 The New York Times says that 2020 saw the largest protest movement in U.S. history, with polls suggesting that anywhere between 15 million and 26 million people participated in various protests over the summer and into the fall. I think for many people this was viewed as a turning point in the ongoing struggle for racial justice, particularly in the movement for Black lives that had seemed to be in a lull after the election of Donald Trump — 2020 was a kind of wild, roaring affirmation that Black lives matter. There has been very little protest since then, though, certainly nothing on the same scale. So what happened? Why do you think those protests with millions of people on the streets did not produce the kind of change that people thought it would?

My frustration with The New York Times calling this the largest movement is that it conflated the number of people going into the streets in the United States with organization. Organizers at Dream Defenders and elsewhere realized that those people weren’t absorbed into organizations in such a way to build campaigns toward eliminating some of the kinds of violence that put them into the streets in the first place. What is exciting is that the 2020 protests also made abolition and defund the police mainstream conversations, which I think is huge. Those ideas were met with a lot of curiosity. A lot of people learned about abolition through podcasts, through tweets, and through articles. Organizations, especially Black organizations, are grappling with what can be done with all of that energy that was on the streets. I think a lot of people were excited about defund and abolition but weren’t necessarily connected to a political home that was able to transform that mobilization into strategic organizing.

And then I think people were just up against a lot, in terms of reforms being offered as a solution. They were up against the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which felt like a real solution that people think at least is something; or they saw that some cities decided to take funds away from the police. They didn’t anticipate that Florida and Texas would try to make it illegal to defund the police and take that power back.

There’s a resource issue, knowing, again, that sometimes we’re up against The New York Times, which let Bill Bratton say that we have “defunded the police,” which isn’t true. Sometimes we’re up against fascists who are banning books; sometimes we’re up against liberal politicians pushing bad policies like community policing. People who tout reform as a more “realistic opportunity” to make social change have resources to push those reforms — more resources than people with more radical ideas about how to change the world. In 2020, I think some people went to the streets because it was anti–police violence but also anti-Trump. Now you have Joe Biden as president. Trump isn’t there anymore as a polarizing figure to resist. And now the new people who were in the streets have to figure out how to fight for causes when Democrats are in office, because there is a lot of “anyone blue will do”— but how do we hold them accountable? How do we push the people we mobilize to think and organize long term, beyond electoral politics?

 Definitely agree that there’s a resource issue. But I think there’s also a more basic tactical issue. You can protest your way to making an issue politically important and attention-grabbing: People talk about policing more and in more charged ways than 10 years ago. We have the mobilizations in the streets to thank for that progress, obviously alongside the organizers who have been keeping consciousness alive between eruptions.

But there’s still the question of who decides what the issue’s importance means and what systemic responses are going to fly — questions that usually get settled well after the protests themselves have been repressed. And that’s the stage when organization really matters. To me, this is why unions are so crucial to making any of this work — not because they are magic or because every member of every union has perfect politics — but because unions are one example of an organization with strategic options that many other kinds of organizations don’t have. They have a group of people who can decide, in democratic processes, what the group’s demands are — politicians don’t get to pick their favorite protest sign and just decide what the protest is really about, as we’ve seen post-2020. If those demands aren’t met, they can respond by withholding something that the people on the other side of the negotiating table want and need, rather than just writing clarifications insisting that the other side has misunderstood why people were picketing or what “defund” or “abolish” really means.

These are the advantages that explain why unions are so potentially politically powerful and have been crucial to movements for justice historically — why they were so pivotal to dismantling Jim Crow, why Dr. King was shot while he was linking up with them. To be clear, other kinds of organizations can play this kind of role too: attacking banks and politicians with debtors’ unions, going after energy companies with ratepayers’ unions, going after landlords and developers with tenants’ unions.

It also shows us what trouble we’re in now that unions are on the defensive. Less than three months after President Biden signed a bill shutting down the rail workers unions’ strike, there was a catastrophic derailment outside of East Palestine, Ohio, that spilled potentially deadly toxins into the air. Train safety had been one of the 

 the unions were pushing for. But corporations like 

, the rail company responsible for the derailment, continue to 

profit. At this point of the climate crisis, who really thinks this is going to be the last environmental disaster enabled by protecting big business’s right to risk all of our lives?

The important part is being able to decide on and build power together, and to do so by using leverage and not just expressing displeasure to people who don’t care. The stronger the organizations are that can do that, the better off we’ll be. Exactly like Derecka said: It’s organization that lets you do this in a stable way alongside and in between spontaneous uprisings.

I want to ask about the resistance. Some of what you all describe are internal debates within the given movement. Should we accept the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act as some means of change, or do we need to do something more radical? So there are those debates. But there’s also tremendous resistance from the right. I’m wondering if you could talk about that, because even as 2020 looked like a high point of resistance to the ineptitude of the response to the pandemic — and to this monumental racism — it also was a moment of mobilization for the right that has gathered momentum in the months since. Most of that looks like the attacks on what they describe as critical race theory, which is part of a discussion about institutional or systemic racism. The attacks on the 1619 Project, which is being literally banned in schools in some states. Derecka, you mentioned the Dream Defenders, who are based in Florida, where Ron DeSantis has created what historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad has described as a laboratory of fascism. A lot of those political attacks have been directed at either trans teenagers or the study of Black people, Black history, anything about contemporary Black America. What do you think the right is doing? Why have this particular response, and what do you think is significant about it?

Protesters outside the U.S. Supreme Court while the justices consider Donald Trump’s Muslim travel ban in Washington, D.C., on April 25, 2018. Photograph by Yuri Gripas/Reuters, via Redux.

 When the Muslim ban happened in 2017, do you remember the protests? Another thing also happened that I thought was very fascinating. Donations to the A.C.L.U. exploded. Legal organizations became the vanguard for how to resist white supremacy. If you look at these bans targeting queer and trans kids and families, who are prevented from getting gender-affirming care, the way that people are responding is to outsource the resistance to lawyers and have them go fight: donate, sue in court, threaten to file an injunction. I think that outsourcing resistance lets fascism flourish because then it becomes a problem that we are not confronting with mass mobilization and organization. Instead we’re telling people to let lawyers, legislatures, and the courts work it out.

Do we need a legal strategy? Of course. But we need mass resistance by everyday people. We need to go to the libraries where people are banning books to say, “Absolutely not. We’re not going to allow this.” We need strategic, disruptive, direct action. We need protests to push back and to show in numbers that this is wrong. I fear that we now just expect a lot of lawyers to do that work. That makes me particularly nervous because the right wing has taken over the courts and several facets of government. You have lawyers who are afraid to bring lawsuits in federal court because of the Supreme Court. How do we reconcile that with what’s been happening since 2017 — the urge to simply donate to the Legal Defense Fund, donate to the A.C.L.U., donate to other legal organizations to go fight — instead of the kind of mass mobilizing we experienced in 2020 as forms of broader resistance to what’s happening?

And along with the anti-trans bills, alongside banning critical race theory, we have also witnessed since 2014, when Michael Brown was killed, the criminalization of dissent, the introduction of laws to remove access to health care and food stamps for people who decide to go and protest. Some states have passed legislation that have enhanced protections for police, so that police have become essentially a protected class. We are up against states criminalizing dissent, and states banning and criminalizing the ideas that encourage people to think differently and act more courageously about the world, all while Biden calls on Congress and states to give more money to the police and increase the number of cops on the streets by 100,000. Who do you think will be enforcing the criminalization?

It’s also worth pointing out that what we’ve seen on the right are just the latest outcomes of an extremely long-term organizing strategy. Derecka, you mention the takeover of the courts — the Federalist Society started incubating the legal careers of the people who would control the Supreme Court decades ago — for at least one justice, as early as the 1980s. ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, formed in the early 1970s and has been laying the groundwork since then to mobilize police violence against the exact kinds of protest that Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, also known as Tortuguita — a forest defender who was killed by state troopers in January — and comrades were doing in Atlanta against Cop City. The right wing is ahead of us by decades, not just by dollars.

But what do we do? I had not thought about the way the different levels of governing are working here — Trump spent the entirety of his presidency packing the courts with young conservatives, unqualified right-wing judges, who are just there on ideological missions. Then you see Republicans across the country just doing blatantly unconstitutional, illegal things, in hopes of sparking lawsuits that go to these corrupt courts, taking a local issue and making it national. And then the only recourse within this framework is to the reactionary, undemocratic, monarchical Supreme Court. It seems like liberals have played right into this by deciding, We’re just going to sue, we’re going to file a lawsuit here and file a lawsuit there. It is a sophisticated web that has entangled people who think that because these things are so outrageously unconstitutional, of course we must challenge them and get them off the books. But instead it becomes more complicated because of the shape of the judiciary. So what do we do?

