Lessons from elders

I’ve had such an incredible week and have been wanting to write about it all on Enough, but I haven’t known how to organize the mile-a-minute thoughts in my head or talk about all the amazing conversations I’ve been having.

So first, I read this great new book called Arm The Spirit by Diana Block – have you seen it? It is a total standout in the genre of memoirs by white activists who went underground in the 60s and 70s (actually Diana fascinatingly went underground in the early 80s) to participate in militant revolutionary solidarity work. Diana was part of Prairie Fire Organizing Committee and worked as a public activist for many years before she and several comrades decided to begin working clandestinely to support the Puerto Rican independence movement and other Third World struggles.

I was so drawn into her story and also felt some of the wrenching sadness I often experience when reading about that era when revolutionaries worldwide really believed that the Left was winning and that imperialism was on the verge of collapse, which now no one thinks despite the fact that capitalism is in crisis and the anti-war movement and Obama’s election both created incredible populist fervor. I also felt so sad when she describes emerging from clandestinity and returning to the Bay Area to find that the vibrant, intersectional grassroots Left that she remembered from her years as a public activist had been co-opted by the nonprofit system. I so viscerally felt her pained bemusement at the proliferation of disconnected, single-issue nonprofits competing for foundation funding. So much horrible stuff happened in the 80s – Reagan and Thatcher and their terrible economics, the rise of global neoliberalism, dismantling of social programs, “welfare queen” mythology, the defeat of so many national liberation movements worldwide. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to resurface into such a different political climate and try to make sense of a Left that was so damaged by the nonprofit industrial complex, COINTELPRO, the growing prison industrial complex, the war on terrorism, and the outrageous success of unregulated capitalism, among ten million other things.

With all this on my mind, I took a trip to the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York to visit political prisoner David Gilbert. David was active in the Weather Underground, has a great book called No Surrender that he wrote from prison, and is a very inspiring person who is serving a life sentence for his political activities and his choice not to participate in his trial. There’s much to be said both about how much I learned from our conversations and about the banal horror of prison visits, but what I mostly want to share here is the very poignant feeling of inspiration I felt talking with someone who willingly and unrepentantly sacrificed so much to be in solidarity with oppressed people.

On my way home from visiting David, I got to have dinner with Naomi Jaffe, also a former Weather member who spent several years underground. She is another brilliant, humble radical, and I was excited to learn that she spent 15 years as the director of a small multiracial radical women’s fund in Albany and so had many interesting observations on the topic of organizing left-leaning rich people to support social justice (here is a good article from Naomi about the economic crisis).

And then when I got home, Diana Block was on a book tour stop in Philly! I got to see her speak and then interview her about Arm The Spirit and many other interesting topics. She’s still a committed activist, working with the California Coalition for Women Prisoners and doing a lot of organizing around the case of the San Francisco Eight, among other things.

I don’t know why all of these things happened in one week – it felt like some major cosmic moment of learning from my elders and earlier solidarity movements. I always find the lessons from that era so fascinating and inspiring (as I’ve written about before) – I spend so much time thinking about how to motivate other white people and rich people, people to be an accountable part of grassroots movements, and the revolutionary urgency of that era produced so many examples of very privileged young people doing everything they could to destroy oppressive systems.

David was arrested after an attempted expropriation of a Brinks truck with the Black Liberation Army, and talking about that got me thinking about the really tangible usefulness of building structures of accountability between owning class folks with access to resources, and movements doing revolutionary work. The B.L.A. was not engaged in activities that ever could have been funded by foundations or any sort of formal funding structure. Obviously now is a different time and different tactics are needed etc, but there are still so many important movement formations that function far outside the realm of funding opportunities, which could obviously benefit from alliances with sympathetic and trustworthy rich people.

But also, I do really think that the work of organizing young inheritors who are poised to receive unprecedented amounts of consolidated wealth and power is strategic beyond just devising radical new ways of giving money. Inheriting an owning class legacy comes with a lot more than financial wealth, and I still think lefty rich people who are really committed to justice would do well to take a page from forebears who creatively leveraged privilege in every way they could. Maybe I really will start the militant splinter group of Resource Generation that I always joke about forming. I was thinking our motto could be “Out of the philanthropy conferences and into the streets”, although I’ve been told it’s not that catchy.