The Adlerian Organizer

In recent days, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris has been sounding a needed alarm about the state of democracy in the United States at present, as well as the continuing efforts by the Republican Party to destroy American democracy by restricting the right to vote in various states.  Therefore I want to return once again to one of the closing themes of my series of posts on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  This is the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

In a previous post I said that building an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed" starts when the oppressed start organizing themselves into local, small groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  As they grow, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

I also mentioned that this kind of organizing was key to many of the successful liberation struggles of the past.  Yet we see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  It is good to ask why this is so.  As I mentioned in the post I have cited, a partial answer can be found in the writings of Paulo Freire, specifically in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  In that book, Freire posits that the oppressed are conditioned by their environment and by the education imposed on them by the oppressor.  This education (which takes place in all areas of society and not just the classroom) teaches the oppressed that they are merely passive victims of a fate that is imposed on them and which they must merely accept.  On the other hand, the pedagogy which leads to liberation opens the minds of the oppressed to see their situation as a problem which can be critically examined.  Critical examination of this problem leads to the realization that the problem can be challenged, changed and overcome.  Seeing the problem as something that can be changed leads to the realization that the oppressed have the power to make that change.  The outcome of this realization is that the oppressed begin to live in freedom - that is, they begin to make the changes which they see as necessary to change their situation.

In other words, Freire treats the problem of oppression in a certain sense as a problem of cognition, a problem whose solution starts with the oppressed becoming first free in their minds.  And yet freedom can be somewhat frightening, even though it begins only in the mind first.  For a free mind begins to lead to free actions.  And those who choose to begin to live in freedom will almost always begin to bear the costs of their choice, for their oppressors will begin to make the choice of freedom costly.  Those who are frightened by the cost of freedom will often therefore reject the dawning awareness that freedom is possible in order to continue their submerged existence as oppressed people without being bothered by their consciences.  So we have two kinds of oppressed people: those who are not free because they don't realize that freedom is possible, and those who are not free because they are unwilling to pay the cost of becoming free.  What is to be done for this second group of oppressed people?

I believe I have stumbled on what is at least a partial answer.  It is found in some of the writings and teachings of a European psychiatrist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries named Dr. Alfred Adler.  

Adler was an interesting character, who made much metaphorical hay from the simple realization that people always have reasons for the things they do - even when the things being done are dysfunctional or cause self-harm.  The experience of being oppressed tends to lead to dysfunctional behavior by the oppressed.  But this dysfunctional behavior has a goal, namely, to compensate psychologically for the damage done by the oppressive situation.  I suggest that this dysfunctional behavior often consists of what looks like passivity, fatalism, and apathy, and that it is an expression of "exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence."  According to the Adler Graduate School, the objective of Adlerian therapy is "to replace exaggerated self-protection, self-enhancement, and self-indulgence with courageous social contribution."  What the organizer is trying to bring about is the "courageous social contribution" of oppressed people coming together into groups to achieve their common liberation.

Thus one part of an organizer's work is to help his or her people begin to see their own motives and the role of these motives in their continued enslavement or oppression.  For it is these motives which motivate the continued passivity of the oppressed and their continued refusal to live in freedom.  Adler used a graphic word picture to describe the process of getting patients to see both the dysfunction and the consequences of certain motives, namely the idea of "spitting in the patient's soup" in order to make the dysfunctional behaviors less palatable.  This notion of spitting into someone else's soup conjures images of organizers going to their people and telling those people what is wrong with their ongoing passivity.  However, the best and most skillful Adlerians get the patient to spit into his or her own soup - that is, they use respectful Socratic dialogue to get their people to admit to themselves out loud what are the motives, goals and consequences of their choices.  From that admission can spring the discussion of better ways to meet the goals of their people.

So it is that Adlerian dialogue can be seen as a component of Freirian problem-posing education of the sort that turns passive, fatalistic, atomized members of the oppressed into purposeful, united, interdependent people laboring together for their common liberation.  There is more that can be said about this, but I need to do some further reading both of Freire and of Adler!  Stay tuned...

Strategic NVR In Action: The Colorado Trucker Boycott

As I mentioned in my last post, my blogging schedule for the next few months will usually be bi-weekly, so that every two weeks a post will be published.  The posts will usually be on Sundays.  However, should there be an event which merits commentary, I may write a short post in between the major biweekly posts.  Today's post is one of those short posts.

