Bremner 1 Dylan Bremner Ross Haenfler May 15 th , 2020 MAP 499: Social Movement Community “ The Revolution Will Not Be Atomized : Building Resilient Movement Communities in the Age of Climate Collapse” Bremner 2 To my community , For the countless delicious meals you gifted me with during the last couple weeks as I shut myself in to finish this — and for putting up with dirty kitchen rags as I’ve steadily grown flakier with my chores. Bremner 3 ABSTRACT In this paper, I interview former com rades who are active in large justice movements, both in the US and abroad, to try and understand why these movements fracture so frequently What I find is that an over - focus on work, and a resulting de - prioritization of the building of deep relationship , is a crucial factor in creating brittle movements. I then shift to looking at how some intentional communities have managed to transform this culture of fragility, and in the process opened new possibilities in the struggle for liberation by pioneering collective rather than individual ways of being. Putting my findings in conversation with other theorists, I find evidence to suggest that tapping into collective intelligence could be crucial to surviving the escalating shocks of climate devastation, and even a pathway to a new era of global, autonomous, inter - locking and stubbornly resilient movements. This paper is as much a practitioner’s guide for movement actors as it is a contribution to the literature. In this vein, I include a lengthy appendix tha t highlights a few of the specific collective processes that have allowed communities to pass through this relational paradigm shift. A HOPE “ How did we ever believe Trump’s country was a n actual democracy? ” you might ask yourself as you gaze fondly at the assembly before you . “ That it was a ‘civic duty’ to c hoose , once every four years , between either a rabid proponent of the status quo, or a tacit one? ” You remember how that was. W atching the wildfires burn, the soil degrading, oceans em ptying , and feeling guilt rather than fury, a s if there actually was a politician to vote for who would stop the madness. Bremner 4 Suddenly, your grandmother hop s on her chair in service of a spirited appeal , spittle flying from her wrinkled mouth as the rest of the assembly erupts into cheers and whistles “Oh, that’s right,” you tell yourself with a smile. “It’s because we never understood wha t a real democracy feels like ” You step out of the lovingly decorated neighborhood assembly building and out into the cool April evening air. Though dusk is falling fast, you ’ re still able to see the bri ght colors of your neighborhood ’s emblem flying on the fixtures of many of the houses you pass. On your way back home you pass Elanor, an aging but fiery member of the women’s wing of the neighborhood guard . She gives you a friendly smile as she continues her patrol route with a friendly smile. The fruit trees lining the street have grown so much since the self - organizing began , but the newly planted native ferns and brush look just as majestic to you E very house has a modest number of solar panels on the roof , and a large rain - capture system that feeds into a large tank beside the house No panels or rain - capture equipment ever arrived from the federal government, and you feel sorry now for those who went on waiting for them. Your glad that your community decided to stop waiting for help that would never come — once you pooled your resources and joined the network of other communities in the city, it became clear that the finances were completely manageable . Every house was setting up rain - capture in a matter of weeks. The panels, months. Of cou rse, you can only use half the power you could before, back when you got your energy from the power company Even less. But you really don’t miss it . T he community theater, the evening social at the golden hour — you wouldn’t trade it for all the Ben & Jerry’s and Netflix in the world You reach your own home and call to your child . She ’s not home — she must be out playing still. She runs free here, as you understand your grandparents used to. You rarely worry about her — the community is perfectly safe, and there’s a hundred “parents” she can look to for help when she needs to. Sometimes you actually feel envious when you see how happy she is. It’s a far cry from the childhood you had, iPad dependent as it was It’s funny how you used to dread the future. When you became aware you were pregnant, how many nights did you stay awake in fear? Y ou would wonder if all your child would know would Bremner 5 be hunger, thirst, and uncertainty. But she doesn’t. And weird thing is that it’s not even that those things aren’t pr esent in your lives now. The droughts and the fires are still there, and nobody can predict where things will go. The death toll must be in the millions by now. The sadness you feel when you think of it is often acute and intense, as can be the worry when the community’s crop comes up short or when the drought is particularly severe. But that’s another funny thing about it . Even these moments you would take over the feeling of non - stop numbness that defined your life before. And the moments of joy. The moments of joy. You’re sitting and feeling the cool grass in your