From the opening day march at the Detroit US Social Forum. Credit: a_vifs/flickr.

I spent last week at the US Social Forum in Detroit. I have got used to seeing a preponderance of baby boomers at left demos and conferences, but this was different: tons of young people, and a wide range of everybody. That was super-encouraging.

These days the US Social Forum is the largest massing of radical grassroots activists on the left in this country. There have been annual World Social Forums since the first one in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, and this is the second specifically US Social Forum, after one in Atlanta in 2007. Over 20,000 people apparently registered, and it’s being reported that 15,000 attended, though I don’t know how definitive that is. There were over 1200 workshops. I spent over ten hours in workshops I was running or assisting in presenting myself, and had some wonderful experiences at them.

But I am not able to sum up this event with any kind of objectivity: I wasn’t close enough to the movers and shakers at it, and didn’t get to enough of other people’s workshops and “people’s movement assemblies” (PMAs). PMAs are the central method of the Forum, whereby activists come up with specific plans for action and commit to them. For example, the National Domestic Workers Alliance was formed as a result of the Atlanta Forum, a major step forward for the trade union movement. The PMAs work best when groups working on similar issues engage in a process of discussion and strategic planning before the Social Forum, and then come together to decide on joint commitments. The PMA training I attended was impressive and I believe great organizational skills were at play. But I can’t tell you how well this process worked overall. I look forward to reading informed accounts of it myself.

I personally found the Social Forum more confusing than inspiring, but met others who experienced the reverse. An example was the final assembly, with maybe a couple of thousand in the large Cobo Hall convention center. It started with a group of children coming on stage to sing — but the mikes didn’t pick up their voices, only those of the adults leading them in the social change lyrics. My heart sank–I get anxious at such moments after a childhood on platforms myself. Then impassioned speakers took to the mikes, and large numbers cheered loudly in support of statements I couldn’t hear clearly, because of the poor quality of the sound system: maybe I’m an old coot whose hearing is going (I’m not aware of it otherwise), or maybe I am phobic about large meetings, after going to too many in my youth. So I’m not the best person to judge this event.

But the difficulty I had hearing the speakers felt like a metaphor to me about the difficulty America will have hearing this message, not because of the technology but because of the content and the language, which was the familiar content and language of the secular left.

Part of this is unavoidable, and maybe nearly all of it is. America apparently does not want to hear that poverty is unacceptable, that mass imprisonment, war, the purchasing of Congress by big money, and all the other evils identified by the left are unacceptable and counterproductive. Maybe one day, when these policies have led to greater inequality and impoverishment, and to more ecological disaster and climate change, the fact that the Social Forums have been bringing activists together over the years will mean that people’s movements are better organized and interconnected and able to take center stage nationally. If many people feel this Social Forum moved that agenda on substantially then I will be glad to hear it.

But maybe new content and language are emerging, and in future people may look back to this Social Forum and find these threads highly significant.

Hazel Williams picks green tomatoes at an Urban Farming crop in Detroit. Credit: Fabrizio Costantini/Bloomberg News at www.cityfarmer.info

A friend reported on a meeting about food politics workshop she attended (also reported here in The Nation), in which food activists initially got across each other somewhat and then, she said, truly engaged and heard each other. This took place when two different meetings were combined: one by the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, concerned about the lack of good affordable food for low income people in the city of Detroit, and the other by mostly white, often college educated urban farmers, who are very active in Detroit and other major cities. My friend was inspired by the way they were coming together. A couple of old white Marxists tried to take over the meeting, she reported, telling the assembled they were not pursuing the Revolution; one of them wouldn’t give up the mike until the whole crowd slow-clapped her, drowning her words, and she gave up.

This seemed highly positive to me! The food movement is very attractive–it gives joy to people as well as helping them oppose agribusiness, it connects people to nature, to the deep satisfaction of growing food, to the community and to eating together–no wonder it is growing! The same happened with the back to the land and communes movement of the 60s and 70s, but if this new wave can connect with low income people’s needs in the cities, then it becomes attractive to many more people in poverty as well as to middle class people. One speaker talked about how in the UK the government has to provide space (an allotment) to every person who wants one (see here and here). When I was growing up urban allotments were almost entirely a working class phenomenon, since middle class people aspired to having a home and attached garden of their own. The local government’s responsibility to provide them was based on legislation starting in the 19th century. It hasn’t demolished agribiz in the UK yet, but as a new movement in this country urban farming has energy and exciting possibilities.

Like the localization movement (favoring the growth of local markets, and sometimes including other means of exchange than dollars) and the cooperative ownership movement, the new food movement offers people the chance to do creative work, in teamwork, that is producing goods and services the community needs. There may not be much money in it but that’s not the point or the satisfaction.