I want to call attention to the case of Rogel Aguilera-Mederos, a Cuban immigrant to the United States.  Mr. Aguilera-Mederos was employed as a semi truck driver (for those who use British English, "semi truck" means "lorry"), and was recently sentenced to a 110-year prison term for the deaths of four people in an accident in Colorado in which the brakes on the truck driven by Aguilera-Mederos failed, preventing him from safely stopping.  The sentencing was determined in large part by the prosecutor in his trial, a Ms. Kayla Wildeman, who "celebrated the harsh verdict" according to one source.  This same Ms. Wildeman reports to a chief deputy district attorney named Trevor Moritzky.  Moritzky gave Wildeman a trophy for the harsh sentence handed down, yet Moritzky managed to obtain only a misdemeanor conviction for a Colorado police officer who raped a woman in the back seat of his police car.  According to another source, Aguilera-Mederos' case also differs from that of a white motorist in Texas named Ethan Couch, who received only ten years probation at his initial sentencing after he killed four people while speeding and under the influence of alcohol and drugs.  His parents were wealthy.  (See this also.)

I must say now that while many posts on my blog have condemned white supremacy, I do not believe that all white Americans are evil.  There are examples of good men and women who do not believe that they and they alone should rule the earth and that they have the right to treat the rest of us as their slaves or punching bags.  However, the prosecution of Mr. Aguilera-Mederos is yet another example of how much of the American "justice" system is corrupted by right-wing white supremacists who seek to use the power of the state to vent their unresolved rage.  Not only do these supremacists want to dump that rage on people of color, but they even rage against those of their own people who do not share their monstrous sense of entitlement and their malignant narcissism, as is seen by the murder of two white people and the wounding of a third by Kyle Rittenhouse.  It seems that Mr. Rittenhouse took exception to the fact that his victims were standing in solidarity with people of color.  Mr. Rittenhouse is, in my book, a pile of human garbage, as is the jury which miscarried justice by acquitting him of murder. 

To repeat, the "justice" system in the United States at present is merely the tool of those who are rich and white and who wish to dominate.  Therefore, many of the verdicts rendered by that system are actually a miscarriage of justice.  Among the victims of that miscarriage of justice, the standard response to that miscarriage over the last several years has consisted of things like mass protests, listening sessions, bumper stickers proclaiming that our lives matter, petitions, and attempts to have conversations about "race".  In other words, our strategy has looked much like trying to convert our oppressors by trying to have conversations with them.  

But the case of Mr. Aguilera-Mederos has begun to show something different.  Aguilera-Mederos was not drunk or intoxicated, and did not willfully and deliberately kill people, but was involved in an accident.  (Note to Kayla Wildeman and Trevor Moritzky: go find a dictionary and look up the word "accident."  The job of a prosecutor is no place for doofuses.)  His sentencing was harsh and unfair.  And while there have been protests in response, there has also been something else - something with teeth that can bite.  Truckers have begun to boycott Colorado.  This boycott has begun to produce results FAST.  When you can't get things in a certain state because truckers refuse to make deliveries to your state, you tend to sit up and take notice.

And this is the power of strategic nonviolent resistance when it's done strategically.  Effective resistance is NOT protest (at least, not solely or even mainly protest), because protests by themselves do NOT impose coercive costs on an oppressor.  Effective resistance is the coordinated, unified withdrawal of economic and political support from an oppressive system.  If that withdrawal is done according to a wise strategy, the oppressed can cripple the system which is oppressing them.  For effective resistance to have long-term staying power, communities of the oppressed need to build their own self-sufficiency by means of what one writer calls "self-organization, self-attainment, and self-improvement."  This is how one can engage in long-term strikes and boycotts which inflict pain and which strike fear into the heart of anyone who wishes to be an oppressor!  For those of us in communities of color, it is this kind of power which we need to build.  

Let's see how Mr. Aguilera-Mederos' case goes.  If Colorado does not commute his sentence (and fast!), I may post a list of companies which are headquartered in Colorado, so that boycotts can be organized against them.

The Urgent Need for Conscientização

[Note: For much of the last two years, I have been posting to this blog on a once-per-week basis.  Lately that has changed to posting once every two weeks.  For the next several months, I will remain on my current blogging schedule as much as possible, so I will continue to post once every two weeks.]