 In early February, I had an event with Amna Akbar, Bernard Harcourt, and Cornel West. We discussed Dr. West’s law-review article on the role of lawyers and progressive social movements that he published in the 1990s. What he says in that piece is that lawyers need to continue to fight defensively, to protect and safeguard the rights that we have struggled to secure over time, and remind people about the suffering that we had before those rights. But we, lawyers and the public, have to understand that litigation is not the most radical intervention we all can make; it’s just a very specific role for some lawyers to protect what we already have. To me, it makes a clear case for movement lawyers to be supportive of and in political homes with grassroots organizations who engage in mass resistance to state violence. But we also need to do what Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs call us to do, which is to project — and then build — the alternate vision of the society that we want. I’ve been thinking about that over the past couple of weeks. I think broadly, for people who care about freedom and justice, we can’t be afraid and should be encouraged to be more explicit in our bold ideas about the society that we deserve.

We have to identify and condemn hypocrisy and the criminalization of our ideas. When I hear liberal and corporate Democrats criticize defunding the police and abolition because they say they are losing electoral seats — and go on to sign resolutions that condemn socialism — it’s as if they almost blatantly ignore that whatever sort of language or narratives they use in their campaigns, the right is going to paint it as the most radical thing ever. You cancel a measly $10,000 in student debt, it’s “socialism,” so you may as well just cancel it all — it can’t be that much more “socialist,” right? But Dems pretend that student-debt cancellation and abolition are narrative issues; they hide behind language to obscure why they don’t support the substantive reasons that lead members of the public to organize for these causes. They are not interested in social transformation, and they benefit personally, professionally, and politically from the status quo. So we must be much more energetic, powerful, strategic, experimental, and organized.

We need to continue to explicitly name the radical ideas that we’re struggling for and to take time, as many organizations do, to be in conversation with the public through political and popular education; through art in various mediums; through media that explains what we mean when we say socialism, abolition, feminism, internationalism. We’re struggling and fighting for these concepts, right? So what are they? Why do they exist? Where are people experimenting with them? We need to use these spectacular incidents of violence that have brought people to the street as an opportunity for everyday door knocking, canvassing, and reaching out to people to strengthen our bases. This is why I’m so excited about what Dream Defenders is building, because we need a national membership-based organization that organizes people and invites them to think more critically about politics and what they could be. They can go on to put pressure on the establishment through electoral politics, through protests, through mutual aid, and building alternatives.

Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) rallies hundreds of young climate activists in Lafayette Square on the north side of the White House to demand that President Joe Biden work to put the Green New Deal into law on June 28, 2021. Photograph by Chip Somodevilla, via Getty Images.

We have to train people to engage in all kinds of direct action, train people to vote, train people to run for office, and train people to organize. These are not my ideas. These are the conversations I’m having with other organizers, with other human rights lawyers, with scholars, with artists, because not only do we have to think about what we need to do, we have to take the risk and go experiment and try it! And then evaluate, and try again. It is an iterative process. But I think one beauty of that, part of the Black radical tradition that makes me and my work possible, is knowing that we’re not doing that alone. We have to do that not only with people across state borders but in deep solidarity with people who are resisting other kinds of fascism across international borders and learn from their struggles — be in conversation with and think critically about what’s happening in India, in Brazil, in South Africa. We have to be ready to understand and also see ourselves as students of movements who are rejecting the kinds of fascism and neoliberalism that we see in other parts of the world and who are embracing new kinds of relationships and potential futures for us all.

 It’s a tough predicament. Unlike the people whose interests they’re protecting, we don’t have the luxury of ignoring the short term to focus only on the long game — the movement is fighting against murder and caging and evictions and deportations, not the very livable disappointment of getting stuck in a job at a lower federal court. But I think we can probably all agree that the legal organizations, whether the Legal Defense Fund or A.C.L.U., are not the organizations that are going to get us over the finish line. So it’s worth figuring out which fights can do double duty — which organizations we can support that will help build long-term power while and through fighting the needed short-term campaigns. I’m glad that we get to hear from KC Tenants in this issue, because that definitely seems like the kind of organizing that could do both.

I’m teaching a course on the civil rights movement right now, so I’ve been reading a lot about tactical questions, questions of strategy and social movements. The legal strategy versus the mass movement was so profound in the civil rights movement. The N.A.A.C.P., of course, championed a legal strategy that targeted Jim Crow laws; just the whole legal edifice in the South was an affront to the 14th Amendment. So the N.A.A.C.P. believed that the movement should let the lawsuits work their way through the courts to have a more secure victory. But King, and the activists in SNCC [Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee], argued that the legal strategy makes no sense without a mass movement. In other words the 14th Amendment had been the 14th Amendment for nearly 100 years by 1965. And that didn’t matter, even after the Voting Rights Act. Often histories of the civil rights movement or this period of the 1960s almost immediately pivot outside the South after the Voting Rights Act — we go elsewhere, we go to Watts, we go to the urban rebellions in the North. But if we stay in the South, you see that even though the law changed, there was not the kind of transformation where the law was this on Tuesday, and on Wednesday all the new regulations went into effect. And we thought we overcame; we were singing “We Shall Overcome.” The law doesn’t matter if people aren’t on the ground, making its enforcement reality. King makes a particular point: that the legal strategy relies on the passivity of those who are most impacted by these decisions. Because you’re telling people to wait for the courts to solve this question, wait for the law to change. And meanwhile, you know, life is hard on the ground. I think those are powerful points. 

I also think that part of the power of the protests against the Muslim ban in the winter and spring of 2017 was not just that people weren’t just sitting around waiting for lawyers, even though that may have eventually been the result, but that it did three things. One, it showed the authorities that no, you can’t just get away with this. Two, it forces the mainstream media to have not just this kind of surface, drive-by coverage but a deeper engagement with the issues bringing all of these contradictions to the surface, the main one being that we are supposed to be a country founded on religious freedom. Protests create the conditions so that people are able to see the contradictions that usually exist beneath the surface. And then third, and perhaps most importantly, is that it imbues a sense of confidence among those of us who are horrified about what the state is doing. Because it can absolutely seem overwhelming if you’re just sitting with your newspaper or watching the news. And seeing people do blatantly illegal things. This is supposed to be a country based on religious freedom, right? That is one of the core tenets in the Bill of Rights: freedom of religious association. There is no state-sanctioned religion; you’re free to practice whatever your religion is. You know this, but if there’s no one doing anything to protect it, it feels like maybe I’m not sure about what I know. Maybe no one cares, or maybe this is just the fate of our society. But when you see hundreds and then thousands of people protesting, it affirms that you know what you know. And it is a way to encourage resistance; it is a way for people to build confidence. It is a way of demonstrating that we are many. And so I feel like that combination of things is part of what we need now. I completely hadn’t thought about it until you said it, but this whole idea that we’re just going to fight this out in the courts isn’t enough.

It’s not something we can just litigate or legislate our way out of, as you both have acknowledged. I’ve been frustrated with the silence of a lot of the popular leadership in the Democratic Party — not surprised, because they are the leadership of the Democratic Party, but frustrated because they are further proof why we need mass public resistance and can’t simply vote our way out of this problem either. For example, as a gesture toward countering the fascist and racist critical race theory bans, why aren’t liberal Democrats rushing to affirm the thing that’s been banned by Republicans? Grants from the Biden administration to affirm racial justice in our schools — where’s that? Where’s that program? What resolutions are being passed to highlight the importance of Black study? Why is this the time to pass a resolution to condemn socialism? Where’s the resolution at least acknowledging “diversity” in educational thought? Because the banning of books and ideas, in addition to the silence coming from the Democratic Party, leaves even liberals feeling isolated and overwhelmed that this is happening. But when the masses are being told that the right way to approach this is to “go vote” or “go sue,” they are implicitly being told not to “go resist,” “go fight.” But that’s what we all need to do — go fight.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 7, known as the “Stop Woke Act,” to ban critical race theory on April 22, 2022. Photograph by Daniel A. Varela/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service, via Getty Images.

This is where the liberal political establishment and the conservative establishment often intersect. The Democrats are more than willing to criticize DeSantis for his authoritarianism, but they don’t actually want to talk about the content of what is being banned. They don’t want to talk about critical race theory. They don’t want to talk about African American studies. They don’t want to talk about Black feminism. They don’t want to talk about the Movement for Black Lives, because it brings to the surface the same issues that the Republicans also want to avoid. Because if we deal seriously with Black history, with African American history, and nearly 300 years of slavery, 100 years of legal subjugation, maybe these Black people have a point about redress. Maybe they have a point about reparations, and maybe they have a point about the need for programmatic institutional interventions to repair the inevitable harm and financial devastation that would come from nearly 300 years of slavery and 100 years of legal subjugation. Neither party is interested in having that conversation, because that’s a trillion-dollar conversation. More than a trillion dollars goes to the military now. It doesn’t go to reparations; it doesn’t go to housing, health care, education, and all of the forms of redress that are owed as a result of nearly 400 years of legalized oppression and exploitation. So neither one wants to talk about it.

And what we get instead is, “Look at this Black woman I put on the Supreme Court. Look at my vice president, look at what I do for Black people” — which is through these individual appointments of Black people —“look at my press secretary.”

