An Introduction to the Training Series and to Session One Homework
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Hello and welcome to Solidarity in the Face of MAGA,
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I (David, your facilitator) am really looking forward to beginning our work together shortly. Amidst Trump's return to the White House, this learning community is meant to help participants find the political clarity, personal direction, and emotional resilience they need to better contribute to our social movements in the months and years ahead.
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If you'd like to review the trajectory of the training series as a whole you are welcome to re-read the descriptions of each of our four sessions mentioned here. Alongside those main topics, we'll continually weave in content throughout the sessions and/or homework materials related to helping you navigate your own path in the work of social change.
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Our first session together will take place on the evening of January 20th, inauguration day. When we gather, we'll check in with ourselves and one another, taking a moment to be with whatever emotions are alive in us following the swearing-in ceremony. We will then dive into the theme of session one, "solidarity-based organizing," and discuss what it means to build a broad movement of ordinary people capable of confronting not only Trump's authoritarianism, but also the system of profound inequality that made his rise possible.
Solidarity-based organizing is an often forgotten political tradition that identifies social oppression as a strategic tool of the ruling class to divide, disorient, and weaken the collective power of everyday working people. During critical periods throughout U.S. history and world history, our movement ancestors have illustrated how unveiling this truth and bringing people together across lines of manufactured division and into an anti-oppressive class struggle has proved far more capable of creating transformative change than anything on offer in the political mainstream.
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The study materials for this session are meant to prepare us to work with these topics together. They begin with a section titled, "Understanding and Navigating our Current Political Moment." This group of resources is meant to 1. help us better understand the two corporate-financed political factions in our politics today (the far-right and the liberal-center), 2. uncover some of the barriers preventing the progressive-socialist left from building more political power, and 3. support you to turn inward and assess what you might be needing on an emotional level amidst the political realities of our time.
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The next grouping of resources includes a number of articles and clips meant to convey some basic concepts of about what "solidarity-based organizing" looks like and what shifts in analysis and culture might be required of us to embody this approach.
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Finally, I included a short video and an article about Martin Luther King Jr.'s lesser-known analyses of race, class, and coalition-building. As much as some would like to airbrush it from history, King's vision was one of bringing everyday people together to challenge an integrated system of racism, capitalism, and imperialism that entrapped us all. This Monday, amidst Trump's inauguration, we get to hold tight to King, too, a figure who modeled for us a form of organizing based in deep solidarity and profound courage.
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If you can't get through all of these resources before we meet on Monday evening, don't worry about it. We'd love to have you there with us and you can return to them any time in the future.
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I'm so grateful to each of you for embracing the opportunity to be in this training series and am looking forward to meeting you soon.
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With care and in solidarity,
David
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PS: A Note about Class and Capitalism: Before you get started with the homework, I want to share one important thought that doesn't get mentioned elsewhere in this week's study materials.
While poor, working class, middle class, and professional-managerial class people all have significantly different life experiences, all of us have a fundamental material stake in changing the economic system we live under. We are all working people. We all have to work in order to survive in a world where a small elite profits enormously from the labor of so many (an elite whose members are swept up in a system that wounds and dehumanizes them, too). We all are made more insecure by skyrocketing costs of housing, health care, and higher education amidst decades of stagnant wages. We are all endangered by corporate interests that buy elections, fan the flames of war to pad their pockets, continually siphon more and more wealth from the entire 99%, and profit enormously as they drive a global climate catastrophe.
I share all this to say that as you go through this training series and learn about the long and continuing legacy of economic exploitation in our world, I want you to feel connected to your own stake in ending this legacy.