Let's Get Started

In winter 2015/2016, as folks prepared to face whatever was coming from the first Trump administration, a call went out across social media to "join an organization". Once moribund groups that had barely survived from the 70s were suddenly full of excited young organizers ready to push back against the fascist creep. Though the largest example was the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), a veritable alphabet soup of acronymed Party-forms and activist organizations swelled in size and number across those years.

Whatever the successes or failures of those organizations, they were focused on large, often national membership growth, with a strong bent toward political pressure campaigns (disruptive protests and media spectacles, changes in the law, electoral candidacies, policy proposals). But as we face down a second Trump administration, one that campaigned on mass deporting 15 million people and putting them in concentration camps, stripping health care away from trans and queer people, further restricting abortion rights and potentially ending even a woman's right to get a divorce or travel across state lines on her own, an incoming administration that also has won both houses of congress, putting pressure on politicians feels deeply inadequate to what we're about to face.

But the good news is, everyone who has a friend or two in their life has the resources and likely the skills to begin organizing toward communal safety and a better life. As the old IWW saying goes, the best time to start organizing was yesterday. The second best time is today.

And there are two secrets about organizing that are not often copped to by activists, professional organizers, self-professed revolutionaries and non-profits, because those two secrets are key to those folks' positions of power, respect and employment.

The first secret is that organizing is simple.

The second is that you're probably already doing it.

There are thousands upon thousands of pages, infinite books, chapters and zines, innumerable podcasts and videos telling you how to get started organizing. Many of them are helpful, but many more of them function as gatekeeping disguised as help. They are full of specialized jargon or ominous warnings about the law or advice on how to manage internal conflict or long thoughts about money and pros and cons of being non-profit or ideas about how to build particular kinds of internal structures.

And all of those things can be helpful, even necessary, at various points in the process of building a project, but the aggregate effect of the discussion is to make organizing seem like something inaccessible to all but the most dedicated or hardworking people. It's intimidating as hell! Look at all those things you need to know! Reading such texts the inevitable conclusion for many people would be "this isn't for me, I can't do this."

But now, imagine that you and your friends want to start a band. But you know about this online forum for people who have bands in the DIY scene in your city, so you log on and find experienced musicians and show booking folks having discussions about the problems that they've run into after years of gigging, and they reference situations with "famous venues" that you've never even heard of and talk about problems managing the particular mixing tendencies of the sound guys at one club and how hard it is to negotiate pay structures for out of town bands, things you didn't even know you'd even have to think about, and you suddenly start to feel absolutely overwhelmed. You couldn't ever get to that expertise, you don't even want to, is that really what's required to have a band in town? Are you even qualified to have a band?

Now imagine you don't do that, you and your friends decide you want to start a band, so you go down to the basement and you start to play music. And at first the result is chaotic, and even though you wrote the music you're struggling to keep up with lyrics, singing and guitar. When you talk about your frustration to your bandmates, so the drummer mentions that she has a friend who's a really good guitarist who could maybe play with y'all, and you realize maybe you dont have to play guitar at all, and just singing actually sounds more fun to you, and when she comes to her first rehearsal she makes these really awesome noises through her pedal board while keeping the spirit of the songs you've been writing, and suddenly you feel inspired by the bigger sound and you and her start jamming and writing all these new songs, and now you've been a band for six months and you have a full 30 minute set and you want to schedule your first gig.

And now you go find that forum to find out what places in the city book first bands and treat them well, and armed with specific questions and a specific task to pursue it's easy to not get sucked into discussions about things you don't care about, and you find posts that are actually really helpful and thoughtful and you think "wow this forum is such a great resource for the city to help people starting up in bands!"

The idea that only special and specially devoted people can organize keeps the organizers and the activists, the Party mucky mucks and the Executive Directors in funds and authority. It also serves the state and capital: if an incredibly basic social activity like organizing to support one another becomes an alienated, specialized and professionalized practice that most people don't engage in, then most people will abdicate their own responsibility and their own power to leaders, formal structures, the police, bureaucracies and the like. They won't even realize how many things they could do to improve their lives and the lives of their community and neighbors because they don't even think it's possible, not for someone like them. After all, they're just a regular person, they're not an organizer.

But if you've ever run a TTRP game; had a book club; started a band; planned a regular movie viewing session with friends; released a podcast; maintained a blog or website with someone else; kept up a regular gaming session; planned meal trains for someone in grief; taught a workshop with a friend; marshalled community care for someone recovering from illness or surgery; planned a road trip with your friends; thrown a party; put on an art show; and many many other similar examples besides, you've already done autonomous organizing*.

Once again for the kids in the back: You've already done autonomous organizing.

The thing is, organizing is simple. A lot of it is easy. It's often really fun.

Organizing is getting together with other people to do something cool you all want to do.

That's it. It's one of the most basic, everyday things we do in our lives. Gathering people together to complete a project. Everything that scales out or gets more complicated or becomes conflictual from there emerges from the process, as we confront problems, barriers or questions that come up as we move forward doing the thing.

