![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Doing stuff with other people
Nov. 27th, 2023 03:46 pmFull disclosure: I went into Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care almost not wanting to like it, since it’s been praised to the skies and I get concerned about people just reading whatever they want into things. On the other hand, this particular type of burnout–suspicious, reading everything through a filter of “how resistant is this to co-optation by the most self-absorbed people in the world” (even though bad actors can co-opt anything), generally dour about my fellow leftists–is exactly the sort of thing I need some way to heal from, so I figured it was worth a shot to see what they had to say.
Hayes and Kaba go to great lengths to ensure this book is not just a litany of “how not to be” advice but let’s face it, there are a lot of potential pitfalls in organizing and a lot of ways that good organizers should not be. Advice on taking care of ourselves and each other, constructive (and not constructive) ways to onboard newbies, how to think strategically (and why it’s so important), the limitations of both traditional and social media, navigating hot-button rhetoric around “violence” and other buzzwords, the importance of political education and emotional processing… it’s a wide-ranging category of topics but it all comes down to being solid advice on how to safely and sustainably do organizing. Hayes and Kaba gently and compassionately insist that “organizing” means organizing, and not just any old shit you do to tell yourself that you are Making The World A Better Place. Honestly, one of the main strengths of this book is that Hayes and Kaba clearly have a lot of experience gently and compassionately telling people stuff they might not always want to hear, like “sometimes one thing really is more effective than another thing” or “here is some information you may not have previously considered” or even “the behavior you engaged in harmed someone else and you are not the sole wronged party in this situation.”
The timing of this read was interesting for me personally because I read it as an immediate precursor to Vince Bevins’ If We Burn, which covers mass protests from 2010 to 2020, and I think it’s useful to see how the advice in the two books compare. I think they dovetail fairly nicely, even though the Bevins book is focused mainly on one type of action and Let This Radicalize You is careful to survey a wide range of types of actions (lesson: you gotta have more than one tool in your toolbox).
It is very likely I won’t end up rereading this because I’m not nearly as good at rereading things as I ought to be, but I am nonetheless glad that I bought a copy of this instead of getting it from the library because I ought to reread it and I ought to be able to lend it out to other people. We’ll see how that goes.
Hayes and Kaba go to great lengths to ensure this book is not just a litany of “how not to be” advice but let’s face it, there are a lot of potential pitfalls in organizing and a lot of ways that good organizers should not be. Advice on taking care of ourselves and each other, constructive (and not constructive) ways to onboard newbies, how to think strategically (and why it’s so important), the limitations of both traditional and social media, navigating hot-button rhetoric around “violence” and other buzzwords, the importance of political education and emotional processing… it’s a wide-ranging category of topics but it all comes down to being solid advice on how to safely and sustainably do organizing. Hayes and Kaba gently and compassionately insist that “organizing” means organizing, and not just any old shit you do to tell yourself that you are Making The World A Better Place. Honestly, one of the main strengths of this book is that Hayes and Kaba clearly have a lot of experience gently and compassionately telling people stuff they might not always want to hear, like “sometimes one thing really is more effective than another thing” or “here is some information you may not have previously considered” or even “the behavior you engaged in harmed someone else and you are not the sole wronged party in this situation.”
The timing of this read was interesting for me personally because I read it as an immediate precursor to Vince Bevins’ If We Burn, which covers mass protests from 2010 to 2020, and I think it’s useful to see how the advice in the two books compare. I think they dovetail fairly nicely, even though the Bevins book is focused mainly on one type of action and Let This Radicalize You is careful to survey a wide range of types of actions (lesson: you gotta have more than one tool in your toolbox).
It is very likely I won’t end up rereading this because I’m not nearly as good at rereading things as I ought to be, but I am nonetheless glad that I bought a copy of this instead of getting it from the library because I ought to reread it and I ought to be able to lend it out to other people. We’ll see how that goes.