The end of a year is often a time in which people project their hopes, aspirations and fears onto the future.  Those who have become accustomed to easy, privileged lives tend to be on the hopeful side of the forward-lookers; those who have had experience of hard times tend to look forward more soberly.  Certainly the last few years have given the world an abundance of reasons to approach the future soberly and cautiously - even in the privileged nations of the Global North.  In the United States, for instance, we have seen the erosion of civility and safety for many groups of people.  We have also experienced widespread environmental catastrophes such as the wildfires of 2020, and the explosive growth of tent cities comprised of the recently disenfranchised.  We have seen the beginning of the breakdown of those supply chains which nourished the consumerism of the nations of the Global North.  We have witnessed the hyper-concentration of the world's wealth into the hands of an ever-shrinking number of so-called "owners".  We have witnessed the emergence of a pandemic whose consequences will be with us for decades into the future.  We have witnessed the undeniable  accelerating consequences of the destruction of the earth's environment, the increasing loss of safe and healthy habitats for the world's biosphere.

And we have witnessed another loss, namely the global loss of safe spaces for democracy.  Consider the following reports:

• "Freedom In The World 2021: Democracy Under Siege", Freedom House
• "'An Urgent Matter': Biden Warns Democracy Is Under Threat At Summit", The Guardian
• "Democracy Slipping Away At Record Rate, Intergovernmental Body Warns", Reuters

The series of posts I wrote on strategic nonviolent resistance and on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy have been my response to this loss of safe spaces for democracy, and especially the damage done to American democracy during the regime of Donald Trump.  Among the themes discussed in those posts, the last theme discussed was the theme of the organic, grassroots, bottom-up building of a society by the oppressed and for the oppressed in order to displace and neutralize the society constructed by an oppressive regime.  To quote Gene Sharp once again, "As the civil institutions of the society become stronger vis-a-vis the dictatorship, then, whatever the dictators may wish, the population is incrementally building an independent society outside of their control...in time, this combination of resistance and institution building can lead to de facto freedom, making the collapse of the dictatorship and the formal installation of a democratic system undeniable because the power relationships within the society have been fundamentally altered."

What does it look like to build an "organic, grassroots, bottom-up society by the oppressed and for the oppressed"?  It starts when local, small groups of the oppressed organize themselves into groups to provide the things they need for themselves which the rulers and owners of their society refuse to provide, or which they will only provide by charging a price which ordinary people can't afford.  These groups which are formed by the oppressed become the parallel institutions of the parallel society by the oppressed and for the oppressed.  And organizing these groups is like organizing a potluck - not like hosting a free lunch for free riders.  Moreover, these parallel institutions become a base of strength for the oppressed which enables them to organize the sustained collective withdrawal of economic and political cooperation from the oppressor's society.  It is this sustained, collective withdrawal of cooperation which shatters the oppressor's power and control.  

History is full of examples of this process in action, from the "constructive program" of Indian self-reliance organized by Gandhi against the British empire to the preparations for strikes and boycotts by the Black majority of South Africa which helped to end the apartheid regime in that country to the parallel institutions organized by the Polish against conquerors and oppressors in the 19th and 20th centuries.  Indeed, I might suggest that one sign that oppressed people have become liberated in their minds is that they begin to organize ways of taking care of themselves without relying on their oppressors, in order that they might then withdraw their labor from the continued support of the oppressor in order to break the oppressor.

We see far too little of this kind of organizing nowadays.  (It would be good to ask why.  More on that later.  Let's just say that this kind of organizing is the hardest kind there is at present.)  What we see instead among the oppressed are either masses of people who are apathetic and fatalistic in the face of their suffering, or we see people who put their hopes entirely in elections, even though they now live in countries in which the electoral process is breaking or has been broken.  Among those who trust in elections, there are "organizers" who seek to stand for the oppressed or for the environment or for something better than unrestrained predatory capitalism.  Their ethics are indeed worthy of praise.  But their strategy and tactics revolve around trying to organize political campaigns to get the right sort of people elected.  And their story of self/story of us/story of now dialogue with the people they try to recruit focuses on the short-term transactional goal of merely getting people to vote a certain way.  Their "dialogue" thus degenerates into a manipulative, slogan-laden monologue.  So the "collective action" of the people is reduced to merely casting a ballot once every few years, and once the ballot is cast, the "collective action" goes away - and has to be rebuilt almost from scratch during the next election cycle.  And the battle between the oppressors and those who seek change by means of political action becomes merely a battle between dueling emotive slogans.

