Public Assemblies Strengthen Community Resistance to Rising Authoritarianism
Assemblies are “a unique opportunity for people to build a democracy that has yet to be born,” says Denzel Caldwell.
“If people don’t participate in the shaping of their futures, then we can’t hope for more radical or revolutionary outcomes,” says Denzel Caldwell. In this episode of Movement Memos, Denzel and I discuss the power and potential of People’s Movement Assemblies, and how the practice of direct democracy can help us fight fascism.
Music by Son Monarcas and David Celeste
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is shared here with permission.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we’re talking about public assemblies and how we can build direct democracy at the community level. You’ll hear from Denzel Caldwell, an organizer with the Black Nashville Assembly — a quarterly gathering where Black residents of Nashville come together to discuss the issues impacting their lives, develop solutions, and take action.
As authoritarianism intensifies in the U.S., we often hear calls to “save democracy.” But one of the problems with that framing is that many people don’t feel they have a meaningful relationship with democracy. But the participatory nature of a public assembly can allow people to create democratic experiences, hear each other out, and begin to solve problems together. I think this is going to be an essential organizing tactic in the coming months and years, and I am excited for you all to hear from Denzel about it. Denzel recently shared some of these ideas here in Chicago at a workshop I organized on this subject. That workshop went so well that I decided we should cover some of the same ground here on the show so that those of you who weren’t able to attend could engage with these ideas as well.
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[musical interlude]
KH: Denzel Caldwell, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Denzel Caldwell: Thank you. I’m glad to be here.
KH: How are you doing today?
DC: So far so good. It’s climate change-degrees outside, so it’s a little hot, but I’ll take it for now.
KH: I am right there with you. It’s burning hot outside, and the air here in Chicago is awful today, but the sun is shining through my window, and everything looks lovely, so there’s that at least.
DC: Yeah, exactly.
KH: I am so happy you could join me today, and I’m really glad we’ve had the chance to collaborate a bit recently. For folks who may not be familiar with your work, can you share a little about who you are and what you do?
DC: Yeah, so peace to everyone listening. My name is Denzel Caldwell. I am a kid born, raised, and organizing in Nashville, Tennessee. I do organize under a number of different formations, but the one I definitely want to talk about today is the Black Nashville Assembly. I’ve been organizing overall for about a little under 10 years or a little bit over 10 years. And with the BNA I’ve been organizing for about five. And so, yeah, I’ve been doing that for quite some time, learning along the way, got some lessons and victories. But yeah, outside of that, I love to read. I love to work out and talk to cool people like Kelly.
KH: Well, I love hanging with you, too — and I’ve been so interested in the work you’ve been doing in Nashville. But before we get into the evolution of the Black Nashville Assembly, can you start by explaining: What is a People’s Movement Assembly?
DC: Yeah, so I think the easiest, most straightforward answer to this question is it’s a gathering of community members. And when I say community members, I mean people who share particular geographic location, at least traditionally. And they answer three questions: What are the shared problems that they face? What are the solutions that they need for those problems? And how can they work together to make those solutions concrete? I would say that’s the most distilled, easiest answer to shape or to explain what it does or what it is.
Now, I would say historically, people’s movement assemblies as we know them today, can be traced back to what’s called the World’s Social Forum. And this was a coalition of organizations, movements and those that are adjacent who were coming together to combat neoliberalism, capitalism, imperialism. And within that body, the People’s Movement Assembly was a mode of governance that they used to make decisions. And so, from there, given the fact that this was an international body, when folks went home, folks utilized this mode of governance and it made its way to the USA in the 2000s, I’ll say, because I’m forgetting the date. And since then we’ve seen a number of different people’s movement assemblies emerge in the United States as the idea or the concept spread. And so, you’ll have some that are regional, some that are very local, and something that I think will be very relevant to this current political moment.
