Fields of Struggle
Since 2020, Chicago has seen the masses engage in various fields of struggle in their fight for 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 field, it simply requires the courage to experiment. It is possible to navigate these fields in ways that activate new radicals, re-ignite those that had been on the bench, build organizations, and reach new political plateaus.
What they have in common
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 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. If you only engage struggles to recruit, you’re simply treating them as stepping stones. 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.
Which to prioritize
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 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 replace our political democracy with 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?”
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 clearly 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 clearly 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 genuine pride at the thought of electing a known member of Chicago’s activist scene into the highest political office in the city.
What all of 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
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, 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. Apologies for the bad joke but there was no way to end this without it.
