ORGANIZE!
Part Two: Getting into Beautiful Trouble
Leftists make “Trouble”
Let’s continue our look at how the Left organizes, the central activity that is the beating heart of the movement.
In Part One, we featured a recipient of $50 million US tax dollars, the Climate Justice Alliance. Here, we’ll look at a resource for Leftists called “Beautiful Trouble.”
You’ll often see Leftists celebrate the “good trouble” they make.
Consider this birthday greeting from PSC Commissioner Davante Lewis, an explicit Socialist, to Louisiana State Representative Mandie Landry, a hardcore progressive:
Here’s Davante discussing making more trouble…
Every Leftist is down for troublemaking.
AOC is encouraged by her grandmother to make trouble:
You can be certain that this (troubled) young woman is well versed in Beautiful Trouble content:
To start “good trouble” is to organize, in other words, to learn how to demand things from others, how to get your way, how to pitch a fit, how to shut things down, how to break things, how to extirpate social institutions.
Activists can shop at Beautiful Trouble - creators of a “Toolbox” of troubles - to buy a revolution. But better yet, it’s all by donation.
Absorb the stories of radical protest. Study the theories supporting it. Base yourself in the principles that guide it. Become proficient in tactics to execute it. And learn all the methodologies for troublemaking.
Let’s take a closer look…
Dale Carnegie, meet Leftist activism
The Tool Box:
Beautiful Trouble:
We believe in people power and the game-changing role that creativity, humor, joy, and mischief can play in the struggle for a better world. We practice shared leadership, modified consensus-based decision making, anti-oppression politics, and international and intersectional solidarity.
We are a global network of organizers, artists, trainers, and writers who form the community of praxis called Beautiful Trouble.
We equip social movements with an ever-growing suite of strategic tools and training to help grassroots movements be more creative, effective, and irresistible.
Beautiful Trouble is the activist’s Sam’s Club. A one-stop shop for all things ORGANIZE PROTESTS!
One website does it all. Here’s just a small sampling…
Want to blockade a building?
Shut down a website?
Perform a citizen’s arrest of your political opponent?
Form a ‘Flash Mob’…
Learn the history of flash mobs, with examples. What’s the ideal flash mob?
The overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt also involved flash-mob-like tactics, with organizers calling for protesters to gather initially in alleys and other protected spaces for safety before moving into the streets in larger and larger numbers. Blogger Patrick Meier explains the thinking behind this approach:
“Starting small and away from the main protests is a safe way to pool protesters together. It’s also about creating an iterative approach to a ‘strength in numbers’ dynamic. As more people crowd the smaller streets, this gives a sense of momentum and confidence. Starting in alleyways localizes the initiative. People are likely neighbors and join because they see their friend or sister out in the street.”
Build a spoof website to disrupt your opponent’s audience?
Responsible people, Beautiful Trouble informs you of the risks…
“Website spoofing capitalizes on the elements of surprise and secrecy and so it is a tactic to be used sparingly and carefully. Website spoofing can easily lead to legal risks of copyright and trademark infringement. Be sure to work with a values-aligned hosting provider (for example, May First Movement Technology) and retain legal counsel….”
An activist internet hosting provider, May First Movement Technology has the appearance of tech-savvy loud-mouthed overgrown children:
But no force on Earth is more dangerous than a passionate 19 year old:
May First Movement Technology is a non-profit membership organization that engages in building movements by advancing the strategic use and collective control of technology for local struggles, global transformation, and emancipation without borders.
Take what you learn at Beautiful Trouble online using May First Movement Technology.
It’s all there at Activist’s Home Depot…
Study “Points of Intervention” and “identify pressure points where you can take action to interrupt business as usual…”
Make a game out of it!
Activism strategies in a deck of cards!
Intended for global consumption…
The Strategy Cards were compiled by over 170 grassroots activists from across 5 continents in 7 languages
Cards for Humanity Design an Action Radical Charades Divine the Future Build A Strategy Pyramid
It’s all quite impressive, actually…
Wonder no longer how the Left can whip up a protest of many hundreds in mere hours.
With funding from organizations like Climate Justice Alliance, Socialists have made it 21st Century Easy to order up a protest, tout de suite!
I hope the bigger picture is coming together, the picture of the Left’s effectiveness. The Left owns significant social property and this is how they buy it: with money from the EPA and groups like the Climate Justice Alliance and Beautiful Trouble.
So in Part One, Lenin in Modernity In Part Two, The Actual Mechanisms of Protest Part Three, Benefits of A Well-Placed Socialist
Before I conclude, let’s return to Lenin, 1917
One of the most important tasks today, if not the most important, is to develop this independent initiative of the workers, and of all the working and exploited people generally, develop it as widely as possible in creative organisational work. At all costs we must break the old, absurd, savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only the so-called "upper classes", only the rich, and those who have gone through the school of the rich, are capable of administering the state and directing the organisational development of socialist society.
This is a prejudice fostered by rotten routine, by petrified views, slavish habits, and still more by the sordid selfishness of the capitalists, in whose interest it is to administer while plundering and to plunder while administering. The workers will not forget for a moment that they need the power of knowledge.
Beautiful Trouble makes ‘Good Trouble’
We strive to create a safe, inclusive, supportive, and liberatory environment in which transformative action, personal growth, and collective solidarity can flourish.
Beautiful Trouble
I’ve saved my favorite tactic to the end:
By running for public office as a prank, you can sabotage a particularly ugly policy or candidate, popularize a radical idea, or challenge the limits of the electoral system itself.
The BEC
Part One:
Organize!
Socialists organize Vladimir Lenin in 1917 - later published in Pravda, 1929… Far from extinguishing competition, socialism, on the contrary, for the first time creates the opportunity for employing it on a really wide and on a really mass scale, for actually drawing the majority of working people into a field of labour in which they can display their abilities, develop the capacities, and reveal those talents, so abundant among the people whom capitalism crushed, suppressed and strangled in thousands and millions.
Excellent information! I knew they were well-organized, but this is ridonkulous. The