The Poor Are Taking Power Back Into Their Own Hands in a “Survival Revival”

The day after Donald Trump received the 2024 election, the ten richest folks on the earth — together with 9 People — expanded their wealth by practically $64 billion, the greatest single-day increase in recorded historical past. Since then, an unholy marriage of billionaire buyers, tech bros, Christian nationalists, and, after all, Donald Trump has staged an oligarchic assault on our democracy. If the nation’s company elite as soon as leveraged their relationships inside authorities to counterpoint themselves, they’ve now lower out the intermediary. We’re dwelling in a brand new Gilded Age, with a proto-fascistic and religiously regressive administration of, by, and for the billionaires.

With the wind at their backs, main parts within the Republican Celebration have quickly eschewed euphemisms and political correctness altogether, airing their anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-poor prejudices in unapologetically broad and brazen phrases. The impact of this, particularly for probably the most susceptible amongst us, is seismic. In the course of the first two months of the second Trump administration, we’ve witnessed nothing lower than an escalatory battle on the poor.

The assaults are many-pronged. Rural improvement grants, meals banks, and environmental safety measures have all been slashed within the title of “ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs.” Planned Parenthood and different life-saving healthcare providers for poor and marginalized communities have been defunded. Homelessness has been ever extra intensely criminalized and Housing First insurance policies vilified. The Department of Education, which has traditionally offered important assets for low-income and disabled college students, has been gutted, whereas the barbaric circumstances in overcrowded immigrant detention facilities have solely worsened. Billions of {dollars} in funding for psychological well being and dependancy providers have been revoked. Worse but, these and different mercenary actions could show to be simply the tip of the spear. Tariff wars and potential cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, Social Safety, and SNAP might go away each the lives of the poor and the worldwide economic system in shambles.

This risky second could characterize an unprecedented, even existential, risk to the well being of our democracy, however it’s constructing on many years of neoliberal plunder and financial austerity, authored by each conservative and liberal politicians. Earlier than the 2024 elections, there have been greater than 140 million folks dwelling in poverty or one disaster away — one job loss, eviction, medical subject, or debt assortment — from financial damage. On this wealthy land, 45 million folks regularly experience starvation and meals insecurity, whereas greater than 80 million individuals are uninsured or underinsured, ten million folks live with out housing or expertise continual housing insecurity, and the American training system has repeatedly scored below average in comparison with these of different nations within the Group for Financial Cooperation and Growth.

Amid large social and financial dislocation, conventional American establishments and political alignments have steadily misplaced their that means for tens of hundreds of thousands of individuals. The vast majority of us know issues aren’t effectively on this nation. We will really feel it, thanks not simply to the violent and vitriolic political surroundings through which we stay, however to our financial institution statements and debt sheets, our rising hire and utility payments. Because the hull of our democracy splinters and floods, the query stays: How will we chart a extra simply and humane path ahead? There aren’t any simple solutions, however there are profound classes to be discovered from the previous, particularly from actions of poor and dispossessed people who have impressed a lot of this nation’s most vital moments of democratic awakening.

That is the main focus of our new ebook, You Only Get What You’re Organized to Take: Lessons from the Movement to End Poverty. Drawing on Liz’s 30 years of anti-poverty organizing, we poured over outdated pamphlets and paperwork, reminiscences and mementos to collect proof that social transformation by the hands of the poor stays an ever-present chance and to summarize among the most vital concepts that, even as we speak, proceed to animate their organized struggles.

Homeless, Not Helpless

Within the late spring of 1990, tons of of unhoused folks throughout the nation broke locks and chains off dozens of empty federally owned homes and moved in. Bedrooms and kitchens carpeted with layers of mud instantly whirled with exercise. Mattresses have been carried in and baggage of meals unpacked. Inside hours, the brand new occupants made calls to town’s vitality corporations, requesting that the utilities be turned on. They have been remarkably disciplined and environment friendly — single mothers who had been dwelling of their automobiles, veterans, college students, and low-wage or just lately laid-off staff, and other people battling sickness with out healthcare. They have been Black, Latino, Asian, Indigenous, and White, and though they got here from radically totally different slices of society, one easy reality certain them collectively: they have been poor, in want of housing, and fed up.

