Wind(s) from Below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible [review]

More than a few writers ask regularly, in the era of massive layoffs, foreclosures, bigotry and the widening gulf between rich and poor, why North America is seeing more right-wing populism in the form of the Tea Party movement than left-leaning activism. The answers for this are complicated. Not the least of these answers, the late Howard Zinn’s scholarship notwithstanding, is that America has had a far deeper, institutionally rooted, more militant and broad tradition of reactionary organizing.

Whether represented in Black disenfranchisement, state suppression of dissent or violence against those attacking socio-political/economic players, large numbers of people, particularly white Americans, have historically been on the side opposing protest of the current order. Power and privilege are the tradeoffs for such loyalty. In exchange, North America’s masses can sit comfortably at home as futures fade.

With this forecast, Wind(s) from Below: Radical Community Organizing to Make a Revolution Possible (Team Colors, 2010) by the Team Colors Collective seeks to make a case for progressivism in a land where free-market fanaticism and hijacked hope lead the day.

The smart pocket book clocks in at just over 100 pages, plus space for notes. In it, the authors present a brisk summation of the current economic and political climate. The analysis is cogent. As the public underestimated (or didn’t want to believe) Barack Obama’s predictions of the long road out of the Bush malady, desires for change made way for cynicism and suspicion. The political right succeeded in capitalizing and the political left was at points too compromised to respond appropriately. The result has been a spiral in which a backlash of U.S. masses to politicians and difference is contrasting with apathy in fighting those same forces ostensibly responsible for failures.

Though at points simplistic, Wind(s) from Below gets the basics on most topics generally correct. Oversights like talking about racism without fully exploring the role of transnational bourgeois classes are forgivable. Its real value is in presenting a vision for organizing opportunities.

Departures from an analysis that features points you may have read before, including the costs of non-profit mediation of oppression and the need for neighborhood organizing, include a focus on healthcare issues as a political dividing line. Reproductive justice and elderly care get special attention. Team Colors deserves much praise and credit for creatively looking at the world and openings for organizing people and ideas.

How to apply teachings through effective community organizing is likewise an engrossing section. In this particular light, organizing must shed self-imposed limitations, including activist self-identification and failure to reproduce a rich political culture, and connect with diverse spaces, home and work, urban, rural and suburban. However, Wind(s) from Below feels contradictory at times and opens up as many questions as it answers. Perhaps that is as it should be. As the authors note, community organizing is a process and must avoid the doctrinaire. Yet it is those nagging questions — the investment in Empire that has been so much a part of the history of those politically aware types are encouraged to organize and learn with — that are sure to be truly worth further soul searching.

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