Shragge Eric - Organize!: building from the local for global justice

This superb collection needs to find its way into the hands of every activist and organizer for social justice. In a series of dazzling essays, an amazing group of radical organizers reflect on what it means to build movements in which people extend control over their lives. These analyses are jampacked with insights about antiracist, anticolonial, working-class, and anticapitalist organizing. Perhaps most crucially, the authors lay down a key challenge for all activists for social justice: to take seriously the need to build mass movements for social change. Dont just read this exceptionally timely and important workuse it too.
David McNally, professor of political science, York University, Toronto, author of Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance and Another World Is Possible: Globalization and Anti-Capitalism, and activist in socialist, antipoverty, and migrant-justice movements

Any book called Organize! has me from hello, but this one brings serious thought and analysis to what it really means to organize and why it is essential to build a base for the work in order to fashion both power and victories. It is also refreshing to read new, vibrant reports of organizing and shine needed light on the exciting work being done both by veteran and younger activists and organizers.
Wade Rathke, chief organizer of ACORN International, and formerly founder and chief organizer of ACORN in the United States

To understand the world, you have to try to change it. Thats what the authors of this fine set of essays and meditations have taken to heart. The result? Some of the best insights on power, organizing, and revolution to be found in Canada or beyond.
Raj Patel, author of The Value of Nothing: How to Reshape Market Society and Redefine Democracy

Organize! Building from the Local for Global Justice
Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, and Eric Shragge
2012 by Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, and Eric Shragge
This edition 2012 by PM Press

ISBN: 978-1-60486-433-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2011939668

Cover by Josh MacPhee/Justseeds.org
Interior design by briandesign

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org

Printed in the USA on recycled paper, by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.
www.thomsonshore.com

First published in Canada in 2012 by Between the Lines, 401 Richmond St. W., Studio 277, Toronto, ON M5V 3A8, Canada. 1-800-718-7201. www.btlbooks.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be photocopied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of Between the Lines, or (for photocopying in Canada only) Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario, M5E 1E5.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Organize! : building from the local for global justice / eds., Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, Eric Shragge.

Copublished by PM Press.
Includes bibliographical references.
Also issued in electronic format.
ISBN 978-1-771130-04-2

1. Social change. 2. Social action. 3. Social justice. 4. Political participation.
I. Choudry, Aziz, 1966- II. Hanley, Jill, 1973- III. Shragge, Eric, 1948

HM831.O74 2012 303.4 C2011-908034-6

Between the Lines gratefully acknowledges assistance for its publishing activities from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program, and the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

Introduction: Organize! Looking Back, Thinking Ahead
Aziz Choudry, Jill Hanley, and Eric Shragge

Activist Research: Mapping Power Relations, Informing Struggles
Aziz Choudry and Devlin Kuyek

Research Partnerships and Local Community Organizing: Reflections by Evelyn Calugay
Kezia Speirs

Fundraising: Politics and Strategies
Anne Petermann

Some Comments on Law and Organizing
Alex Law and Jared Will

Rights, Action, Change: Organize for What?
Radha DSouza

Escape, Retreat, Revolt: Queer People of Color Living in Montreal Using Photovoice as a Tool for Community Organizing
Edward Ou Jin Lee

Listen to the Music: Work the Music, Organize the Community
Norman Nawrocki

Art for Palestine: Renarrating History and the Present
Rafeef Ziadah

Community Organizing: Maori Movement-Building
Maria Bargh

Solidarity, Real and Imagined: Lessons from the1991 Postal Strike
Dave Bleakney and Abdi Hagi Yusef

Immigrant Worker Organizing in a Time of Crisis:
Adapting to the New Realities of Class and Resistance
Mostafa Henaway

Prefigurative Self-Governance and Self-Organization:The Influence of Antiauthoritarian (Pro)Feminist, Radical Queer,
and Antiracist Networks in Quebec
milie Breton, Sandra Jeppesen, Anna Kruzynski, and Rachel Sarrasin (Research Group on Collective Autonomy)

Making Our Space, Taking Our Place:
Lessons From Migrant Womens Organizing in Montreal
Dolores Chew

Mad Activism Enters Its Fifth Decade:
Psychiatric Survivor Organizing in Toronto
David Reville and Kathryn Church

Organizing and the Boycott, Divestment,
Sanctions (BDS) Strategy: The Turn to BDS in Palestine
Solidarity Politics in Montreal
Brian Aboud

Muhammad Ali and the Moon Migrants
Joey Calugay

Solidarity Tourism and International Development Internships: Some Critical Reflections
Gada Mahrouse

Moving Beyond a Politics of Solidarity toward a Practice of Decolonization
Harsha Walia

Organizing in Solidarity with Threats to National Security:The Campaign against Immigration Security Certificates
Mary Foster

Confessions of a Reluctant Food Activist
Martha Stiegman

Building Power Beyond the Grassroots: ACORN Matters
Robert Fisher

Urban Neoliberalism and the Right to the City Alliance
Yuseph Katiya and Christopher Reid

We are putting this book together shortly after hundreds of thousands of Egyptian people occupied Cairos Tahrir Square and the roads surrounding Egypts parliament and government buildings, and trade unions began strikes. For some weeks, the world watched the power of mobilized citizens demanding an end to a Western-backed brutally repressive regime. In nearby Tunisia, a mass movement ended twenty-three years of Ben Alis iron-fisted rule at the start of 2011, and since then, regional elites in the Middle East, along with their domestic and overseas allies in governments and business, have continued to shuffle nervously. Events and movements like this are exceptional historical moments. They are periods when there is a shift in how people act, abandoning their day-to-day activities to stand together to overthrow a repressive regime. These uprisings have unfolded in an era of unprecedented capitalist crisis that has spurred major mobilizations in countries such as Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and Greece in response to the imposition of austerity measures. These measures once again shift the burden and the blame for the crisis onto the shoulders of the majorityworking people, the poor, and the economically and socially marginalizedrather than holding to account the financial, business, and political elites who caused it in the first place.