KH: I couldn’t agree more about the relevance of this approach in the current moment. And while the World Social Forum is a clear predecessor to some of the assemblies we’re seeing today, this kind of gathering and this approach to organizing has ancient roots, across the Americas and Africa. The Muscogee councils, which have existed for hundreds of generations, are one just one example. Within my lifetime, we’ve seen a resurgence of some of these traditions during moments of transition, upheaval and social reclamation. The Zapatista movement, for example, created village assemblies to facilitate decision-making at the community level. The Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, known as MST, has used assemblies for collective decision making in their encampments. In 2011, the Indignados movement in Spain held horizontal, plaza-based assemblies to deliberate and make decisions outside of formal institutions. And that same year, I got my first experience of direct democracy in the Occupy movement.
Occupy’s General Assemblies were messy, and we didn’t always get where we needed to go, but gathering together with dozens and sometimes hundreds of people to listen, share ideas, and make decisions that would shape our movement and affect our lives was a really important experience for me as an activist. I had never had that kind of opportunity to be heard, or to decide what would happen next, at that scale, in concert with other people. Eventually, we had neighborhood-based assemblies here in Chicago, and some of the core people who attended those neighborhood Occupy assemblies in my area became part of an organizing crew that I worked with for years after the Occupy movement had faded. A lot of really important work was born out of that moment, and out of those spaces that incubated so many ideas and so much potential.
During Occupy, we were moved by the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, the austerity of neoliberalism, and the momentum of global justice movements. What moved you and your co-organizers to create the Black Nashville Assembly?
DC: There were a couple of factors. Prior to 2020, because 2020 is really a watershed moment for us. Prior to 2020, there was some growing interest across the local (and by local, I’m referring to Nashville) ecosystem in terms of doing invest/divest campaigns or abolitionist campaigns that encouraged city councils to spend more money on social services and things that people actually need and less on cops, courts and cages.
And so, what emerged from that was just a coalition where folks who were on the left were committed to that work. So that was around the budget cycle. But as we initiated this work in 2019 going into 2020, one of the themes that kept coming up from our opponents on the city council was that we weren’t organizing Black people in Nashville. They were trying to make this claim that we didn’t represent the interest of working-class Black folks in the city.
And so, a number of different organizers, including myself, Erica Perry, Jamel Campbell-Gooch, Mike Floss, we who are from Nashville, decided to go out and organize our folks. And so, we initially were bringing Black folks, and in this case for us, this was our family and friends and our networks to the larger coalition, the assembly work to challenge the carceral appropriations to the city budget. But what we realized is that along the way, a lot of our folks were interested in creating a container where Black folks, working-class Black folks were able to build their own analysis, assess their own problems, and create strategies and methods for making those solutions concrete. And so, from there, that’s when the Black Nashville Assembly emerged, which is a Black autonomous space. So those who participate are of African descent or identify as Black, but we do have spaces where we invite our comrades to build with us.
KH: I love that you and your co-strugglers responded to this claim that you didn’t represent your community by mobilizing your community in such a highly visible and participatory way. I think there’s a lot to be learned from that example. So, how did this project evolve over time?
DC: So initially as it started, it was a call, as I mentioned earlier, from a larger coalition to particularly organize Black people to build a people’s budget for the city, an abolitionist one. And so, a lot of that initially at the beginning was focused solely on that. And that still is a pretty key core to our work. But over time, as we learn more and more about the importance of organizing working-class Black folks in the city, and more importantly falling within the lines of the traditions that we descend from, that being SNCC and others, within the Black Radical Tradition, we learned that our assembly had to become more multifaceted and it had to reflect our people.
So a lot of it evolved where we had artists that we were organizing perform during the assemblies. We’ve developed a youth assembly that has come out of our work where our youth are organizing our political agendas and bringing it to the larger assembly, and going through the voting process to land on an agreed upon political agenda.