toes as you indulge in the unabashed splendor of the sunset . The moments of joy you now regularly experience still hit you like a city - dweller discovering their first mountain strea m — cleare r, sweeter , and deeper than you ever would have thought possible. Bremner 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract Introductory Notes What Is In This Paper? A Short Summary Introduction : Running Out Of Ground — Political Deadlock, Converging Crises, and Fragile Movements PART 1: Tedious Movements, Fragile Movements — Overcoming Burnout, Shallow - Rootedness, and Fragmentation Overwork Burnout Whiteness as Alienation Whiteness as Hierarchy Resistance Lies Outside Whiteness PART 2: The Insurgent Community — The Deep Potential Behind Collective Ways Of Being The Ripples of Movement Legacy Movement Breakdown and Its Aftermath Prefigurative Politics and Envisioning the “Real Utopia” Insight From Ecovillages — In Community, Freedom Non - hierarchy & The Intentional Processes That Make Community Work A Clarification PART 3: Decentralized Resiliency : A New Paradigm of Movement Coalition Bremner 7 Collective Intelligence — Unlocking Potential Joanna Macy — Collective Intelligence in Nature Self Determination and Community for All Historical Examples A Contemporary Example Conclusion Appendix: Methods and Tools for the Practitioner Works Cited A NOTE TO THE READER These pages I write as a love letter to everyone I’ve met on my journey, who have given me so much, and to everyone who is trying to imagine a way out of this mess. I know that many of you will not be sure what to think of some of the things you read in th ese pages. I apologize in ad vance for anything that comes off as “ preachy .” That is definitely not my intention, as most of what I present to you here is new for me too. There is not a single idea in these pages that are my own. Most of them come , in either a more or less direct sense, from the ancestral practices of cultures hundreds and thousands of years old. Just like you, I am on an ongoing journey to bett er myself and to shed some of the toxic and unhelpful conditioning we have all internalized . What I share with you I do so in the hopes that it may help you in this journey, as it has helped me. I only wish I could have shared a bit more. The impact grappling with some of this stuff has had on me feels immense. But there is only so much I c ould fit in these pages. I really encourage you to find in the citations page any source that you want to dive deeper into. G et in touch with me at dylandoggo@protonmail.com , and I ’ll send you a PDF of any of the readings. A NOTE TO THE DEPARTMENT Bremner 8 Hi Sociology department. I’m aware that the style these pages are in are not what the final product of a Mentored Advanced Project ordinarily looks like But then again, there is almost nothing about the times we live in right now that are ordinary. With the climate crisis looming and the political response paralyzed, we need all hands on deck to face this crisis with any degree of grace. And in the past when sociologists were more interested in following the conventions of our peers than fulfilling o ur duty of providing a compass for the changing times, we not only failed to predict the largest movement mobilization of the 21 st century , but may have actually aided in its suppression by declaring its leaders guided by “short circuited reasoning ... [and]... rapid, irrational shifts in behavior that [would] continue until ... social structure guided their return to normalcy” (Smelser 196 2 ). The stakes have never been higher, and we cannot afford to make the same mistakes again. For this reason, I am trying my best with this piece to follow the examples of the legends of our field — those people who made a point to allow their theory to be informed by their praxis, and who allowed their love for the people to guide them above all else . From W. E. B. Du Bois to C. Wright Mills to all the feminist, critical race, and queer studies Sociologists that blew our field wide open with their piercing insight, I am in good company even if it is the company of giants. I made the decision t o treat indigenous epistemology with as much or greater authority as I would a professor in our own department, as I believe there is no body of knowledge more authoritative right now. I strove to keep my writing style accessible in the hope that some of m y comrades in th e movement might read it. WHAT IS IN THIS PAPER? In writing this paper I initially set out to answer the question of “what role does community play in movement - building,” but ended up going to some places I never expected to end up. In the first section of what follows , I interview various actors , mostly former co - conspirators and friends of friends, who are active in the mainstream movement milieu . I draw connections between their experience of verging on burnout and their movements’ unconscious adoption of aspects of our mainstream white supremacy culture. Bremner 9 In the second section of this paper, I turn to looking at how some intentional communities have had great success at transforming these toxic interpersonal dynamics. I try to show how the resulting cultural shifts some of these communities have passed thro ugh has allowed them to harness conflict