That wave of takeovers was led by the National Union of the Homeless (NUH), one amongst many carried out by the group in these years. The NUH was not a charity, a service supplier, or knowledgeable advocacy group however a political group led by and for unhoused folks, with near 30,000 members in 25 cities. Liz was launched to it on her first day of faculty. Inside a couple of months, she had joined the motion and by no means left.

NUH members included individuals who had just lately misplaced their manufacturing jobs and will now not discover regular work, in addition to low-wage staff who couldn’t sustain with the rising prices of housing and different each day requirements. In such dire instances, the truth of the unhoused solely foreshadowed the attainable dislocation of hundreds of thousands extra. The NUH emphasised this reality in considered one of its slogans: “You Are Solely One Paycheck Away from Homelessness!” The title of the group itself mirrored a connection between homelessness and the brand new economic system then being formed. As industrial work floundered and labor unions suffered, there was a rising want for brand spanking new unions of poor and dispossessed folks.

Within the late Eighties and early Nineties, the NUH received a string of victories, together with new insurance policies guaranteeing 24-hour shelter consumption, entry to public showers, and the correct of the unhoused to vote with out a everlasting deal with. Additionally they received publicly funded housing applications run by the previously unhoused in practically a dozen cities. Such successes have been a barometer of the incipient energy of the organized poor and a corrective to the idea that poor folks might maybe spark spontaneous outrage however by no means be a power able to wielding efficient political energy.

On the coronary heart of the NUH have been three ideas: first, poor folks may be brokers of change, not merely victims of a merciless historical past; second, the facility of the poor is determined by their means to unite throughout their variations; and third, it’s certainly attainable to abolish poverty. These guiding ideas have been crystallized in two extra slogans: “Homeless, Not Helpless” and “No Housing, No Peace.” The primary captured a too-often obscured reality in regards to the poor: that one’s dwelling circumstances don’t outline who we’re or restrict our capability to vary our lives and the world round us. The second caught the political and ethical company of the impoverished — that there will likely be no peace and quiet till the demand for important human wants is met.

One other NUH slogan has additionally echoed by way of the years: “You Solely Get What You’re Organized to Take.” It’s a favourite of ours as a result of it expresses a vital argument of our ebook: that poverty and financial inequality received’t finish due to the goodwill of those that maintain political energy and wealth (as is abundantly clear as we speak) and even by way of the charitable actions of sympathetic folks.

Change on such a scale requires a protagonist with a extra urgent agenda. Poverty will finish when poor folks and their allies refuse to permit society to stay complacent in regards to the struggling and dying brought on by financial deprivation. It should finish when the poor turn into an organized power able to rallying a important mass of society to reorder the political and financial priorities of our nation.

Tasks of Survival

Within the mid-Nineties, Liz was energetic in North Philadelphia’s Kensington Welfare Rights Group (KWRU). Kensington’s workforce had by then been decimated by deindustrialization and disinvestment. Folks with out regular or dependable housing have been shifting into vacant buildings or cobbling collectively outside shelters, whereas tenants refused to depart properties from which they have been being evicted. In its actions, KWRU reached deep into this effectively of expertise, taking the spontaneous survival methods that poor folks have been already utilizing and adapting them into “tasks of survival.”

