“Building a Diverse Working Class Movement to Transform America”

From the description of the epidsode: What is to be done? How can I get involved? Those are questions that a lot of people are asking now that Donald Trump is about to become president of the United States. Today, I speak to Nijmie Dzurinko, a Black woman who grew up poor in the deindustrialized Western Pennsylvania steel town of Monessen. Nijmie is one of the smartest and most experienced organizers we know. In the past, she has been Executive Director and organizer with the Philadelphia Student Union, was a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project, and is a co-founder and currently co-coordinator of the group Put People First! PA.

A year ago today I spent much of the day on planes coming back from 10 glorious days with the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil. I attended their National Congress and spent a few days visiting MST settlements with a delegation put together by the Friends of the MST.

The MST is one of the largest social movements in the world, with over a million members. The movement has won land for over 350,000 families, and has a three part program: reclamation of land, collective production and transformation of society. The movement celebrated its 30th anniversary during the time I was there, and the National Congress functioned as a massive birthday party, agricultural fair, political education school, and a time of strategy, visioning, and building community.

The trip I took one year ago could not have come at a better time for me on my personal/political journey. I am someone who has found myself driven to collective action through my own early life experiences in the context of my family, and an early visceral sense that there were larger forces and structures at play on the people in my household, which were invisible to me at the time. My experiences within organizing communities in Philadelphia and throughout the country have provided both beautiful and extremely painful experiences – sometimes feeling more like the culture of a dysfunctional family than a force for good and liberation.

Over the last few years in particular, I’ve been driven to evaluate and transform myself, and my approach to and practice of organizing, after asking myself the question “If we (loosely defined as those working for social justice) were in charge tomorrow, what would that be like?” and not liking the answers that come to mind.

Over the past 30-40 years, the time period in which I have grown up, have arisen three (to me, inter-related) phenomena: 1) the ascendance of neo-liberalism, 2) the emergence of the non-profit industrial complex and 3) the primacy of organizing based on identity categories. Although we don’t often look at connections between these three developments, it seems more than co-incidence that all three have occurred together. Delving deeply into the implications of this is a subject for another time.

In working to transform my own practice, I have committed to increasing myself awareness through my own healing work. There is a lot of trauma in our people, and the saying “hurt people hurt people” really is true. There is no way to move forward when we are simply acting out trauma onto each other under the guise of organizing.

There are a number of lessons that I drew from Brazil that I’ve committed to incorporating into my own practice:

Collective action should bring us back to life. It must activate us as whole people. What we do must be connected to a long term vision and strategy. It must develop us into better people – not just people who know the right things to say. We must live by a new set of values, not just speak them. We can use the immediate to secure the future – if we prioritize political education. Our work is not sustainable if we organize as individuals – we must organize as families and communities. If we can’t presume to lead our society, and not just people who look like us, then the system that we are working to transform has already won.

For me over the past year this has looked like:

• Prioritizing 1 on 1 time with leaders
• Building an organizational culture where values and principles are a focus internally as well as externally
• Creating a separation between my paid work and my organizing work
• Seeing individual expressions of oppression as symptoms, not causes
• Focusing on my own healing work and sharing it in my organizing community

Here’s to a 2015 filled with humanization of our movements.

I was raised in Monessen, PA.  My maternal grandparents and I lived in a one-floor house on Reeves Avenue, almost at the top of a hill.  There are some huge hills out that way.  My family’s move up the hill from “down-street” (closer to the mills spewing out black smoke, poorer, and lower elevation) was a symbol of slight upward mobility that was afforded by my grandfathers’ lifelong employment at Wheeling Pittsburgh Steel.  My grandmother’s two brothers also worked in the mill (she even did a stint there during World War II when there was a shortage of male workers), and one of her brothers died in the mill, crushed by a molten hot beam.When I was 10 years old, the steel mill closed for good.  When I was 11 my uncle moved us away.  In the 2010 census the population of Monessen was 7,720, down from a high of 20,257 in 1940. Per capita income is now $16,627. My memories of Monessen as a place are fond.  I spent a lot of time outside, we grew our own vegetables, and when I tested into 4^th grade at the age of 7 after being homeschooled by my grandmother, I wasn’t the only kid of color or of mixed heritage, not by a long shot.

Over two decades after I left, I reconnected with friends from elementary school on social media.  Many of them are still in Monessen or in the surrounding towns of Donora and Charleroi.  I’ll always love and care about my first friends because I grew up with them.  I notice their positive qualities and I see their shortcomings and challenges through a lens of loyalty, as is customary among friends.  Their way of seeing the world shows up in my news feed.  There are lots of family photos, struggles with health, relationship drama.  Some of them – not all – are angry about recent waves of immigration.  Some don’t like Obamacare much.  Some aren’t in favor of raising the wage for fast food workers to $15 an hour.

Surprisingly perhaps to you, there’s a lot of resonance between their views and the views of people on my block of row houses in the Cobbs Creek section of West Philly (with the possible exception of a positive, as opposed to negative disposition to Obamacare), in a city of 1.5 million people, with a per capita income of $16,509.  When there are fewer and fewer means to survive, and we don’t have answers that get to the roots of why or a way forward (instead – powerlessness, isolation, scapegoating and false solutions) we tend to become less – not more – magnanimous.   We’re influenced to believe that if we have something it’s because we outdid someone else, and whatever anyone else “gets”, whether that’s a pension, a raise, healthcare, or some form of assistance, it means less for us.   And because we don’t have any guaranteed means to survive or the power to mold the world to our benefit, as our true opponents do, that worldview has a certain logic to it.