rather than become paralyzed by it . For these communities, this creates an environment much more conducive to collective intimacy and cohesion . I argue that these breakthroughs, so underrepresented in movement liter ature, has significance not only for increasing movement longevity but also for creating new ways of organizing for liberation — they allow us to begin to learn the magic of moving as a collective rather than just as individuals. In the third section, I put this insight into conversation with theorists Joanna Macy and Murray Bookchin. Macy shows us how the se communities’ collective way of moving could make them much more resilient at resisting the climate disaster s that will define our century. The encounter with Bookchin suggests the possibility of a new era of inter - locking, community - embedded movement s Finally, in the appendix section I detail some of the processes that might be helpful for creating more resilient communities that are more successful at harnessing collective power. METHODS I am coming to this project informed by a few years of activity with a couple of different movements. My involvement really began with the Standing Rock Movement in 2017 — a movement of Indigenous resurgence in defense of the sole water source of the Standing Rock Sioux, threatened by the Dakota Access oil pipeline. I was exposed to it through the Little Cr eek Camp in Iowa. I spent about 6 months being active in the s tudent p ower wing of People’s Action on my college campus. And then I spent about a year involved with the Extinction Rebellion (XR) movement, mostly in Europe. XR is a movement that utilizes ci vil resistance to force national governments to commit to achieving net neutrality of carbon emissions by 2025 Bremner 10 It was in this last movement that I built the deepest relationships in, and gained the most familiarity of. Part of what drove me to embark on t his project is that, a few years later, I still haven’t encountered anything as powerful as the Indigenous - led community that inspired me to wade into the arena of movement struggle in the first place. And the more I saw of white - led movement efforts , the more I came to realize just how unique my first exposure was I had the hunch that the strong community evident at Little Creek, and Standing Rock before it, was central. I wanted to dig deeper to understand better, so I reached out to many o f the people I have met along the way to get their thoughts in the form of focused interviews The involvement of those I interviewed varied widely. Some were active domestically , and some abroad . Some were active at a city - wide level, some with national c oordination work, and some international. D ue to the complications of Coronavirus, my methods could not extend beyond conducting these interviews and comparing it to the results of my investigation of the literature , but this did not stop me from producing some results that I found fascinating INTRODUCTION Running Out Of Ground — Political Deadlock, Converging Crises, and Fragile Movements Our democracy has been broken irreparably — in a time when sweeping reforms have never been more needed, conventional politics are at a complete and total dead - end. For decades, political pundits have been warning us of the poor health of our democracy ( Pew Research 07/22/ 2019 ). Now, at long last, it seems to be dead on the operating table. For my part, I first heard the indisputable sound of the flatline when the D emocratic party axe d the campaign of presidential candidate Bernie Sanders I know, I’m unfashionably late to the party. But I couldn’t not see the obvious anymore, when it became clear that their supposed despera tion to beat the Republicans wasn’t enough to stop them from actively sabotaging the most popular Bremner 11 candidate running on the Democrat ticket ( Bowden 2019 ). When the pretext of a fair election is so flimsy that even headline s in mainstream liberal newspapers like the New York Times read “Democratic Leaders Willing to Risk Party Damage to Stop Bernie Sanders,” it seem s clear we have entered new territory ( Lerer 2020 ). W hile populist candidates on the left like Bernie Sanders are blocked with relative ease, the ground is cleared for authoritarian fascists to rise, profit ing from declining public faith in the integrity of the democra tic process and in voting ( Pew Research 04/11/2019 ). We feel this with a sinking heart, as Trump slashes funding to the World Health Organization in the midst of a pandemic , and as his followers go to their deaths by following his advice to inject disinfectant and ri sk their lives in “reopen” protests ( White House 2020 ; NBC 2020 ) Has the American Left ever seemed more shattered than in our current moment? Lifetime movement organizer and theorist Murray Bookchin say s ‘no’: “ ... capitalist social relations [have] become more deeply entrenched in the human mind than ever before, and ... culture regresses appallingly , almost to a vanishing point ” (Bookchin 200 7: 79). For someone like Bookchin who been politically active since the days o f the CIO and militant Labor in the 1930s, it must be deeply disheartening to see culture itself swallowed by the spread of globalized consumerism “ To people today,” he writes, “The hopeful and very