Yeah! “Look, here’s a holiday. I’ve surrounded myself with all of these Black women, surely I hear you. And I’m committed to this.” I think it’s important that we continue to polarize people who support the Democratic Party around these issues. We should help reveal how racial representation and political power are actually dichotomies presented by the Democratic Party. Do you want a Black Supreme Court justice? Or do you want student-debt cancellation for HBCU students? Because Biden promised both and reneged on the latter. Do you want him to choose a Black woman running mate so that he can keep your votes, or do you want him to champion universal health care so that you can keep your life? Do you want an additional 100,000 diverse cops on the streets? Or do you want investment and the proper infrastructure in your neighborhood to keep you and your community safe?

Biden is not the only target. We experience this directly with Black politicians, too, who are willing and excited to play into a certain kind of racial-representation politics in exchange for more transformative demands. Keeanga, you write about this so well. I think that’s such an excellent point. We have to continue to remind each other what we are owed, what we deserve, and what we can build together.

After the Uprising, What Is to Be Done?

After New York State passed the Build Public Renewables Act in May 2023, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò spoke with three organizers from the NYC-DSA Ecosocialist Working Group who campaigned for the legislation.

 To start off, what is public power? Why is it a big deal? Why was it an important struggle? Could you speak specifically to its implications for racial justice and class politics?

 When crises hit anywhere in this country — in the world, really — Black people are made to suffer the most. And we have a climate crisis that is not looming — we’re living in it. On top of trying to help people’s current material conditions, anything we can do to stave off the worst of the climate crisis for as long as we can is going to benefit Black and brown people who are thrown on the front lines of this. And people understand that. That’s not abstract to people. When we were doing canvasses in Gun Hill homes after Hurricane Isaias in 2020, I talked to someone about how whenever there’s a storm, they lose power. This is a low-income person, and they have to find a motel to stay in, because they are on ventilation and their mother’s on ventilation; all their kids have asthma. They’re not able to stay in that place. And when we talk about how we’re trying to rework the energy system and move to renewables, they get it immediately. A lot of climate activism does feel highfalutin, where you buy your Prius and go composting, and a lot of people just don’t do that. But when I’m tabling in the Bronx, saying, “Hey, don’t you hate ConEd?” that just connects. Everyone understands that; everyone knows their energy bills are too high and keep going up. You know there are proposed rate hikes all the time but never accompanied by improved service, so what are we paying for? Whenever there is stress on the energy grid and they have these planned blackouts, they do them in predictable neighborhoods — Canarsie, the Bronx, or somewhere like that. Not the West Village. Not Gramercy. People get it. Being able to change that reality is a direct hit on class politics.

 Socialists in New York City spearheaded the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) to authorize and mandate our public power authority, the New York Power Authority (NYPA), to build, develop, and own renewable energy in the state to meet the climate goals set in 2019 to decarbonize our energy system. We also wanted to create discounted utility rates for low- to moderate-income communities because people are struggling to pay their energy bills, as well as close down all of 

, which are primarily located in Black and brown neighborhoods, like where I live in Astoria, as well as the South Bronx.

Energy politics can be hard to translate, but we wanted to talk about the impact of fossil fuels on our neighbors in terms of health and environmental racism. Brandon and I live along one of the neighborhoods called Asthma Alley because of all the power plants and polluting infrastructure that were intentionally built here. In the context where our energy system is owned by private utility companies that are able to raise rates at any point, building renewable energy has to benefit impacted communities. So it was important not only to include the fossil fuel phaseout and discounted utility rates but also to connect that to everyday people’s lives and say, “If we build renewable energy, we can not only meet our goals and stave off the worst of the climate crisis in New York but also better your material conditions as a low-income person, as a Black and brown person living in these parts of New York.”

 It’s going to be really hot this summer in New York and all over the country. When it’s a hot day, we get a text message from ConEd saying, “Don’t use power.” Because our energy grid is overextended, the existing system cannot provide energy for our needs, which ironically is made worse by its reliance on fossil fuels. And everybody gets that. Everyone needs air-conditioning. We have lights in Times Square that never get cut. We have empty office buildings in midtown that are air-conditioned to 65 degrees. They never are told to stop. It’s always individual households, working families, who are told to sacrifice during these inhumane summer months. And people forget, but those are terrifying times.

 The other important aspect of our bill is that it’s a just transition bill — the AFL-CIO helped us write the labor provisions in BPRA so that any job that’s going to be created under NYPA will be a union job. For us to believe in a just transition, jobs need to be protected, and quality jobs under the public sector must be given to fossil fuel workers who are transitioning out of those jobs and also to working-class people in frontline communities.

 You talked about the AFL-CIO; you talked about canvassing in particular neighborhoods. Could you all say more about what the crucial alliances were to getting BPRA passed and how you made those alliances?

 From the start, the bill was DSA-coded; we had a lot of trouble getting the bigger climate organizations on board. We did build relationships with environmental justice organizations like 

, other DSA chapters who were with us, organizations like 

 to get labor unions and other organizations to support our bill and get it over the finish line. It’s really from the strength of us challenging power and making this seem like it was the most important climate legislation that we built strong alliances toward the tail end of our campaign. I want to give a special shout-out to not only the teachers union, UFT, which co-sponsored a rally with Representative Jamaal Bowman to call for “

,” but also 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East, which supports climate legislation because the union sees how health care workers struggle on the front lines of the climate crisis. It’s no coincidence that the unions that do care work and are on the front lines of their communities bearing witness to the effects of the climate crisis, especially in Black and brown communities, are aligned with the broader movement and socialist legislation.

 The unions in New York are a little bit politically and socially conservative. They don’t take bold steps. Our municipal unions were not at the front line of fighting 

, for example. So there’s a lot of risk aversion despite the fact that New York has one of the highest union densities in America — 

around 20 percent of public and private sector workers are unionized

. But many unions don’t take a progressive, frontline approach toward full policy changes, so it was difficult to get some unions on board. My union, the PSC-CUNY, which represents the faculty and professional staff at the City University of New York, 

. But we’re not 1199SEIU, we’re not 32BJ, we’re not the biggest union. We’re not the teachers [UFT, United Federation of Teachers]. The NYC teachers’ union has almost 200,000 workers. But our union is part of this broader statewide coalition called NYSUT, the New York State United Teachers. Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced a 

 for New York state pensions in 2020, but internal activists — local unions and members of NYSUT — continue to 

. A nice thing about a union coalition is that you can get them to pass things. But leadership may not necessarily use their political capital to support a resolution. Yet our union and other NYSUT Bernie-type folks throughout the state helped to pass a resolution in support of the Build Public Renewables Act. We got it passed unanimously at the 

, which is a big deal because now we could say, “We’ve got statewide labor support.”

 We tried really hard to build with the impacted trade unions, but we also didn’t wait for them to come around. We shifted the material conditions. We passed this piece of legislation. And now they’re like, “Let’s have a meeting. Let’s talk about this.” We were the ones who led with the policy and the vision, and now the trade unions are included in the planning and implementation process. And honestly, the role of the left is to say, “Our vision 

 include you all, and you don’t have to be with us every step of the way. But now we are here— let’s build together.” That’s what BPRA is doing: creating a path for green workers and the left to build a coalition to guarantee high-quality jobs and put more power at the hands of workers and the movement in the long term.

 You have this vision that included labor, and you didn’t wait around for them to figure that out. It’s moved forward now. And so now you’re at the stage where NYPA has this new public authority, but the way that it’s written into the budget language, NYPA has to hold public hearings on its clean energy projects. That will involve you and various unions potentially being involved in the planning stages, but NYPA is in the driver’s seat. What does the next step look like in terms of organizing to make sure that you try to push NYPA in the right kind of direction, aligned with the broader vision that BPRA came out of?

 We only got this far by organizing regular, normal people, organizing labor, organizing politicians into the vision. That’s how we got to where we are right now. So it only makes sense to keep that going. We understood that from the beginning, and it was important for there to be democracy in this process, and that requires constant organizing. It’s not like we get to a point and then we drop it off.

 We are continuing to do outreach with labor unions, so that we are aligned on what we want NYPA to do, which is to make sure that NYPA builds and that these jobs are union jobs. And we will continue organizing and building up socialist chapters across the state, so when projects are proposed, there is already a base of people who say, “Yes, we want this. We want these jobs. This is good for us and the future of our community.” We’re going to continue to pressure NYPA so that we have a firm hand on the implementation of this bill. We have to implement this thing. And that’s going to be a lot of work. So I’m aware of and feeling the burden of organizing labor and organizing people across the state to make sure this happens.

 Plenty of laws get passed in New York that don’t get implemented. The Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act that passed in 2019 was a gold standard climate change protection act. It put us at the front of the map, a better law than anything California passed, and for years, New York State didn’t do anything to implement it, which is part of one of our talking points: We haven’t passed any climate legislation in four years. This law means nothing if nothing happens behind it. But there’s a movement behind it that won’t allow the state and its agencies to just kick the can down the road, because we have nothing better to do except to be a pain in their asses until we hit our goals plus new ones, because BPRA is not enough. It’s a first step toward decarbonization; there’s so much more left to do to reach climate justice. We hit our first goal, but the goalpost just keeps moving. I’ve got two kids, and I’m like, “Why did I have two kids while the world is burning? Unless I’m actively trying to stop them from being on the front lines of the water wars 2040?” So I think that our political enemies are right to be skeptical, but they’re wrong to underestimate just how annoying we can be.

