1.5: Liberation Theory Part 1

Introduction to Ideas for Action

As we engage in community organizing, we need to be clear about the goals of our work. Having an understanding of the major forms of domination at work in society will help you understand the deep systems in place that anchor the problems we are fighting against. People don’t just have trouble affording housing because they don't manage their money well. There is not enough housing available at prices people can afford. There are deep problems in how our society is organized that have to do with imbalances of power, which make housing unaffordable for many people. Understanding these deeply entrenched systems will help us to see where to put our energy to change society to work for all of us.

Note

The following is a short excerpt from the introduction to the book "Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change" by Cynthia Kaufman.

When I went to my first meeting about the growing wars in Central America, I was nineteen years old and had never been involved in a political group before. At that time, my reaction was a simple humanitarian horror that people were being murdered and that my government was on the side of the murderers. Before I knew it, I was being recruited to form a chapter of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador in the area north of Los Angeles where I lived. I had no idea what I was doing, or how to go about forming an organization. Fortunately, I was put in touch with a few other young and inexperienced people from the local community college who had already begun to organize. They had just arranged an educational forum on El Salvador. One of the speakers lived in my community and had been very involved in the movement to stop the Vietnam War. As I listened to his stories of doing social change work back in those days, I realized how much our group could benefit from the involvement of people with more organizing experience.

Through this work, I got to know many people who had been involved in the radical social movements of the 1960s and others who had come directly from the revolutionary movements of Central America. I felt fascinated by the ideas and histories that appeared to be second nature to more seasoned activists. They had a whole vocabulary of historical events, famous people, and political positions that I had never heard of. They talked about the Russian Revolution, Emma Goldman, mysterious countries I didn’t know existed; they argued over violence and pacifism; people would be dismissed as out of touch, with labels such as “sectarian” or “Maoist.” At first I found it all very intimidating. How could I be a part of this movement if I had no idea what they were all talking about?

As I became more involved, my understanding of the world was completely shattered. Where I had once believed that the US government was democratic and that it promoted democracy around the world, I began to see it as controlled by evil forces and wreaking havoc on the world. In order to make sense out of my new awareness, I began to read. I read books about anarchism, Marxism, the Spanish Civil War, and feminism. My reading was scattered, and the more I read the more, I realized, I still had to learn. The most important thing I gained from all of this reading was a new framework for understanding the world. I no longer saw the United States as a benign force for good, nor did I see it as simply a force of pointless evil. I began to gain a new, fairly coherent picture of the world that included concepts such as imperialism, colonialism, corporate influence over the media, and ideology. These concepts were crucial for forming a new sense of meaning.

At the time when I became involved, there were many people around me who had been involved in the movements of the 1960s. And though many had come to see limits in what they had accomplished, they nevertheless had seen some major social transformations—the end of the eight years- long Vietnam War, for one—happen before their eyes and as a result of their actions. As that time recedes into history, and textbooks and TV movies portray ’60s activism as nothing more than naïveté and a bad fashion statement, the possibility that social movements can make a positive difference is increasingly hard to believe.

Mainstream media rarely represent social movements without distorting them—and the theories associated with them—beyond recognition. Still, when activism becomes too widespread to ignore—as it did in 1999 when tens of thousands of protesters shut down the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle—popular dissent and the possibility of making a difference becomes obvious even to the mainstream. Yet the intellectual tools needed to turn this discontent into a plan for action remain virtually inaccessible. Those interested in reading about politics find few contemporary theorists whose writing is easily understood. In meetings as well as in written materials, newcomers encounter people who use information and political jargon as a weapon to gain social status and intimidate others. And they see how intellectuals sometimes put themselves above people with less education. One easy response to all this is to become anti-intellectual, yet the fact is that we are always using ideas and theories. If we don’t reflect on them, we are likely to be using ideas that will not serve us well.

As people begin their engagement with movements for social justice, they often struggle to understand what they are doing and why they are doing it. Without some basic literacy in social theory, it is easy to be confused about what sorts of issues one should be working on, how this work will ever end up making a difference, and how the things one doesn’t like in the world are related to each other. Confronted with the corporate corruption of our government and declining avenues for democratic change, many people choose to drop out of politics altogether. Popular media portray cynicism as cool. The majority of Americans feel hopeless, ineffective, or both.

Understanding the issues from a historical point of view and using theory to analyze them can be very empowering. If we know the places where people’s thinking has gotten stuck in the past, we are less likely to repeat their mistakes. If we understand the references people are using, we are more likely to challenge and question, and less likely to be intimidated into agreement. If we understand the underlying issues in a given political situation, we are in a better position to analyze it for ourselves and to understand what should be done.

When I first began to study radical ideas and history, I had to remind myself that I was never going to know about everything. I needed to get used to the situation of knowing that there was a lot I didn’t know, and many theoretical issues about which I wasn’t sure of my opinion. That is a lesson I carried into the writing of this book. The book presents issues that I’m still wondering about and great debates that I can see both sides of.

