Building Movement-Accountable Government: A Conversation with Steve Dubb, Rithika Ramamurthy, and Maurice Mitchell

Editors’ note: This article is from Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine’s summer 2023 issue, “Movement Economies: Making Our Vision a Collective Reality.”

Rithika Ramamurthy: Could you talk a little bit about your background in student organizing? How did your youth organizing lead you to decide to make social movement work your career?

Maurice Mitchell: I was a middle school student, and there happened to be a youth group with one staff person that organized the regional high schools around peace and justice issues. The group organized my older brothers, and I got pulled into it. That’s how I got acclimated to the idea of being an organizer, even though the work that we were doing wasn’t necessarily very rigorous—it was more of a discussion group than anything else. Here, I also got acclimated to the themes and issues of social justice.

It was really in college that I started practicing organizing and activism in earnest, after one of my classmates was killed by the police. That was catalyzing for a lot of people on our campus. A college campus is a unique setting; it isn’t like society at large. It’s a place where a lot of young people with more free time than they know what to do with challenge their ideas, form their personalities, and develop sensibilities that will be with you for a lifetime. For me, it was a great setting to decide that ultimately, I wanted to make a commitment to social change. It was in those years that I made that lifelong commitment.

Steve Dubb: Your Working Families Party bio cites Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed your home in Long Island in 2012, and the murder of Michael Brown in 2014 as being two critical events in your life. How have these two events influenced your views of economic and racial justice work?

MM: Hurricane Sandy was a traumatic moment for both me and my family. We became storm refugees, and I was homeless. Dealing with both the experience of homelessness and all of the other challenges recovering from something as devastating as a superstorm like [Hurricane] Sandy had a huge impact on me.

As devastating as it was, my family and I speak English, and even though my parents are immigrants, they weren’t undocumented. And I’m tech savvy, so we were able to apply for FEMA aid. As I was helping us get through it, I recognized all the institutional barriers that made it really difficult for us—and made it near impossible for others. This shaped my understanding of how climate impacts communities; how race, class, and gender intersect with climate; how climate is an economic justice issue in a real way. It lit a fire in me to want to do more organizing, even while I was homeless, so I kept going. Even though I was facing these challenges, I kept on doing the work—and I felt even more convinced.

The experience of being on the ground during Ferguson was inspirational. I feel like I learned a tremendous amount during that time. I left everything that I knew behind to embed within and support the Organization for Black Struggle, maybe a week or two after Michael Brown was killed. It was so inspiring to see all those people—mainly working-class Black people—organizing organically, not in any “traditional” way. People across all age groups and identities working together, united around justice: justice for Mike Brown, and justice for all Black people. I felt like I saw the future when I was on the ground in Ferguson. I felt that if other people could feel just a modicum of what I felt, they would be inspired to want to carry that not just in their hearts but into their communities, and that we could spark a movement. And we did—we built a movement that became international. But it started in the hearts of the people of Ferguson, who acted with uncommon courage and gave others, people like me, permission to act.

RR: This powerful context brings us to 2018, when you made a shift from working in the Movement for Black Lives to working with the Working Families Party. Can you talk about the reasons for that shift?

MM: One of the things that I noticed in the Movement for Black Lives was that when we were protesting, we were all in questions. Social movements—when they’re at their best—call questions and raise contradictions. When they’re really at their best, those questions demand answers and those contradictions demand resolution. But who answers those questions? Who resolves those contradictions?

After Michael Brown’s death, as calls for justice around Michael Brown became a national discussion, a company named Taser International [now Axon]—the number one producer of body cameras—offered their product as a solution. They lobbied city councils, mayors, state legislatures, Congress, and the White House around their product, and even at one point offered it for free.¹

During the call for justice on the streets in Ferguson, working-class Black folks were calling for justice, calling the question—and the answer came from a multinational corporation. It was an alley-oop play, where capital was dunking the ball. I wanted to interrupt that. I wanted people who are accountable to our movements to be in a position to ask the question, but also to answer it. One tool that working people have is the ability to democratically elect people to public office. We don’t have access to capital, but our government has the capacity to both constrain capital and to provide answers to those questions. If we build the muscle of movement-accountable governance, where our people actually govern, then we’ll be in a position where movements can raise the contradictions and then governance can provide resolutions.

That’s one of the reasons I went to the Working Families Party. When Trump became president, it became even more clear that we needed to build a multiracial solidarity movement to oppose White nationalism. We needed a multiracial electoral united front, and it needed to be explicit about race, class, and gender. It needed to be inviting, it needed to be bold, and I felt like I had the experiences, the tools, and the desire to build that. WFP was, at the time, and continues to be the most advanced project bringing together that multiracial, working-class electoral united front.