 That’s a perfect segue to the strategic power of being the right measure of annoying. I want to ask about balancing the need for alliance and antagonism. When you’re canvassing and talking to regular folks, you probably hear a range of opinions — some people are aligned with you, other people aren’t. And then the same thing was true across the different union leaderships and among the different elected officials. How do you balance the need to find some connections with people who might not have the same vision that you all had with the BPRA but also the need to be a pain in the ass to others? How do you make those decisions, coming back to Brandon’s point about movement democracy?

 In terms of decision making, this campaign has been extremely democratic. There are quarterly strategy sessions where people get together and take the lay of the land: What have we done? What have we accomplished? What remains to be done? What happens next? And we sit down and talk about them, take votes on things. You win or you lose on your particular vision, but you keep moving forward. Leadership was spread out as broadly as possible, and we were always trying to bring new people in. Not everything was nice and easy. There were some arguments. There were some tense moments, and trying to figure out how to balance things, including the actual strategy, wasn’t an easy process, but it was extremely democratic — one person, one vote, and staying together within that.

Now for the fun part, the antagonism. BPRA and public power in general is an unabashedly eco-socialist vision for how to work energy in this state, which also means that it is a natural magnet for enemies. We were trying to upend how the energy system works, so obviously we had fossil fuel corporations and all sorts of politicians who are in various pockets against us. Honestly, the ability to show power was the most important thing, and a lot of that is antagonism. Some of that is alliance building, too. How do you build alliances so you can have power to back what you’re trying to achieve? That’s where the balance is. It’s difficult to figure out how to do that. I’m naturally an attack dog; I go in on people. I help with comms. Often, I’ve tried to take a very aggressive approach against a particular target, and then someone has to say, “Hey, listen, we can’t really do that with this person, because behind the scenes they’re doing x, y, or z,” which I don’t necessarily know about. It really is about trust in the people that I’m working with, who are engaged in different parts of the campaign, who know things that I wouldn’t be privy to, so if someone tells me something, I trust and believe that they’re on top of what they’re doing. At the same time, they trust and believe in what I’m doing, too. So there’s a little push and pull there. But overall this was a bold campaign to reset people’s ideas on what was possible on climate, which made it naturally antagonistic. But there is always a need for coalition building and seeing people as partners, even in moments when they don’t necessarily agree. I do think the key to bringing everyone on board was wanting to see a just transition for workers, wanting to see workers in these frontline communities brought on board to be part of the solution. You have to want to do that alliance building. And then you have to want to attack people, too, when they get in the way.

 When we were power mapping, we did an analysis of who has power, who moves leadership within the legislature, and who is not acting on climate. And it turns out our own Senate bill sponsor is not moving our bill past committee. So all across the state we ran seven electoral candidates specifically on climate as their key issue. That was part of our calculation: if you are not moving climate legislation, you will lose your job. After our bill’s lead sponsor was primaried and won by a plurality, by less than half, then he started moving things. We came up on PowerPoint presentations that he was giving to the rest of the Senate where BPRA was presented as priority legislation. And then electing Kristen Gonzalez and Sarahana Shrestha was incredible because there was renewed energy behind this legislation. Sarahana was a Public Power organizer before she ran for office; her organizing brought a lot more legislators on board where we previously didn’t have access. As scrappy socialists who don’t have power but understand that we need to contest power in order to build it, we challenge seats and are trying to expand the state electorally so that we can implement legislation. And that’s not just for climate, it’s for everything—housing, taxing the rich, workers’ rights, decarceration, and true justice in our communities. So yeah, we did that. [

] And it was exhausting. But if we didn’t do that, we wouldn’t have gotten this far.

 In addition to primarying, there’s also a lot of shaming. There was this great 

 where I got arrested along with many other leaders. Our team created these great Venmo boards that demonstrated how much money all these electeds took from the fossil fuel industry, and some of them were so offended, like Amy Paulin. It became clear how many of our elected officials were in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry. That was an example of a very confrontational protest. We all got hit with misdemeanor charges, later dropped, because it took an hour or so to get us power-sawed out of this structure that included chicken wire and cement, so it was a big deal. I think it kind of worked as a way to mobilize our organizers to continue and feel energized about the fight.

 An important aspect of this was the outside stuff, the direct actions, the meme warfare. And there’s the inside stuff — you’ve got the stick of shaming and then the carrot of Sarahana and Kristen and all the people running the inside strategy. It seems like you are saying that was key to your success here. But I’m thinking of other parts of the country that don’t, at this moment, have allied elected officials. What parts of this are replicable in those parts of the country? Should folks elsewhere start with trying to find vulnerable places in the state legislature and try to run candidates? Do you think they should start outside and see what labor or other organizations they can get on board? What do you think folks who face a different electoral side of the power map could take from what you all have done?

 We didn’t have aligned electeds at first either. We had to create that. That’s harder to do in other places than for us. So it’s hard to say what someone should do specifically or technically. But here are the broad takeaways. People understand that we are in a crisis. People understand their own material conditions. Workers understand what will help pay their bills. Politicians understand that you can get them the hell up out of there. Playing on all of those things is how you win. However that happens from state to state, municipality to municipality, that’s different. But you have to go to the people. You have to have an aligned group of individuals with you. You can start off really small, as we did. And you have to be bold in challenging power, particularly on this issue, because we’re working with tight timeframes. We don’t have time for half measures. We don’t have time to play that game. Bold antagonism is what’s needed. And doing as much as you can to align people’s material goals with your own climate goals is the real key.

 As an organizer, I’m always like, “You’ve got to power map. You have to understand and assess your conditions, and then chart your path forward and be willing to fail and make mistakes.” But the heart of the matter is that I loved organizing with my comrades. I was changed and developed through this campaign. A lesson to come out of this, besides analysis, power mapping, and electoralism is: Take heart. Believe in your comrades, believe in the movement, and build with people. All organizing, all building, happens with people. All of our vision is implemented through people. And trust that your vision will win. And that’s not even poetic. That’s just something that you need. That’s a spiritual foundation you need to fight over the long run, and for our comrades across the country who face violence, increased state surveillance, and the rise of fascism, let’s take heart. All of our issues are connected. And there are already people who are working on these issues in a wide array of ways. So do not fear that you are alone. And build as big of a historic bloc that you can, in a Gramscian sense, to let people know that this is a mass movement.

 The bill passing changes the organizing landscape for people in other states who want to replicate or improve on this. Being able to look at New York provides better opportunities for other groups. DSA, for example, is trying to organize nationally to build this out across the country. Success breeds more success. It’s not going to be easy, but we are working as much as we can with others. Somebody just said, “Let’s get in touch with an organizer in Minnesota right now. Let’s get them to pass BPRA, if they’re going to pass all this other stuff through with a 

.” I just called somebody in Minnesota. I went there for grad school. I said, “Let’s find out how we can use our networks to spread these strategies, because every place is vulnerable and in need of these kinds of changes.”

 Is there anything that you didn’t get to say about BPRA or organizing in general?

 It took every single person to pass this bill, and we do not take that for granted. Everybody who participated in some way felt like this was building something, and it did. One day, we will win, and it takes everybody. Don’t take your comrades for granted. Love, trust, and respect the people you organize with.

 We have a lot of direct discussions with regular New Yorkers ahead of us. This summer’s going to be really hot; it’s a good opportunity for us to do the work the government should be doing, which is “Here’s the law. Here’s how it can improve your lives.” We’re going to make everyone we speak to learns what the NYPA is.

You Can Win Bold Climate Laws in Your State

On Oct. 25, 2023, Waldemar Oliveira, Jen Parker, and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò spoke with Mohammed Nabulsi, an organizer with the Palestinian Youth Movement, and Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal.

To start, it would be interesting to hear more about the work of your organizations and how they view the situation in Palestine and the protests in the U.S.

We are a legal defense for the movement for Palestinian rights in the United States. We’ve been around for 11 years. We provide free legal services to activist students, professors, anyone who’s been censored, punished, or falsely accused for speaking out for Palestinian rights. I’m based in the New York City office, and we’re a small team of people.

Palestinian Youth Movement is an independent grassroots movement of Palestinian Arab youth within North America and Britain. We are located across 15 cities. Our focus is on mobilizing Arab and Palestinian youth to take a leading role in the struggle for Palestinian liberation. That typically involves building power within our local context, where our primary base is the Palestinian Arab community. The biggest stakeholders in the liberation of Palestine are the communities in the diaspora, who have been severed, both geographically and politically, from our national movement. PYM’s role is to reconnect the Palestinian diaspora and its struggle, especially youth who have been largely disenfranchised both within local institutions and the national movement more broadly. We do that through a variety of means, of which one is mobilizations — especially in this moment, that’s what we’re seeing as our main role — but it’s also through political education, cultural programming, building institutions, whether it’s associations, unions, community centers.With a common vision and strategy across the diaspora, we can leverage power we build within our communities toward political and social change.

On October 18, the Center for Constitutional Rights 

 a legal analysis that alleged, “Israel is attempting to commit, if not actively committing, the crime of genocide in the occupied Palestinian territory, and specifically against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip.” Do you agree? Would you put it differently? How do you think about this?

