Conscious Choice: The Crisis: Building a New Activist Alliance

July 1996

The Crisis: Building a New Activist Alliance

by Ronnie Cummins

Let’s get blunt about the Crisis in our activist Rainbow. A friend of mine overheard a Native American brother remark yesterday that walking through our environmental exhibition hall here at the IJC in Duluth was like walking through a cemetery — passionless, lifeless, sanitized — all the activist groups divided up into their own cubicles, single issues, and organizations. If we don’t phase out or sunset the kind of divided, marginalized Movement that we have now and build a new fighting, creative, inspirational Alliance that unites all of our groups and our efforts, then we are finished.

Our environmental movement and the entire left, labor, progressive and green activist Rainbow remains on the defensive — while the political machinery of our adversaries grows stronger and stronger everyday. We at the grass-roots have been wasting our time fighting among ourselves — waiting for instructions to come down from our so-called "Big 15" environmental groups, or our so-called "progressive" leaders in Washington or Ottawa, or from our state and provincial capitals. We’ve been arguing about whose burning issues are more pressing or more politically correct — and waiting to vote, or give our support or consumer dollars to the lesser of two evils, or three evils, or a literal shopping mall of evils. We’ve been waiting perhaps for funding for our project, or a new Movement Messiah, while an unholy alliance of powerful and profoundly evil transnational corporations, right-wing populists (such as the Wise Use movement), pseudo-Christian fundamentalists, and assorted reactionary special interests have hijacked our Democracy and stolen our future.

The biological time-bomb we call the future is ticking away even as we consider these matters. We have no time to lose. The time for standing around and feeling inadequate or frustrated is over. If you’ve been waiting for new Movement leadership and new ideas to arrive, wait no longer. Look in the mirror, look at the people around you today. Go back to your community and form an affinity group of like-minded individuals, people who you feel good about. Work with people who will make your social change efforts effective as well as fulfilling, and yes, even joyful. People bold enough to take on the corporate Global Lords, yet humble and grounded enough to practice what they preach.

Once properly grounded, link up your core group and your outreach and coalition building efforts with other compatible groups in your community, county, state, and region. If you’re not exactly certain of how to go about getting organized in your community, then search out the activist "coaches" and social change Movement "veterans" who are willing to help you. Don’t mourn about the state of the world or the state of your individual soul! Organize! There’s only one reason for joining up in the worldwide Movement to save the planet and build a more democratic and ethically sound Commonwealth: because it’s the best way to live.

If you are already part of the activist community, or find yourself "on the verge" of getting further involved, here are eight fundamental steps that we need to take together:

Step One: Acknowledge the interconnections between all the burning issues and face up to root of the Crisis. We must stop bullshitting ourselves or beating around the bush. Democracy no longer exists. We are ruled by Big Business, Big Science, and Indentured Government, and we know it. We must address the root cause of the Crisis, the tyranny of the Global Lords. To be specific, we must address the stranglehold which the world’s largest thousand corporations exercise over the global body politic and the biosphere.

Step Two: We must build a new alliance that extends throughout the continent, an alliance inspired and led by locally-based core groups and collectives. Circles of resistance and renewal, I like to call them, woven together, town by town, county by county, state by state. we must form alliances willing and able to address the fundamental issues of corporate power and tyranny, and brave and bold enough to talk about the only practical solution — a fundamental redistribution of wealth and power.

Besides acknowledging the root of the problem, we must be straightforward about the solution. There can be no environmental sustainability or justice without economic justice and a sweeping transformation of the system. Let’s be blunt again: it’s going to cost hundreds of billions, even trillions of dollars globally to make the transition to the kind of society we’re talking about. Ordinary people, the 90 percent of us who make less than $120,000 per year, are not exactly excited about paying any more taxes than we are already paying. The current economic pie is not large enough to pay for the life-and-death transition we are talking about. But our solution is simple. We are going to qualitatively expand the economic pie.

