May Day and Activist Explorer
Thoughts on International Workers' Day and on my Activist Explorer Project
Spring Greetings, CCNRFs (Comrades, Colleagues, Neighbors, Relatives, Friends)!
May Day Reflection
May Day, which on the Left traditionally encompasses the first few days of May, brings working people (i.e., virtually all of us) together to demonstrate our power—to ourselves and to the minuscule cabal of folks who appropriate and misuse the wealth we produce.
It’s good to have this annual opportunity to feel our power, which is immense even in the raw state it is this time—1particularly here in the United States, which is where I am writing.
Anyone who has been part of a big demonstration has felt that power. Yet simply coming together is only the start. We need a deeper awareness of the full meaning, the full potential, of our collectiveness.
As long as we are unaware of our collective power to create the world we want, that power continues to be harnessed by the microscopic ruling cabal for its purposes—not ours. It’s when we become aware of it, when we make that intellectual, experiential, spiritual leap to understanding our strength as connected humans, that we can wield it for ourselves.
Our basic goal, and our basic connection, are very simple: virtually all of us want the same basic things—a decent life for ourselves, our communities, and—with a little more consciousness—for everyone.
The beast in whose belly we live—that metaphor for the unjust, exploitative system we currently endure—works very hard to disconnect us from ourselves and our fellow humans, to prevent us from reaching the level of consciousness necessary to understand, feel, and mobilize, our immense power.
The beast devotes huge energy and resources to making sure we don’t figure out that we need not put up with exploitation, injustice and misery, that there is actually plenty for all of us, humans and Earth, and that life is simply better when we share and care rather than loot and shoot.
Here in the US it can be hard for us to feel fully connected to the world’s workers, even though May Day—International Workers’ Day—long celebrated around the world, started here in the US.
This disconnect is a part of our culture I feel we need to explore further, to help us address the particular challenges of living, and conducting our struggles, in the heart of the empire. I feel that as denizens of the empire, we have some specific work to do in order to be in solidarity with the world’s workers.
This project posits that part of the work of being an activist, in addition to on-the-ground work of advocating for change, is to share the stories of how we make these changes, and about the fascinating specifics, the relationships, processes, feelings and details of the struggles we take on. These stories bring people, including ourselves, closer to what we’re doing and why. This is crucial, since none of us are immune from the othering that isolates and pits us against others—and against each other.
Activist Explorer is about creating, cultivating and collecting activist stories, for ourselves and our movements.
Activist Explorer Project
Lately, I have been percolating this project to clarify and crystallize the ideas embodied in this newsletter and organize my explorations on activist culture and activist stories into a structured whole.
Within the general field I refer to as Activist Culture, the project focuses on collecting, creating, cultivating, and connecting stories of the activist experience, fostering the art of story creation within human rights/social justice movement-building.
Below are some of the Whys that led to my embarking on this project. Soon to follow will be the Whats, Hows and Wheres, to show what the project looks like in practical terms.
A piece of what I am exploring here is the story of a project in development, with its own ebbs, flows, ups and downs—like activism itself.
This meta part—the story of someone seeking stories—is the chronicling of an older woman bringing forward a new project. I hope sharing that process may be useful to others, especially those who feel they may be too old to start something new—which is one of the many ways the beast tries to convince us to keep quiet.
Chronicling the unfolding of this project in real time is a bit like serializing my novel. Except in the case of the novel, I already know how it will end!
Why Activist Stories?
I’ve participated in a variety of areas, places, organizations and issues—student, popular education, union, racial justice, feminist, youth, and more—within the broad movement to transform this unjust system into a society of love and care for Earth and all her inhabitants. Raised in a family that embraced activism early in my childhood, I began attending Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and related activities as a young teen, along with my siblings, parents, and friends. During the late sixties and early seventies we were surrounded by a general sense of the need and the possibilities for sweeping social change.
Throughout my decades of activism I have found respite in fiction, particularly novels. Yet I began to be frustrated with stories where characters encounter problems that beg for a collective, organized response, but the story does not touch on anything of the kind. Individual characters solve their challenges (or try to) through personal effort, at most with a few friends or supporters. Unions, social movements, and the myriad of social change organizations and efforts so critical in real life rarely come into play.
In mainstream fiction, 'solving' typically involves the main character(s) undergoing some form of personal transformation as they tackle whatever issues they’re up against (frequently aided by superheroes and/or state coercive insitutions like police or the military), leading to a reestablishment of the status quo. The villains may be punished, the wrongs may be righted, but the underlying causes remain unchallenged and unchanged. Most of the time, also unnamed.
More and more, I was asking myself, Where are the stories of people rising up together to tackle the underlying issues causing the characters’ woes?
Fiction Featuring Activists
Actually, when I started looking for such stories, I found quite a few. This became the Collecting part of this project—about which more later.