 PYM’s position, which you can see in our messaging, is that this is a project of genocide. It’s a genocidal campaign being waged on the people of Gaza through a variety of means, including a 16-year-long siege of Gaza. We’ve seen an intensification of that siege in the last two weeks, the denial of fuel, water, electricity, and medical supplies, coupled with an unrelenting bombardment on a densely populated area with nearly half of its population being children — all while the U.S. works to send more bombs. The only way to see it is as genocide, coupled with the statements by the representatives of the Israeli state calling Palestinians “human animals,” talking about how they’re going to transform the Gaza Strip into a city of tents, and various other genocidal claims being made across the spectrum politically and on every level of the political establishment within the Israeli state, calling for a second Nakba. 

 have self-identified it as a genocidal campaign. We don’t need to read between the lines to understand; they’ve made it explicit.

Unfortunately, we agree with that, too. The Center for Constitutional Rights is a close partner of Palestine Legal’s. We should take the Israelis at their word. The Israeli minister of defense called Palestinians “human animals;” he said Israel’s military will “eliminate everything” in Gaza, and there have been calls to flatten whole neighborhoods. This is genocidal language, as 

 have pointed out, and the horrific military violence against Palestinian civilians should terrify everyone. Knowing the history of how this rhetoric has been used in other mass atrocities is very frightening. We’re very concerned about what Israel will do next. It’s important that the international community urgently stop attempts to commit genocide against Palestinians.

The Center for Constitutional Rights’s analysis and both of you pointed out a number of specific roles that the United States has in aiding and abetting Israel’s military response. There’s the role that the U.S. plays as a direct military ally and funder. There’s the role the U.S. plays in preventing action in the United Nations, its role in the Security Council. And then there’s the role that the U.S. plays as a hub of a powerful media apparatuses that can work on an international level to help manufacture a legitimacy story for this. From a strategic perspective, is there a particular one of these roles that you are focusing on or that people acting in solidarity with you should focus on?

At Palestine Legal, we are domestic focused. We’re here to make sure that activists like Mohammed, whom I represented when he was a student, can speak out for Palestinian freedom. We let activists do their organizing, and as movement lawyers we think it’s important to take a back seat, to be the defense, and not to dictate or direct the movement.

For us, it’s a struggle that must be waged on every front. Direct material aid has been the focus of the Palestine movement historically, the multibillion dollars provided by the U.S. government to Israel for military aid. There’s also now a call to increase military aid to Israel. The actual bombs being dropped on Palestinians in Gaza, the white phosphorus that’s being dropped on Palestinians in Gaza, are alleged to have links to the U.S. There needs to be a disruption of that.

As far as the U.S.’s involvement in the international arena, the call for a cease-fire, which is being echoed across the Palestinian rights movement in the U.S., is being amplified by a vast majority of governments across the world. Only a handful of states — many Western nations, including former colonial powers, and their de facto client states — are opposed to a cease-fire. We’ve seen an attempt at a resolution calling for a cease-fire brought by Russia, two separate resolutions, both of which the U.S. government vetoed. There’s also been messages internal to the U.S. government that there’s not to be a discussion of cease-fire. Our priority right now is to raise the political cost of the U.S. government’s policies.

Finally, to the question of media — that’s obviously a main front of ours, to counter the narrative. A project of manufacturing consent for genocide has occurred in the media; there’s been lies and fabrications, repeated and echoed by political and public officials. We’ve had to go on a full-frontal response to that. In the PYM, we’ve organized media trainings; our members across the U.S., Canada, and Britain have engaged media. I think we’ve done up to 100 interviews, both on a local and national level. We’ve also participated in alternative media, things like podcasts, YouTube channels, journals, including leftist journals. Right now, for the PYM specifically, it’s beyond the mobilizations in the streets. It’s about reducing this fervor that exists within the media around massacring Palestinians and raising the political costs, especially for the Democratic Party’s complicity.

Pro-Palestinian protesters during a demonstration in Brooklyn, N.Y., Oct. 28, 2023.

Both PYM and Palestine Legal are directly or indirectly supporting the current pro-Palestine protests. We would like to hear more about the impact of these protests and what you expect to achieve through them. What is the strategy of both your organizations at this point?

First, it’s to demonstrate that there isn’t a consensus in support of genocide, that there are millions of people, domestically and globally, who are against the genocide of Gaza, and that this campaign is not going to be waged without fierce opposition. It’s a declaration of our position on this issue and the position of the grassroots on the streets. Second, it’s to mobilize our communities and supporters of Palestinian rights into the streets to create actual pressure. The work doesn’t end or begin in the protests on the ground — those are part and parcel of a broader set of tactics, including direct actions, media campaigns, and targeting public officials. These are the types of things these protests are meant to do. It’s also about raising the political ceiling on what our community’s calling for, placing the call for a cease-fire within the context of 75 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing. It’s also about enlisting the people who come to street protests into actual organization. A lot of the time people’s involvement ends after going to a protest. These people need to be brought into actual organizations that can maintain that energy and direct it toward targeted goals.

Just to clarify, the demand right now is obviously cease-fire. We see it as the most tangible pressure point toward U.S. policy. Because it doesn’t end at cease-fire; there’s still a 16-year siege that we’ve been waging a struggle against. There’s a 75-year ethnic cleansing campaign and settler colonial project that exists on the ground. There’s expansion of settlements, settler pogroms; there’s the displacement of Palestinians from their neighborhoods and their homes; there’s an attack on prisoners.

Something that’s been missed are two prisoners who’ve recently been abducted from the West Bank and likely assassinated inside Israeli prisons. There’s over 1,000 people who’ve been imprisoned out of the West Bank; there are thousands of Gazan workers who at the time of October 7 were actually inside of 1948 Palestine, or what is called Israel, and were arrested as part of the response to the October 7 attack. 

[Note: they were eventually released back to Gaza without money, phones, or even identity documents.]

 There’s all of this stuff happening. There’s over 100 Palestinians who’ve been murdered in the West Bank since this all started.

For us as an organization, cease-fire is obviously the immediate demand to relieve the brutality of this campaign on the people of Gaza, to allow for them to receive basic goods and medicine. We’re talking about people who are dependent on medical supplies to sustain themselves, beyond the fact that they’re being murdered from the sky. The cease-fire is the immediate call, but it’s within the broader context of calls for justice, dignity, liberation for our people.

We have been getting a record surge of requests for legal help — a tsunami of incidents. In the past couple of weeks, over 300 people have come to us for legal help.

 [Note: as of Nov. 14, that number had increased to over 600.]

 That’s what we saw in all of 2022. And it’s nonstop. We’re seeing people being fired from their jobs for saying that they support Palestinian human rights or criticizing Israel’s policies. We’re seeing Students for Justice in Palestine and other Palestinian students being threatened with violence and anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic messages. They’re being smeared as terrorists, removed from their positions, or investigated by their schools for making statements similar to what 

 made, questioning Netanyahu and Israel’s role in all of this.

So many professors are contacting us, telling us that they have been questioned or that their classes have been canceled. They’ve been locked out of email; they’re afraid of losing their jobs. Even tenured professors are afraid of losing their jobs for communications supporting Palestinian rights, which is just McCarthyite, pure and simple. We’re seeing massive doxxing efforts, naming students who have signed statements in solidarity with Palestinians, things like a “college terror list,” severe harassment, death threats, threats to careers.

The list of things that we’re seeing goes on and on. Students are afraid of getting kicked out of school for, again, engaging in regular speech activities that students should be able to engage in on campus. The chancellor of the Florida state university system released a memorandum 

 all public universities in Florida to “deactivate chapters of national Students for Justice in Palestine” on their campuses. We’re seeing this massive effort from 

 groups, from big donors, from politicians trying to stop this growing movement for Palestinian rights. We are trying to push back on that, because we do see, as Mohammed mentioned, this overwhelming support from the streets, from the grassroots, and especially from the younger generations, artists, and writers who are speaking out against what’s happening, often at immense personal risk. We are trying to make sure that people have the space to speak out against what’s happening right now.

What is Palestine Legal’s legal strategy at this moment?

We have a movement lawyering strategy where basically we think of the law as one tool to be used in the struggle for justice. Sometimes it can be an effective tool; sometimes it’s not an effective tool. Sometimes organizing or speaking out or some of the things that Mohammed mentioned is much more powerful than using the law, because we know that the law wasn’t designed for activists, but sometimes it can be useful. Often when activists come to us, sometimes there isn’t a great legal solution, and we have to tell them that. But often if there is a way to use the law that’s helpful to the movement, we try to use it. In the case of Students for Justice in Palestine in Florida, this is just blatantly a First Amendment violation. It’s just a total do-over of a Supreme Court case called Healy v. James, involving Students for a Democratic Society, that was decided in 1972. It’s just unconstitutional, period. Where the laws are useful, we’ll use them to fight back.

We are a small office. We’re based in Illinois and New York City, and we have an attorney in California, but we field cases from all 50 states, so we’re not doing this alone. We work with a lot of partners and other movement lawyers. Right now, we’re in a desperate situation to expand our attorney network. Sometimes we file lawsuits. Sometimes we’re advising people on their rights so they know what to do, and particularly students so they can be their own advocates. Or we’re writing legal letters to universities, warning them against taking a discriminatory or unlawful action against students supporting Palestinian rights.