And a lot of other programs from that assembly work have emerged. We’ve had book clubs, we have a men’s circle. We’re just constantly coming up with different ways and things to evolve our work and to reflect the needs of our folks. Black Nashville Assembly is also a project of Southern Movement Committee, which is a container that we created not only for our youth assembly work, but also to engage in statewide assembly work or aspirationally engage in statewide assembly work for Black communities across the state of Tennessee. And so, those are just some of the ways that our work has evolved over time and we’re constantly evolving in terms of our cultural organizing, our assembly work, and our youth assembly work as well.
KH: I really appreciate what your story is illustrating here around the creation of book clubs, the BNA’s men’s circle and the youth council. Larger gatherings and political projects often serve as incubators in ways that people don’t always consider or realize. Years ago, I was involved with a project called “We Charge Genocide” here in Chicago, which challenged police violence. That effort sent a group of young people to present a shadow report to the UN about police violence and torture in Chicago. It also played an important role in winning reparations for police torture survivors. At We Charge Genocide meetings, we would engage as a large group, and then break into working groups that were focused on different projects and pursuits. My collective, Lifted Voices, which provided political education workshops for thousands of people during the decade or so before it sunsetted, wouldn’t have existed without We Charge Genocide’s radical education working group. Those working groups set people on a number of paths. In a moment like this one, when we don’t have all of the projects, participation, and experiments that we need, we need to create more fertile ground for that work to begin.
But circling back to the growth process of the Black Nashville Assembly, did you have a plan or formula to start with or did the people you organized inform the process?
DC: So it was definitely more so of the latter than the former. When we started as an assembly formation, a number of us who had founded this assembly had previous organizing experience, and we had already a developing political ideological orientation. And so, that colored how we approached the assembly work. However, one of the most brilliant things that has come from our assembly work in these past five plus years has been that a lot of the most innovative, radical, grounded ideas have come from folks who have participated in the assembly process. I think sometimes there’s this assumption that for those of us, especially on the left, but that we have to take this evangelical approach to organizing. But one of the most powerful things that we’ve recognized doing our assembly work here is that a lot of our folks know exactly what we need and do have a grounded analysis in the systems that oppress them and really are looking for a container to actualize some of the solutions that would need to take root and to be birthed into reality to address those problems.
And so, of course we have political struggle and our politics are evolving, our practice is evolving, but a lot of our direction, if not most of it, comes directly from those who participate in the assembly. And one of the things I definitely want to lift up here is that the first time that we released a political agenda, that was the result of months and months of deliberation, power mapping with our folks, turning some solutions into policy demands or into policy language and then doing things like a candidate forum during a judicial election as well as the city council and mayor elections, so that instead of politicians coming to our space to do a stump speech, they are being interrogated based on the concretized political agenda of the assembly. And so, that’s heavily shaped how the electoral outcomes have happened, not only in the judicial elections, but also in the mayoral and city council elections.
KH: I love the idea of politicians having to contend with questions that are informed by an agenda a community collectively built. So, in reflecting on what you all have built, can I ask, what surprised you about this process?
DC: Yeah, I think for me it’s a couple of things. One, just as I mentioned before, the first thing is (I would hear this often) to trust the people and to trust their ability to lead, to organize, and to dream of a fundamentally better world, but seeing that is different and that was huge for me. It didn’t take this, again, this evangelical approach where we’re just browbeating people over the head with our ideological reading and position necessarily. A lot of folks came to very abolitionist, anticapitalist conclusions on their own.
I’ll never forget one time or often, we do this often anytime we table, we’ll create a poster and we’ll ask folks, “What makes you feel safe?” And we’ve done that several times and every time that we do it, not once do people write down “police,” not once do people write down “cages” and not once do people write down this carceral system, any piece of this carceral system that makes them feel safe. They talk about family, their faith, their community, their loved ones, the things they love to do, the things that make the city great, things like that from music to culture. But not once do people bring up police.
And so, I think sometimes we can really underestimate the radical potential of our people. And so, that’s been one thing that was huge. I think the other thing that stands out to me was the outcome or the reaction to our candidate forums. In our candidate forums, we had an agenda and we sent the agenda to the candidates that were running for various offices and we gave them an opportunity to fill out their responses to each position, policy position, and we interrogated them once we got there. And you can actually find at least the mayoral one on YouTube and I’ll share that link for folks to see later.
