How activists let their own movements die out

Author’s note: This article is the first of two columns about the challenges of activism and organizing.  

Running an activist organization of any kind isn’t easy; unfortunately letting it run into the ground, leaving behind a scorched path of petty grievances, discarded institutional knowledge and innumerable disillusioned organizers, is shockingly simple.  

Many politically active young people in the United States keenly remember the atmosphere of the country following the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Amidst the widespread grieving and righteous anger surrounding police killings of Black people in America — horrific stories that were surfacing or resurfacing at skyrocketing rates that summer — was also a tempting optimism that we as a country would finally “do something” about the white supremacy in America, which activists and journalists located everywhere from policing to public health. 

Just as unforgettable was the influx of grassroots organizations popping up throughout Connecticut, bringing Black Lives Matter chapters or new, community-based racial justice organizations to towns and cities across the state to hold protests and, ostensibly, build numbers to mount a sustained movement against systemic racism. Shaped just as much by social and economic insecurity sent into overdrive by the COVID-19 pandemic, local and national organizations alike took to “mutual aid” with the intention of meeting the needs of people left behind by the state and an increasingly unequal economy. These took — and for those that lasted, still take — the forms of food distribution tables, community fridges and even volunteer-run grocery delivery services for vulnerable people. As Amanda Arnold writes for The Cut, this “solidarity-based support” unites communities “against a common struggle, rather than leaving individuals to fend for themselves.” This outlook proffers a vision of production, exchange and consumption that ultimately seeks to provide an alternative to the capitalist economic model (more on that later). 

National coalitions with radical and exciting proposals for reshaping our institutions away from policing arose as well. The Cops Off Campus coalition, for example, united nearly 60 student and statewide organizations from around the country around the demands of removing all forms of policing from campuses and, eventually, society; returning colonized land back to Indigenous nations in North America and dismantling the police- and military-industrial complexes that enforce colonialism; and decommodifying higher education by way of free tuition, food and housing, devolving power from university administrators to students and employees and paying fair wages for all university workers. 

Backed by hundreds — if not thousands — of scrappy, inspired activists and seasoned organizers around the country, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to have believed at the time that we were witnessing a watershed moment in the history of this country; one that would leave a permanent footprint on our political and economic landscape. But nearly four years,  more than 1.1 million deaths to COVID-19 and at least one militarized police training compound later, most of these formations have fizzled out to mere fractions of their former activity, if they even still exist at all. Case in point, the Cops Off Campus coalition has been in radio silence since 2022 despite its scathing critiques of policing, colonialism and higher education still being important to discuss and debate today. 

Mutual aid, similarly, has not made a dent in the capitalist mode of production, let alone posed a viable alternative to it; rather, it has become a less effective version of the charitable non-profit or church-based food distributions that its adherents so radically contrast themselves to (“Solidarity, not charity”). 

Bolstered by the unbridled energy for organizing and protesting (mostly the latter and far less of the former) spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and movement for Black lives, but without disciplined and active local support or a coherent ideology and strategy, most of the movement-based activism that came out of 2020 didn’t have a leg to stand on. If the urgency of a global pandemic or unprecedented urban uprisings weren’t enough to build lasting impactful political structures, then we can consider ourselves helpless before ongoing crises like the genocide in Palestine or climate change — that is, unless we go through a period of critical reflection about what went wrong in 2020 and beyond. For more on the ideological and strategic failures of the past four years of organizing, keep an eye out for next week’s edition of “Mass Mood.”