There is a beautiful and real power to grassroots organizing.
When people come together in person to support local campaigns, major demands can be won for communities and individuals fighting for equity and justice. Localized manifestations of injustice – from workplace maltreatment, to the realities of state backed deportations, to specific local fights for housing justice – can all be meaningfully tackled through the power of grassroots mobilization.
Moreover, when we recognize that these issues are inherently connected to global struggles against the infrastructures of neocolonial capitalist injustice, meaningful change can be co-inspired and occur in conversation across political geographies.
Today waves of progressive political analysis online are often shared without relational exchange to the local community work at the heart of politics. A disconnection between individual voices online and grassroots collective work on the ground leaves little space for accountability and dialogue between commentators and activist movements.
In the early 2000s global projects like Indymedia emerged as important examples of exchange between social movement actors and independent media production. The later advancement of corporate social media platforms owe a lot conceptually to the frameworks of open publishing and dialogue first developed in activist media spaces like Indymedia. In a radical shift from Indymedia, corporate social media platforms push to individualize, privatize and disconnect the online space from real life collective realities and organizing.
Today there is an urgent need to develop more exchanges between online progressive worlds and grassroots community spaces. The fact that online rhetorical framings, articulated as progressive, often arrive at positions that focus on state power relations at a global level and not on lifting up real life community campaigning is a major contemporary challenge.
Linking the local to the global
There is clearly a noticeable shift in many progressive spaces toward online campaigning and away from in person exchange in recent years. In this light it is important to retain a critical eye and constantly assess the ways that online campaigning can become disconnected from localized realities and experiences.
In building progressive media projects online it is critically important to always work within those initiatives to remain grounded in local issues, even when addressing international questions. Local rootedness can play an essential role in translating global systemic critiques into real political victories that change people’s lives.
I experienced this within the context of the global justice movement. After 9/11 there was a major effort to protest war but also a move away from focusing on protests at the summits of the global elite, like meetings of the World Bank and IMF. Instead more energy was directed toward supporting local struggles for justice, from organizing around housing issues, to migrant justice, to Indigenous land rights.
Local connection can act as a balancing element today toward a phenomenon in online progressive activism in North America that sees many commentators focusing on analysis about places and politics without action based connections to communities. It would be meaningful for progressive online media makers to be more involved in local community work.
Today it is essential to build and strive for connections between online activism and local community networks of organizing, particularly within places that hold global focus.
Connecting grassroots activists across borders, even in Ukraine
In the context of the war in Ukraine there has been endless analysis on the reality of a military stalemate on the ground. Additionally there has been an important and necessary focus on the realities of war crimes that define the Russian invasion. However, there has been little focus on connecting with local activists in Ukraine.
What about linking up with Ukrainian activists on the ground who are both against the Russian invasion and also critical of the right wing militarist government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy? Activists fighting the neoliberal, International Monetary Fund (IMF) backed wave of privatization in Ukraine.
One example of a local activist in Ukraine who has gotten some global attention, is Yurii Sheliazhenko, who last August was charged by Ukrainian authorities with “justifying Russian aggression,” as Sheliazhenko was calling for a ceasefire.
It is essential for activists in North America to build relationships with activists like Sheliazhenko who against the odds work to carve out an independent political space in Ukraine that is both deeply critical of the right wing government in Kyiv, while also actively protesting the Russian invasion.
In the Ukrainian context offering online media analysis that only considers state power, either the Ukrainian or Russian, is not meaningful. Instead let us ask together, what are the ways that we can build real relationships of solidarity across borders?
As Dru Oja Jay writes in The Breach, “since the fall of the Soviet Union, Ukraine has borrowed more than $125 billion from international financial institutions, which pushed the sell-off of public enterprises and rewarded oligarchs and the super-rich with every loan they made.” This context of privatization in Ukraine has driven wealth inequality and has also been widely opposed.
What would it take to build networks of solidarity against such neoliberal policies in Ukraine? Many groups, like the Council of Canadians, have campaigned against privatization locally and globally. Now would be a meaningful time to build links with groups on the ground in Ukraine opposed to a neoliberal model for the country.
Beyond online analysis that conceptualizes Ukraine as an abstract place within geopolitical power relations, let us try to build relationships with the people on the ground.
Local organizing during the pandemic lockdowns
During the pandemic lockdowns there was a great deal of dedicated organizing that advocated for mutual aid. Also broader alternative visions of politics emerged, articulated in projects like Pandemic Solidarity, that speak to the ideas of people on the ground struggling for just work and life conditions as a basis for inspiring change.
Local struggles are an important basis of experience for thinking about what solidarity across borders can look like at a grassroots level. Projects like Mutual Aid Disaster Relief is a good example.
The intense pandemic realities shifted our collective focus to what really matters in a material sense and also toward the workers holding up societies on the essential frontlines. In thinking about solidarity across borders today, the collective local must continue to enlighten our analysis about the world across all contexts. Politics isn’t only about the powerful and traditional frameworks of power, but is also about how real people organize on the ground to create alternatives.
Throughout the first year of the pandemic I was deeply involved in organizing the campaign to support Dollarama warehouse workers facing both unsafe and totally unjust working conditions.
This activism took place through the Immigrant Workers Centre and revolved around weekly outreach sessions close to the Dollarama warehouse. The regular encounters, organized during shift changes, built the context for a larger campaign to demand safe working conditions and a boost in wages, demands partially won. I specifically worked on the weekly outreach sessions but also on organizing to get local artists to speak up.
The consistency of this local campaign and how it was firmly rooted in challenging the neocolonial capitalist system as manifested in the realities of workplace injustice in Montreal was a very politically grounding experience.
Every week I spoke with workers from all around the world, including international students, refugee claimants, non-status workers and newly arrived immigrants. These conversations touched on many things, from progressive voices on the internal politics of political movements in Ethiopia today, to the major protest movements in India, organized by Sikh farmers, that successfully took down neo-liberal agricultural reforms. Also we talked about local issues, including the #StatusForAll movement that continues to call for the full regularization of all non-status people.
Activist voices around the world need more focus
Today connecting local work to global issues is important.
Online international progressive political analysts can do more to connect with grassroots social movements.
A focus only on the halls of power is misguided. It can drive important critical analysis that spotlights state actions, like the case of US government support for ongoing war in Ukraine, but can also fail to speak to the power of social movements in the respective contexts.
Highlighting grassroots voices is essential and urgently needed today across struggles for peace and justice. Major change will not happen without lifting up the real alternative political possibilities embodied within social movements organizing against the odds across the world.
I want to thank Naomi Klein for encouraging me to explore these ideas.
Support rabble today!
We’re so glad you stopped by! Thanks for consuming rabble content this year.
rabble.ca is 100% reader and donor funded, so as an avid reader of our content, we hope you will consider gifting rabble with a donation during our summer fundraiser today.
Whether it be a one-time donation or a small monthly contribution, your support is critical to keep rabble writers producing the work you’ve come to rely on as a part of a healthy media diet.
Become a rabble rouser — donate to rabble.ca today.
Nick Seebruch, editor
