Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable NUMBER!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fall’n on you:
YE ARE MANY—THEY ARE FEW.
—Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Masque of Anarchy: A Poem”

More than once those who have the least defenses against the violence of the powerful have dared to defy that power, dared to confront that violence, with their own. And, more than once, those with the most meager resources to resist oppression have won something important, as the result of that confrontation. And in every instance, it has never been who is the leader but rather who are the people. It has never been what is the organization but what is the crisis.
—June Jordan, Some of Us Did NOT Die

It is Shelley’s anguish, written in the aftermath of the massacre of demonstrators calling for reforms at Peterloo in 1819. It is Jordan’s amazement, reflecting on the spontaneous riots in Miami upon Arthur McDuffie’s death at the hands of police officers in 1980 (as with 1968, Rodney King, Oscar Grant…). Then, as now, the commoners are rising after slumber against the chains that bond them. Occupy Movement is “incoherent,” goes the oft-repeated critique. A multitude of screams against seemly endless injustices, channeled into specific sites of intensity that overwhelm as much as inspire: this is incoherence at its most brilliant, struggle at its most creative and open. It is the nascent struggle—the lion stretching its form in a full-bodied yawn, testing its power, scanning the horizon.

In the wake of a still-emerging struggle, we in the Team Colors Collective want to offer some context, questions, and critical points that we hope will be useful. But we do so out of the recognition that this struggle is still very young; that it continues to draw in more voices and conversations, of which ours is but one small addition; and that those on the ground are feeling both exhilaration and exhaustion.  So we offer these words in the spirit of careful reflection, of constant listening, of humility, of gentleness. Chris Carlsson, in our book Uses of a Whirlwind, calls it “radical patience”: a strong sense of history, a slow-burning resistance that takes many forms, an orientation to the long haul as much as the here-and-now of awakening.

After Slumber: Crisis and Resistance

Much has been made of how 2011 has offered up a “perfect storm” of conditions for revolt: the untenable impositions of austerity and debt, the obvious fallacy of change through electoral politics, crises along multiple dimensions. But the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, the “indignant” struggles in Europe, the student uprisings in Chile, and the now-exploding occupations of major cities cannot be explained through “perfect conditions,” nor solely understood as spontaneous struggle. They have emerged out of everyday resistances and frustrations, organized in a myriad of forms. We can return to this dynamic, if only because the occupations are sparking interest and conversations in new and startling places, of which self-identified radicals constitute only a small part.

Here in the US, we would do well to draw in histories of struggle that inform what we see today: the direct actions of AIDS activism and queer organizing in the 1980s, the movements of the urban homeless, the unions that refused co-optation, the inspiring work of environmental justice and ecological defense organizing. Connecting with contemporary struggles amplifies the occupied movement: the prisoners’ hunger strikes in California, wins resulting from domestic worker organizing, struggles in the universities. Its useful to remember that none of these struggles emerged fully-formed; they were messy from the outset and continued to engage with the messiness, shifting and re-making themselves in the wake of failures and difficulties. The messiness at the occupation sites, of the Occupy movement in its multitudinous forms, is thus no cause for alarm; what matters more is how it is engaged, through “radical patience,” and reaching out through concentric circles of activity and to other nodes of struggle.

The Many, the Few: Towards a Critical Conversation

“We are the 99%” finds its reflection in “Ye are many.”  While “the few,” the 1%, is a good starting point for articulating the stark inequities of power and wealth throughout the world, the risk is in making it the endpoint as well.  “The people” making up this 99% (and in its opposing 1%) are not easy to describe, but exploring these complexities is central to the movements’ ongoing conversation.  A few thoughts.
The 99% and the 1% are not just opposed but related within a social system.  The configurations of state and capital are not only crucial to maintaining inequity, but also defusing resistance. The 99% in practice is difficult to comprehend, as it is used in different ways. It is at once an illustration of Marx’s notion of a class in itself—a sack of potatoes sitting dormant for statisticians pecking. In others, it is used to mean the class for itself, the class in struggle—are 99% objectively, but you are against 99% when you abuse us, when you assault us.

The 99% includes not only the police that have beaten and repressed those at the occupation sitesand elsewhere, but also service providers that arbitrarily deny access to the most basic of needs and assistance, parents who punish gender non-conforming children, psychiatrists who abuse patients, and prison wardens and judges who maintain the smooth functioning of the criminal justice system, amongst many other functionaries.

