What's the Plan?

What do we want?  What are we fighting for?  Are we even fighting?  Or are we merely criticizing?

It seems, somewhere in the last 30 years, we've lost our revolutionary traditions.  I'm tempted to point to the success of the Civil Rights, Women's Rights, Chicano, etc. movements at changing bourgeois culture.  The problem is that all of those organizations left behind and/or forgot about the working-classes.  Additionally, socially, we've fallen into some bad habits.

1st) The 60's movements' bourgeois rhetoric that emphasized the rights of the individual rather than collective rights (or used the a rhetoric of collective rights to win individual rights) has us today focusing on similar battles for justice instead of critiquing deeper, capitalistic injustice that runs across race, gender, ethnicity.  As long as we keep fighting for a piece of the pie we will never develop a praxis that rejects the pie altogether.

2nd) We have privileged voice, articulation and argumentation over straight-up organizing.  I think it has to do with the way that our education system has taught morals and/or the way that democracy is supposed to work.  As long as you are speaking out against injustice then people will see the righteousness of your communication and then join you.  Real organizing is door-to-door and face-to-face (see 3 below for another argument for why this isn't happening).  When was the last time somebody knocked on your door to talk to you about the revolution?  (Though I did have a couple of volunteers from the mayoral campaigns stop by . . .)  We don't know how to organize anymore - the success of SNCC and the UFW (to name merely two organizations) came from organizing communities door-to-door.

3rd) We don't really talk to people anymore.  I blame it on television and/or the internet and/or the DVD.  We've lost human connection and so we don't know how or we're too scared (or maybe I'm just talking about myself) to knock on doors and introduce ourselves.

4th) So what should we be fighting for?  Better wages, more (and better) opportunities, more local, community control.  How should we do it?  By organizing.  1st step personal goal: get involved in a pre-existing local neighborhood organization; maybe I'll meet my neighbors and learn some things about organizing . . .