Accountability in Organizing
...or lack therof
Often folks find themselves turning to political and movement organizing when they are watching their fellow humans being brutalized by the police and injustices. Before it was what the mainstream media decided to report on but now in the days of social media, we are flooded, if not overflooded, with the trauma of empire and the colonial settler projects genociding, ecociding and the death of our world, the animals and humanity every single day.
Organizing tends to have a bright eyed, rose colored glasses perspective when one begins their activism. Organizing in the 60’s and 70’s was taught to us to be this powerful tool to shift the spectrum of politics, culture and society left, to a world that wants to take care of each other, the planet and all the living beings here. You expect to find not just comrades, but friendships and even potentially family, I mean you are risking everything and possible arrest together, wouldn’t a strong connection, trust and a bond matter?
But then the reality sets in. Its another recapitulation of empire, of the exact thing that we are supposed to be fighting against and working towards abolishing. All the words of liberation, the study around the abolitionism, social justice, the history, the politics, all it goes into the trash the moment conflict and rupture is introduced into the organizing scene. The mask is revealed that underneath the charismatic leaders and the political language is just the same cult like vibes that you experience in the non profit setting. If you comply and are obedient and don’t talk about the harm and the violence, then you’re in, but if you start addressing it or standing up for yourself, you’re out.
Solidarity is also never actually unconditional in these spaces. Solidarity and resources can be given and taken away just as capitalism and the carceral punitive system of mass incarceration does to those who awaken to the compliance and obedience demanded of us every day while existing and trying to survive with the modernity’s matrix. That the fight for inclusion was just to have a different master with a different identity driving the slave ship, but at the end of it all, at the end of identity politics, its still the same ship, just with a BIPOC and/or queer master controlling who gets resources and who doesn’t.
Harm and trauma is dished out just as much as in the colonizer world, if not more, because vulnerable people think they can bond and be vulnerable with each other in these spaces. They’re sold that this is a “safe” space because people have identities or claim identities that are considered “marginalized” and “oppressed” in some way. But quickly folks realize that that these oppressed identities are weaponized in a fashion that recreates the power over, domination dynamics that squeeze the breath and the spirit out of the chase for liberation. That we become the cogs of the machine of empire because we aren’t really building praxis, but instead are reacting and getting our dopamine hits from the amount of likes our “protest” gets on social media.
Social media has transformed the way our movements move, mobilize, organize and take action. The social media social justice culture is a breeding ground for narcissistic personalities to get the masses’ attentions while sensationalizing situations and being in the repost of the repost of the repost circle jerk that gets you engagement.
The social justice social media influencer dominates over the revolutionary leader of the 1960s/70s. Instead of thoughtful, well written and intentional speeches that have become studied by students of the movements for decades, we have talking heads just spewing their thoughts out in 90 second TikToks and reels and being seen as “heroes” for showing up to protests just to capture content and leave. The social justice social media influencer tends to only organize smear campaigns against comrades that they have fedjacketed with no founding proof, removing any resources, support or sharing of other people’s work, effectively gatekeeping who and what gets shared, just like the mainstream media that is controlled by the Amerikkka settler colonial state.
Identity politics has also been a breeding ground for the oppression olympics and another way to recapitulate the “power over” dynamics that the colonizer has instilled in us through neurocolonization and the domination of our neural transmitters. We identify the power of self and of humanity to have supremacy, that because I am this, that I have this power and that makes me better and more supreme than you.
At the end of the day, organizing spaces are not and have not been spaces of liberation or the actual space of practice of prefigurative politics. Neurocolonization and the lack of praxis focus of self actualization (bell hooks) and conscientização (Paul Friere), and development of our minds, spirits, bodies and nervous systems, have led to more trauma and to the point where activist and movement work is always futile and ends up failing.
For those of us who are serious about collective liberation (who I call Liberationists, moving away from “activists”), we must ask ourselves how can we slow down and dig deeper and shift from what Vanessa Machado de Oliveria calls, “unrestricted autonomy” to “accountable autonomy”, from what am shifting my lexicon from “community building” to “village building”, where we are able to do the work and build a somatic praxis in which we can sit in the heat and look at our shit long enough to be able to sit in the fact that we are inevitable to cause harm, irregardless of our identities, oppression, trauma, privileges and all the things that colonization has compartamentalized to make us individual and separate? And when that harm happens, how can we hold each other so the one or the folks causing the harm can acknowledge it, own it, feel authentic and radical remorse, build praxis and try to do better next time to reduce the harm?
How can we hold folks accountable that have the most marginalized identities and the intergenerational trauma while they express harm from a distorted and disregulated nervous system? How can we be trauma-informed but yet not allow the trauma to excuse harmful and abusive behavior? What does this culture look like? What does this methodology and infrastructure look, feel, and taste like?
Our movements and our organizing spaces are broken and fractured. They are not spaces in which people can actually flourish enough for potent and magnificent energy of liberation to take hold and expand and breathe so that the global majority can come together, out organize fascism and make a world worth living for our children, their children and 7 generations and beyond to belong and to thrive.
Humanity is at a precipice. We have been shown the death cult bourgeoisie’s poison path of mass surveillance, child sacrifice and trafficking, pedophilia and hoarding of the earth’s abundance. And right now the global majority is fractured because we are harming each other with such egregious lateral violence and have been the oppressed who have become our own oppressors, to our selves and to others, that fascists don’t have to do much to fucking takeover.
So what is the solution?? Somatic praxis centering accountable autonomy. We are accountable to not just our Ancestors, the spirits and Creator (if you believe in that), but to the plants, the waters, the elements, the animals, and to each other. To the earth. We have to expand and widen our capacity and our states of our nervous systems so we can be humble and have humility and admit when are wrong and when we harm each other. That no one is exempt from harm. That we have all contributed to the settler colonial paradigm that has genocided Indigenous Black and brown and queer people for 500 and more years.
And as someone who has struggled with this and still have to learn this, we have to take that trauma, that poison, and alchemize it, transform our bodies to be able to hold a societal, ecological collapse and work for our children to have the trees we plant now, the food systems we grow now, and the new, yet ancient, ways of life that our DNA is begging for us to unwind that exist within each and every one us. The Ancestors are begging for the 4 races of the Medicine Wheel to come together, to acknowledge the harm, to own it, to feel deep remorse, and for us to build a praxis where we are responsible and accountable to each other and to the kingdoms of this goddamn beautiful planet and to Pachamama.
Will we choose the Collective Medicine Path? Or will we keep forging and drinking the poison until this entire planet is gone? Until we are gone?
Only time will tell.