Fields of Struggle

Since 2019, Chicago has seen the masses engage in electoral campaigns, protest waves, mutual aid, and more in their fight for survival and liberation. During these years, we also witnessed various organizers denigrate, or stand on the sidelines, for one or more of these.

Some stayed out of electoral politics, claiming that as long as we're limited by a two-party system, "there is no way to win". Others stayed away from protests, seeing them as "purely performative". Still, others rejected mutual aid as a distraction from "the real work of structural change".

Depending on how you navigate a field of struggle, you can end up proving these critics right! But there is more than one way to engage in any struggle, it simply requires the courage to experiment. It is possible to navigate these struggles in ways that activate new radicals, re-ignite those that had been on the bench, build organizations, and reach new political plateaus.

Definition Copied!

Class struggle, much like military struggle, happens across various fields, sometimes simultaneously. Just as militaries battle via land, air, sea, intelligence, so too does class struggle occur across streets, elections, workplaces, media, and so on. All of these fields are sites of struggle between left-wing and right-wing politics. Often, they are also simultaneously sites of struggle within each political pole, between socialists and liberals, or conservatives and fascists.

While all branches of the military are intended for war, how they wage war is dependent on their field of struggle. The skills and tools of an air force pilot will differ from those of the army's infantry. Similarly, the skills and infrastructure necessary to organize successful protest movements will differ from the skills and infrastructure needed to win an election or organize a union. There will be points of overlap, but also significant points of specialization.

Meet People on the Field They're At Copied!

If the goal is to help get to a point where the working class is able to liberate itself, then that class needs to be organized. So how do you organize such a massive and heterogenous group?

For starters, you have to meet them where they're at. By their own disposition, various individuals will be more drawn to one / another field of struggle. So you have to be open to meeting them there, even if that field of struggle is outside of your experience or comfort zone.

Also, keep in mind what it is that motivates people to become organizers. Every protest, every electoral campaign, every union drive, every mutual aid network is essentially picking a fight with the status quo. This is what inspires people: the fight itself. Picking a fight has the potential to pull in new people. This means every field of struggle has the potential to get more people organized.

But you have to be deliberate about this. In any struggle, it is easy to forget that struggles themselves come and go. It's easy to get so lost in the planning and success of the struggle itself, that you forget to prioritize meeting and recruiting people.

We've all gotten so lost in the minutia of putting together a protest, the routine of bottom-lining a canvass, or the urgency of acquiring and delivering material aid… that we forget to bring sign-up sheets or follow up with our 1:1s (for example). We get so lost in the immediate tasks that we forget that a successful event does not add up to much if we haven't grown out of it.

To be clear, it is important to always fight to win. But unless we know that the current struggle is going to be the one to kick off the revolution, then we always have to have one eye on today's struggle, and one eye on tomorrow's. Win or lose, every struggle should leave you more prepared, more organized, and more experienced for the next.

The reality is that, in a class society, the ruling class is going to win most fights. Otherwise, they wouldn't be the ruling class, would they? Being open to all fields of struggle helps us tip the scales in our favor. Ignoring or prohibiting any field of struggle just guarantees that the ruling class and right-wing forces get to enjoy a field, unharassed.

Diversity of Tactics? Copied!

Some folks might refer to all of these as constituting different "tactics" (i.e. "a diversity of tactics"). Diverse tactics at a protest might involve contingents of peaceful marchers split up from contingents of black bloc protesters. Diverse tactics in mutual aid might involve switching between hosting weekly events at a specific site to dispense goods vs organizing to deliver them. Diverse tactics in an electoral campaign could involve alternating between focusing on positive messaging for our candidate and negative messaging for the opponent.

In each of these cases, the different tactic pertains to it's respective field of struggle.

#StopCopCity, provides rich examples of both using diverse tactics and moving across different fields of struggle.

The movement has mainly relied on diversity of tactics in the field of protest: occupying the forest where Copy City is planned to be built (and where police murdered Forest Defender Tortuguita), organizing weeks of action, and mobilizing people to speak in record numbers at Atlanta's City Council.