Even though I did ferret out instances of activism in stories, there’s no doubt that the fiction industry that dominates mainstream culture in the US—with its immense repercusions around the world—presents many fewer instances of collective action than what is warranted, given the true role of collective people power in our world.
Alongside this massive erasure of activism, I also began to notice that when activists do show up in fiction—novels, movies, TV shows, narrative games, or any form of imaginative story—the portrayals are often dismissive or stereotyped.
I became progressively more annoyed by this, until—being an activist!—I decided to take some action, to wit.:
Nonfiction. Writing book/movie/TV show reviews, and essays on this topic such as Where are the Social Movements in Fiction?
Fiction. At present, I’m finalizing the “movement mystery” novel Rainwood House Sings, partially serialized here. Stay tuned for publication details of the upcoming full novel , date TBA soon.
Real Life. That is, real world activity together with others. I’m part of a small group of activist novelists we call The Activist Fiction Writers Circle. All of us will soon be publishing our novels featuring activist characters and settings. We’re looking forward to doing some fun joint promotion of our books.
Next time: more concrete info about these activities.
Why Activist Culture?
As mentioned, I have participated in a lot of activist spaces, both in the US and in Latin America, of varying size, issue, constituency served, type of people who participate, and more, working in environmental, racial justice, women’s liberation, workers’ issues and more. Within the overall rubric of the Left, each has a particular approach, emphasis, ideology, lexicon and more.
That activists in a wide range of milieux and ventures share common characteristics points to a common, if highly diverse, activist culture.
As an anthropologist as well as an activist, I pay special attention to culture. I consider myself a participant-observer in the wildly diverse global grab-bag of boat-rockers, city-hall fighters, radicals, revolutionaries, and creative gadflies loosely gathered under the term activists. My approach is not the traditional one of studying cultures of the “other,” but rather observing and reflecting on the culture I belong to, that of my own activist community.
Along with my growing awareness of how activism is represented—and omitted—in fiction, I’ve become increasingly conscious of tendencies, positive and problematic, that manifest repeatedly in the different activist communities I’ve been part of, which appear to be characteristic of activist culture. Among those that seem most challenging include:
the way our groups often fracture over differences in ideology, strategy, and tactics.
the fraught experience of living our lives and doing our activist work in the belly of the very beast we are struggling to transform.
I have written about some of our challenges here in Substack. However, this informal compilation of essays and reviews does not entirely capture my curiosity about the relationship between activist culture and activist stories.
I am interested in exploring our stories as an entry point, a tool, for movement-building, sharing concrete experiences and thinking together about their significance.
This is in no way a rejection of theory or analysis. Rather it is a means of starting with the concrete experience, delving into our stories together, comparing and contrasting them in the crucible of theory we have available from many thinkers, in order to build on and create new theory.
How does our activist culture further, and hinder, our capacity to think together with creativity, imagination, and well-informed yet open-minded analysis? As we think and do things together, how can we achieve a comradely balance that recognizes our many filters—our emotions, upbringing, and more—that influence our world views and the ways we approach reality? What are the effects on our activism and activist culture of the stories about us that continually recirculate around us?
We activists tend to be passionate about our belief systems—they provide inspiration and energy, as well as ready connection to others who share them. Yet they may become a helmet that closes us off from others rather than enabling us to creatively explore wider connections and develop collaborations leading to creative, reliable deploying of our collective power.
This notion—which I trust you will not equate with blanket repudiation of recognized social change theories nor of the wisdom of our teachers and leaders—prompts this idea of creating theory about our reality, our culture, with the sharing of stories as a jumping off point. This process strengthens not just our ideas but our connections with one another, to build collaborative understanding and help illuminate some of the sticky places in our movements.
Specific topics to explore through pooling our stories include how we:
prioritize our connections and defend against divisions. (Solidarity Now)
carve out spaces in the midst of movements to experiment with creating the new world now. (Life in the Liberated Zone)
deal with the daily contradictions and tensions, the emotional landscape, of living in the belly of the beast as we struggle to transform it
understand how our own reactions, quirks, strengths, and weaknesses as human beings impact our capacity to organize our movements—and how the more we understand about this, the more we can defend against our human nature being manipulated (Activism and Human Nature).
Activist Explorer will be holding conversations about these topics with activists in different settings, to share in an upcoming podcast as well as in writing and in person.
Next time: the specifics: what, how, where.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this project idea!
Workers of the World, Unite! Viva International Workers’ Day!
Justice, rights, and equality for all!
No war, no warming!
Fight fascism!
Stop genocide!
Down with imperialism and colonialism!
Viva el Cinco de Mayo y la valentía e inteligencia de los Pueblos Originarios!
Love not looting!
I hear that AI likes using m-dashes—but so do I! So even though they—m-dashes, that is—are supposed to be indicators of using AI, I assure you that no AI has been employed in the creation of this post. I’m not voicing an opinion about AI here—just saying I’m capable of peppering my work with m-dashes on my own!
Yes!!!
Good to read- puts so much together. It's BIG😊👍