Just because your objective is liberation or community safety rather than like "fun" or "creative expression" or "giving care for a specific person" doesn't transform it suddenly into a wildly different, more sacred or difficult or heavy experience. The tendency for organizations to be built on large memberships and huge amounts of money and paid organizers and an acronymned name and a massive formal goal of changing the entire world? That's all gatekeeping bullshit, at best built on an outdated and ineffective model of political change, at worst a way to coopt social movement energy while scamming college kids out of membership dues and free labor.

For most cool stuff we want to do in the world, a group of four or five is plenty of people to get started. As anyone whose had experience in organizing spaces will tell you, most orgs are actually only maintained by the intense labor of a few core people anyway, with occasional assists from the larger surrounding community, so why not accept that at first the organization is gonna be small, no matter how large its dreams or ultimate goals.

Many people are going to want to help, and they are going to be helpful, but only in one particular instance or for one particular task. Do you really need to have those people inside the org, inside the container? They can do the helpful thing from outside just as easily, and if they want to join the project because they love what it's doing, they will show up consistently for more than just the one thing in a way that makes their joining make sense.

I really can't stress how many times I've seen projects flame out not despite lots of people being interested but because too many people are too interested too early, and the size of that group becomes immediately unwieldy to building actual momentum.

Having a group chat or an email list with forty people on it where twenty are silent and five of them only really pipe up to apologize that they can't make the scheduled meeting time is demoralizing. And the other people in the group see that too, they see the silence and the demoralization, and it makes the group look less effective, makes it feel less effective, whether or not that's the case. It can also cause a kind of spiral or cascade of people not taking responsibility--oh there are 30 other people here, one of them can handle it, they'll show up to the meeting--so only particular personality types, the kind who say can't bear an awkward silence or have unrealistic expectations for themselves and their own capacity end up volunteering for everything, then either not doing what they said they would, or burning themselves out and becoming resentful.

And to be ABSOLUTELY CLEAR, I have just as often as not been one of the twenty silent ones and one of those five well-intentioned apologizers, where I just didn't have the energy to really participate even though I think the project is cool as hell and in a perfect world would be giving my time to it. It is a structural result of a particular kind of organizing practice, not the personal failure of any individuals!

Nor is it to say that a structure like that can't work. It's just that the projects that I've seen take off that have a big paper membership like that? They tend to have three or four core passionate organizers who are really doing the work: and everyone else just shows up sometimes. That can be totally fine! But the main point is that numbers just as often hold us back as help us, and the idea that more members is always better or a sign of strength is market-logic bullshit, a confusion of quantity for quality.

But if you're gonna accept a smaller size to begin, that also correlates with setting your original goals at an achievable level for that many people. We want the total abolition of capitalism, for sure, but for now we're just going to make flameless heating lamps that unhoused folks can use in their tents, or we're trying to build a free store that meets once a week in the park to distro mutual aid, or we're throwing a queer dance party to support trans folks relocating for their safety, or we're supporting a group of political prisoners from a particular action or movement that are coming up for parole.

If things go well, you can expand the goal: more frequent parties, an actual full time physical location for the store, etc;. It might not feel like much, but it's gonna build the infrastructure of real power. And in the process of growth, solving problems, answering questions, you're gonna necessarily meet other likeminded crews doing similar work, and y'all can start collabing and sharing information and experience without having to all be at the same meetings. Now you're in movement.

And when the streets pop off, when massive political changes create openings, and they are going to, you'll have resources, goals, desires, connections, and ideas.

There is nothing wrong with trying something and having it not work. Not all people who jam together become a band. Not all people who start a role playing campaign together see it to its conclusion. Book clubs and podcasts end, websites stop publishing. That's gonna be part of it.

But if we look back at the most powerful uprising of our lifetimes here in the US, the George Floyd Rebellion, how were folks showing up? They were showing up in groups of friends, coming through to express their anger, take the things they wanted, and drive the police out of their communities, not through group chats of thousands of people (though those eventually formed) but through hundreds and thousands and even millions of groups of four, five, six people coming out to achieve something they wanted to achieve, even if that was just an expression of rage and frustration.

And as we enter a period of more and more open repression, a big organization with large visible meetings and structure is much more vulnerable to repression by the state, infiltration by the far right, or cooptation by bad actors and scammers, who are increasingly common in this crumbling society.

I don't mean to argue that autonomous organizing is the only model, or will work the same regardless of context or need. But as we stare down the barrel of at least four years of full-throated fascism, a lot of us are going to have to solve problems for ourselves, for each other, for our community, and we're gonna have to do it without many resources or much formal support.

But the thing is, we totally can. You've probably already developed the skills. You might even already be doing it. It's just about choosing something you want to do, finding a few other people you like who want to do that thing too, and getting started.

We got this.

*For a long time I kinda hated the word "organizing" because it is so often used and controlled by a certain kind of activist and when they use it it becomes a moral value, like: a movement or struggle that wins its demands? well organized. Something that fails? "not organized enough". Alas, there isn't really another good word for what we're talking about here, although I'm open to suggestions.