Pittsburgh Green Left

Organizing people and campaigns is one thing, but any organized campaign must have a clear message to reach the people. After all, the goal of these campaigns isn't so much to "convince" those in positions of authority (often they simply don't care, because the system works for them), but to convince the people as a whole that change can happen. When the people are united and organized, they have the power to enact change. Convincing people that they do in fact have the power is the hard part, and part of that relies on spreading a vision people believe in -- a vision for how our social systems can be changed into ones that work for all people and not just wealth oligarchs. George Lakoff, a linguistics and cognitive science expert, argues in his short book "Don't Think of An Elephant!" that communicating that vision is one of the major failures of the left over the last few decades. In particular, right-wing ideas have permeated our culture and gove...

When considering the systemic change necessary to address the climate crisis and many related social issues, it's important to reflect on strategy and tactics. We can learn a lot from the activists that have come before us about what sorts of actions are effective, or not so much, and how to grow a movement for change. Recently a few books have been published on exactly this topic. Much of the leftist organizing tactics since the 1960s seems to have been forgotten in modern movements and so these books help save the learned lessons from the successes and failures of those movements. It is of course impossible to condense down a book full of lessons and discussion into a short essay, but let's at least list some of the main points in order to develop a stronger terminology and idea of what leftist organizing looks like. George Lakey's 2018 book "How We Win" offers the following points and advice for successful action campaigns (mixed in with a little of my own ...