My whole household is activists, including my 65 year old parents. Here are some things I’ve picked up from listening to and observing them all:
-Social change is like those Japanese bamboo fountain things, the ones that make the donk noise. It builds up over time, drip by drip, with no recognizable effect, and then it hits a tipping point and a lot happens all at once. Where you are in that process is influenced by a chaos theory level of factors beyond your or anyone else’s control.
-Workaholism is the drug of choice for most activists, and it is counter productive as hell. It’s hard to resist, because what you are doing is important, time sensitive, and urgent. And the culture of activism is infected with this macho bullshit about pushing non stop. Well news flash m’dears, there will never come a time when there are not more important, urgent, time sensitive battles than any one person can address. Strategically, an activist can accomplish much more by insisting on a sustainable work-life balance and fighting on for decades than by burning themself out all at once. Rest. Play. Relax. Self-care, y’all. *Do it.*
-Trying to make your organization or movement completely ideologically pure makes you smaller, more isolated, and less effective.
-When you start organizing a group of people, the first ones to jump at the chance for leadership are not usually good leaders. What you want are the people who wait a little, think it through, see where it’s going. Also the people who already have the respect of their peers on account of being solid folks.
-Maintaining ethics and integrity can be a pain in the ass, especially when struggling against those who have neither, but it is *vital*. Any short term advantage you can gain through skeezy tactics is overshadowed by the trust and respect you lose, among your allies as well as your opponents.
-People’s politics and their personal decency don’t always match up in a logical way. You will meet people whose politics are straight fucked up, but who somehow still treat everyone they interact with directly well. You will also meet people who say and seem to believe all the right things, and are *assholes*. Handled right, the former can be hugely tactically useful as points of contact, and potentially teachable. The latter will join your organizations and proceed to shit right in the bed.
-The best way to support intense struggles against oppression far away in from a position of solidarity, with your feet firmly planted in struggles close to home. Ignoring local oppression because other people have it worse doesn’t help anybody. It’s a win for Team Oppression.
-Guilt, fear, and worry are not useful. Don’t beat yourself up for having these feelings, but know you are not in any way *obliged* to feel them. Acknowledge them, then let them go. Calm thinking and reasonable self confidence make you more effective.
-Don’t cut out people who are only capable of making smaller efforts and commitments in the struggle. That’s just throwing away resource. The idea that low effort contributions siphon away energy and make people less likely to be active is a myth. Low effort contributions make people feel involved, and more, not less, likely to participate in other ways.
-Running organizations in a democratic way is a giant pain in the ass. There will be drama and delays. There will be dumb decisions. Still 100% worth it.
-Organizing and activism are learned skills. There is a lot of history and a lot to be learned from it, there are people who have been doing this shit for ages and know how to make it work. Seek out good information. There’s no need to slow yourself down by reinventing the wheel.
-The impulse to give up on a flawed organization or movement, tear it down and start over is counterproductive 9 times out of 10. If you wait to get it perfect, you’ll never get anything done.
One drop raises the sea.
Or in this case, tips the bamboo slightly more towards a ‘thunk’
I have some reservations about some of these but lots of basic good advice in there too
Would love to hear which ones and why @queeranarchism but you’re definitely not required to spend the energy doing a write up. I’m here to back up the fact that people who volunteer to lead without taking the time to watch and learn are almost always a bad choice. Leaders who act without deep thinking are rarely good ones.
The ones I’d point out are
– the one about organizing democraticly. Obviously I would prefer to organize anarchistic, decentralized and pragmatic, based on what is needed. Like, you can organize with or without representatives, through majority decisions, through unanimous concensus or through ‘everyone who is for this can do it and the rest can do other things’, and so on.
– the one about dismantling organisations. While it is not suited for every kind of activism there is also a lot of potential and dynamic in not sticking to fixed organisations that last years and to form groups as needed and allow them to fall apart again.
QueerAnarchism 