Pro-Palestinian protesters during a national student walkout day in support of a cease-fire in Gaza at Washington Square Park in Manhattan, N.Y., Oct. 25, 2023.

Where do you see this going? Because they’re not going to stop with silencing people on Palestine. How do you understand the relationship of the attacks on pro-Palestine students with broader trends and the broader significance for free speech? Why is the right to free speech important for the Palestinian struggle and struggles beyond it?

We’ve long said that Palestine is the canary in the coal mine for rights. After the American Studies Association passed its historic academic boycott resolution in December 2013, which was mirrored after anti-apartheid boycotts against South Africa, the association was met with a slew of legal threats. The ASA was eventually sued, and in the wake of that, pro-Israel lobby groups pushed states to pass laws targeting the boycott movement for Palestinian rights.

Looking at these anti-BDS laws, we later saw that 

 was behind a lot of this cookie-cutter legislation. And of course ALEC is behind a lot of other model legislation that supports corporate power and white supremacy. Palestine isn’t alone. We can see that, particularly in Florida with what DeSantis is doing; the same people who are trying to stop critical race theory and other social justice movements or ideas from being taught in our schools are also trying to stop students from advocating for Palestinian rights or discussion about Palestine in classrooms.

If it’s true that the right to free speech is used in a defensive manner, we were wondering if the right to free speech also has a more active role supporting the struggle. How could success in the courts against repression open another path for the Palestinian struggle in general?

I do see the courts as a last resort. Hopefully, we don’t need to use them. But it’s not just a free speech issue. We’re seeing a myriad of laws being violated as far as discrimination laws, as far as universities not supporting their Palestinian students and the hostile anti-Palestinian environment at college campuses, which violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

A lot of different laws are in play here. The First Amendment and free speech laws are just one subset of laws that are being broken right now in this repression campaign. We’d like to see institutions, colleges, and universities treat their Palestinian students equally, the same as other students. If you’re reaching out to support your Black students after George Floyd’s murder, if you’re trying to support your Asian students after the anti-Asian spa killings in Atlanta, why not do the same for Palestinian students whose families have been killed or are being bombed in Gaza? That’s what Palestinians are asking: to be extended the same compassion and be treated the same as everyone else. Because their lives should be valued, too, and are no less valuable than anyone else’s. The same goes for Palestinians speaking up for their rights and their supporters as well. They shouldn’t be censored or punished for taking a principled stance on a human rights issue, on a freedom struggle issue.

Universities or people in power might not like that students are calling what’s happening ethnic cleansing or apartheid or genocide, but here in the United States that’s why we have the First Amendment — it’s so that the government doesn’t punish you for your views. That’s something we’re reminding people of now as well. And if we need to file lawsuits, we will.

How are your organizations laying the groundwork for struggles into next year and beyond? What is the midterm game and the long game?

Right now it does feel like we’re in this hamster wheel of reactiveness because we’re in a moment where so many people are losing their jobs and are quite terrified. But this is only, unfortunately, the beginning. We expect more threats to the student movement, and that’s because students have been on the cutting edge of social change throughout history. That’s where we see the greatest attacks — often in the university, against the student movement, against professors and teachers but also against writers and artists. That was true during the McCarthy era. It feels like this moment is a throwback to that.

But I don’t want this to be just a downer conversation, because the reason we’re seeing so much censorship, especially at Palestine Legal, is because so many people are speaking out. And that’s really exciting to see. We’re getting calls from doctors, lawyers, novelists, professors, teachers, models, professional poker players, you name it. There’s no area that hasn’t been touched, because working people across the country are speaking out against Israel’s attempted ethnic cleansing and genocide. That’s why we’re hearing so much about the repression. It’s inspiring to see that people are fighting back and are standing up. And that’s just going to be more true. This situation can’t stand forever.

It’s a very complicated conversation to have in the midterm. We’re dealing with an assault; we’re in the middle of a really intense campaign, the fronts that we’ve already discussed. We’re responding to what’s happening but also trying to go on the offensive in terms of campaigns around specific messaging, creating pressure to stop the genocidal assault — that’s the midterm goal.

Now, during this process, we’re identifying gaps that exist in terms of infrastructure, reach, networks, etc. That assessment is happening in real time, and it’s going to have to happen after the fact. We’re going to have to look back and see what we were prepared for, what we weren’t prepared for, and what we had to work out on the fly. That’s happening regularly, especially for the PYM. It’s a democratic organization with multiple chapters. We’ve shifted our messaging throughout this period; we’ve shifted some of our tactics and strategies, and we’re kind of testing what works and what doesn’t. There’s also feedback from our communities and partners; we’re learning what they want us to amplify or what they think is an effective approach. And we’re also shifting, arguing about, or rejecting some of the approaches our community is seeking.

In the long term, the fate of Palestine — and it was signaled by what Radhika said — is the fate of the left in this country. Where the left goes, we go; our ceiling is with the left. There’s only so much support for Palestine that can exist without a broader politics around a lot of different issues. I don’t need to give a spiel about why the struggles are interconnected, but our enemy — the largely right-wing institutions and strategies — are mobilized not just against the Palestine movement, as Radhika said, but against every struggle, including the climate struggle. One of the anti-BDS clauses in Texas was mirrored and now exists around the fossil fuel industry. Like Radhika said, ALEC is the main body creating these bills, which are then brought through state legislatures. The long-term strategy is to build the broader left movements in this country around the unifying platform. I say left and not progressive, because the progressive movement wavers. We’ve seen that both in terms of the elected officials who self-identify as progressive and the broader progressive institutions. So that’s how the PYM sees it.

Now obviously, we also understand setting aside left-wing politics, which are often ideological or political in a specific way. There’s also the goal of building power among Muslim, Palestinian, Arab communities that don’t necessarily fit neatly within a left-wing framing but are one of its most important constituencies, even if those communities disagree with some of the agenda of the left. One of the things we’ve learned is the significance and importance of Islamic institutions in this country and the role that they play in a moment like this, and also just broadly Arab institutions.

Lastly, a politics of anti-imperialism and internationalism is critical to a domestic left-wing agenda. This is where we see the separation between left and progressive, where progressive movements sometimes have narrow conceptions of what progress means that don’t apply to the global south or don’t extend beyond our borders. That is also a struggle. For us in the PYM, our intervention, or our focus, is obviously with the Palestinian and Arab communities and the Palestinian struggle specifically, but we understand the breadth of struggle being rooted in a much broader front. That requires coalition; that requires collaboration, networking, and the development of a shared agenda and a shared strategy for advancing this broad front.

You just mentioned coalition. I’m wondering if there is a general federation or platform through which many different organizations — both Palestinian and anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, collectives, and legal NGOs — get together and define a common strategy.

There isn’t a broader federation or coalition where we get together and define strategies. We are in touch with different institutions engaged in this work. The movement can be divided into two categories. You have the Palestine solidarity movement; Palestinians are present within it, but it also includes nonprofit organizations. It includes solidarity formations, meaning non-Palestinian-led organizations; that includes organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace or IfNotNow. Those are the Palestine solidarity movement.

There’s also the Palestinian national movement orgs; their constituencies are Palestinian, their leadership is Palestinian. Sometimes its membership is either Palestinian Arab exclusively, like the PYM, but at the very least it’s Palestinian-led, and these types of formations not only make demands on the domestic scene or on the struggle but also have an internal politics to the direction of the national movement more broadly. The Palestinian struggle is a national liberation struggle. National liberation formations are required in our work. There’s communication and engagement across both the solidarity movement and the Palestinian national movement, but it’s not centralized. Often in crisis moments, a broad consensus or parameters develop, but that happens organically and not necessarily through direct conversation. With PYM, that happens internally to our work. We are an organization whose multiple chapters take their experiences, synthesize them, and arrive at a vision and a strategy. Then the cycle occurs where it’s brought back to the local, but nothing like that exists between organizations at this moment.

Members of Jewish Voice for Peace and other pro-Palestinian protesters during a demonstration at Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, N.Y., Oct. 27, 2023.

 Something that Muhammad has brought up a few times is the coalition of right-wing interests in favor of imperialism and in opposition to Palestinians and the Palestinian solidarity movement. I want to tie it to the conversation we had earlier with Radhika about the repression in the United States but maybe not exclusively in the United States. When we’re looking at the behavior of this anti-Palestine coalition — however we want to characterize the right-wing collection of people forming against this — on the one hand, they seem to be responding to the increase of popular support for Palestine in the U.S. and elsewhere. But on the other hand, it’s hard to look at their actions outside of the continued $3 billion to $4 billion of aid that the United States provides to Israel despite that increase of popular support. Should we understand what’s happening on the right today, the repression against BDS activists, as renewed strength on the Palestinian side? Or should we understand it as a show of weakness, a kind of show of desperation?