There are nuances among the 99% such as unwaged work, which reproduces community and social relations (most of which is done by women); or social wages such as healthcare benefits (not available to many undocumented workers and precarious laborers) and the use of public commons (which are rare in the suburbs, where the majority of the US population now lives); or in the “wages of whiteness” and other benefits along lines of race, gender, sexuality, and ability. These differences are brought to bear at the occupations—where the sick, the imprisoned, the precariously employed, the survivors of trauma, the undocumented, the elderly, and children may not be as “active.”

Emergence: Sowing Radical Currents into Storms

Until recently, our collective was dialoguing with others around the questions of impasse, of a distinctive “stuckness” that seemed to pervade movements in the Unites States since the end of the alter-globalization cycle of confrontational protests a decade ago. Perhaps the “stuckness” is lifting; in fact, people might be more ready than we think, raring at the bit to generate powerful storms of activity that re-make the terrain of organizing.

What does seem certain is that something has to give. There are strong positions that could close-off organizing potential: relentless insistence on nonviolence, to the point of refusing self-defense; a settling into pre-figurative world-making in the space of the occupation, at the expense of necessary pushes towards confrontation; a bend towards symbolic reclamation rather than more disruptive direct action that pushes “occupation” into new territory. There appears to be greater emphasis on media attention and memes, and less on the relationships we have, the new ones we’re building, how we are changing through. There seems to be a stronger focus on the general assemblies (whose practices of radical democracy are still messy) and less on practices of listening, sharing of personal stories, harm reduction, and activities that center support and care.

A genuine opening-up of this struggle is already pushing back against these tendencies. Caucuses of women of color and queer folks are changing the conversations on the ground; through their own resistances, the organizing is shifting. We encourage greater energy to these forms of opening-up. We’ve discussed in our pamphlet Winds from Below the many tools at our disposal, such as inquiry, encounter, and dialog; in the space of the occupations, these can take the form of local organizing in nearby neighborhoods, churches, community centers, and street corners; community dialogs and interventions; or meetings with organizers in other historic and ongoing struggles. These activities can find a more solid grounding beyond financial instruments or electoral politicking: they can return to the stories of our everyday lives, the commonalities that resonate amongst each other—perhaps these can form the brunt of the general assemblies, both within and outside of the spaces of occupation. Such organizing recognizes people where they are, rather than where we would like them to be; it creates and reproduces autonomous self-activity that sustains us, but also pushes towards its own limits; it draws from the resources and activity of nonprofits, academic institutions, and longstanding community organizations, while consciously and radically extending beyond the confines that come with them.

Like lions after slumber, we are emerging, in ways that shout the possibility of new subjectivities and new worlds. The struggle did not begin with Occupy Wall Street; nor will it end there; and throughout its radically patient arc, it will continue to course through our everyday lives and resistances, our practices of care and support, our reaches towards the limits places upon us. We in Team Colors are excited to be part of the conversations and circulations; may they blossom in unvanquishable number.

Team Colors is a geographically-dispersed militant research collective. Together, they are the editors of the collection Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporay Radical Social Currents in the United States (AK Press, 2010).

Team Colors is pleased to announce that multiple reviews of both Uses of a Whirlwind and Wind(s) from below have been published recently.  These are listed below and if you are interested in reviewing either of our titles get in touch with the collective.

• NEW — Whirlwinds & Winds from below: “Reaping the Whirlwind: Recomposing Working Class Power in the U.S.” by Robert Ovetz (Working U.S.A. Vol. 14, Issue 2. June 2011)
• NEW — Whirlwinds: “Writing Resistance: Team Colors Collective’s Uses of a Whirlwind and A.K. Thompson’s Black Block, White Riot” by Geoff Bylinkin (Perspectives. Vol. 13, No. 1. Fall 2011).
• Whirlwinds: “Book Review” by Jack Aponte (Make/Shift Magazine. Issue #9, Spring/Summer 2011)
• Whirlwinds: “Book Reviews – Activism” by Cindy Crabb (Doris Zine Blog Spring 2011)
• Wind(s) from below: “Book Review” by Ernesto Aguilar (dotrad: notes on insurgent digital culture Winter 2011)
• Whirlwinds: “Radical Thoughts for the Time Between” by Billy Wharton (WIN / War Resisters League Fall 2010)
• Wind(s) from below: Left Commentator Ernest Aguilar reviews Wind(s) from below (Blog Post, 25 October 2010)
• Whirlwinds: “Uses of a Whirlwind Says Student Activism Isn’t Dead” by Jessica Newman, includes interview with Stevie Peace of Team Colors (Campus Progress, 27 September 2010)
• Whirlwinds: Review of Uses of a Whirlwind by Judas Lee, includes interview with Team Colors (The Defenestrator, Fall 2010)