We are going to close out the welfare and the subsidies for the rich and powerful. We are going to tax the hell out of the rich and the transnational corporations, we are going to cut the hell out of military spending and corporate subsidies. We are going to slap a global transaction tax on the bond dealers, the stock speculators, the currency traders. And then we’re going to double the minimum wage, institute a 30-hour work week, eliminate college tuition, and give everyone who wants to work a job by rationally dividing up and carrying out the work that needs to be done in our local communities.

Step Three: We need to immediately identify all the activists and groups in our local areas and regions who share our vision and our sense of urgency, and begin regular communications and Alliance-building.

We must take an inventory of the entire activist rainbow so that we know the locations, expertise, and strengths of all our groups and activists. Their needs for organizational training, technical assistance, and equipment must be catalogued. We must establish Activist Alert communications networks using computers, fax machines, and telephone trees in every congressional and parliamentary district.

Step Four: We must make a commitment to begun framing and linking up all of our issues and campaigns in a populist, hard-hitting manner.

As long as activists do no more than whine, compete among ourselves, and suggest tiny reforms, we’re not going to fire up any passions. To gain the attention of the public, force our way into the media, stay in the public eye, we must emphasize the interconnections between all of the gut issues we’re dealing with — toxics, health, the cancer epidemic, food, environment, animals, biodiversity, economics, justice, demilitarization, and so on. Unless we are fanning the flames of people’s anger against out-of-control corporations and politicians, unless we are walking our talk and practicing what we preach, unless we are expanding people’s imaginations about an alternative way to live, we’re not really organizing for change.

Step Five: We must make an honest attempt to transform the pre-existing national and state organizations which have grass-roots members in our local areas — but if they are going nowhere, or if their national and regional bureaucracies refuse to budge, then we must abandon them — period.

The people who are fed up with the "business as usual" mentality that prevails in our Movement are the ones who are joining up with us to form new grass-roots Alliances.

Step Six: We need an environmental and economic justice action plan for every voter precinct, county, Congressional district, Parliamentary district, state, and province that ties together the burning issues and brings together in common mass outreach and mobilization all the best organizers, researchers, visionaries, communicators, and networks in our local areas and regions.

These grass-roots action plans must provide clear lines of responsibility for who does what, when, where, and how. The goal of these integrated and complimentary local plans will be to undo every bad law, environmental initiative, and corporate practice which threatens us, while moving forward with sustainable and equitable practices that give ordinary people a taste of the new Eco-Commonwealth which we will eventually bring to birth.

Step Seven: An organizing circle or activist team must be identified and recognized in each strategic district or zone to coordinate outreach, telephone and letter-writing trees, protests, publicity, and other day-to-day activities.

The days of ad-hoc, single issue, or "do your own thing" organizing are over — that is if we ever want to win. In terms of research and identifying the public’s "hot button" issues, we must stop duplicating one another’s efforts. There are over 25 million progressive donors, activists, or would-be activists in the U.S. alone. These names are jealously guarded by national bureaucracies in Washington, DC, who are more concerned with direct mail response than they are with building a Movement. Local activists need and deserve to have access to the names for their area. National groups and publications who refuse to share their lists with local grass-roots activists must be exposed, criticized, and phased out or "sunsetted."

We must obtain and consolidate all the progressive membership, donor, and subscription lists in each of our areas so that volunteer organizers at the county and Congressional-Parliamentary level are supplied with the names and telephone numbers of everyone in their local areas who’s likely to be their ally.

Step Eight: We must learn how to pace and enjoy ourselves as we struggle to build a better world. The transformation we’re talking about will take the rest of our lives, as well as the lives of the next generation. People join transformative movements — not out of guilt or fear or because of abstract arguments — but because they perceive that it’s the best way to live. As we used to say in the student and youth movements of the 1960s, the Revolution begins the minute you start living it. All Power to the People, not the corporations! All Power to the Imagination!

Ronnie Cummins is the director of the Pure Food Campaign and Farmer-Consumer Alliance. The material above is excerpted from the speech he gave at the U.S.-Canada International Joint Commission on the Great Lakes, September 24, 1995.

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