But I think the thing that surprised the most was that a lot of organizations in the city and people in the city were really just amazed by the fact that we asked the questions as an assembly rather than the politicians answering a question that no one asks in terms of what they’re going to do for their constituents. And it threw me off and it threw others off because in my mind I’m thinking there’s a lot of civic organizations throughout the city, throughout the state that do civic engagement, electoral work. And you would think, oh yeah, folks have asked the critical questions. But when folks felt like this was groundbreaking, we were like, wait, all we did was just concretize the political agenda that folks our base wanted and then interrogated politicians based on that. How is that groundbreaking? But for me, that was surprising because that just showed how anti-democratic just like our norm is in terms of how we engage in governance under this current structure. But it was just a reminder also of how powerful the People’s Movement Assembly process is.
KH: One thing I really appreciate about this process is that it’s really the opposite of how a lot of people are experiencing politics right now, alone together in the glow of their screens. We have a serious problem in the U.S., in that our reliance on digital mobilization has left us with a generation of organizers who never learned how to base build or how to canvas. In this alienating culture, that often means that people simply don’t know how to talk to strangers or how to work with people who aren’t of their own choosing. And I’m not blaming people or getting down on people, that alienation is inflicted by design. And unless your political work evolved within an organization that wanted you to canvas or do the labor of base-building, you probably never got that training. We got a lot done by other means, but now, we’re about a decade and a half into the process of being deskilled in this way within our social movements. When you compound that with the alienating dynamics that have evolved on social media, and the isolation of late capitalism, we’re in real fucking trouble. Even when people want to make a difference, they often don’t know how to do more than seek or reward affinity and agreement. They don’t know how to navigate difference or talk about justice with people who don’t understand them or their goals. We need to get practiced at talking to people we would never normally engage with about their fears, hopes, and desires —and we need to be able to build around the shared interests that emerge in those conversations.
So, that said, I’m really curious, how did you and your co-organizers adapt some of your movement, language, and ideas to fit the needs of the community?
DC: Yeah, so that’s a great question. This was an experiment. This is, very much so, an experiment. And what we have found to be successful is attaching the assembly process and the demands and the desires of folks to larger political language. And there’s a meta-note that I have to make here. One of the most important organizing lessons that we have learned in the past five years is our people are very receptive to listening and engaging in learning and political struggle when you consistently show up, I think too often, and I don’t think this is exclusive to liberals, but I think too often even those of us on the left will engage in momentary organizing with folks based on a campaign or a particular flashpoint, but we’re not continuing to cultivate those relationships with our base, which leads to this hamster wheel where we don’t get any farther.
And so, part of our work has really centered on relationship building. So that means in our early days we used to have this thing called “the recharge” where instead of there being an assembly, it was like a party essentially. We got a DJ, people were playing music, and folks were just recharging because we probably went through a particular election season or some really rough moment or we just needed a break. And so, we would do things like the recharge, we have cookouts with our families and folks who are part of the assemblies and bringing folks together.
And so, it’s through that constant interaction that it gives us the trust and basis to do certain, what we would consider mass meetings, because our mass meetings are different than our people’s movement assemblies, where our mass meetings are where we engage in civic and political education and the people’s movement assemblies are the moments where we actually develop our political agenda and strategy.
And so, it’s through those constant interactions, constant events where we’re bringing together community members that we get the trust to engage in civic and political education. So we talk through some of the things that we’re developing in the People’s Movement Assembly and say, Hey, the folks who shape that problem we’re dealing with are in the courts. Let’s break down how the courts work. Or the reason that we keep running into this issue around youth violence is because this carceral system adds to or shapes the violence that our youth are victimized by.
