Moving Bodies and Moving Minds
Integrating Research, Education and Action in Movements for Social Change
This post is inspired by a presentation I gave in a webinar on “Stopping Trump’s War Machine: Boosting Movement Strategies,” sponsored by the Dismantling the Military-Industrial Complex network. A video of the webinar is here, and Dismantling the MIC’s website is here.
I was honored to be on the panel with two remarkable organizers on the front lines of the fight against militarism: Brittany Ramos DeBarros of the anti-war veterans group About Face, and Julian Aguon, a human rights lawyer and the founder of Blue Ocean Law, which works at the intersection of indigenous rights and social justice.
Brittany’s work at About Face is crucial to building a stronger movement for social change, in part because vets – those who have been in combat, not senior officers who go to work as lobbyists for the arms industry – can be the backbone of a renewed movement for peace and justice.
Jullian Aguon is working night and day against U.S. plans to further militarize Guam and the Pacific Island chain. He is the author of No Country for EIght-Spot Butterflies, which has been described as “part-memoir, part manifesto . . . a collection of essays on resistance, resilience and collective power in the age of climate disaster; and a call for justice – for everyone, but in particular, for indigenous peoples.”
Julian’s work could not be more crucial, or more urgent. Throughout the Pacific island chain, the U.S. military’s goal is to create launching pads for a potential war with China. The buildup on Guam is central to this larger plan. It poses severe risks to the residents of Guam in the event of a war, as Guam would likely be one of the first targets, given its large number of U.S. weapons and military facilities.
The U.S. military presence already occupies large quantities of scarce land in Guam and generates toxins that seep into the air and soil. The current expansion plan will only make matters worse. The U.S. is moving 5,000 Marines from Okinawa in Japan to Guam in response to the concerted, longstanding local protests against the U.S. base in Okinawa.
The U.S. is deepening Guam’s ports to accommodate larger ships, and building at least a half dozen missile defense sites around the island, which it treats as if it is a U.S. aircraft carrier.
Julian and his colleagues are fighting back against the U.S. plan to further militarize the island. Their struggle needs to be better known on the U.S. mainland, not just to progressives and the traditional peace movement, but to members of Congress, joined by anyone who believes in sovereignty, self-determination, human rights, and genuine democracy. The movement to reduce the U.S. military presence in Guam and promote sovereignty for the people of the island deserves our support.
For my contribution to the panel organized by Dismantling the Military-Industrial Complex, I reflected on the relationship between research, organizing and strategy, drawing on my own experiences and citing the experiences of others.
I am considered an expert on the military-industrial complex, and in some respects that may be true. But there are many forms of expertise and experience, and some of the most important expertise is possessed by people and organizations who are organizing against militarism – particularly those who have been on the receiving end of the war system, as direct or indirect victims of armed violence. Communities harmed by the indirect effects of war and preparations for war include people impacted by the long-term health effects of nuclear testing, by toxins left behind after military action, by war-induced starvation and disease (as has occurred in Gaza), and by punishing sanctions that too often do more to harm average people than to weaken repressive regimes.Their voices and their experiences should help guide us towards more effective strategies, and inspire long-term commitments to the fight for social justice.
I have been researching the military-industrial complex since my time in the South Africa divestment movement in the 1970s, when I was an undergraduate at Columbia University. A group of us did research on the university’s stock holdings in firms involved in propping up the apartheid regime. We generated a strong student movement, but it was left to a later round of student activists to finally force the university to divest in 1985. The university’s decision came a year before the 1986 action by the U.S. Congress to impose comprehensive sanctions on the apartheid regime, overcoming a veto attempt by Ronald Reagan. Eight years later, on May 10, 1994, Nelson Mandela took the helm as the first president of a free South Africa.
The student divestment movement was just one part of the successful effort to end apartheid, with primary credit going to the liberation movements within South Africa. But South African activists were appreciative of the level of global solidarity generated on their behalf, and the student movement helped spark and expand that network.
As for the role of research in the anti-apartheid movement, coordinating it with strategy was made easier by the fact that the impetus for isolating the apartheid regime, through an arms embargo and a robust global divestment campaign, came from the liberation movements in South Africa itself, including the African National Congress and the Black Consciousness Movement. These goals dictated what research was needed – from research on the portfolios of universities, to lists of companies involved in selling to the apartheid regime, to banks lending to South Africa, to firms that actually had facilities inside the apartheid state..