radical certainties of [that ] period ... seem almost naïve.” After all, t h e unchecked spread of global capitalism has done more than hollow out our democracy. Terrifyingly, it has completely obliterated our ability to respond to the disasters that will define this century , as the current pandemic has painfully revealed. A reporter for the Irish Times wrote in an article published April 25 th : Will American prestige ever recover from this shameful episode? The US went into the coronavirus crisis with immense advantages: precious weeks of wa rning about what was coming, the world’s best concentration of medical and scientific expertise, effectively limitless financial resources, a military complex with stunning logistical capacity and most of the world’s leading technology corporations. Yet it managed to make itself the global epicentre of the pandemic... ( O’Toole 2020 ). While the article is right in highlighting how the decimation of the public good has been most enthusiasti c in the United States, the rot has gone global. For decades, the US gov ernment has Bremner 12 ruthless ly leverag ed its power to force countries to open their markets to corporations and to slash public spending, punishing the governments that resist (Gowan 1999). This has facilitated the rise of leaders across the entire world that have squashed unions , resisted the will of the people, and pushed through trade deals that have ushered in the wave of consumerist mania that we know today We do love to bash Trump, but it has never been mo re clear that Trump is a symptom of a broader problem. We have seen a wave of far - right, authoritarian leaders elected across the world that has not been seen since the rise of fascism that preceded Hitler ( Wittner 2020 ) From Bolsenaro in Brasil, to Erdog an in Turkey, Modi in India, Orban in Hungary , Johnson in the UK, as well as China, The Philippines , and Poland , far right leaders are in power and continue to tighten their grip ( Gienger 2019 ). At least part of the global rise of the right can be chalked up to the stagnation and decay of the prevailing liberal order ( Fidler 2020 ) This is the same liberal order th at spilled so much ink on advancing the interest of the common people while, yet again, we broke the record for yearly greenhouse gas emissions in 2019 (Plumer) This is almost a full 30 years since the scientific community issued one of their first unequivocal ly dire warnings on climate in the form of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Rio de Janeiro conference in 1992 (United Nations) As these year - on - year increases in emissions continue to come even as half of marine life is now dead , it is clear that we are in the fast - l a ne to our own demise and our leaders have the child - locks switched on ( Jozuka 2015 ). There is all manner of depressing climate statistics I could cite to drive this point home. The fact that up to 80% of flying insects across the world may now be dead ( Carrington 2019 ). The fact that half of the ice in the arctic has already melted ( Stroeve 2019 ). But those still can feel abstract to us. Here’s something far more crucial that you’ve probably heard even less about. Neoliberal control ha s not only eviscerated our democracy ; t he consolidation of corporate power has also system at ically slashed all redundancy in the name of “efficiency ” As a result, infrastructure has been falling apart while food now comes “just in time” to the supermarket ( BBC 2000 ) The reserve food stores have been slashed over the decades into almost nothing , even while we begin to see climate - induced crop failure unfurl across America ( Snyder 2019 ). Whether we’re talking about food or power, o ur new, hyper - global system is so interconnected Bremner 13 and precarious , the failure of just a couple nodes in the chain could bring devastation to millions. “If you take out just a handful, about 9, of the critical electric transfor mers across the country, you can take out the entire [power] grid” says Samuel Feinburg from the Helena project ( h elena.org). According to Feinburg’s in his TED talk, water could stop flowing from the tap immediately and food in supermarkets could gone wit hin three days . When we combine this with a quick peek through our fingers at the unprecedented super - storms, heat - waves, droughts, floods, tornados, earthquakes and tsunamis that will make pre - climate crisis earth seem like a French park on a Spring day , the implications are downright terrifying ( Bendell 2018 ). The reality is that millions if not billions will die if the trend of the last five decades continues, which it seems poised to do. In the Global North as well as the Global South What are our movements doing to protect our people from this horror ? Th ose that are most visible a re trying to mobilize as many people as possible to achieve change at the scale we need . As just a few examples, there’s the Bernie Sanders movement and Sunrise pushing the Green New Deal , and Extinction Rebellion (XR) with a global strategy of forcing national and local governments to make a plan for carbon - neutrality. Even more central recently have been the Black - led uprisings in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the months of protests which have followed. It’s