After Seattle: Strategic Thinking About Movement Building

Monthly Review, July, 2000 by Martin Hart-Landsberg

Their growing opposition to capitalism as a social system has created new possibilities for building labor-environmental alliances with a class perspective. By encouraging representatives from these and other key social movements to plan community-sponsored May Day events and actions jointly, activists can help deepen and broaden such alliances and, in the process, create a social framework within which resistance to the structures and organizational forms of capitalism can be combined with new visions of working and living.

As noted above, the history of May Day also highlights the importance of the relationship between campaigns and movements. May Day actions were organized by worker-community movements, which were in turn strengthened by these actions. As these movements weakened, it became harder for activists to ensure that May Day actions retained their radical orientation. Eventually, the day itself lost its social significance. This is an important lesson because many contemporary activists, no doubt buoyed by the success in Seattle, have tended to focus almost exclusively on organizing new actions or campaigns. While these activities are an important way to create connections and inspire future activism, they do not automatically lead to the development of movements capable of transforming capitalism. In other words, we must strive to ensure that our actions and campaigns are part of, and enrich, a broader movement-building strategy.

Building a Movement while Responding to Peoples' Immediate Needs

Successful movement-building involves creating strong, accountable, and politicized organizations; a community-based structure that connects these organizations; and a common commitment to struggle based on a shared vision of the future. At the same time, movements for social change must be responsive to peoples' immediate needs.

There are many ways activists can help build strong organizations within a community-based structure. First, we must take seriously the task of organization-building. This means that campaigns and activities need to be organized in ways that encourage those who participate to join and become active in the organizations that speak to their concerns. It also means that organizations must take advantage of these actions to mobilize and engage their membership.

Second, we must ensure that organizations take internal education seriously. Many church, labor, environmental, student, and social justice groups have been successful at generating participation at events, but far less successful in creating an internal space where members can discuss past actions, expand their political understandings, debate strategy, and participate in planning future actions.

Third, we must unite the many organizations into a community. One way is to create informal gatherings where activists from these organizations can share experiences and develop strategies that integrate the activities of their respective organizations into a common project.

All three tasks can and should be combined. For example, activist meetings should help promote greater understanding of, and respect for, the concerns of the various participants and the communities they represent. This understanding and respect should then be integrated into the internal education programs of the various organizations. In this way, people from different parts of the broader community can learn to appreciate the strengths and struggles of others. Solidarity is thereby built from the bottom up, not from the top down. This solidarity makes it easier for organizations to plan common events and actions and to secure broad-based participation from their respective membership.