When #StopCopCity switched gears and started canvassing Atlantans for a city-wide referendum on Cop City, this was no longer a different tactic. It was a completely different field of struggle that they were taking on that required different skill sets and forms of organization. To organize protests and mutual aid is to primarily be around self-selected, like-minded people working towards a goal on an indefinite timeline with very few concrete metrics to measure progress.

On the other hand, a referendum requires organizing like-minded people to go out and try to directly engage people that probably haven't attended any of your protest events and likely don't even use the same political jargon you do. It requires learning how to succinctly and plainly communicate your struggle to people at their front doors and/or in their neighborhoods and there is a concrete deadline coupled with a measurable vote.

So just as all military organization and combat holds similarities, the Navy is still different from the Air Force or Army. Similarly, while all organizing will have overlapping skills, organizing a series of protests will be different from trying to win an election.

Which to prioritize Copied!

With so many potential fields of struggle, it can be overwhelming to figure out which to focus on. It would be easy to burn out if every organization was trying to do all of them, all at once. Some folks try to solve the problem by prioritizing one field of struggle for all time.

If we only focus on elections, the ruling class will simply subvert the reforms we pass, or even overthrow our political democracy for dictatorship. If we only focus on protests and strikes, we'll succumb to either police repression or our own diminishing collective stamina. If we only focus on mutual aid, we leave the structures of capitalism intact.

The question we should ask is, "What is the right field of struggle for a given moment and which organizations from our political ecosystem are best positioned to lead on that field?"

At the start of the pandemic, the primary site of struggle was mutual aid. Everyone was terrified, everyone was in need. People all over the country had spontaneously begun to help each other with various manifestations of mutual aid. They needed to help each other, both because there were people in need of material assistance, and because many of the people providing the help needed to break through their own sense of powerlessness.

In the middle of June 2020, the primary site of struggle was the streets. The Uprising mobilized the masses in a struggle against both the police in particular, and racism in general. There was a collective rage that was rampaging across the country, foreshadowing a future revolutionary movement, that organizers needed to tap into, learn from, and help push forward.

In Chicago, during the months of Sept 2022 - April 2023, the primary site of struggle was electoral. There were people inspired all over the city to campaign for socialist and progressive alders. There were also people inspired to campaign for Brandon Johnson: a proto-labor mayor, emerging from a proto-worker's party built out of Chicago's political ecosystem. There was excitement at the thought of crushing Chicago's old boogeyman, Paul Vallas. But more than that, there was a genuine pride and excitement at the thought of electing a known member of Chicago's activist scene into the highest political office in the city.

What these analyses have in common is that they were rooted in the mood of the masses. At a given moment, what is the mood of the masses? Is it frightened, enraged, or inspired? Based on the collective mood, what field of struggle is it driving people to? These are the things to consider before meeting the masses on that field. There is no one field that stands above all others across space and time. There are also no forbidden fields that are off-limits to organizers. There is only the given political moment and how one should respond to it.

Conclusion Copied!

Capitalism teaches us to look at life in a binary of eternal "right and wrong". Many people internalize this and look for the "right" field of struggle and then counter-pose it to the "wrong" ones. This bourgeois way of thinking also tricks us into thinking there is only one way to do things. So if others before us have taken a field of struggle, and handled things badly, then any attempt to join that field must follow the same path.

But real life is more dialectical, offering us the "right" solution based on the fluctuating mood of the masses, and the potential to experiment with new approaches to a given field. After all, politics is a science. Which is to say, it requires experimentation. If a set of politics is just rote memorization of eternal truths, then it is a cult.

Learning to read this mood, keeping an open mind to join a given field of struggle, identifying and distinguishing between the organizations that need to lead vs support on a given field, and a willingness to experiment on that field, opens up new opportunities. Opportunities for organizers to learn, meet and recruit new people, and expand the political ecosystem.

If we are interested in the self-emancipation of the working class, by the working class, as a class: then we have to meet them where they're at and organize them. In the process, turning these fields of struggle into fields of dreams.

Updated 09/18/24: Added "Definition" section.