There aren’t any simple answers to political questions, but there are tools and points of reference that can enrich our understanding of what is going on. I hope this book offers a coherent analysis of the issues and theoretical innovations of current US social justice movements and encourages you to investigate further. People can disagree about important issues and still be on the same side politically. They can accept some ideas from a thinker while rejecting others. When activists use a black-and-white framework, with theorists already pegged as either good or bad, they don’t push themselves to do the hard but rewarding work of putting the world together in a way that makes deep sense for themselves.

There are habits of mind that I think are important for a healthy engagement with the political world. One of the most important is openness. When we think we have all the answers, it is easy to become dogmatic and authoritarian. The other is humility. By this I mean holding on to a sense that no matter how much we know, other people have experiences and perspectives that we have much to learn from. This openness to complexity can also serve us well in political situations, where we learn to value the multiplicity of perspectives that different people bring to a situation.

If I believe that there are simple political truths, then I am likely to make judgments about other people before I have really listened to their perspectives. A vision of the world that includes the possibility for change requires a major reorientation in how we see the world. The biggest reorientation we need is one that enables us to see the ways that ordinary people, when they work together, can make huge changes in their society.

We are encouraged to see history as being made by amazing individuals, by the inevitable flow of things, or by government action. The fact that ordinary people acting together to achieve goals is a crucial part of the history of human society is rarely part of the picture we are given. Yet if we look at the positive changes that have been made in the recent past, almost all were the result of collective struggle.

Women didn’t just get the vote in modern electoral democracies when the time for it was inevitable. Rather, thousands of ordinary women, and men who supported their cause, in countries all around the world, organized and agitated to get the vote. The elementary school version of the civil rights movement is that Martin Luther King Jr. made it all happen through the sheer force of his personal morality. What’s too often left out is that King himself operated in the context of a broad popular movement made up of many ordinary people pushing for what they believed was right. The movement made King as much as King made the movement.

We can see these distortions in the way that Rosa Parks’s story is told. Many people learn in school that Rosa Parks was an African American woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who was so tired coming home from work one day that she refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white rider. She was jailed for her action, which led to a boycott of the bus system that lasted more than a year until segregated seating was abolished.

What we aren’t told is that Parks was an activist who had gone through organizer training at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, that she was a member of the NAACP, and that King and his organization were looking for a case to draw attention to the issue of segregation. While it wasn’t especially uncommon for African Americans to resist giving up their seats— conflicts over segregation happened all the time—what was special about Parks’s case was that she was part of a movement to challenge segregation.

Rosa Parks was not an amazing individual when she took action. She was a person of conscience acting as part of a movement. When she refused to give up her seat, she didn’t know how the situation would play itself out, but she knew she could count on the movement to back her up. When we’re in the heat of a movement, we often don’t know the importance of what we’re doing. Partly that’s because it really is unpredictable how our actions will add up to lasting social change. But we also lack the most basic information about how the actions of those working for change in the past have added up to many of the things we take for granted in our lives.

The eight-hour workday was one of the major goals of the labor movement from the nineteenth century when the struggle began until it was enacted in the twentieth. In contrast with the US Labor Day in September, people throughout the rest of the world celebrate International Workers’ Day on May 1, to commemorate the May 1886 demonstration for the eight hour day in Chicago’s Haymarket Square and the four anarchists, whom the Illinois authorities hanged for their alleged association with a bomb that exploded at that demonstration. The Haymarket incident was just one of the many events that took place as thousands of ordinary labor movement activists fought to achieve the eight-hour workday. Surprisingly few people in the United States have any idea that it was the labor movement that enabled us to have some reasonable time off from work.

Probably most of the people involved in the movements that have shaped our lives for the better doubted their abilities to make a difference and were ridiculed or persecuted for thinking that they could make a difference. Yet ordinary people acting together for common goals have accomplished incredible amounts. There is nothing magical about making social change happen. What is required is a sense of hope that it is possible to make a difference, and some understanding of the world that helps orient our choices about what kinds of actions to take.

It is easier to see how our actions can make a difference when we can see how the actions of others have made a difference in the past, and when we can understand activists as ordinary people like ourselves.

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Reading Response Questions

Please reflect on this reading by writing a short response to these questions. Your answer can include personal experience, and the writing does not need to be formal or polished. You are welcome to write as little as a sentence and as much as a paragraph. Think of it like journaling. 

1. How does it feel to you to think about being involved with social change?
2. What do you find intimidating about it?
3. What do you think about how Rosa Parks is taught about in school?
4. What do you relate to or find interesting in the Introduction to Ideas for Action?

Attributions 

• Adapted from "Ideas for Action: Relevant Theory for Radical Change, 2nd Ed” by Cynthia Kaufman is copyrighted. It has been reproduced with permission from the author and publisher