SD: Could you discuss how you see social movements and political parties interacting with each other? How do political parties build and maintain that accountability to the movements?

“Governing power, worker power, organized labor, and other kinds of worker power are the various nonextractive, nonexploitative economic strategies. And these economic strategies can’t be divorced from political ones. This is why we need an ecosystem approach.”MM: There should be a healthy relationship between social movements and political parties where social movements, again, are pushing for the world we want to live in and pushing the Overton window, and political parties secure the victories to make it possible. Social movements should be in the lead, and political parties should follow, through policy and government, with the gains that social movements demand.

But there are also real differences between their roles, and I think the more understanding there is about that, the better their relationship can be. Social movements and political parties are accountable to the same politics, but elections are majoritarian. You need to get to 50 percent plus one if you want to win an election. Social movements don’t need to be majoritarian to be effective. When people hit the street, you just need a lot of people. It doesn’t need to be the majority of people. As long as there’s a lot of people and there’s intensity, then you have mobilization. Social movements are often able to call on people to make binary choices; they ask: “Which side are you on?” Elected officials do not always do that. Elected officials often bring together broad coalitions of people that disagree on a lot of things. There may be divergent and necessary sets of prerogatives for a social movement or a politician that’s seeking election. What I need to do to get elected this year might be very different than what an activist might need to do in the context of an ongoing movement. Both might be necessary but different. When that lane distinction isn’t clear, it can create tensions and breakdowns. Conversation and trust between movements and parties could mitigate those breakdowns.

RR: You’ve written that “we need institutions for a powerful and durable movement.” What do you see as the key institutions that are needed to advance economic justice? What role do you see unions playing? What role do you see solidarity economy organizations like worker cooperatives playing?

MM: We need many different types of institutions. You could call it an ecosystem, or a team, where everyone plays a different position. But I think if you’re serious about economic power, you have to be serious about governing power. Organized capital is very successful at capturing government, so we need to have a parallel governance strategy. That’s why WFP exists.

But on the flip side, simply getting people elected and controlling the machinery without an economic power strategy is also very limited. We need to build both, and they need to be aligned. Governing power, worker power, organized labor, and other kinds of worker power are the various nonextractive, nonexploitative economic strategies. And these economic strategies can’t be divorced from political ones. This is why we need an ecosystem approach, where the different actors intentionally talk to one another. Our elected officials and politicians, their campaigns, need resources in order to win. The corporate politicians, they have corporate lobbies and private interests. We need our interests. We need our economic base. We have small-dollar donations from individuals, but we need nonextractive, nonexploitative industries supporting our political projects. And our political projects should be helping the economic interests of working people.

SD: You’ve noted that nonprofits are, in some important respects, incompatible with power building, yet there seem to be few signs of movement organizations becoming more independent of philanthropy. What needs to shift to build institutions compatible with power building?

“We need to talk about economic justice in an integrated way. It can’t be economic justice over here, and racial justice over here, and political power over here. Otherwise, we can think about it in a competitive way, which is very unhelpful. It needs to be both/and. We need as much power as we can muster, we need as many tools as we can devise, and we need to use these tools in concert.”MM: Currently, most institutions that do this work are 501(c)(3) nonprofits, and a significant percentage of the income is coming from philanthropy and high-net-worth individuals. I think it’s obvious why that isn’t sustainable long term. But imagine a world with vibrant, nonextractive, nonexploitative economies that were explicitly political, saw themselves as the economic reflection of people’s organizations, and made significant investments in organizations that helped create their conditions. I get excited thinking about that. Imagine a world where all the things that our organizations invest in, all of those things, all of those vendors, they’re part of that economy. Currently, a lot of the resources that go into our organizations come from and go into an extractive economy. What if we thought critically about owning the means of political production? We try to think about that at WFP. We spend too little time thinking about nonextractive revenue generation, owning the means of production, owning the means of political production, and building economies that can support people’s organizations. We need to ensure that our organizations provide real, material benefits to the people they serve, and that a mass base of people own and direct these organizations. Dues are one way to do it, but I don’t think we can dues our way out of this. We need a multifaceted approach to funding our movements.

RR: How are movement actors talking about economic justice today, and how should they be talking about economic justice?

MM: We need to talk about economic justice in an integrated way. It can’t be economic justice over here, and racial justice over here, and political power over here. Otherwise, we can think about it in a competitive way, which is very unhelpful. It needs to be both/and. We need as much power as we can muster, we need as many tools as we can devise, and we need to use these tools in concert. We need to nest all these strategies; we need to nest all of these tools.