sti ll a bit too soon to say what changes these protests will bring. But if it is anything like the last round of protests associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, change will be mostly limited to the national conversation and will not translate into s ubstantial change in the material conditions of our society. And when momentum slows down, the insurgency will fade, like the last round of BLM and Occupy before it. A pattern I have noticed is that w hen a given movement fails to make significant progress assailing the entrenched power of the corporate elite due to infighting or lack of coordination or whatever else , local members of the movement leave to join the newest movement , as there was little more than the hope of victory unifying the temporary coalition Sometimes the coalition begins to fracture and break even sooner, as started to happen on t he ground here in Atlanta just a few weeks into the protests I do not want to downplay the very real impact these movements have had on changin g dialogue and leading to some modest structural shift. I also do not want to create the illusion Bremner 14 that I am any sort of authority on anything. But I think this trend of our movements collapsing just as fast as they rise should worry us — because it delays ju stice, but even more frighteningly, because of how it erodes our ability to build the long - term infrastructure our communities will need to survive the shocks of the decades to come. Bremner 15 PART 1 Tedious Movements, Fragile Movements — Overcoming Burnout, Shallow - Rootedness, and Fragmentation As I conducted interviews for this project, I began to notice a nother trend For the overwhelming majority of the people I interviewed, the number one thing that seemed to driv e the movement organizations they had experience with was “getting stuff done ” V irtually everything else t ook a strong backseat to this all - important imperative Digging a bit deeper, it began to seem like the hyper - centering of work was often driven by a widespread fee ling that “we’re not doing enough.” OVERWORK This is the sentiment I was picking up from Kaylin, a member of an Extinction Rebellion (XR) NYC local group, who seemed a tad impatient when I asked her if she would value a meeting devoted solely to getting to know the other s in her group better . She told me, I don’t really care about having a community with the other people in XR After a slight pause she went on, Look, I already have friends my age that I’m close with. I work a full time job and I don’t have tons of free time. The time that I do have I want to spend trying to actually do something for the climate. I felt like I could relate to her position — surviving under capitalism has a habit of leaving little time for anything else. B ut, thinking back on the years I spent trying to juggle organizing campaigns and school, and the numerous moments of emotional, mental and physical exhaustion I experienced during that time, made me feel tired just listening to her I could see where she w as coming from. I also knew that if , in a different scenario, she was trying to recruit me to join her group , I never would. I never want to go back to that way of organizing. Bremner 16 But Kaylin’s fixation on what might be referred to as “tangible results” se ems to be wide spread i n XR , especially in the US wing of the international movement. “It’s been like that since we started,” a long - time XR NYC member, who I’ll call Cleon, told me. “I’ve tried to fight it, but it’s come to completely define our culture he re.” He was exacerbated with the “fast - action” culture of the movement in NYC and the way it tends to force out everything else, from building a long - term strategy to addressing crippling conflict To illustrate, h e told me about a meeting he had facilitat ed recently with an XR local chapter in an NYC borough. The focus of the meeting was to discuss what it would look like to take more time to build community within the local group “But t hey just weren’t interested !” he exclaimed. “ It was clear none of them had ever even really considered it . They just thought it was a waste of time... two of the people responded by saying the only thing they were interested in was more direct action.” After my conversation with both Kaylin and Cleon, it became clear to me that it wasn’t just that many in XR NYC place comparatively little value in relationship - building. It’s that such hard - to - quantify things are sometimes even viewed with hostility because they take time away from more “productive” thin gs like planning another action Cleon immediately concurred when I asked if this analysis felt accurate. An impatience with non - work focused agendas is not unique to Extinction Rebellion. Conversations I had with three members of NYC Democratic Socialists (DSA) also fit this pattern. They were content for their meetings to be structured around tight agendas where one item of business flows seamlessly into the next; the one non - work moment at a meeting I attended was a brief check - in at the start. Relations hip - building happened after the meeting “at the bar,” they told me. Certainly, this is better than nothing but for a variety of reasons , bars are not the most accessible space to build community in, and