If not Alinsky, then what?
Many of the most committed organizers of the 1960s and 1970s had formed the “New Communist Movement” (NCM), which attempted to build the conditions for a Marxist-Leninist party to emerge and guide the nation toward a revolutionary overthrow of the government and capitalism. The character of NCM organizations varied greatly, from earnest working revolutionaries to cult-of-personality demagogues. What united most groups were roots in the 1960s civil rights, anti-war, and student struggles, an analysis that US imperialism was the enemy, and animosity to the idea of “reformism.”19 Throughout the Reagan years, many of these organizations kept left organizing alive through participation in workplace struggles, anti-apartheid organizing, and work against US intervention in Central and South America.
Many of us had contact with these organizers, but ran shrieking at the possibility of actually becoming cadre—for both good and bad reasons. We weren’t stupid enough to believe that criticism of existing forms of communism were simply capitalist propaganda. As young rebels, we questioned the need for secretive and hierarchical leadership forms empowering a small group of leaders. At least in the beginning of our political involvement, my generation of organizers lacked the ideological compass that our predecessors possessed. We knew what we were against but had a hard time articulating what we were for. Were we for radical inclusion or a revolution? In some cases, our ambiguity allowed for a positive experimental approach to organizing, far more accountable to the people we were working with than the vague and mutable ideas of a future revolution. It equipped us for the type of organizing rooted in the politics of door-by-door, face-to-face conversations. It also left us in times of crisis trying to guide a ship without a rudder, ill equipped to answer many of the important questions arising in our work, such as the role of the state and the place of reform in the larger picture of social change.20 Even if we initially lacked a grand unifying theory of social change, my generation of activists had strong international, national, and local influences on our ideas of social justice, starting in the decade in which we came of age—the 1980s.
During the Reagan years, many of the most catalyzing political movements were communicated through the lens of identity politics—battles against racism and homophobia, and for reproductive rights. Campaigns against US intervention in Latin America and in support of South Africa’s apartheid regime also brought many into activism.
As Black South Africans fought to end racial apartheid, the international movement toward boycotts, divestment, and sanctions captured the imagination of many around the world, especially those in the San Francisco Bay Area. This solidarity movement was at its best when it drew connections between local and international racism. It also revealed the complicity of the United States in upholding apartheid, and at the same time provided ample opportunities for local action. Department stores selling South African gold krugerrands were protested, and the International Longshore and Warehouse Union refused to unload South African cargo imports. Organizing against apartheid put the conversation about race in the center of our emerging worldviews. Groups such as Anti-Racist Action, Red and Anarchist Skinheads, and others militantly confronted a resurgent white nationalist movement exemplified by White Aryan Resistance, Stormfront, and various smaller neo-Nazi groups, reminding many that the United States had not yet awakened from its own racial nightmare.
At that time, the religious right also began its own form of civil disobedience, through blockades at women’s health clinics. The Clinic Defense (or Clinic Escort) movement brought forth a new generation of pro-feminist, pro-choice, pro–direct action activists.
Solidarity work confronting US military intervention was front and center in the 1980s and 1990s. Groups such as Committee in Support of the People of El Salvador and the Nicaraguan Institute for Community Action regularly sent delegations to Latin America in hopes that “brigadistas” would build an anti-imperialist movement upon their return to the States. These efforts were often the beginning of political consciousness for young North Americans. Related to this was the Sanctuary Movement, a mostly faith-based Underground Railroad for refugees of US proxy wars in the Central America.21
The emergence of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT-UP) and Queer Nation revitalized queer politics, with a focus on nonviolent direct action methods. Growing up in the Bay Area, it was rare to not know someone who had contracted HIV/AIDS, and ACT-UP’s uncompromising spirit inspired many.22 Queer Nation also made an impact by insisting on visibility in the Bay Area’s suburbs—holding kiss-ins at malls and sports events. Taken together, these big-picture movements helped shape the worldviews of those who would become involved with community organizing in the coming years.
The last decade of the twentieth century was turbulent from its beginning. In 1990, the first invasion of Iraq, under George Bush Senior, brought many thousands of people to the streets. America’s racial tinderbox was ignited once again in 1992, when police offers involved in the beating of Rodney King, a black motorist, were acquitted, resulting in the Los Angeles rebellions. And once again, in 1992, color and hue became central to the activist conversation as indigenous organizers brought forth a series of colorful and often confrontational mobilizations on the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the “new” world. For those of us who were struggling to contextualize these upsurges within our own experiences, we arrived at conclusions strikingly similar to our 1960s counterparts: the system of imperialism had both external and internal expressions.
In 1994, Congress passed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the most visible critics of which were a group of revolutionaries in Chiapas, Mexico, who launched an armed occupation of seven Mexican towns to protest the actual and cultural genocide resulting from free trade. To say that the Zapatista Army of National Liberation was inspiring to North American activists is an understatement. Their theory of “leadership through obedience” came with a set of powerful stories and narratives. The story of dogmatic revolutionaries going to the mountains to recruit indigenous people into a political party, only to have their own practice transformed seemed to at least temporarily address the problems we had at home between strict top-down organizations and the covertly hierarchical consensus-based organizing.23 It never fully addressed the problem, serving more as an ethical benchmark than a replicable organizing model. When the EDN was invited to work with residents of public housing, many of us were convinced that we could simply emulate the Zapatistas. Like many before us, we took a great example from another land and attempted to apply it mechanically to our own situations. (Probably not what Subcomandante Marcos or Comandante Ramona had in mind.)24
The pitched protest movements confronting right-wing attacks on the inclusive social progress of the 1960s and ’70s and international revolutionary movements inspired my generation of organizers. Those of us who chose to operate on the neighborhood level believed that we were in fact connecting the dots between the global and the local, confronting the impacts of the global economy, racism, and a rising right in the neighborhoods we lived and worked in.
Throughout my life, I’ve seen moments like this through the battles for home and public space. They are always fleeting, as are the tenuous alliances that bloom and wilt again. Neoliberalism has literally stolen the city from those who most contribute to its vibrancy. While things will never be (and maybe never should) be the same, resistance—not only capital—shapes urbanism.
Chapter One
Landgrabs & Lies: Public Housing at the Crossroads
Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?
Proving nature’s law is wrong, it learned to walk without having feet.
—Tupac Shakur
Thanksgiving Morning, 2003. At the intersection of 30th and Mission Streets, an odd assortment of humanity—even by San Francisco standards—gathered. Homeless families, most with strollers in tow, cautiously mingled with trade-union