Media

• Interview on Labor Radio (KBOO Radio, Portland, OR; Summer 2010)
• Interview with the Team Colors Collective by Microcosm Publishing (Summer 2010)
• Philadelphia Book Talk with Craig Hughes & Stevie Peace of Team Colors (at The Wooden Shoe)
• New World From Below Collaborative Book Party at the USSF with Stevie Peace of Team Colors speaking about Whirlwinds and Kevin Van Meter of Team Colors as MC.
• Baltimore Book Talk with Craig Hughes of Team Colors (at Red Emma’s)

In a way it is even humiliating to watch coal-miners working.  It raises in you a momentary doubt about your own status as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior person generally.  For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.  You and I and the editor of the Times Lit. Supp., […] and Comrade X, author of Marxism for Infants – all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to the poor drudges underground, blacked to the eyes, with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.

-       George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier

In the first three months of 1936, George Orwell was dispatched to the grey industrial towns of Northern England by the Left Book Club, a similar initiative to the subscription services currently offered by many radical publishers.  His task was to document the conditions of the working class, the content of their lives and contours of their struggles.  Wigan Pier had ceased to exist in fading memories and many people he encountered in the region seemed unable to remember precisely where it stood.  What they were clear about was their position within the capitalist system and their relation to ‘intellectuals’ and socialism, Orwell’s movement of the time; this comes across in the richness of the portrayal.

Orwell’s quote points us to the need to undertake exploratory and descriptive accounts of life under capitalism and the state currently, as well as question how one documents the content of our lives and contours of our struggles, broadly defined. Far too many recent accounts are little more then abstract academic white-papers, or irrelevant ideological duels, or worse, activist trysts that only see like-minded activity as valid and worthwhile.

Hence Team Colors, along with our contributors and comrades, began an inquiry with the purpose of mapping a number of radical currents that we hoped would assist organizers to move through contemporary movement stagnation. We sought to form a collection that would provide a set of arguments and positions rather than simply taking a pulse; something focused, readable, and challenging, but that would avoid being ideologically partisan or another ‘introduction’ to radical politics. We wanted something that would be used by radical social movements in a time of crisis.

Kate Khatib, our editor, and the rest of AK Press supported us in presenting this project in the form of Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States.  Our concern both initially and since the launch of the book last year was to provide a document that would be useful; our political purpose was to provide an opportunity to begin the arduous task of starting the motor of radical community organizing.  At this one-year anniversary of the book’s release, it seems worthwhile to discuss the importance of movement research, some of its limitations, and a few of the reviews the book has received.

Team Colors and many of our comrades wondered, and continue to wonder, what the contours of struggle are at the present moment.  It was in this spirit that we began to inquire into the current composition of struggles in the United States.  Of course, we only touched on a few organized initiatives.  The collective didn’t dispatch writers in the same sense that the Left Book Club dispatched Orwell, though such a notion seems to be both distant from and immanently possible for our politics today.  Instead we asked organizers, artists, activists, theorists, and historians to write from their own position and experience.  The results were a partial mapping of current organizational initiatives in the anarchist and anti-authoritarian sphere.

Whirlwinds captured movement developments in the United States at a particular juncture – the late summer and early fall of 2009, and prior – hence a number of important current struggles did not find their way into the collection.  Since this period, we have witnessed the emergence of student occupation movements and an ongoing fight around ethnic studies education in Tucson, Arizona; union resurgence in Wisconsin; the IWW organizing in the food service industry, expanding from a coffee chain to a fast food chain; strong anti-police marches on the West Coast and a historic prison strike in Georgia, which has just this week erupted in California; and important community organizing by Vietnamese fisherfolk and other Gulf Coast residents in the wake of both human-caused and natural disasters – just to point to a few.  It is important to see these neither as terrific mobilizations or crushing losses – as some have characterized them – but rather points in a larger trajectory of struggle where intervention by radical forces would mean different outcomes.