The student divestment movement and the research that fueled it was embedded in a global movement that included trade unionists, progressive churches, state and local officials, cultural workers, and sports figures.
The movement in the U.S. benefited from the participation of South African exiles like Jennifer Davis, who was the initial editor of Southern Africa magazine, a publication dedicated to covering and supporting the anti-apartheid movement and the liberation struggles throughout Southern Africa. Under Jennifer’s leadership and later that of Jim Cason, the magazine filled an important gap in media coverage of the U.S. and global anti-apartheid movements and the liberation struggles in Southern Africa. The magazine’s structure – run by a collective with one paid staffer, the editor – may be a model at a challenging time for raising funds for progressive organizations.
Another of many South African exiles who helped build the movement in the U.S. was the late Dumisani Kumalo, who served for a time as the field organizer for the American Committee on Africa, the hub of anti-apartheid organizing in the U.S. Dumisani went on to be the first UN representative of post-liberation South Africa.
My anti-apartheid work was squeezed in around my studies, and then around a series of jobs that had nothing to do with social change and everything to do with making a living while I figured out what to do with my life.. I only started writing full-time about the arms trade, Pentagon spending, nuclear policy and the economics of defense for a living in 1979, at age 24, when Abby Ross (then Gordon Adams) and David Gold hired me to work on a project called the Conversion Information Center, at the New York-based Council on Economic Priorities, an organization focused on corporate social responsibility and founded by Alice Tepper Marlin. Our mission was to do research that would help communities that depended on funding from the Pentagon to diversify their economies and create new jobs outside of the military industry.
One of my major research products of that period was a 1984 report on the potential economic benefits of a nuclear weapons freeze, developed in consultation with movement leaders like the labor leader and educator Gene Carroll, who was doing outreach for the Nuclear Freeze Campaign at the time. The jobs question loomed large in the debate over scaling back and reversing the nuclear buildup, so the report was largely dictated by the needs of the movement.
The work on what was called at the time “peace conversion” was sidetracked for a number of reasons. A major one was the Reagan military buildup, which led many community leaders to abandon efforts at conversion from military production and instead to compete for the new flood of arms contracts flowing from DC.
The problem of how to transition to a less militarized economy remains. The best analysis of how to move forward towards a more balanced economy that doesn’t need to throw a trillion dollars a year at the Pentagon to create jobs is my friend and colleague Miriam Pemberton’s book Six Stops on the National Security Tour: Rethinking Warfare Economies. Pemberton cites several promising initiatives, from a military contractor making propulsion systems for hybrid buses to a California consortium that included arms contractors that worked on developing electric vehicles. The missing element for sustaining these efforts for the long-term was adequate public investment. But the examples described in Pemberton’s book demonstrate that a transition from jobs based on making weapons to jobs in clean energy and sustainable development is possible given adequate government funding during the transition period.
Work on moving away from a militarized economy is continuing. The Transition Security Project, jointly launched by the UK-based organization Commonwealth and the U.S.-based Climate and Community Institute, is a promising new organization working to, in its own words, “produce research and analysis to support organising. We follow the money from defence ministries to the investors that own military contractors, analyse the greenhouse gas emissions and resource demands of military spending, and commission research on how US and UK military interventions threaten global safety and a stable climate transition.”
The project doesn’t leave it for research. It partners with organizations directly impacted by a militarized economy and working towards one that promotes human security over the “needs” of weapons corporations:
“Working alongside trade unions, grassroots movements and policymakers, we design alternatives from place-based proposals for military industrial conversion to security strategies that prioritise everyday, universal safety over the profits of military contractors.” [Disclosure: I am a fellow at the Transition Security Project, among other colleagues – a full list of staff and fellows of the project can be found at this web page.]
As I have mentioned before, one of the organizations that has done the best job of integrating research, organizing, and strategy is the Kairos Center, in its own work and as part of the Poor People’s Campaign, a joint effort with Repairers of the Breach. The Poor People’s Campaign: A Call for Moral Revival, is led by Rev. Liz Theoharis and Rev. William Barber, and it is inspired by the campaign that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. launched at the end of his life, before he was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
The new Poor People’s Campaign takes up the three key issues raised by Dr. King and the movement of that time – racism, poverty, and militarism – and it adds to contemporary challenges – environmental restoration and white Christian nationalism. A key premise for the campaign is that if the millions of people who are at or near poverty were more politically engaged – including going to the polls – we could transform this nation and create a government that seeks to meet the needs of all people. Their target audience is not a small group – roughly 140 million Americans are either poor or one emergency away from poverty. And the campaign firmly believes that the fight for social justice can and will be led by poor people themselves.