And so, we really just take the opportunity through relationship building and through moments where people are assessing their problems to inject this political, more politicized conversation and some of the movement language, where we reshape things like public safety, reshape things like the notion of community safety and things like that. And that’s what helps people to sharpen their analysis in our experience.
KH: Can you give me an example of something that you might hear in a leftist space language-wise and how it might be talked about differently in the community space?
DC: I think I’ll just use abolition. This is the easiest one to think of where in most leftist spaces, we talk about abolition as this challenge to the legitimacy of the state where we challenge the need or notion of law enforcement or police and the larger carceral system that shapes this arm of the state. And we talk about how we need to build a world where those things don’t exist, and we have these robust accountability processes that exist that allow us to get to the root of a problem. So that’s in our leftist spaces. But then when we’re talking about talking to our folks in the assembly, we might be in conversation and our folks are like, “Yeah, we don’t rock it to police. We’re not interested in that.”
We are interested in something else. We feel we are forced to talk to police. We’re forced to go through this court system, but I really just want to be in a place where I can talk to my folks and have some type of community trust and buy-ins, where we can address the problems without having to involve the law. Or people will bring up a lot of these really robust ideas, especially the youth, around how we resolve conflict in the public schools. Our youth are bringing up restorative justice processes on their own. They’re brilliant enough to say, “Hey, we have to find ways to restore relationships within the school because we know that the school resource officers and the metal detectors and things are a threat to our safety.” And so, our people are talking about the things that they already do to avoid the carceral system.
And what they’re doing is talking about ways to institutionalize those things, so that the necessity for police becomes less and less, or the legitimacy of the police becomes radically less. And so, this is how the abolition conversations come up. And sometimes, honestly, we may not even use the word “abolition,” but the spirit of abolition is within the conversation in the analysis-building and the concretization of our political agenda. So it’s in there, it’s materially in there. But sometimes we may use the language and they’re familiar with it, but we may not. And that’s okay, because we care about the material outcome of our agenda and our struggles for wins.
KH: That really resonates with me, and I have had a similar experience talking with people who are trying to combat the damage done by the opioid overdose crisis. In Native communities, some of the people I talk to are on the same page as me about not fucking with police, but I’ve also heard people talk about holding out hope that there was some way the cops could arrest our way out of this. They thought that if the cops could just be pushed to “do their jobs,” or do their jobs in a particular way, fewer of our people would die. And then, over time, those people observed the actual trends on the ground. They saw that people who were using substances were more likely to overdose after getting arrested. Because while they’re locked up for a few days, their tolerance to the drug drops, and when they get out and use — which will happen, because people don’t heal in jail, they just become more traumatized — they are more vulnerable to overdose. So, some people who previously looked at cops as a potential solution now recognize that our people actually need care, and to be insulated from contact with the police, whenever possible. And these are things I’ve heard from people across different communities, and the Native people I’ve talked to about this stuff, most of them wouldn’t call themselves abolitionists, and they are not out here calling for the abolition of prisons, but the work of replacing carceral responses with care is abolitionist. The work of reducing contact between our community members and police is abolitionist. So, often, I’ve found, it’s really about addressing people’s needs in very concrete terms. What actually helps? What actually hurts? And if we’re thorough and honest in our analysis on those points, there’s going to be alignment with some of our radical politics — because those politics exist for a reason.
Of course, the work of hearing each other, and meeting people where they are, can get messy. Activists and justice-minded people have really built their own cultures and subcultures around the pursuit of justice, and we can sometimes be intolerant of people using the wrong terminology, or knowingly or unknowingly saying things that are problematic or disrespectful. So, how do you handle it, in the public assembly setting, when someone says something fucked up, or there’s a harmful impact that occurs?
DC: Yeah, I appreciate this question, because this is something we definitely have experienced before. I want to say that one of the first things that we do with that expectation that something like that would happen is we have a set of community agreements in our assembly that folks have to consent to before we begin.
