Our Movements Need Infrastructure for Care, Recovery and Belonging

I hope you'll check out this week's episode of Movement Memos, in which I talk with my friend Aaron Goggans about how activists can resist the trends of late capitalism, including the alienation imposed by the tech world, by cultivating modes of communication and communal care that defy the norms of our individualist society. In our conversation, Aaron poses the key question, “What are the ways we could organize people into new social forms in which new human, more humane, more liberatory capacities would emerge that we could use for our own liberation?” I found this conversation so helpful and clarifying, and I hope you will too. Aaron shares a number of crucial insights in this episode, including this one:

"If we’re honest with ourselves, the model of social movements has been to just throw young people at these crises and not have a plan to take care of them mentally or physically or financially, and to just always assume that there’s another generation of people who are going to spend five years doing it, and as long as there’s enough of us who put in the 20 years to kind of be in leadership positions, we’ll be fine. When that strategy hit a mass disabling event, we realized that there isn’t a bench anymore, and the care network that we all required to reproduce our lives fell apart."

If you listen to or read the episode, and you're on Facebook, please share your thoughts in our Movement Memos Discussion Group. You can also message me here on Patreon if you have thoughts you would like to share about this conversation.

Please take care of yourselves out there, and remember that starting from a place of compassion means having compassion for yourself, as well as others. If this week finds you tired, know that I am sending love your way.

In solidarity,

Kelly