“The way that people live their lives is not in a reductionist way. People are just living their lives; they don’t decide to be Black or working class and then toggle between identities. Choosing to have an ‘intersectional practice’ is just a practical choice.”SD: In the past, movements for economic justice have often underplayed the need to address structural racism. At the same time, sometimes racial justice movements fall short in addressing class inequality.

MM: That’s one of the reasons why I came to the WFP—because you need to be honest at the doors if you want to win. You have to tell no lies—and that means talking about race and class. You can’t be reductionist on either end if you want to tell a true story. It’s a completely false choice. The way that people live their lives is not in a reductionist way. People are just living their lives; they don’t decide to be Black or working class and then toggle between identities. Choosing to have an “intersectional practice” is just a practical choice; it’s choosing to live and communicate with people about the world the way they live in it. Organizing 101 says “Meet people where they’re at.” I just think a lot of these class versus race debates demonstrate a disconnection from the field. On the ground, those realities are just so present. If you’re actually on the ground in a working-class community and you have eyes and ears, you’ll see all of those contradictions—race, class, and gender—and it would be foolish not to articulate them.

SD: Where do you see opportunity to build efforts that effectively address both the class and racism aspects of racial capitalism?

MM: There’s an organization, Detroit Action, that does economic justice work in Black Detroit. It’s all about economic justice, but it also is all about racial justice. It’s just about both, and they do rigorous organizing work. The work isn’t theoretical; it is real and material in people’s lives. They are a group that wrestles with this experiment every day. They don’t make distinctions. It’s just in their DNA.

RR: You have said, “We are in a transformational moment.” Yet you have also noted that corporate and billionaire power is continuing to expand. Where do you see the economic justice organizing going, and what steps do you think are required to realize the transformational promise that you see?

MM: Corporate and billionaire power is expanding in a dialectical way. As corporate and billionaire power expands, organizing opportunities do, too. I recently met with Nwamaka Agbo of the Kataly Foundation, and she was sharing several projects. These are exciting because they attempt to wrestle with neoliberal capitalism, living in a time of intense corporate and billionaire power, and leveraging capital in a disruptive and subversive way that can lead toward liberation and new economic models. We have to figure out what that bridge is, because we don’t have the model. We do know that neoliberalism as it was designed is likely in transition. And many people, including neoliberals themselves, concede that neoliberalism may be coming into an end. That presents a moment of opportunity. It doesn’t mean that that corporate and billionaire power is not ascendant, but it means that there’s a shift.

In that space, we could provide creative solutions and bold ideas about what a new economy could look like. Some of the work I am hearing about gives me hope—experiments around land trusts and housing, for example—because it is trying to figure out how people could live dignified lives when capital is sucking that away from us. These experiments don’t have all the answers. Right now, we’re in a moment where economic fictions are being exposed, the far right is trying to mount some form of fascism, and new experiments for social justice are also attempting to take root. That last thing is on us, which gives me a lot of hope. It’s an emergent and possible future. We can be the protagonist in this moment, not the billionaire class.

SD: In your article, “Building Resilient Organizations: Toward Joy and Durable Power in a Time of Crisis,” you challenge many myths in the movement and build some principles for moving forward. Anything you want to say about the response you’ve gotten? And any thoughts about how to move forward given that response?

MM: The response is heartening and overwhelming. You write something and you want it to have impact, but I didn’t expect it to have the level of impact that it’s had so far. One thing that I’ve heard from people is that people were looking for a framework to have really hard conversations about what movements can be.

We’re in this moment of transformation. We’re in an in-between moment, an interregnum where our ideas really matter. Our ideas, identities, culture, are all constructed. The article may have reminded us that we are protagonists of history, and that despite many of the contradictions and challenges that we face that can lead us toward cynicism and frustration, we are the agents of change.

Notes:

1. For more information on how Axon profited from body camera sales in the aftermath of Ferguson and the rise of Black Lives Matter, see David Gelles, “Taser International Dominates the Police Body Camera Market,” New York Times, July 12, 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/07/13/business/taser-international-dominates-the-police-body-camera-market.html. On its use of giveaways of body cameras to further increase its market share, see Cyrus Farivar, “Taser stuns law enforcement world, offers free body cameras to all US police,” Ars Technica, April 5, 2017, arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/04/taser-announces-free-body-cameras-cloud-storage-to-all-us-cops-for-a-year. According to Farivar, between 2012 and 2016 Axon earned $90 million in profits from its body camera sales alone.