To Be Transformed in the Service of the Work: The Organizing Philosophy of M4BL

• In Event: Organizing Struggles from Below

Abstract

To Be "Transformed in the Service of the Work," the Organizing Philosophy of the Movement for Black Lives

"The mandate for Black people in this time!
Is to avenge the suffering of our ancestors!
To earn the respect of future generations!
And be willing to be transformed in the service of the work!"

The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) is currently the subject of a number of examinations and analyses, however, the robust political philosophy of the movement has yet to be fully engaged. That philosophy, which I call radical black feminist pragmatism, is fundamentally anchored by the notion that democratic politics has been detrimentally diminished by the dominant theoretical and political emphasis on rights, procedure, and participation, to the exclusion of considerations of capacity, understanding, imagination, and futurity. In this way, M4BL takes up the concern, most closely articulated in philosophical pragmatism, that “the conscious adjustment of the new to the old is imagination” (Dewey 2005, 283) and that there can be no practicable solutions to pressing political problems without funding the capacity to recognize oneself as a developing political subject in collaboration with other such developing subjects, who can both imagine and enact change.

Utilizing insights from John Dewey on democracy and imagination in dialogue with Hannah Arendt’s observations about how political action is constituted, I argue that organizing is the unique mode of politics in which what Louis Althusser called the “interpolated” subject can be “transformed,” that is, come to understand themselves and the world, anew. Critically, the new understanding and capacity for action that is developed in organizing is not a property of individuals but is instead the product of relations between them. Thus, organizing is a critical aspect of democratic practice, distinct from other hallmarks of politics such as mobilization and electoral participation, because it is a process that entails not only coming together in public or political choice, but the dialogic and collaborative creation of both individual political subjectivities and what will count as the subject of politics within polities. This is because organizing is chiefly concerned with political change, an undertaking that requires capacity-building, political understanding, pragmatic imagination, and orientation toward action, in the Arendtian sense of beginning something new and unexpected. In this way, examining organizing as a political activity makes it possible to study the significance of capacity-building, imagination, and futurity to democratic political change.

Author

• Deva Woodly, New School for Social Research