as a result many DSA regulars don’t make it out. In a ddition, it seems that these post - meeting bar meetups would consist of more “shooting the shit” than deep relationship building. All three members I interviewed confided in me that, despite their deep involvement in the organization and despite the frequen cy of these after - meeting bar meetups , they largely did not confide in their comrades when they felt at risk of a burnout, whether due to lack of relationship or lack of comfort. Bremner 17 “The question is, what qualifies as action?” asks author Peter Block in his b ook Community: The Structure of Belonging He continues, Traditionally, we want a strategy, and a list of next steps and milestones.... Any change in the world will, in fact, need this kind of action. To say, however, that this is all that counts as action is too narrow. If we are to value building social fabric and belonging as much as budgets, timetables, and bricks and mortar, we need to consider action in a broader way ( Block 2008: 60 - 61). Peter Block believes hyper - focus on the “tangible” work ma kes our movement spaces unsuited to the task of reshaping our world. It leaves us no time for co - creating a new context that is less compromised by white supremacist capitalism , and so the same old harm is reproduced And it’s not just him saying this — ther e are dozens of Black and brown authors who have been making similar points for decades, even centuries. Block is merely just repackaging their wisdom. As he says elsewhere in the book, The context that restores community is one of possibility, generosity, and gifts, rather than one of problem solving, fear, and retribution A new context acknowledges that we have all the capacity, expertise, and resources that an alternative future requires.... [But] t o create a new story, we first need to come to terms with the current one ( Block 2008: 27; 32) In other words, f or most groups it’s not as much a question of resources but intention. In many of my conversations for this project , I could s ee the truth at the center of Block’s message — that a lot of what is causing our movements to crumble again and again is our unconscious and uncritical importation of mainstream values , values which put productivity over everything Just like Block states in his appeal for us to redefine “action,” I could see how our enshrinement of a certain kind of productivity is keeping us from investing deeply into the kind of relationship building that can mushroom into a network of strong relationships rooted in trust. This network of rich, liberated relationships anchored in mutual interdependence, whether large or small, is the foundation for long - term power. It’s also usually what I’m thinking of when I use the term “community” throughout this paper. Right n ow, it seems like comparatively few movement groups are anchored in this network of relationships. And so, l ike a tree that rapidly blooms but falls at the first storm, our movements are caught in a boom - bust cycle in which infighting, distrust, burnout, and the reproduction of Bremner 18 oppression cause s our coalitions to rupture before they become powerful enough to create a viable material alternative. But things usually fall apart well before that happens — organizing out of deep rel ationship is so important that our inability to do so blocks us from reaching even our most immediate goals. BURNOUT Certainly, t he problem of “overwork” goes beyond those engaged in movement work Sociologists since Max Weber and his famous work “The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” have written about how hard work has become so fundamental to the American identity that a “strong work ethic” has come to eclipse other virtues , whil e vocation s have been recast as “c alling s ” (Weber 1905 ). But for organizers overwork can be especially toxic due to the urgency of our stru g gle and the literally endless amount of work that goes into “saving the world , ” for those of us who choose to view their work that way ( Gorski 2015 ). For this reason, “overwork culture” in acti vism creates highly unsustainable movement spaces where frequent burnout can result in a hemorrhaging of membership ( Chen 2015 ) In my conversation with Kalvin, a field director for two states at different stages of the Bernie Sanders campaign and one of the more experienced organizers I spoke to, it was clear that overwork had been a constant specter throughout his organizing work : “ T he majority of the groups I’ve been a part of don’t try to make any space for community ,” Kalvin told me “ They’re all work focused ! But w here’s the roots there? How long can something like that be sustained? The reality is that none of those types of groups last.” Kalvin ties this insight back to his recent experience running a field program for Bernie: People in the campaign wanted to win so bad, my job wasn’t to get them to work harder, it was to get them to eat and sleep... [ After Super Tuesday, ] when coronavirus was hitting, the grief was so large that if I hadn’t literally forced people to stop and build community with each other, they would have burned out a few days in. Kalvin’s words resonated strongly with my own experience in organizing, and it echoed what I heard from Cleon, too. Bremner 