What should organizations *do*?
Dip discusses ways in which organizations of activists can think about their activities.
We’ve laid out how to get started in movements and what shapes organizations should take. Let’s talk about what those organizations should do.
In that piece on organization shapes, I defined three areas of activity: care (social reproductive labor), analysis (making sense of things) and action (doing things). I like to call this the three-piece of movement work: for the whole to function, each of these things work together in a generative way. Within each of these areas, there is a constant interaction between them and with the “general” tasks of: Mapping the terrain → Building Relationships → Building horizontal bodies → acting from collective power. These similarly operate within a cyclic process, where it’s less about a concrete order, and more about patterns of activity. Like, if there's no mapping, then it’s hard to know where to focus efforts and plan effective action. Each part builds off of the “previous” one.
Photo by Markus Kammermann on Unsplash
So, think of those tasks as a kind of background context or framing for the activities of care, analysis, and action. As a reminder, these activities should be–in my estimation–focused on radical ways of relating that center those on the margins: this includes youth, elderly, Black, homeless, Indigenous, racialized, Queer, Disabled, Mad, poor, precarious, and/or marginalized gender (maGe) folks.
Given this, any organizing activity should start with care. For me, care is about building communal contexts of mutual aid and self-sustainment, where free association and free initiative are understood to be paramount. Said plainly, it is to minimize negative conflict around needs, wants, and desires, whether that looks like minimizing conflict overall, making that conflict generative, or some combination of the two.
It’s–in following Mia Mungus in Pods: The Building Blocks of Transformative Justice & Collective Care–about “[r]elationship[s] and trust first, then analysis.” Before it gets all heady and intellectualized, people have to be able to continue existing. The methods I find useful for this are pod mapping as described in the above article, and asset-based community development.
Pod mapping is about figuring out who the concrete people and institutions are that you can rely on for various needs.
Asset-based community development is about learning about what people in those pods and the wider community are capable of, interested in doing, and what they have to offer to enable care.
Once the ability to sustain things is established, analysis can start in earnest. This is the kind of work that Chaos and Conviviality (we refer to it as C&C internally) is deeply rooted in; trying to understand the world so that it can be changed. Analysis can get heady, but at its base, the work should be seen as a radical recontextualization of gathering and analyzing information, spanning various methodologies that might in other contexts be based in the fields of research, intelligence, or investigation. Some methods I’d recommend are conjunctural analysis, (auto)ethnography, social investigation and class analysis, and workers’ inquiry.
With all of this context in tow, action can take place. To be clear, this is not about what is to happen. It’s what ought to. Rather than being overly tactical, as that feels less helpful without being able to speak directly to this or that reader, goals feel more apt. I have three that I constantly revisit: 1) community control of poor communities, 2) return of the land to indigenous peoples, and 3) the destruction of all prisons and other parts of the modern slavery apparatus, including (c)overt and clandestine trafficking networks. This allows folks to free the land, free the body, and free the youth, ending The World so all who are entangled with it (and are willing to be held accountable) can flourish.