And so, some of those things include not making assumptions about folks, being curious, making space and taking space. Some of these things, we’re familiar with. A lot of us on the left and in movement spaces are familiar with. And of course we are adjusting it to reflect our folks who are organizing with. And so, that’s sort of like the basis or the agreement or the account upon which we can engage in accountability. Because oftentimes when people talk about accountability, people forget that a prerequisite of accountability is relationship and an agreed upon set of values or agreements to which we hold people to account. And so, in our assembly, the community agreements are the things that people consent to first.
So when someone says something fucked up or when someone says something that is out of alignment, we take time to remind people, “Hey, we agreed to these community agreements. Let’s reground.” We’ve done different things, we’ve had conversations, we brought people to the side and talked with folks during and then after our assemblies. But one of the things we also do as well is we remind people of the agreements. We always center the agreements, and we push back. We have no problem pushing back in our space. We do it not from a place always of combativeness, from a place of love, and love being the willingness to see the fullness of our people and the willingness to struggle with them towards a collective liberatory victory.
So we talk about our edges, our growth edges as something as a part of our community agreement. We recognize it. We recognize that people come in with fucked up ideas, that people come in with a colonial mentality or colonial outlook. We are all under colonialism. And so, we acknowledge that up front. We don’t run away from that, and that’s embedded in our agreement so that when we do hear things that are colonial, are carceral, are anti-Black, all these things, we are able to address it from a more solid basis than just calling somebody out because they said something fucked up, but not really being in relationship with them, which is something we see too often online and unfortunately even in some spaces, real world spaces.
So I would say that our community agreements have been the basis for how we respond and struggle principally with our assembly members, and then also just relying on our relationships. So it can take a lot of organic forms. We can hit folks up and just say, “Hey, I want to follow up with you and just talk with you about what you said at the assembly.” Or sometimes that might even shape our mass meeting content. And there’s a number of examples there. And oftentimes it’s something that within the assembly work and the political agenda development, that shapes the conversations and policy demands and agendas that we develop in the assembly. So I say all that to say that that political struggle is embedded within our assembly work and we don’t run from it. It’s embedded in our community agreements and our folks are still here.
KH: Can you say a bit about how you developed the community agreements?
DC: Yeah. So a couple of things that I think it’s important to note. I think with the community agreements, that is probably of the places that initially was shaped by our political orientation, our political pillars, and to specify, our four political pillars as an organization are pan-Africanism, Black queer feminism, economic democracy, and police and prison abolition. And so, as I mentioned earlier, a number of those of us who were at the beginning and formed the assembly, we came in with a certain set of politics or political dispositions already. And so, a lot of the things we saw in community agreements, in other spaces, other movement spaces of the base-building organizations we brought with us.
But the thing about it is that as we started to engage our people, as we started to learn our folks, struggle with our folks and have the assembly shape be shaped in our folks’ collective image, the way in which those community agreements evolved began to more directly reflect the people that were in the space. So it’s not that so much they shifted in terms of being curious about people not making assumptions, acknowledging growth edges. It’s not so much that they shifted in terms of the spirit, but the language might have shifted to reflect our people. The way in which we ground the assemblies or the mass meetings more accurately reflect our folks who are part of the assembly. And so, yeah, I say that to say that there was a mixture of our initial or our base political orientation that shaped it, but it has evolved based on the engagement of folks in the assembly work.
KH: I really hope people will internalize this piece around developing an approach that reflects the culture of the community and the space. There is no one-size-fits-all approach, and the language and norms of our movement cultures and subcultures are not going to copy-paste well into a neighborhood practice. We need to be of the community, and for the community, rather than trying to simply prescribe something for the community. And we need to shape our goals in the same way.
Speaking of goals, what are some of the wins you’ve experienced since beginning this project?
DC: We’ve had a couple of strong wins, actually. I would say just as we began the assembly five years ago, we played a critical role in the normalization of abolitionist language on the city level, particularly when it came to the budget cycle. Because before 2020, if you brought up this idea that money needed to be reallocated away from Metro Nashville Police to the social services, there would be a lot of pearl clutching.
