sheer spite press

“This zine is sort of a departure from the previous two issues of Privilege and Solidarity. It focuses less on philanthropy and more on
grassroots organizing: in particular on the poor people’s organizations I have learned a lot from working with for the past several years.

These are organizations for and by poor people, with no salaried staff and little institutional funding, and they share a quality of visionary imagination that I think is unique to movements that aren’t totally swallowed by the nonprofit industrial complex. This is the kind of work that gives me the most hope, organizations that demand things that logic and history seem to indicate are impossible: an end to all poverty and capitalism and racism and patriarchy, housing for everyone, healing the earth instead of destroying it, movements based on caretaking and interdependence. I?m drawn to the huge visionary dreams, to the goals we are told are unrealistic.

As someone with lots of privilege, I’ve struggled with this consistently huge vision can feel naive and idealistic, and I occasionally worry that my energy would be better spent trying to make small, concrete changes that require compromise and reform but would tangibly better people’s lives, at least in the short term. And I spent a lot of years thinking that since I do a lot of organizing around class privilege, that means my role is to engage with organizations of the wealthy, because I have access to them to “leverage privilege”. Like, I could fight for progressive tax reform (because it’s strategic for rich people to say they should pay more), or I could work with philanthropists to get them to give more to social justice, or work with foundations to get them to spend down more of their capital. And I’ve done some of those things, a little, and they make me feel despondent and ineffective and just totally, totally sad. I always end up feeling like I’m fighting for miniscule changes to a system that is irreparably broken, and it creates this sense of hopelessness about real change.

So I keep coming back to these revolutionary poor people’s movements that are fighting for the “impossible” changes: launching constant, confrontational protests; reclaiming stolen land for poor people; occupying buildings; calling out systems of power; demanding so much(/demanding what everyone deserves). And meanwhile, they are building new things, and affirming each other’s humanity, feeding and housing and healing everyone they can with meager resources. What I want is to direct my energy to transformative,
revolutionary change, to building a new world, because that?s the only direction that feels particularly hopeful.

Working with these organizations has given me an opportunity to envision community outside of the capitalism and white supremacy that are so all-encompassing in our current systems, and to envision strategies for resistance that challenge dominant paradigms about how resistance is possible. It’s so easy to feel enclosed by the limitations of our current conditions, and to forget that real, transformative change is even possible.

POOR Magazine uses culture, spirituality, art, media, care giving, and community-building strategies to create an organization of poor people that demands self-determination through protest and resistance. The alternative strategies of support that they build, off the grid of social services, make the oppositional work they do (within a system/culture that makes survival very difficult for most of their
members) sustainable. I no longer feel that it is possible for me to do oppositional organizing without also participating in nurturing,
supportive community projects that give me hope and strength: not just because I’m tired and burnt out, but because I can see that it isn’t sustainable for anyone.

Lately, I find myself actively seeking out examples of building and creating, feeling like that is where so much power lies. I heard an interview with Vandana Shiva on the radio when she was in Philly on a speaking tour, and she was saying that rather than spending all of our energy fighting Monsanto and GMOs and seed privatization, we should be putting more energy into building local food systems and community gardens. I know we need both: the opposition and the creation and I learn that lesson in new ways all the time.”