I think so. But it’s not just the right that’s doing this. Democrats, liberals, are also taking action. It’s desperation. That’s why they’re trying to throw everything at this moment and see what sticks. If we were irrelevant, then they would not be paying attention to us. That’s why we really are seeing this surge in the past 10 years — there has been a sea change in support of Palestinian freedom among the younger generations, the 200 or more Students for Justice in Palestine chapters across universities, not to mention other student groups that support Palestinian rights. We see this in Israel lobby groups statements, this fear that they’re losing Gen Z and people of color.

It’s not a one-note issue. People who care about Palestinian freedom also care about other social justice struggles and are deeply involved in those struggles. I do think it is because there’s power here. This is obviously a horrific time, with the number of deaths in Gaza — over 5,000 I think, with over 2,000 children killed. But no one expected apartheid in South Africa to fall as quickly as it did when the time came, and I do believe things could change on a dime when it comes to Palestinian liberation as well. That’s why there are these last gasps from those who support Israel’s apartheid regime to stop people from speaking out. There is this realization that regular people get what’s happening and aren’t going to stand for it.

I agree generally with what Radhika said. The same interests animate both liberals and Republicans in terms of how they orient politically. Institutional capture exists. The dominant structures of power, whether governmental or nongovernmental like the ADL, are captured by and animated by the same interests, by the maintenance of the status quo, even where they disagree on the specifics of social issues or the specifics of the language used to justify what they want. In moments of crisis like this, these different wings of the ruling class come closer together politically to set the line on these issues. And the thing that they cannot capture or constrain is the grassroots, the people power; that’s outside of their control.

Now, they still attempt to shape the views and/or orientations of these people, whether by direct repression and levying costs for them stepping out politically or just media and propaganda. But what we’ve seen, not just on the Palestinian question but on various issues, is they still maintain a strategy of structural capture. The Republicans are really good at this. For example, they’ve had a strategy for the last decade and a half regarding the courts, the Supreme Court and federal courts, putting in judges who are going to uphold their direction. They use the courts or use the government to engage in acts that are clearly unconstitutional. They destroy institutions like reproductive health care in a state, and it takes 10 years for it to be reversed. By that time, the damage is already done, and you’re back to square one trying to pick up the pieces of what they destroyed.

This is the strategy across the board. It’s not just on the Palestine movement; the same can be said of the educational system. They are really upset that they feel like the university system is outside of their control — tenured faculty, the student movements — this is really disturbing to them. What they’re trying to do is reverse tenure. Like what DeSantis is doing, the anti-CRT fight is a mirror fight around all of these issues — LGBTQ issues, book banning, K-12 education — this is the strategy. They target institutions, they try to capture them where there’s space for agitation or dissent. Palestine, like Radhika said, is the canary in the coal mine around us. It tells us what they’re trying to do and how they’re doing it. They are coming where the site of struggle is out of their control. That’s what we’re seeing.

They’re worried about the future more than they are about the present. When you say you’re targeting students, you’re talking about potential future leaders of government. Polls show stark differences between the generations not just on Palestine but on every issue — employment, wages, health care. This is how they attack us. It’s a positive sign that we’re in a struggle in this moment, but we have difficulty translating this grassroots energy into political power. How do we translate this into actual impact on this class of people dominating our lives? That’s the big question, despite us feeling a shift: What’s going to have to happen so these young people grow up and have different politics? Are the same actors, this limited set of people, going to continue to run our world? Or are we going to be able to wrestle control out of their hands?

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators  in Brooklyn on Oct. 28, 2023.

I want to follow up on your argument that the right is operating from a place of weakness. Biden said a couple of hours ago, “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war. … the Israelis should be incredibly careful to be sure that they’re focusing on going after the folks that are propagating this war.” Would you argue that this comment comes from a place of fear, or, as the guy who commands the richest military in the world, is he acting as the mouthpiece of empire?

The U.S. and its relationship to Israel and its standing in the world is the weakest we’ve seen in decades. That’s very clear. Whatever pronouncements Biden makes regarding the destruction of Gaza and the genocide that’s happening on Palestinians, the U.S. doesn’t know where to go right now; the U.S. is extremely constrained in how it’s able to move forward. First of all, they’ve exhausted so many resources, including their military stockpiles, toward the war in Ukraine. They went full-fledged into backing this and turning it into a proxy war between them and Russia. They essentially pivoted away from the Middle East toward Russia and Ukraine, and then China and Taiwan, in a way that divided their ability to manage the situation. They’re worried about a regional war that’s going to inflame both the Arab world more broadly and the different actors in the region, and they’re exposed because all of their military bases right now are under potential threat. So right now, I don’t believe the U.S. knows where to go.

The war in Gaza is going to be prosecuted by a fragile government. Netanyahu’s coalition had already lost support internationally, before they even set foot into Gaza. What that means is Israel, and its standing in the world, is very precarious. And that’s not just diplomatic, not to mention militarily, not to mention what would happen if Lebanese resistance entered the war — that doesn’t tell us what would happen if this becomes a regional conflict. The contradictions that are being put forward at the same time — 

We support Israel’s right to defend itself, but it should respect human life

 — all of that is a lack of a strategy on the part of the U.S. government. They don’t know where to take this war. The U.S. is one of the main orchestrators of what will happen in Gaza. This is the United States’ war just as much as it’s Israel’s war, because Israel is their outpost. It’s not some independent country that decides what it’s going to do in a region, because that’s why the U.S. gives them billions of dollars.

There’s so much more to say about the state of the economy, their attempts at normalization with Arab states. But truthfully — and what kind of makes this worse but also not completely doom and gloom — is both sides of it. The scary part is they’re backed into a corner, both the Israeli government and the U.S., in terms of where they can go; they have limited choices. The Israeli government doesn’t have the political sophistication to navigate themselves out of it. Netanyahu is basically a criminal. As soon as this war is done, he’s going to prison, potentially. And then you have the U.S., which is worried about this regional context, and worried about Ukraine and and Russia and China and Taiwan. That’s scary, because you don’t know what they’ll do. You don’t know if it’s more genocide, potentially. At the same time they’re scared. They’re fearful of what to do. I don’t remember the last time the U.S. government was fearful of what to do and worried about their partner in Israel being unstrategic and potentially drawing them into something they don’t want to go into.

There’s a lot of vulnerabilities for the U.S.-Israel relationship right now. Geopolitically, the U.S. was alone as far as the UN Security Council and in giving Israel the particular kind of support that it has been consistently giving for decades. Add that to the domestic situation, where more and more people are vocally in solidarity with Palestine. If we continue with those threats and think of this as a time of opportunity, what strikes both of you as good examples of concrete actions that people acting in solidarity should be thinking of? Should it be street protests? Should it be vocal cease-fire calls from civil society? Should it be 

, like the weapons factories that are sending munitions to Israel? The National Writers Union is documenting and connecting with media workers who’ve been fired and retaliated against for expressing solidarity with Palestine. Are there any particular actions or avenues or even targets that would make sense, given the way both of you are looking at the situation?

As lawyers, we don’t like to tell activists what to do. But I love all those ideas.

It’s a collection of what you described. This is an opportune moment to agitate politically around broadening our consciousness in terms of the interrelatedness of struggles and the interrelatedness of repression and the enemy that we’re facing. This is all happening against the backdrop of a recent spike in union activity, both in terms of union membership and strikes, whether it’s the UPS, autoworkers, the Writers Guild, actors. Now, those are at different levels politically. But there’s a state of crisis economically. And it’s connected to what’s happening in Palestine and elsewhere in the globe. This is an opportunity for us to draw those connections. Where we are weak politically and need to strengthen is to make this more cohesive. This is an opportunity where we have people in the streets to draw those connections and to build that into organization. We’ve gained those experiences over the years, from the Occupy movement through the Black Lives Matter struggle and the various other movements; it’s about consolidation. My fear is we get these upticks and there’s a lot of mobilizations, but transforming that into sustained action is where we have work to do.

In terms of the Palestine movement, where to channel the energy, it is into everything you described, like the protest movement. I hope that the repression makes things more clear for people. I really do think it has the capacity to backfire miserably, especially on younger generations that have very little to lose in terms of their futures. You’re threatening a population unable to afford housing; you’re threatening a population saddled with debt. I don’t know that it’s a good strategy to violently alienate that population. If I were to advise the other side, I’d say, 

You probably don’t want to do that. It’s a losing battle.

 The earlier question of why they’re repressing so violently — they don’t have any other avenues. We’ve been in it for decades, and we’ll continue to see this younger generation be much less interested in being controlled and dictated to about what our world should look like.

This Is America’s War on Palestinians as Much as Israel’s

Here is the real modern labor problem. Here is the kernel of the problem of religion and democracy, of humanity. … The emancipation of man is the emancipation of labor and the emancipation of labor is the freeing of that basic majority of workers who are yellow, brown and Black. — W.E.B. Du Bois, 

hen the British Crown assumed direct rule over Kenya in 1895, that year marked a milestone in a project to restructure the social world to aggrandize a few well-placed elites in London. The British Crown had pursued this same project in Jamestown, where it created the colonies that would become the United States; in Bengal, where the British East India Company’s armed forces established a political foothold on the Indian subcontinent; and in countless far-off places. Racial capitalism is a framework to understand what the British Crown sought to build.