But we played a huge role in normalizing that language when post-2020, post-George Floyd uprising, in a way that has shifted the Overton window left locally, as far as the budget cycle is concerned. I would say more concretely our biggest, we’ve had back-to-back wins in the past two years, this year and as well as last year. Last year, just to give you context, our youth, when they developed their demands for the budget cycle in 2024, they came up with this plan called the Varsity Spending Plan.
And this was a $10 million plan where you had money that would go to the nation’s first Office of Youth Safety, which was an office that was dedicated to creating proactive solutions, youth-led solutions to youth gun violence that is fundamentally working separate from the carceral system. And this is language that was included in the executive order, the mayoral executive order when this office was erected. The other part of the varsity and spending plan includes some restorative justice programs or pilots in a number of different schools, public schools that are predominantly Black in the city, as well as providing more support for community center funding as well as ensuring there’s funds for a full-time restorative justice staff.
And so, with this Varsity Spending Plan, the assembly got behind it. There was a consensus with the adults and the youth that this was the assembly or the political agenda that we would put forth. And so, back in 2024, we were able to secure a million dollars towards this plan. And again, this is not something that’s going to our organization. This is something that’s a part of the larger city infrastructure, so the Metro Nashville infrastructure. And so, that a million dollars had $750,000 go towards the Office of Youth Safety, which again, according to our analysis, is the first of its kind in the nation, not just in Nashville. And we also got funding to go towards restorative justice pilots in some of our targeted schools.
This year, we were able to increase that budget allocation to $1.7 million. And so, since then, our youth have played a direct role in the selecting of the director for the Office of Youth Safety, as well as the organizing and advocacy and public commentary that led to the additional allocation for the restorative justice programs as well as the Office of Youth Safety. And so, we’ve been on a two-year winning streak. We hope to continue building and moving towards that $10 million allocation to fully fund the Varsity Spending Plan. But we’re proud of our youth, we’re proud of the assembly, and we look forward to continue winning.
KH: That is all so heartening. And we need heartening stories right now.
We both expressed earlier that we think that the creation of public assemblies is a particularly important organizing tactic right now. Can you talk about the importance of the public assembly as a tactic in this moment of intensifying authoritarianism?
DC: Yeah, I think that there’s always, in this country, even when we take a decolonial lens, in public discourse, there’s always been this question or conversation around democracy. Depending on who you talk to, some would say that democracy has been under threat for a while or maybe even is coming under threat under Trump. I think those of us who fall under the Black radical tradition recognize that this U.S. project was inherently anti-democratic from the perspective of the colonized.
And so, I think in that vein, I think that what this process, the People’s Movement Assembly process provides is a unique opportunity for people to build a democracy that has yet to be born or has yet to exist. And I think that is particularly unique and something very opportune in this moment because a number of people across the political spectrum, honestly here in the United States, are looking for something different. People recognize the dilapidating social safety nets, the increased cost of living, the impending climate disaster and Armageddon we’re facing, and the imperial boomerang that we see coming back home to roost with the increase in ICE raids, the further militarization of police.
And so, with that, one of the most potent tools that people can do, not only as a means of survival, but as a means of world making is to engage in a governance structure process like the People’s Movement Assembly, because this process invites people to be active participants in shaping the collective outcome of our people’s futures.
And that is a primary and oftentimes missing ingredient in building mass movements, because if people don’t participate in the shaping of their futures, then we can’t hope for more radical or revolutionary outcomes. And if we look across history at various revolutionary moments, radical moments, especially throughout the world, one critical component was organizing the masses towards being active participants in the shaping of their futures. Whether that’s through literacy campaigns, whether that’s through collective assemblies, whether that’s through party formations, all of the above. And I think particularly in this moment in the United States history and this particular political moment, not just domestically, but internationally, that the U.S. and people who live within the U.S. can in some ways, once again, depending on the history that you reference, can participate in a larger struggle for a world where people and systems are governed directly and democratically by the masses, and controlled by the masses rather than by a wealthy predominantly European few.
