Articles
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Max Bender Editor’s Note: Organizing, Innovation, and Upheaval
Racial justice organizers are innovating organizing tactics and strategies during the pandemic and the uprisings. In this series, we examine some of the innovations in organizing happening this summer.
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Chris Grafton The History of the DC Statehood Movement
A historian of the capital city on the history of voter suppression in DC, the challenges of organizing for statehood, and why winning might be possible now.
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Joshua Earle Organizing in the Belly of the Beast
The District of Columbia has a long and venerable history of local organizing that offers important lessons for how to push for change at the local level, take on powerful interests, and challenge an entrenched political establishment.
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Koshu Kunii Building a Socialist DC
Two Metro DC DSA organizers on the group’s electoral campaigning, the challenges of organizing during COVID, and their vision for a more just DC.
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Koshu Kunii Black Lives Matter Equals Defund the Police.
Lessons from the whirlwind.
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Janeese Lewis George Campaign Build the Movement. Elect Bold Leaders. Repeat.
A socialist candidate’s upset Council victory offers clear lessons for the left on how to organize and movement build during the pandemic.
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Leslie Cross Fighting for a Bold, Progressive Agenda in DC
Activists in the District of Columbia are building support for statehood while fighting to advance a progressive agenda and holding their own elected officials to account.
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Janeese Lewis George Campaign To Win, We Need to Do Things Differently.
Movement building and risk taking are key to winning insurgent electoral campaigns.
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Bringing Bernie 2020 Organizing Tools to the Workplace
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a project born out of a partnership between the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), is taking the lessons learned from the Bernie 2020 campaign into workplace organizing.
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Clay Banks Reclaiming Rhode Island in a Movement Moment
Bernie volunteers in Rhode Island are turning their presidential campaign operation into a statewide leftist organization. In the process, they’re learning to connect their socialist principles to the demand to Defund the Police.
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We Don’t Know What We’re Doing
Two new books on how to strengthen the labor movement end up showing something very different — that we don’t know why or how unions succeed or fail, and we don’t have any clear sense of how to do better.
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Library of Congress How Phyllis Schlafly Found The Right Balance of Racism and Misogyny and Charted the Future of the Radical Right
An excerpt from The Lie That Binds, a new political history of how the radical right used abortion to gain power and hijak the Republican Party.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Shaping Narrative, Shifting Power: Interviews with Organizers
We asked veteran organizers how their work transforms public narrative. They told us stories that demonstrate the power of narrative to shape the way we make sense of the world and the possibilities for changing it.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Challenging Neoliberalism by Building Power for Tax Reform
Challenging the power structure and the assumptions of capitalism requires building a movement with millions of people. We can only do that if we transform the dominant worldview.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Editor’s Note
Narrative is not a communications strategy to be layered on top of organizing campaigns but fundamental to the work we do as organizers: expanding people’s sense of possibility, agency, and power to create change.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Safety Depends on Everyone Believing They Have a Future
Why we must move beyond “welfare queens” and “superpredators” to narratives that create opportunities for all of us.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Fighting for Retail Workers’ Rights Means Revealing the Lies of Racial Capitalism
Retail corporations tell powerful narratives about the irresistible forces of economic and technological change to obscure the impact of their focus on short-term profits — often at the expense of workers. Winning campaigns with retail workers requires changing those narratives.
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Ricardo Levins Morales “Love is Love” and Other Stories: The Role of Narrative in Winning the Freedom To Marry
To win the freedom to marry for gays and lesbians, we didn’t need new arguments. We didn’t need to find new rights. We needed to transform the hearts and minds of the public.
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Ricardo Levins Morales Putting the Nails in Neoliberalism’s Coffin
"This is going to be the decade of Reconstruction if we can organize well."
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Ricardo Levins Morales Pulling Back the Curtain to Reveal What’s Possible
Most people operate under a set of competing narratives. Our job is to bring their most progressive understanding of the world to the fore.