I don’t feel the need to apologize for the people that I grew up with any more than the people who live on my block.  To do so would be insulting and dehumanizing.  At the end of the day, my people out in Monessen and Southwest PA are struggling, in a way that is similar to my people on the block.  They are not calling the shots, making laws, creating policy, buying candidates, granting tax breaks, or ruthlessly exploiting our very real and justified fears of survival.

That’s why I’m involved in a movement to create more connections between people who both the politicians and the pundits seem to want to see at odds.  To disrupt the two-sides-of-the-same-coin ideology that makes people in Philadelphia feel fear and loathing for people in Monessen in the same way that people in Monessen are made to feel fear and loathing, instead of closeness and friendship, for us.

I’m a fan of Game of Thrones.  Before the opening credits are over, we get a short lesson in each of the “sigils” of the major houses – the symbols of the people who are vying for power.   Well beneath those who are vying for power are “bannermen” – vassals who owe their service and allegiance to the feudal lords. They get their name because as they ride into battle they carry the banner of their lords – they are, in essence owned and controlled by the interests of this banner.  They do not show up as real actors in the story, but extras who merely serve a function for the ongoing quest for power between different factions of elites.

There are women and men throughout our state of 13 million people that have a capital D or capital R next to their name on the voter rolls.  That designation is the basic thing about their lives that matters to the powers that be.  It’s not all that matters to me.

“It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.  We must love each other and protect each other.  We have nothing to lose but our chains.” – Assata Shakur

On a recent canvassing day in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania, now famous across the country as the home of rogue police chief Mark Kessler, a local mother went door to door surveying residents about their ability to meet their families’ needs to healthcare, housing, education, food, and other basics. 

On one block, when asked about access to quality, affordable healthcare several residents put forward a vision for our health system that the reader might not expect: “They should make it like Canada.”  As in: a publicly funded healthcare system that is free and universal – which goes beyond even what Obamacare will do. 

The resident doing the door-knocking was a Local Organizing Committee Leader with Put People First! PA, a fast-growing organization formed to change what is politically possible in the state of Pennsylvania.

She discovered what doesn’t go viral on social media and what corporate media has no interest in revealing.  There are lots of people outside of big cities in the state of PA (and every state) who might never call themselves “progressive” but when given a chance to talk about their lives, values, struggles, and needs, will respond in ways that defy labels and even party lines.

For every job opening in Pennsylvania, there are four unemployed workers, and another  four under-employed workers who are seeking additional work (State of Working PA, 2011). Is it any wonder that our education system is on the ropes, with 474 out of 501 school districts in the state receiving less than adequate funds? (Education Law Center of PA). The well-organized fight against cuts to education funding in Philly captured major headlines – and despite how the story got framed, Philly wasn’t the only place that stood up. On all of our fundamental needs – jobs, education, housing, healthcare – PA families and communities are hurting across the board.

This is consistent with our society as a whole – where a recent survey revealed that a whopping 80% of adults face near-poverty and unemployment.This despite the fact that the economy, judging by the stock market and financial indicators, has “recovered.”How can the fundamentals of our economic system be so entirely out of step with the lived experiences of the majority of our population? And more importantly, what are we the people going to do about it?

“We’ve known for quite some time that the real fight in this country is at the state capitals. Because in the state capitals, that’s where election laws are passed, educational laws, labor rights. All of those issues grow out of legislation that comes from state capitals,” says Reverend Willie Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP in reference to the Moral Monday protests that have targeted his state’s legislature.  PeopleFirst! PA – the brainchild of seasoned organizers born and raised in PA working in concert with emerging leaders from around the state – operates on the principle that we need a new kind of organizing to change the political landscape at the state level. 

We need an independent base of regular people who are poised to hold politicians on both sides of the aisle accountable, while at the same time understanding the fundamentals of how our economy works.  We need organizing that doesn’t just amass a list and treat people as bodies to turn out for this or that agenda or mobilization, but as leaders who are prepared to connect, align, and foster joint action of those around them.  We need to focus on policy with the understanding that those solutions are really about principles like universality, equity, transparency, participation, and accountability.

August 28^th marks the 50^th anniversary of the march on Washington and it’s never been more clear that the powers that be rely on race, gender, sexuality, and now immigration status as tools to oppress, divide and control people.   As we move forward we would do well to remember another anniversary – the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s announcement of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1967.

“There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life…” – MLK

From Philly blocks to Schuylkill County streets, we can feel that freedom and power building in Pennsylvania.  Can you see the new and unsettling force on the horizon?

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Put People First! PA is an entirely bottom-up, grassroots effort by and for the people of Pennsylvania.  Please support our work to build the new and unsettling force by making a contribution to our summer crowd-funding campaign.  We are proud to be building our model with our partners including the Vermont Workers Center, United Workers/Healthcare as a Human Right Maryland, the Poverty Initiative/University of the Poor, the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative, and the Media Mobilizing Project.