KH: I couldn’t agree more, and I think that we need to give people a different set of experiences, if we want people to want folks to develop a different perspective. Right now, a lot of people are experiencing politics as consumers of takes and information. We consume opinions, we approve or disapprove. Maybe we echo a perspective or add one to the mix. But we need to get people into a practice of actually hearing each other, and actually having a voice among other people who are trying to solve a problem or a set of problems together. Some of that needs to happen in person. Some of it can happen digitally, outside of algorithmically curated spaces. It can also happen with an eye toward accessibility and COVID safety. When we gathered to talk about public assemblies in Chicago with you recently, Denzel, it was too hot to gather outside, so we were indoors and we were masked. The important thing we need to realize is that we need to create space to build the kind of relationships and potential that we want to see right now. Repeating the same patterns isn’t going to give us different outcomes.
If we want people to fight for democracy, let’s give them a sense of what democracy can feel like. Let’s build that together. And whether people are gathering around a specific issue, like housing struggles, austerity, a site fight, or defending their neighbors, let’s give people a hands-on sense of what it means to come together and make decisions that shape what happens next. I know some people in this country already have a passionate or romanticized relationship with democracy, but that’s not everyone, and I don’t think it’s most people. Most people just want better lives. They want less suffering and more justice. We have to make democracy a vehicle toward those ends.
So, all of that said, is there anything else you would like to share with or ask of the audience today?
DC: Yeah, definitely, if folks are interested in following the developments of the Black Nashville Assembly or the Southern Movement Committee, definitely feel free to connect with us or support our work through OurSMC.org. Beyond that, I would highly encourage folks to find an organization.
Whether you’re engaged in mutual aid, whether you’re engaged in particular policy campaigns or whether you’re engaged in assembly work, to find an organization, find an organization in particular that is, ideally, anti-imperialist, that is challenging capital and wants to build a fundamentally different world. Especially in this political moment, there’s a wide political window, and we hope that you are able to find one that fits, and there are many out there. And if you don’t see one that exists, feel free to build one that meets the need. But yeah, I would encourage folks to find an organization. I would encourage folks to do political education in connection to collective work, as opposed to just engaging in ideological study and ideation, attach it to some work.
And lastly, to maintain hope, maintain revolutionary optimism. I think it’s very easy and it’s a tool of the empire for folks to engage in Doomerism, especially those of us on the left. So I would highly encourage folks to adopt a revolutionary optimism that isn’t delusional, it’s not idealist. It is a optimism that says that we can win if we choose to actively engage in collective struggle against these systems that oppress us and the planet. So I would leave with just those parting words of: join an organization, maintain revolutionary optimism, and ensure that your political education that you’re engaged in is tied to some type of organizational work.
KH: That’s good advice. And in addition to joining an organization or starting up a project, I also want to encourage folks to keep picking up skills. Over the years, I have worn a lot of hats, because I’ve picked up a lot of skills. Sometimes, skills that weren’t immediately relevant to what I was doing became crucial under unforeseen circumstances. In unpredictable times like these, having just-in-case skill sets is going to be important.
And on the subject of skill-building, if you want to learn more about facilitating public assemblies, Denzel and I are planning a virtual followup workshop that will build on some of the ideas Denzel covered in his recent workshop in Chicago, and in today’s episode. So, if you attended that workshop or listened to this episode, you will be welcome to join us. And you can look for updates about that in my newsletter. Right now, we are thinking that will happen in early October.
Denzel, I want to thank you again for joining me today. I am so grateful to be working in collaboration with you, and to have the chance to learn from you and everything that the Black Nashville Assembly is accomplishing.
DC: Thank you so much. I’m excited to be participating and I’m looking forward to leading this virtual workshop and conversation and talking with more folks who are interested in engaging in this type of work.
KH: I’m looking forward to it too. Let’s keep connecting and building.
DC: All right. Peace, everybody.
KH: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