A key resource for understanding the way forward is the book by Liz Theoharis and Noam Sandweiss-Back, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lesson from the Movement to End Poverty, which includes descriptions of the work of groups like the National Union of the Homeless, which used to occupy unused properties and turn them into living spaces for people in need of housing, among other activities.
For me, a key part of the book was the section on the need to ground action in a continuous process of political education:
“WIthout a continual process of learning, reflecting, and growing intellectually our organizing is reduced to mobilizing, an exercise in moving bodies without supporting existing leaders and developing new ones. . . [M]obilizing people is important, but when it becomes our sole focus, we sacrifice long-term power for short-term action.”
Theoharis and Sandweiss-Back cite a similar point made by Martin Luther King, Jr. in his essay Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?:
“Education without action is a one-sided value because it has no true power potential. Social action without education is a weak expression of pure energy. . . Our policies should have the strength of deep analysis within them to be able to challenge the clever sophistries of our opponents.”
Dr. King wasn’t the only key figure in the civil rights movement of the 1960s to appreciate the need to combine research and education with action. Derek Seidman has done an incredibly useful essay on the research arm of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Seidman’s essay begins with a summary of the importance of SNCC to the larger movement:
“SNCC may have been the most important movement of the postwar civil rights movement. It grew out of the wave of sit-ins in 1960 and was guided originally by Ella Baker, the foundational organizer whose emphasis on bottom-up organizing and democracy deeply shaped SNCC’s vision and methods.
Its members were on the front lines of the struggle to dismantle Southern Jim Crow, organizing everything from the Freedom Rides to the Albany Movement to Mississippi Freedom Summer. SNCC members took the movement into the most dangerous areas of the deep South [and] worked to educate and empower ordinary people, and also register them to vote.”
The legacy of Ella Baker continues in the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, an Oakland-based organization that does training, educational work, research and advocacy with the goal of breaking “the cycle of divestment and incarceration in communities of color.” Information on supporting the center is here.
As Seidman points out, the fact that SNCC had a research department at all is little known by most activists today. In 1965, the department distributed a circular to members encouraging them to reach out to them for research that could be of use for the organization’s Freedom Schools, speaking tours, investigations into racial discrimination by businesses, and more.
Crucially, as Seidman notes, SNCC researchers were not separate from the rest of the organization:
“[R]esearch was not a top-down process in SNCC. Rather, organizers and researchers worked closely with each other as a larger, collective unit. Organizers shaped and did research, and researchers informed and participated in organizing. Everyone was in constant interaction with each other.”
Although at the moment there are many separate strands in the fight against war, militarism and repression, the idea of researchers working closely with organizers is extremely relevant at this moment. Given current circumstances, that will often mean researchers from one organization working with organizers from another group committed to the same goals and values – a sort of shadow network of researchers and organizers that is not limited by narrow organizational mandates.
For its part, the SNCC research department did all manner of projects large and small, including a pamphlet on “The Mississippi Power Structure,” which Seidman described as follows:
[The pamphlet] analyzed how big money — from cotton farms, northern capital, oil companies, electric power, and finance capital — was invested in the state and how it related to political power and class and racial hierarchies. The document also illustrated how white elites pitted poor whites against poor blacks in Mississippi so they could more easily exploit both groups.”
The research department also produced “A Chronology of Violence and Intimidation in Mississippi Since 1961, which documented incidents of white supremacist violence and police intimidation in the period prior to the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer.
There is much more to be learned from Seidman’s piece, and from sources he cites, like Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC.
I will talk more in a future post about an important report by Shailly Barnes and Jarvis Benson, A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis. The report looks at “the extraordinary networks of care that have sustained communities through the pandemic and beyond” and “reveals how survival organizing can transform into a powerful movement for systemic change. Indeed, as political extremism threatens democracy and economic inequality deepens, amid climate breakdown and escalating violence, this report challenges us to see beyond mere survival—to reclaim power, mobilize communities, and demand a just future for all.”
Much to think about and discuss . . .