These creative movements have a much more positive emotional affect than the kinds of struggle involved in wresting concessions from the current robber barons of the economy, which so far affect many more people. But the creative movements are related to those hard long struggles, or need to be. The successful working class movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries were not only in struggle against, they were also in struggle for: they believed in a socialist future. Utopian vision is critical to providing joy, solidarity, hope, love. If it’s all just about our power vs. their power, it becomes dispiriting. The power frame has to be leavened with a frame that combines utopian vision, current healing, creative work, pride in craft, community caring, joyful celebration, and empathic connection. This latter frame gets all too often neglected in left movements that are focused on systemic change. Compared to changing the system, these joy-creating actions can seem too small, personal, and even distracting, pulling people’s energies away from the big struggles against power. And they can in fact do that. Lots of people who identify as spiritual do neglect the systemic. More on that in another post. But the people who are growing good food, are proud of their craft, are working for the community, are healing themselves and others, are working on connection and mediation, are singing and celebrating, are worshipping in truly spiritual ways: they lift the whole struggle and enable it to continue and provide hope and evidence that the world the struggle builds will be better than the one we have now.

The visionary thinking at the Forum that I saw that came from classic left organizing seemed very tired and formulaic. It was intriguing to me how many tables in the tabling area were occupied by traditional Marxist, Communist, and old-style revolutionary parties and publications. I don’t recall any beautiful artwork there, anything that drew me towards a future of loving communities in sync with nature and human nature. Most book covers were grim, about suffering and conflict.

One singularly beautiful piece of art at the Forum was the cover of Tikkun, and that must be one reason that so many people were happy to have it. The 1,000 copies of our upcoming July/August issue headlined “Queer Spirituality and Politics” that I had brought with me were easy to hand out, and all were taken: many people of color were drawn to the image, and the word “queer” was definitely popular with many–not to mention the many people who knew of Tikkun already and said they loved the magazine. (The people who refused a copy because they had a subscription were my favorites! Join them and subscribe!)

Incidentally I found it odd that there wasn’t a single LGBTQ table that I could find, and very little on urban farming and food, issues that have energized so many young people, including a great many at the Forum.

The spiritual / religious activists at the forum ran a variety of workshops, and the content is summed up in this document, Transforming Our Movements, that was produced by Claudia Horwitz of Stone Circles and Cathy Rion. I’ll talk about that and the workshops I ran or assisted with in another post.

On the overall effect of the Forum I find this piece on Alternet, “15,000 Progressive Activists in Detroit: Why No Media or Respect?“, resonates with me. The author, Sally Kohn, suggests that the Tea Party gets more coverage than this huge gathering of the left in part because it (the Tea Party) has managed to sell itself as new:

Shiny, new things always catch our eye, including our collective political eye, more than old and seemingly tired things. The progressive/left conglomeration of organizations and ideological perspectives that comprise the United States Social Forum have, literally or metaphorically, been around in American politics for decades. And even where that’s not the case – for instance, very recent and innovative formations like the Domestic Workers Union or Right to the City Alliance – the reality is that the anti-oppression, pseudo-Marxist, liberation rhetoric they adopt often finds them lumped in with their old left brethren.

But more than that, Kohn argues, the Tea Party has the gall to claim vociferously that it represents the majority of Americans: the fact that it doesn’t is not the point, it has managed to tap into widespread anger about the bailout, the corporations, and the declining middle class, — along with fear of socialism and unstated white anger about a Black president — and to link that anger to its own minority libertarian policy prescriptions. Why hasn’t the left managed to do the same? The progressives may represent just as much mainstream American hopes: after all, a majority voted for Obama, and favor universal healthcare. But the left continues to see itself, and more importantly to present itself, as a minority, employing minority language.

In his argument for hegemony as a left-wing aspiration, Antonio Gramsci wrote that before actually winning power, a political movement must believe it can win power and have a vision for how to use it. Yet the psychological failure to claim hegemonic aspirations – let along make significant progress toward realizing majoritarian power – can be linked to what another left philosopher, Frantz Fanon, dubbed the psychology of oppression. Communities so accustomed to personal and political marginalization have a hard time even imagining themselves as the ones wielding power as opposed to those over whom power is being wielded. Such hopelessness focuses a movement inward, leading to the kind of internecine fights around identity politics and issue positions that frequently divide the left. This explains United States Social Forum workshops like “The Struggle for Single Payer in the Time of Obamacare,” piling onto the conservative attack on liberal policy in the name of left-wing ideological purity.

The comments on Kohn’s article generally castigate her for not understanding how useless the Democrats are, how powerful capitalism and the money-controlled media are, how well financed and promoted by Faux Noise (lovely monika for Fox News) the Tea Party is, and so on. These are all fair points, but as reasons why we can’t possibly win over the American majority they also make her point for her about the psychology of oppression among people inured to marginalization.

I see in what I called above the joy-producing and visionary activities of the left the best chance for getting majority buy-in. If we are always focused on what is wrong, not just with the great powers of this world, but with every person who disagrees with us, then we are not interesting or attractive to all those people: we just sound like a pain in the butt. If instead we focus on appreciating what we agree with, and creating the communities of joy and caring that people want to join, we turn the tables around. We have to analyze and discuss what’s wrong, but one of the main things that seems wrong is to focus on judgment, blame and opposition, rather than on empathy (even with enemies!), healing, vision, and building caring communities. That is an analytical approach and a set of practices, with their attendant language frame, that is pioneered most fully, I would argue, by the spiritual progressives (though not all would call themselves spiritual or progressive). And that requires another post. First I have to go and buy my groceries for the week.