A Movement For Everyone

We need every skill set. We need what you offer.

NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us

shoving at the thing from all sides to bring it down.

-Diane di Prima, Revolutionary Letter #8

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The first time I spent much time with a bona fide fiction writer was in a car in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere, about twenty years ago. We were security, armed only with radios and flashlights, keeping watch on a lonely stretch of road in Southern Oregon to make sure police didn’t raid our camp.

See, an old growth forest had burned in the area. Ecologically speaking, this shouldn’t have been a problem – the forests there rely on fire to clear out the undergrowth and make room for new trees. Some of the pine cones lie dormant until they’re opened by extreme heat. The fire wasn’t the problem. The problem was that burned areas that would otherwise be protected from logging suddenly aren’t anymore, so people were clearcutting.

Most forests recover just fine from fire. They don’t do so well recovering from clearcuts. When the biomass of an area is stripped away, there’s nothing to feed the next generation of trees, nor to protect the topsoil from blowing away in the wind or washing away in the rain. This is a process called desertification, and most areas can only sustain a few cycles of clearcutting before they’re entirely different ecosystems.

The locals wanted the forest to remain in place – so much so that only an out-of-state logging company, with out-of-state loggers, signed up to destroy the forest. So the locals called on us, forest defenders, to join them in their fight and there we were with blockades and treesits.

And, notably, me in a car in the middle of the night with a flashlight and a radio, talking with a creative writing teacher from Portland who spent her weekends trying to stop the world from being destroyed.

I picked her brain about everything – our main job was to stay awake, after all – but the main thing I learned is that everyone has a role in social movements. She couldn’t risk arrest, and she had a day job, but there was nothing illegal about hanging out in a parked car next to the road on her weekends. She was still able to participate not just in the movement more broadly, but in direct action.

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These days, I’d say that my artistic work is writing, particularly fiction, while my activism is focused around bringing people into movements. I’ve said it before: what our movement needs isn’t gatekeepers, it’s ushers. Not people to bar the door for those who aren’t good enough to join us, but people to invite people in and help them find where they feel best and can be the most useful.

I hope that we don’t chastise people for failing political litmus tests, but to invite people to pass those tests (or question which of those tests serve us at all).

Over and over again, people tell me that they don’t have the right skill set for activism, or they have life circumstances that prevent them from joining various movements. They don’t tell me this as excuses, but because they genuinely don’t know how or where to plug in.

People within the movement, though, have no doubt that a wide variety of people with a wide variety of skill sets can be useful. Because we look around and see not just what we’re good at, but where we’re lacking.

We need frontline direct actionists, for certain. We need people willing to build barricades. We need people willing to sit in trees. We need people to chain themselves to the boats delivering weapons to genocidal governments overseas. We need armed people to stand guard outside drag shows. We need people willing to de-arrest their comrades in the streets. We need people willing to [REDACTED].

Sometimes I find myself saying things like “for every direct actionist we need ten supporters” but even that phrasing doesn’t work for me, because it presumes the central position of the person doing direct action. You might as easily say “for every cook you need ten people who need to be fed” or “for every bookkeeper you need ten activists to do the work that needs recordkeeping.”

Whatever your skill set, there is a way to apply it to movement work. The trick is to consider three variables, maybe as a venn diagram: what are you good at, what kind of work do you find fulfilling, and what is necessary. Sometimes you look for where all three overlap. Sometimes, two or one is enough.

Are you an illustrator? We need flyers and posters. Do you throw good parties? We need benefit shows – and those same skills you use to throw parties would likely translate to political organizing. Do spreadsheets make you happy? We need bookkeepers to help keep our finances in order. Are you good at teaching? Skillshares build community and togetherness as well as pass along valuable information. Mediating conflict? My god we need mediators.

Do you work in the medical field? Protests need medics. Meticulous observer? Talk to someone about becoming a legal observer at protests. Writer? Of course, you can always incorporate politics into your existing work, but you also might try your hand at reporting on protests, or even sloganeering. Engineer? Barricades don’t just build themselves. LARPer? It turns out that fighting with stick and shield has direct application in conflict with the far right. Ex-soldier? I sure wish your skill set wasn’t as useful as it is, but we need everything from security to logistics to communications to – sadly – how to sweep an area for explosives.

Extrovert? You are already good at building connections between people – just by being present at certain events, you are valuable. Notice who is feeling left out and work to include them. Notice which social cliques are forming and work to network them together. Introvert? An awful lot of movement work can be done alone – ask me how I know, writing this on my couch next to my dog, with more deer than people in the immediate vicinity.

It’s also not just a matter of applying skills you already have, it’s a matter of developing those skills in new directions. Most day jobs or college courses won’t prepare you for facilitating a consensus decisionmaking meeting, not explicitly, but teambuilding and managerial skills can be adapted once the hierarchical assumptions are stripped away. 

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Those of us on the blockades at that forest defense camp in southern Oregon, we came from a few different backgrounds. There were full-time forest defenders – anarchists and Earth First!ers who traveled from movement to movement, action to action. There were also locals of various types, most who’d picked jobs that offered them flexibility and had them working outside, in the forests that they loved.

