Please join Coffee Party-Houston, Public Citizen and Americans for Campaign Reform at a public forum to learn more about the Fair Elections Now Act and view a preview screening of the upcoming documentary, Priceless.

The moderator will be Dan Weeks, President of Americans for Campaign Reform.

The event happens Thursday, October 7, at 7:30 p.m. at the Havens Center, St. Stephens Episcopal Church
1827 Alabama Street in Houston. Please RSVP to info@youstreet.org.

“Do you want to get the big money out of politics? Public funding of elections will do just that and help make Washington work again,” organizers say.

My last week has been more focused on other things — including the Friday FBI raids on solidarity activists, a few of whom I personally know — and I hadn’t had time or interest to follow all of the latest online conversations. But in the respite from particular talks, I wanted to offer a thought on something unrelated: the idea of movements.

While I understand it’s quite fashionable for everything to claim the term “movement,” I wanted to encourage everyone to keep in mind its broad implications.

Using a word too often cuts into its power. Like “revolutionary,” movement is in constant danger of being stripped of its edge.

We blog, tweet, facebook and such. And though some may call that activism in the most postmodern or broad sense, I always try to bear in mind that social media can’t provide what social change requires: movements historically composed of people in communities actively engaged in grassroots work to create social change. Bringing together bloggers, creating Twitter debates and getting blog comments are really great gestures, but they are only a facet of what movements to create social change can be.

Adbusters penned one of the better dividing-line pieces on this issue earlier in the year, entitled “Rejecting Clicktivism”:

By turning activism over to the technocrats, we’ve done a great disservice to the noble tradition of rabble rousing that has brought humanity every egalitarian development. We’ve exchanged the difficult process of engaging in real world struggles for the ease of sending emails and clicking links. And I say this knowing that digital-activists agree and a new generation are only too eager to offer their services, hawking themselves as the pioneers in the cutting-edge field of turning email addresses into bodies on the street. But we must resist their claims to expertise and their successes defined by quantity. The way forward will not be through the mediation of the screen.

Activism, when properly conceived, aims at revolution by striking at the root. It deploys an essential critique of society that cannot be resolved, or recuperated, without a major cultural shift. Each era must find and hone that critique and with persistence use it to repeatedly attack the prevailing social order. The essential critique of our generation is the mental environmentalist perspective which understands consumerism to be a plague upon the earth supported by pollution of our mental ecology by advertisers.

As I endeavored to comprehend the recent plight of my movement friends trying to pick up the pieces after the FBI kicked in doors last Friday, I was reminded that some of the Internet stuff can be helpful, but at times seems insular. In countries that are not super-repressive and control information access, how can social media in any way spark social justice work? How can online conversations in any real or sustained way be an influencer of poor communities of color, which still struggle with the digital divide as well as class differences between the acculturated blogosphere and the lives the unaffiliated communities live offline?

It is perhaps the anonymous, disconnected nature of the Internet that allows a sometimes sad cynicism about the power of regular people to understand their circumstances and organize.

When we talk about social problems in the abstract as well as the concrete on the Internet, there can be a tendency to blame people as solely the perpetrators of their own dramas. Talk that suggests larger forces at work may be dismissed as, to coin one thing I saw, “‘blame it on the system/structure/institution/man’ excuses.” I get frustrated with community and individual failings as the next person. However, we need to be careful to avoid twisting accountability into an acutely patronizing ideology that, in every historical moment, has proven to be the antithesis of any successful campaign.

Micah White reminds us of the danger of mixing up the educational role of Internet activity with street organizing:

Gone is faith in the power of ideas, or the poetry of deeds, to enact social change… Political engagement becomes a matter of clicking a few links. In promoting the illusion that surfing the web can change the world, clicktivism is to activism as McDonalds is to a slow-cooked meal. It may look like food, but the life-giving nutrients are long gone.

Patrick Ryan’s narrative of organizing bus riders is one of the more affecting pieces for me on this. He reminds us, “we trust that people can change the world and that while our enemies might have a lot of money, lots of technology and weapons, we have people and rely on them.”

The basic character of movements provides the most critical contrast to online drives; movements are not the choir, where we can find plenty of people who agree, but rather are a space where organizers are pressed to balance out all the needs of those involved. Being in someone’s face pushes you to consider language, history and the aforementioned larger forces in a way you can conveniently dodge in Internet forums.

Anson C. Asaka offers a truthful allusion to online realities versus community realities. “Hopefully, instead of simply writing about problems, the black blogosphere will unite again and actually mobilize and organize the community to remedy other challenges such as inner city violence, inferior education, unemployment, war and police brutality,” he writes.

I am far from a super-activist, but count me as one of those people who still believes in the power of movements. They do the necessary block mobilizing, talking to neighbors, protesting and troublemaking that may never get media attention, but inspire hope and teach.