Now I do believe that one of the duties of citizenship is to participate in the electoral process.  It is partly because of decent people who did not vote in 2016 that we had to suffer four years of Trump.  But voting is not the only characteristic of good citizenship.  And to rely on voting alone as a means of positive change is a grave mistake.  In democracies whose democratic processes are being sabotaged or have become broken, election seasons have become downright nasty.  (To me as a citizen of the United States, the last several election cycles have not been a time of hope or of joy but rather like a paroxysm of coughing during a long bout with pertussis or like one of the paroxysms of fever and chills which characterize a long bout of malaria!  Except that in this case, it's the Global Far Right that is the infectious agent.  And next year, here we go again...)

The kind of organizing which liberates the oppressed in their minds so that they begin to collectively take charge of their own destiny - this is the kind of organizing which truly transforms.  To quote Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, the true organizer must labor with the oppressed to forge a pedagogy of liberation - "a pedagogy which must be forged with, not for, the oppressed (whether individuals or peoples) in the incessant struggle to regain their humanity.  This pedagogy makes oppression and its causes objects of reflection by the oppressed, and from that reflection will come their necessary engagement in the struggle for their liberation."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 48).  In other words, the organizer engages with the people he or she is trying to organize, in order to collectively create a "story of us" and a "story of now" by which the people thus organized begin to change their world.  

The organizer's task is to engage his or her people in an act of what Freire calls "problem-posing education", where "...people develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality, but as a reality in process, in transformation.  Although the dialectical relations of women and men with the world exist independently of how these relations are perceived (or whether or not they are perceived at all), it is also true that the form of action they adopt is to a large extent a function of how they perceive themselves in the world.  Hence, the teacher-student and the students-teachers reflect simultaneously on themselves and the world without dichotomizing this reflection from action, and thus establish an authentic form of thought and action."  (Pedagogy of the Oppressed, page 83)  To break this down into simpler pieces, the education of the oppressed should do the following:

• It should show the oppressed that the world is not just some static thing over which they have no control and to which they have no choice but to submit.
• It should enable the oppressed to see themselves and their relation to the world more accurately - not as mere objects acted upon by forces over which they have no control, but as people who have the power to act to change their reality.
• It should move the oppressed to begin acting on their reality, both as individuals and collectively, as a logical consequence of beginning to see themselves in the world more accurately.
• As part of this movement toward activity, it should lead the oppressed to more clearly see the present intolerable reality of their oppression.  To quote Freire (who quotes Marx), "Hay que hacer al opresion real todavia mas opresiva anadiendo a aquella loa conciencia de la opresion haciendo la infamia todavia mas infamante, al pregonarla."  ("It is necessary to make real oppression even more oppressive by adding to it the awareness of the oppression...")

And this change in consciousness is not something which the organizer shoves ready-made down the throats of his or her people, but something that arises as a result of dialogue as organizer and people engage in common reflection upon the world.

It is this patient work of consciousness-raising which is lacking from the work of many organizers who seek to reverse the rise of oppressive autocracy in the world today.  And while I have enjoyed my contact with the Leading Change Network over the last year or so, it seems to me that the members and teachers in this network have a surprisingly weak knowledge of this kind of organizing.  (For that matter, so do I.  But I do want to get stronger!)  This weakness of knowledge has led the LCN increasingly to organizational efforts which focus solely on electoral politics and whose tactics seem at times to be shifting away from bona fide organizing to mere mobilizing. 

It is because I want to strengthen my ability to do this consciousness-raising work that I am thinking of writing a series of blog posts exploring Paulo Freire's book Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  This may be my next series.  Those who want to read along with me will, I am sure, be able to find online versions of the book if they want.  Otherwise, the book itself is not that expensive.  The aim of my exploration of this book will be to answer the question of how to lead oppressed people from passivity to the kind of activized consciousness that causes the oppressed to collectively take charge of their own destiny.  This movement is the beginning of any true liberation struggle.