A local massage therapist came out one night and donated bodywork we badly needed after spending our nights moving boulders into the road. A week or so later, she u-locked her neck to the steering wheel of a broken down car in the road, using her body to stop the logging of the forest she grew up in.

One morning, while the loggers’ trucks were blocked on the bridge, the loggers themselves got out and walked past our lines. A few of us tailed them, shouting things like “why are you destroying these forests you say you love” or whatever. We probably weren’t at our most articulate.

One man, tired already from his day’s work, with the sun not yet above the horizon, looked at us and said “well what do you do for a living?” Which is a fair question in a number of ways – there aren’t so many ethical ways to make your living in a capitalist society.

“I’m a landscaper,” I said, because it was true.

“I’m a logger,” the man next to me said.

“I’m a logger too,” said the woman on my other side.

I worked in rich people’s gardens in Portland. My comrades next to me worked in the woods, doing sustainable harvesting and thinning to develop healthy forests. Almost every skill set can be used for good or for ill.

“Oh,” the logger said, then set about his work day of destroying the forest.

Of the two loggers on my side of the barricades, it’s hard to say if it was their work in the forests as loggers that brought them into direct action environmentalism or whether it was their work in environmentalism that found them looking for jobs in the forest. Either way, they were taking one skill set and adapting it slightly to another complimentary purpose.

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Some of the Greek anarchists I know refuse to talk about the “movement,” which implies a certain unified set of beliefs and direction, and instead talk about the “constellation” of stars. Myself, I find myself falling back time and time again on the Zapatista saying, that we are fighting for a world in which many worlds are possible.

There are as many “movements” as there are, I don’t know, genders, or people. What exactly I’m fighting for is different day to day, year to year. What I want, what I fight for, is our ability to have diversity – not just of people, but of ideas, of solutions.

Our movement (there’s that word again) is strongest when we don’t just accept our diversity but we celebrate it. When we accept it as our strength.

Another cliche I fall back on time and time again is respecting a “diversity of tactics.” That is to say, we ought to respect that different people will have different tactical ideas. Some people will want to march peacefully or use nonviolent civil disobedience. Other people will want to be rowdy. Some people perform sabotage. Some people fight back. These actions don’t exist as a hierarchy, with one side better than the other. We needn’t waste our time arguing about which way is strategically or ethically superior. Instead, what we ought to spend our time discussing is how these various tactics can complement each other and avoid stepping on one another’s toes.

A strategy that doesn’t play to our strengths is a poor strategy. Diversity is our strength. Our strategies need to play to that.

Even the state understands the value of diverse tactics – consider the oldest trick in the book, good cop / bad cop. Once someone has been kidnapped by the police, bad cop goes in and scares them. Then good cop comes in and “saves” the kidnap victim by saying everything will be okay as long as the kidnap victim cooperates. It’s incredibly effective. Even when we know it’s happening, it’s hard to resist.

Social movements are strongest when a variety of people have a variety of ideas.When you have multiple overlapping tactics and strategies, then the failure of one tactic doesn’t mean the failure of the broader movement. Furthermore, multiple tactics can synergize: the radical demands of the nonviolent civil rights movement (the radical legacy of which has been appropriated by the liberal establishment) seemed particularly appealing to the establishment when compared with the burgeoning Black power movement. We can play good cop / bad cop too.

The state’s primary aim, in the destruction of the movements of the late 60s and early 70s, was to sew division between the more radical and less radical aspects of the movement. The state sought to isolate the most radical elements within the movement and repress them, while appropriating and watering down the less radical elements. We ought not let them do that. They seek to divide and conquer. The way to prevent that isn’t by “unifying,” and insisting we all have the same strategy – that impulse actually fosters division, because it creates competing camps vying for control. The way to prevent division is by celebrating our diversity.

Of course, this means our movement is vulnerable to the tolerance paradox, the idea that a tolerant society that tolerates intolerance will wind up intolerant. The tactics and ideas our movements don’t need are those that foster a singular party line or a singular world view. We don’t need peace police. We don’t need a vanguard. We don’t need authoritarian leadership.

We need organization. We need communication. We need mediation. We need strategies that play to our strengths.

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One reason I keep coming back to that creative writing teacher in that car, watching the road at night, is that she wasn’t there using her creative writing skills specifically. She was just there doing what needed to be done, based on her own limitations.

The other thing I keep coming back to is what the science fiction author Ursula le Guin told me in an interview I did with her, back when I was first starting to figure out what it meant to be both an anarchist and a fiction author:

I think if you really want to pursue liberty, as an artist, you cannot join a movement that has rules and is organized. Regarded in that light, feminism was fine — we mostly realized we could all be feminist in our own way. The peace movements, very loose and ad hoc, have been fine. And I can work for things like Planned Parenthood or Nature Conservancy, or a political campaign, but only as an envelope stuffer: I can’t put my work directly in their service, expressing their goals. It has to follow its own course towards freedom.

We can all be feminist in our own way. It’s not about a party line. And while we ought not make everything about “the movement,” everything we do is part of a beautiful constellation. As every sailor knows, constellations can point the way as surely as any compass.