An admitted limitation of our project is that we only asked organizers in established initiatives to speak, while the voices that are emerging and just beginning to resonate with one another – here pointing toward organizing to come – were not included.  One must ask, while struggles may resonate with one another, what happens to their unarticulated precursors?  Or more importantly with a project such as this: do those who read the text see themselves reflected in it?  Whirlwinds provides the opportunity for other self-identified radicals and organizers to see themselves within projects described.

Taking the spirit of The Road to Wigan Pier, a popular title during its time, points us to other resonances – those that take place in everyday life, in the conditions and fabrics that construct it and give it meaning.  What would such interventions look like currently?  What mechanisms and initiatives can we create to bring this work into being?  How can we document these new winds from below so that they circulate beyond our current valleys and strongholds?

We should have doubts about our own intellectual quality and superiority as revolutionaries, when it seems that so often we are only chasing our own shadows.  Orwell speaks to a momentary opportunity to see a reflection in someone else that we didn’t know was there before – what Team Colors refers to as becoming-other – and this is the seed of a relationship, the precondition for solidarity and mutual aid, and of course a revolutionary movement.

When anarchists and other anti-authoritarians see themselves as part of a larger continuum of working-class intellectualism we avoid the pitfalls of superiority that Orwell is talking about.  Emma Goldman, Carlo Tresca and the IWW, Marty Glaberman,  League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Black and Grey Panthers, Jane, ACT UP (the list could be expanded tenfold) – all are part of this history.  We raise this history as a bulwark against the anti-intellectualism that seems to be pervasive in our current movements, as well as the idea that Whirlwinds is too difficult or too academic.

We take Karl Marx seriously when he said: “I presuppose, of course, a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for [themself]”.  The complexities of life and struggle aren’t easy and cannot fit into simple slogans and explanations.  Part of the critique against academic work is certainly valid – the professionalization and enclosure of knowledge, reinforcement of class distinctions, and use of specialist language – but who are these readers that radicals are looking to defend against difficult material?  Is it some imaginary Other, the unconvinced and unenlightened?  Or is it simply themselves?  Regardless of the reason given, we believe this critique has more to do with the fear of organizing outside of our own circles then any actual trouble people may have with difficult reading.  Here, and in future endeavors, our goal is to create work and moments where the readership can see themselves reflected in it.

Anti-intellectual discourses within radical movements limit the intellectual development of its adherents as well as prevent those from outside the self-identified radical subculture from participating in what could be an opportunity for self-education and personal development.  Recently, during a talk for Oppose and Propose!, author Andy Cornell related an interview he had with a former participate in Movement for a New Society (MNS), the subject of his book.  This former member relayed how the organization was created by white, middle-class activists who were rebelling against the dominant culture and how this subcultural content defined the organization’s work.  But since people of color, working class and poor people, indigenous and immigrant people, and others all have a different relationship with – and hence rebellion against – the dominant culture, the work of MNS and its own organizational culture was immensely alienating to these populations.  We would argue this problem – and the off-putting nature of subcultural rebellion – is not only prevalent in current radical movements, but that it is far more damaging than difficult reading material.

This reflection by a former member of MNS raises another point that repeatedly arose in the Whirlwinds project, namely the quality and honesty in giving an account of one’s own activities.  While the account above is self-critical and speaks to the limitations of particular approaches, current radicals seem to be infected by the discourses that dominate the left, trade union movement and non-profit industry.  These approaches often provide a press-release version of their own organizing: they never discuss limitations and impasses, rarely admit defeat, or talk about how their organizing work functions within particular geographic, class, and other boundaries.  A number of individuals and organizations we spoke to stated that from beginning to end they have never made a misstep or strategic error.  Anyone that has been involved in actual organizing knows this has to be far from the truth.  We are certainly not calling for a generalized “shit talking” of others’ work, or our own, but rather the need to challenge how we research and present current organizing.  For instance, a survey created for and distributed by a local infoshop can illuminate who utilizes the space, who doesn’t, and why they don’t, which allows the project to connect with various communities and networks in our neighborhoods.  This research gives the infoshop organizers and the community it serves the opportunity for an honest portrayal, as well as the development of strategies to address impasses, limitations, and successes of the project.  A survey is just one simple way of moving toward more useful assessments of how our work functions.

