogspot.com under the title The “Great Rutgers Walkout” of 2007.

I also want to emphasize that the vast majority of antiwar walkouts were organized by high school students, and that these walkouts were among the most militant to occur around the country in 2007. They represent a grassroots response to an unjust and illegal occupation, and there are many lessons which college students may draw upon if we have the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with high schoolers. My hope is that SDS or some other organization can allow the space for this knowledge exchange to occur.

Focusing organizers’ efforts on learning how to hold mass events such as walkouts and mass rallies is a first step to learning how to organize mass strikes and other popular actions (a marked difference from many radicals’ focus on individualistic and small-group tactics over the past 30 years). Eventually if the Left is going to start winning, we need to take seriously our task of learning how to encourage peoples’ self-determination, workers self-management and increasingly how to democratize the many autocratic institutions which play such an important role in our lives.

Timothy Horras

Tent State University/Students for a Democratic Society

Rutgers – New Brunswick

thorras@gmail.com

Appendixes:

Appendix 1: Sample Structure for Coalition Decision Making

(Note: This model emerged organically from our experiences organizing for a Walkout. It is presented not so as to be adopted uncritically by other SDS chapters, but as an attempt to create a sophisticated democratic process for working with other groups.)

Structure for Coalition Decision Making

By Anthony Shull

Proposal:

Rather than making coalition decisions by taking votes of only those at meetings; we propose a decision-making model that will allow those who work on a project to have a say in the running of that project even if they do not make it to a meeting. Each organization will elect or appoint, however they see fit, two delegates. These delegates will be empowered to speak for their entire respective organizations during coalition meetings.

Explanation:

Coalitions are formed by autonomous organizations who hold some goals and views in common while still maintaining differences. This means that they may not organize for the same reasons, though they may organize around similar issues. Furthermore, each organization has a different amount of power—people, level of commitment, contacts, respect, skill, etc. This power is not necessarily reflected in the number of members an organization fields for coalition meetings. Rather than counting ONLY the number of people present at a meeting, representation should reflect the amount of effort groups are putting in. What will we gain by doing this?

Justifications:

1. We will save person-power and time. Instead of mobilizing 20 people for coalition meetings simply so their votes can be counted, we will send only two people to such a meeting which will allow the other 18 or so people to divert their energy toward actual organizing.

2. We will advance our belief in democracy—that those who work together should decide together. Votes should be proportional to the amount of work being done.

3. We will increase the participation of members of every group. If votes are counted based on work; each group will hope to do as much work as possible in order to have more say.

Implementation:

1. Each organization will elect or appoint two delegates. They will be empowered to make decisions for their organization with an idea of what the organization wants. Delegates will be recallable if their organization wishes it.

2. Delegates will agree upon tasks that the coalition wants to accomplish. These tasks will then be divided up and delegates will volunteer their organization for said tasks. Distribution of votes in succeeding meetings will be based on the completion of those tasks. If all tasks agreed to are completed the group will keep two votes for the next meeting. If only half of the tasks are completed the group will have one vote. If none of the tasks are completed they will have zero votes. Each coalition member will have two, one, or zero votes depending on their completion of tasks since the previous meeting.

3. Mass meetings will be scheduled occasionally to amp people up to organize and to get everyone on the same page. However these will not be decision-making meetings.

Antiwar Project Plan (coming soon)

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[1] If you haven’t already, check out Jo Freeman’s famous essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, available at http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm

[2] This can be especially true for SDS chapters. Often when you are dealing with the press, they will use the “60’s flashback” frame, i.e. the campuses are protesting again just like they did back in the 1960s. Careful thought should go into how your chapter wants to set the perception of itself and the event you are holding.