zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric

Friday, October 18, 2002

SHALL WE STARVE THE MOVEMENT?
The San Francisco Weekly Says Yes

It’s a rare article in the corporate media—even the corporate "alternative" weekly media—that takes visionary radical youth work with more than a grain of salt. More often than not, today’s young social justice leaders are treated with more ironic eyebrow-raising than genuine respect. Take Peter Byrne’s hit-piece in the San Francisco Weekly this past week on School of Unity and Liberation (SOUL), a nonprofit group of under-thirtysomethings based out of West Oakland’s Mandela Village who train hip-hop generation youths to build a movement.

SOUL functions with a simple premise: to raise hell effectively, you not only need to organize your rallies, you need to organize yourselves. In this day and age, that means not only developing cutting-edge skills and issue-frames, it means keeping your organization funded and your staff stable. Environmentalists have a term for this: sustainability. History is littered with the corpses of well-meaning organizations that ran out of dough.

Byrne takes SOUL’s need to sustain progressive work through fund-raising as "a contradiction". He writes, "A score of gold-plated, capitalist foundations regularly pump large sums of money into Mandela Village, even though SOUL promotes anti-capitalist ideas—including the redistribution of the world’s wealth to the poor—that, if made real, would mean the end of private property, not to mention philanthropic foundations."

Instead, Byrne sides with SOUL’s critics, whom he tellingly describes as "old-timers who are wary of those who feast from the hands they are supposed to bite." These baby boomers finger-wag at SOUL’s apparently money-grubbing revolutionaries. One old hippie compares the women activists to "poverty pimps". But while 60s poverty pimps paid for fur coats and high-heeled shoes with government subsidies, SOUL schoolers might be happy to get free promotional T-shirts from their favorite major-label conscious-rap artists. Byrne’s article is utterly devoid of context. It’s easy to take cheap shots when you conveniently leave out 30 years of corporate globalization, governmental disinvestment and civic disengagement.

But Byrne is not merely a fallen liberal nostalgic for the supposedly radical 60s. He’s out to discredit these hip-hop generation rebels, P.J. O’ Rourke style, by trotting out the old tropes geezers used to use to delegitimize the long-haired rebels of the 60s and glazing them with a thick coat of irony. Tropes like:

*Activists are merely confused, guilt-ridden kids working out issues of family and authority on someone else’s time and dime. After detailing each of the SOUL sisters’ personal stories—often marked by tragedy and family strife—he notes that SOUL pays its staff salaries and offers them health benefits and paid sick leave. Horrors! That’s not suffering for The Movement! He then cites Maria Poblet—"SOUL’s ideal of a leader for the 21st century: young, female, intellectual, immigrant, idealist...and salaried"—who worries that she makes a bit more than some of the families on General Assistance that she organizes. Judging by paltry New Times standards, Mr. Byrne likely still makes at least 50% more than these organizers do. But it’s not his guilt that’s in question here.

*Young radicals are hypocrites who practice exactly the opposite of what they preach. Byrne says the SOUL borrows "techniques and language from the corporate business world". He cites no proof, but presumably is referring to words like (duh) "empowerment" and techniques like (double duh) workshops, whose allegedly corporate provenance he doesn’t note either. But even worse, they take money from foundations whose endowments were built on the backs of those who still struggle to be free. Funny, back in the 60s, they used to call this "the redistribution of the world’s wealth to the poor".

It is a bizarre notion that requires one to bite a hand only if it is doing nothing but slapping you silly. This is a bourgie idea, of course, but there are havens for it on the left, often amongst young, upper middle-class romantics whose main struggle in the morning is choosing which Birkenstocks to wear with which Patagonia. If they can throw a rock for anti-capitalism, who says old rich farts might not want to give money to them and their poorer, urban counterparts to do it some more? And why, on the face of it, is that always wrong?

More to the point, since the 60s, right-wingers—philanthropists or activists—haven’t worried about little things like ideological purity. Instead they have poured billions of dollars—billions, mind you—into building up activist, organizing, academic, and media institutions to implement a vast agenda. They have taken that money to push for the corporatization of the public space, the defunding of social services, including youth programs, the deracination of education, and the criminalization of young people and people of color. According to a study done by the People for the American Way, they have also used that money in order to, as one conservative put it, work toward "extinguishing" the funding sources of progressive groups. And so-called liberals (and some of their so-called "alternative" weeklies) have jumped on the bandwagon, supporting reactionary initiatives like Propositions 209 and 21, while reducing their charity to progressive causes.

And yet Byrne asks if these social justice activists—who fund five vibrant organizations, staff dozens of organizers, and train thousands of activists on less than $700,000 a year—are hypocritical for receiving money from the relatively teenier progressive foundations. The real question Byrne should have asked is this: How shall we fund The Movement? Until the left builds individual donor networks that can rival those on the right, foundations will—of necessity and not without tensions—play a role in supporting work for social change.

If Byrne has a better idea—we can reasonably assume that he doesn’t—he isn’t telling. And you’re not likely to find one soon in The New Times’ owned San Francisco Weekly, a chain which has become a haven for ex-liberals who are defining the political "alternative" to alternative. This article, in fact, is a good example of how far some "alt"-weeklies have fallen: it uses the investigative tools once deployed to uncover corporate greed and government corruption to bring down po’, broke, social justice activists. Byrne’s article might read like a parody of the once-mighty alt-weekly expose if it weren’t so malicious.

This question of funding the movement is not merely an ideological one. It has to do with real day-to-day choices activists inevitably have to make. If I give my life to The Movement, an activist must always ask, what will it give to me? Inevitably, far too many progressives flee political work because they decide, for a variety of reasons—money not being an inconsequential one—that the activist life is not sustainable.

Organizations like SOUL are correct to model the democracy they would like to see in their own work practices. It’s a process that is not only about participatory decision-making, but about how we value work and working. An organization that mistreats its workers by starving them and overworking them and psychologically battering them is not revolutionary, whether it’s a corporation or a collective. Shall the rest of the progressive community continue to exploit people who work for social change? Would we be moving toward a better, more just world if all the progressive activists were starving and burnt out? If you, like Byrne, believe so, you too are part of the problem.

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