19 Cleon went to a Quaker high school where community was a central tenant . Th e difference this made when compared to his experience with XR NYC was night and day : “The community would hold you... and I was not conscious then of how powerful it was to be able to speak and have the community hold what you say.” But then when he went to college, he suddenly found himself without the community that had become such an effective support system for him. He had no - one to lean on: “I just was so miserably alone. Like at George school when I had those fears, there was a place I could go, the re was space to be held. And at Sarah Lawrence I was just isolated and alone and I... I just spiraled ... I was very mentally sick.” Deep relationships offer us a way out of the terrifying isolation that Cleon was describing. People who know us deeply know when to check in on us. When we’re surrounded by close friends who share our understanding of the world, we’re surrounded by people with the desire and the capacity to hold us when we feel like breaking. But unless we have the time and the willingness to make ourselves vulnerable to each other, this depth is never reached. Admittedly, t he feedback for movements to place more attention on how members relate to each other is nothing new. S ocial movement scholar James Jasper might be tempted to couch all the arguments of this paper within the long - standing debate of the “Janus Dilemma ” The dilemma refers to the difficulty movements face of deciding whether to focus more energy on the outward facing work or on the inward work (Jasper 2014). But the stakes are getting hirer. And given the fact that the majority of contemporary movements appear to collapse not long after receiving widespread attention, it seems clear that our movements are consistently trying to run before they’ve learned how to walk. So says organizer and author adrienne maree brown: There is such urgency in the multitudes of crises we face, it can make it hard to remember that in fact it is urgency thinking (constant urgent unsustainable growth) that g ot us to this point, and that our potential success lies in doing deep, slow, intentional work. We need to go beyond having a critique... [or an] alternate systemic plan for society — we have to actually do everything differently... ( b rown 2017; 95). The magic of adrienne maree brown’s words from “Emergent Strategy,” which I’ve recently realize d is just a better version of what I’m writing in this paper, highlights a dynamic worth noting. For many of us terrified by our rapidly deteriorating social order, the nonlinear and Bremner 20 time - consuming path of self - transformation would, at first glance, be quite understandably unappealing. carla bergman and Nick Montgom ery make a similar point in Joyful Militancy , in their explanation for why “call out culture” within movements can become so punitive : “Empire’s destruction in motion can trigger desires for control and militarized discipline. It can lead to a monolithi c notion of the right way to be radical.... It forces out the messiness of relations and everyday life in favor of clear lines between good/bad and radical/revolutionary” (bergman & Montgomery 2017:114). T hese rigid dynamics can make conflict explosive while making genuine trust very difficult to build, because everyone is just too afraid to show their flawed , compromised selves. B ut ignoring conflict by focusing on “what we can agree on,” tangible output like direct action, is clearly not the solution. What ever it is you’re doing, relationships are going to be involved. Of her co a ching work with movement leaders, adrienne writes, “...in the course of our work together we often find that the problem is in the relationships between the members of the group” ( b rown 2017 : 60). U ltimately, neglecting to cultivate liberatory relationships leads to brittle, short - term, and shallow work. After all, i t wasn’t symbolic direct actions that sustained the Independence movement over decades of high - risk struggle ag ainst the British. It was the formation of a robust “movement ecology” that was capable of decentering action and driving it forward even when Ghandi was in prison ( Engler and Engler 2017 ) . In the decade before the famous Salt March to the sea, Gandhi w as tirelessly laying the groundwork According to movement scholars Mark & Paul Engler, he: “ ... relentlessly traveled to different regions to cultivate relationships, solidify support for his program, and build up local party infrastructure. By 1922, there w ere 213 District Congress Committees, covering the great bulk of the country that was under direct British administration ” ( Engler and Engler 2017 ). In reality, Ghandi saw direct action , or s atyagraha (which literally translates to application of ‘truth force’) , as just the tip of the icebur g (Moore - Backman 2016). T he bulk of the movement , he saw as work of s elf - transformation , facilitated by a collective “building of the alternative” ( Engler and Engler 2017 ). He once famously said: “The best propaganda is not pamphleteering, but for each one of us to try to live the life we would have the world live.” For him, satyagraha was a very useful tool, but one that should only come after the proper groundwork has been laid.