This is one strategy for initiatives to produce knowledge while expanding the base and density of relationships.  Additional strategies include hosting ongoing community dialogs, community inventories and map making, interventionist and participatory art projects, local history events, regular cross-cultural potlucks, issue-specific speak-outs, oral history projects, and co-research endeavors, among various others.

* * *

Team Colors takes the position that “struggle is never inevitable nor automatic”. Struggle requires an honest assessment of the current relations of power and of the composition of the working class; it requires research and feedback loops on the strengths and weakness of movement strategies; it requires radical community organizing that is grounded in our own everyday lives as they are rather than as we wish them to be; and it will require relationships that are built beyond the boundaries of our current movements.  The future of the revolution can be found, partially, in movement research that will include projects such as Whirlwinds and those in the spirit of Wigan Pier.

We offer Uses of a Whirlwind as a document to be used by and useful for those in radical movements. Its limitations and omissions are simply opportunities for future research.  Some years ago Harry Cleaver, autonomist Marxist and author, stated to us that “working people are too busy making history to document history”.  It is our task as revolutionaries to do both.

Stevie Peace & Kevin Van Meter for the Team Colors Collective

July 2011

As we wrote these words in the fall of 2009, there were a number of clouds on the horizon and the winds began to speak to us. Currently there are storms raging and new storms gathering. Team Colors created Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States not just to inquire into currents in the United States, but with the sincere hope that an array of social forces would utilize the lessons contained therein toward launching their own initiatives. In June of 2010 Team Colors and AK Press launched the collection at – and some might say into – the US Social Forum in Detroit, and since this time both the text itself and collective members have been circulating the country.

At this important juncture, and to celebrate the 1-year anniversary of the collection’s release, we want to offer the collection as one of many tools to inform current struggles.

Toward this end, and in addition to Whirlwinds, Team Colors published the companion volume Wind(s) from Below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible. Both books have found their way into radical bookshops, study groups, class rooms, and community spaces as well as the arms of radicals across the United States, and both books are now available in the UK and Europe for radicals looking to understand current movements here.

Special 1-Year Anniversary Offer

To mark the anniversary of the collection’s release, we are running a special promotion: starting on May Day, the first twenty-five individuals to order Uses of a Whirlwind from AK Press will receive a free copy of Wind(s) from below AND a Whirlwinds poster, printed by Eberhardt Press and designed by Justseeds.

To take advantage of this offer you can place your order, on or after May 1, here.

Offer good through June 1, or while supplies last.

Team Colors is quite pleased to announce that both Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States and Winds from below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible are available for sale and wholesale distribution to colleagues and comrades in the UK and across Europe!

Many thanks to AKUK for distributing Uses of a Whirlwind and to Drew at Natterjack Press for all his work with Winds from below.  Individual copies as well as  press and wholesale information is below.

Uses of a Whirlwind – Currently Available

• Pickup a copy from AK Press UK.
• One-sheet for Press & Wholesale Copies.

Winds from below – Available for Pre-sale / 1 June 2011 Book Release

• Pickup a copy from Natterjack Press.
• One-sheet for Press & Wholesale Copies.

Building Healthy Communities, Building Healthy Movements: An Interview with the Rock Dove Collective, by Ben Holtzman and Kevin Van Meter (Organizing Upgrade, Winter 2011).

The Rock Dove Collective is a radical community health exchange in New York City working to address the need for accessible and anti-oppressive health care in our communities. We are excited to share this interview (done by Ben Holtzman with Kevin Van Meter) as a contribution to the ongoing dialogues about healing justice.

Points of Resistance and Departure: An Interview with James C. Scott, by Ben Holtzman and Craig Hughes (Upping the Anti, Fall 2010, Issue #11)

James C. Scott is among the foremost experts on the struggles of subaltern people in Southeast Asia and throughout the world. He is the Sterling Professor of Political Science and Professor of Anthropology as well as the Director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University. Scott’s books have included The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia(1977); Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance(1987); Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts(1992); Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Better the Human Condition Have Failed(1999); and The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009). In this interview, Scott discusses his own political development, elaborates on some of the major contributions of his work, and offers significant insights into understanding the intricacies of recent worldwide struggles. This interview was conducted in New Haven, Connecticut by Benjamin Holtzman and Craig Hughes in July 2010.