But what is racial capitalism, anyway, and where does the term come from? For some people, racial capitalism is one word too many: “Capitalism” alone explains the kinds of oppression and exploitation we see in the world. For others, “racial capitalism” is several words too few: The phrase fails to mention gender, ability, nationality, and other bases for systematic injustice. But racial capitalism is best understood as a way that both racism and capitalism work in history and in the present — and how the world as a whole is formed from the areas of colonialism built off the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

Consider a closer look at the historical example of colonial Kenya, where the British Crown — an empire, not a corporation — embarked on a massive redistribution of economic and political power. The categories for these redistributions were racial. The colonial government 

 the most agriculturally productive land and relegated the African “natives,” including the Maasai, Kikuyu, and Kalenjin who had lived and worked on these very lands, to “reserves.” The colonial government gave exorbitantly large estates to white settlers and restricted Indian settlement to low-lying lands.

By 1951, the result was a standard assignment of teams: wealthy capitalists at the top, proletarians and peasants at the bottom. Some other distinctions stood out as well. The historians 

 have chronicled sharp age, gender, and racial stratifications in colonial Kenya within and across the economic designations of “worker” and “peasant.” African women and children were the lowest paid for farm labor overall. Even the highest-paid African men made less than half of the earnings of the lowest-paid Asian men and one-tenth of the lowest-paid European men. The stark divides evident in land and housing continued. The colonial government created racially segregated urban areas to serve as administrative centers, while reserving the most well-planned residential centers for whites and more crowded segments for “Asians.”

Race served as a hierarchical principle of accumulation in the society the British Empire created, whether speaking of income, land, or housing: more for whites, less for “Asians,” least for the Black “natives.” To the racial capitalism theorists, of which I consider myself one, these sorts of stratifications are social divisions that are just as relevant for political analysis as distinctions among capitalists, workers, and peasants. All of these stratifications, not just the latter ones, help explain why this system stayed in place.

Racial capitalism is hardly only an artifact of the past. It tells us just as much about conditions in the present and closer to home. Consider the mounting water crises in the United States, where the most publicized of these so far has occurred in Flint, Mich. The city temporarily switched its water source in 2014 from Detroit’s water supply to the Flint River as part of cost-cutting measures recommended by the city’s emergency manager. 

, residents began complaining about the color, taste, and odor of the contaminated water, and General Motors Corporation discontinued its use of local water. Compounding matters, Flint officials continued to insist into 2015 that the water was safe to drink. 

This crisis was the culmination of a decades-long downward trajectory, as the geographer Laura Pulido 

 in an article: “Flint was abandoned by capital decades ago, and as it became an increasingly poor and Black place, it was also abandoned by the local state. This abandonment can be seen in shrinking services, infrastructure investment, and democratic practices.”

 that the term “racial capitalism” is deeply tied to 1960s and ’70s 

 with Nelson Mandela for working to destroy apartheid) and the South African Communist Party’s organizer (and onetime 

 debated their contemporaries about the nature of the relationship between race and class in South Africa’s social structure.

But the global studies scholar Yousuf Al-Bulushi 

 of the relevance of broader trends and conversations in African political thought and practice at the time. During these same years, in Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam school of radical thought and in other countries, a connected set of researchers reshaped social science in a radically interdisciplinary direction. They argued that the global development of colonialism and capitalism had linked too tightly the history, economics, and sociology of far-flung reaches for countries or regions to be well understood in isolation. The work of this Tanzanian community — which included visiting thinkers like the American sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, the Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, the Italian economist Giovanni Arrighi, and the Egyptian-French economist Samir Amin — helped develop a number of new directions in left intellectual thought, including what’s now known as the world-systems theory.

The African American political theorist Cedric Robinson met and exchanged ideas with intellectuals and activists who had participated in these communities as he traveled in England and throughout the African continent. Thus, his classic text 

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition

 developed an analysis that borrowed from structural insights on the relationship of race, class, and capitalism developed by the South African Marxists, which he combined with the global scale of politics influenced by world-systems theories. As a result, Robinson’s book played an instrumental role in popularizing both the term and a version of the analysis known as “racial capitalism.”

To get back to basics, it’s helpful to be clear about what we mean by both racism and capitalism. To some, racism is a moral commitment held by individuals and institutions: for example, the explicit commitment to treat people of some skin types and assumed ancestries better than others. This view might reserve an accusation of racism for the most full-throated white supremacist groups. Other definitions might focus on subtler targets: for instance, the 

 of negative ideas, imagery, or dispositions with racially marginalized people. These ways of thinking about racism prioritize acts, the bad things people do (e.g., hate crimes) or the bad ways people do innocuous or even good things (e.g., enforcing neutral policies in a racially discriminatory way). In this wider view of racism and racists, even well-meaning liberals may count as racists, or as acting in racist ways. This line of thinking is embedded in many anti-racist workshops and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.

Another way to consider racism might focus on the ways race fits into or makes up social structures, rather than how racism might characterize particular actions or actors within those structures. The racial capitalism family of thinkers and theorists sits under this broader umbrella. As the American studies scholar Lisa Lowe 

 these are the theories that begin with “the sense that actually existing capitalism exploits through culturally and socially constructed differences such as race, gender, region, and nationality and is lived through those uneven formations.”

If you ask a skeptical Marxist to define capitalism, the kind of person who thinks racial capitalism is one word too many, that person might say something like this: Capitalism is a system that organizes economic activity around those who control the means of production (capitalists), who use that leverage to buy the productive labor of others (the workers) and produce goods and services for exchange. Through today’s version of this production and exchange, capital accumulates, making it possible to make even bigger production and exchanges tomorrow. This cycle repeats endlessly — well, until the triumphant rise of the workers to dig capital’s graves (if you’re a glass-half-full type of person) or until we destroy the planet (for the pessimists).

A racial capitalism theorist needn’t disagree with this basic picture. After all, this framework doesn’t tell us what is being produced, where it’s being produced, or who does the accumulating. It’s possible, of course, that this highly abstract picture of the world tells us most or all of what we need to know to figure out the sides of political struggle as the years change: capitalists and workers. If that were right, it would be a good reason to think racial capitalism was one word too many, after all. But one reason to disagree returns to Lowe’s observation earlier: that “actually existing capitalism” has spread through “uneven formations” of differences like “race, gender, region, and nationality” and that these sources of unevenness are politically important. That disagreement might start from the suspicion that the steady deterioration of Flint’s water quality had something to do with which people lived there; that to determine which people in colonial Kenya got the fertile land and which people got the “reserves” was to largely determine the colony’s future.

The term “racial capitalism” has been used in many ways by many theorists, but not all in compatible ways, as the sociologist Julian Go 

. This opens the door for potential tensions in reconciling one person’s claims about racial capitalism with another’s, many of which critics have continually raised as the term surges in popularity. Hudson 

 of one particularly important tension: South African Marxists Martin Legassick and David Hemson (among the 

) focused on claims specific to the South African context, whereas Cedric Robinson preferred to wield it in a characterization of the world system as a whole.

In the end, racial capitalism is perhaps better thought of as a set of questions about how racism and capitalism work than as a separate theory of what our social system is like. But rather than insisting on principle how racial stratifications and disparities are “really” just disguised forms of class oppression (as “class reductionists” might) or how all social injustices might boil down to the preservation of white supremacy (as “race reductionists” might), theorists have simply tried to explain what these different but related things might have to do with each other. To ask such questions is simply to pay attention to how capitalism’s restructuring of production alters the relationships that make up our entire social world, not just our practices and roles in economic production.

Some skeptical Marxists see racial capitalism as a deviation from class and proper left thought in its insistence on the tight relationship of economic relations to broader social ones. But in this respect, racial capitalism is quite in agreement with 

 thought. The writings of many figures in Marxist history link social categories to purely economic ones, and this connection is one of Marxism’s most basic and fundamental insights. This goes beyond the level of theory to the level of practice: Revolutionaries like 

 connected women’s political rights to the class struggle; 

 did the same with anti-colonial nationalism. We would do well to remember that the Russian Revolution gained a foothold for socialism by way of overthrowing an empire. The thinking offered by racial capitalism allows us to “open up, as opposed to foreclose, more complex analyses,” as the Black studies scholar Charisse Burden-Stelly wrote, analyses that integrate thinking about other forms of hierarchy and marginalization.

You don’t need to be sold on the phrase “racial capitalism” to understand it. Use it or don’t; the world will be what it is, whether we subtract a word or add several to any term. What matters about racism, capitalism, racial capitalism, and any other options are the ideas underneath and what we do with them. Racial capitalism offers us a clue: If it is true that racism and capitalism are in a mutually supporting relationship, then we should expect that any potentially effective anti-racist and anti-capitalist struggles will also be mutually supporting. Our ultimate goal isn’t to understand the origins of a term or even its lineage, but to understand the workings of a world we are trying to change.

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@OlufemiOTaiwo

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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

@OlufemiOTaiwo

Contributions

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1

After the Uprising, What Is to Be Done?

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2

You Can Win Bold Climate Laws in Your State

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This Is America’s War on Palestinians as Much as Israel’s

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A Framework to Help Us Understand the World

FREE TO READ

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