Democracy Guest List

May Day March in Chicago is Sunday, May 1st—2PM Union Park. More info here.

We have been organizing with no access to media or institutional resources, no logistical or financial support from big organizations or from anyone with weight to throw around. We also are not relying on social media—the impact of Twitter and Faceboook for the Egyptian uprising notwithstanding, we have seen how limited online tools really are, especially when it comes to self-organization within immigrant communities, and in cities as deeply segregated as Chicago. This means day after day of flyering.

It turns out that flyering is not the boring drudgery I thought it would be. It is not simply standing there to hand people a piece of paper. Flyering means a LOT of talking. Repeating the super-short version of Mayday history hundreds of times, and looking for new forms for the story based on assumptions of who is asking (Really, there was a strike in Chicago 125 yeas ago?). Repeating concrete coordinates a thousand times (when is May Day?) and the occasional political debate about what “working people” might refer to (papers or no papers, waged or unwaged, in the home or in the factory, in the office or in the home office; in the classroom or the unemployment line?).  It means hearing snide comments from overworked freelancers (8 hour work day?? Boy, I wish I could find a job like that!) and witnessing countless instances of anger built and redirected (these union bastards think they deserve better than me? I got no benefits!). It means hearing from undocumented people who are skeptical and mighty pissed off, because the movement has done little to change the conditions of their lives (we are worse off now than before we started marching). It means hearing from well-meaning people who think there really is such a thing as “illegals” and who do not question how some border crossings come to be legitimate and others are labeled trespasses. (I have no problem with the illegals, as long as they respect the laws). There is a LOT of practice talking.

But there are also moments when people stop, just simply stop in their tracks, snap out of their frenzy and isolation, and unexpectedly share part of their life with you. Flyering for something like May Day can give you a lot of practice in listening as well, can make you the repository of hundreds of fragments, little individual confessions about life getting harder, about feeling less and less connected, about vulnerability and effort and insecurity and fear, about how the conditions within which we live and work are changing and their effects on things like home and kinship, like food or the air we breathe or the schools our kids go to, or the way we can or cannot walk on a sidewalk. If you flyer in the local grocer, the fleamarket, the arts festival and the CTA, you hear and help to put together a deeply shared story about how our sense of living, and what we call “working” , are becoming degraded, squeezed into forms increasingly hostile to anything not reducible to profit.  No dream can to linger without a sale; no energy without profit extraction; no life form without consumption.

But these remain individual stories.  They do not find the conditions to express themselves collectively or even to coincide in space and time; these separate fragments have no structures, no institutions, no language and forms, no corporeal practices or ideological paradigms, no public spaces and habits, to bring them together as a social act of narration, of telling and listening, of articulation.  People have asked me: why protest, it hasn’t changed anything? Of course a protest now and then does not by itself produce social change. But protests are one of the ways we learn to articulate something together, we practice forms of speaking and listening that are social, collective.

P.S. At a recent meeting, an exchange between two undocumented youth organizers with very different views on the question: “I am sick of marching, it hasn’t changed anything , it hasn’t gotten me any papers.” Reply: “Man, this isn’t about you, its about something bigger, we have to build something bigger to take on a system in the long-term….” This year’s May Day will not be “big” in the sense of numbers of people, at least not compared to 2006-2008; but the question of the scale or scope of an action is more complicated than that. I think it has to do with the extent to which structures are built that can link and collectivize experience, analysis. If the organizing process is anything to go by, something “big” may be starting to happen…