The phrase “venture of survival” was borrowed from the Black Panther Celebration, which, within the Sixties and Seventies, created profitable “survival applications” just like the Free Medical Clinic Program and the Free Breakfast Program. In 1969, the top of the nationwide College Breakfast Program admitted that the Black Panthers have been feeding more poor children than the state of California. The Panthers, nevertheless, have been involved with extra than simply assembly fast wants. They have been targeted on structural transformation and, by way of their survival applications, they highlighted the federal government’s refusal to deal significantly with American poverty, even whereas then spending billions of {dollars} preventing distant wars on the poor of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

KWRU discovered from the Black Panthers. Within the late fall of 1995, a chilly entrance swept by way of a big KWRU encampment generally known as Tent Metropolis. In want of indoor shelter, the group set its sights on a vacant church a couple of blocks away. Earlier that yr, the archdiocese of Philadelphia had shuttered St. Edward’s Catholic Church as a result of its congregants have been poor and the drafty constructing costly to keep up. Nonetheless, a few of these congregants continued to wish each Sunday in a small park outdoors the shuttered church. Finally, dozens of residents from Tent Metropolis walked up the church steps, broke the locks on its entrance doorways, and ignited a extremely publicized occupation that lasted by way of that winter.

On the partitions of the church, Liz and her compatriots hung posters and banners, together with one which requested, “Why will we worship a homeless man on Sunday and ignore one on Monday?” As winter engulfed town, residents of St. Ed’s fed and cared for each other in a fugitive congregation whose youngest resident was lower than a yr outdated and whose oldest was in his nineties. That occupation in the end pressured the archdiocese to refocus its ministry on poor communities, whereas electrifying the native media to report on the rampant poverty that had usually been swept underneath the rug.

Such tasks of survival enabled KWRU to construct belief in Kensington, whereas serving as bases for greater and bolder organizing. As a younger lady, Liz gained new perception into how bottom-up change usually begins. Whereas media narratives repeatedly depict poor folks as lazy, harmful, or too over-burdened with their very own issues to consider others, there’s an immense spirit of cooperation and generosity among the many poorest folks in our society. Certainly, that spirit of communal care is the generative floor from which highly effective social actions emerge.

A Survival Revival for These Instances

In the present day, amid the rising tide of Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s billionaire-fueled authoritarianism, there’s an pressing want for defiant and militant organizing amongst a broad cross-section of society. As our democratic horizons proceed to slender, we discover ourselves working inside a important window of time. In our work, we name this a “kairos second.” Within the days of antiquity, the Greeks taught that there have been two methods to grasp time: chronos and kairos. Chronos is quantitative time, whereas kairos is the qualitative time throughout which outdated and sometimes oppressive methods are dying whereas new understandings battle to be born.

In kairos moments comparable to this sinister Trumpian one, it’s usually the folks whose backs are up towards the wall who’re prepared to take decisive motion. In each standard, pro-democracy motion, there’s a main social power that, by advantage of its place within the financial pecking order, is compelled to behave first, as a result of for them it’s a matter of life-or-death. And by shifting into motion, that power can awaken the indignation and creativeness of others.

Proper now, there are tens of hundreds of People already in motion making an attempt to defend their communities from the rising ravages of financial, environmental, and political catastrophe. Their efforts embrace meals banks and neighborhood associations; church buildings and different homes of worship offering sanctuary for the unhoused and immigrants; ladies, trans children, and different LGBTQ+ people preventing to make sure that they and their family members get the healthcare they want; neighborhood colleges moving into the breach of our beleaguered public education system; mutual-aid teams responding to environmental disasters which are solely growing due to the local weather disaster; and college students protesting the genocide in Gaza and the militarization of our society. Such communities of care and resistance should be small and scrappy, however inside them lies a latent energy that, if additional politicized and arranged, might ignite a brand new period of transformational movement-building at a time when our nation is in growing hazard.

Certainly, simply think about what is likely to be attainable if that’s the case many communities have been working not in isolation however in coordination. Think about the facility of such a probably huge community to shake issues up and assert the ethical, mental, and political company of these underneath assault. Meals pantries might turn into locations not simply to fill bellies however to launch protests, campaigns, and organizing drives. Ever extra devastating superstorms, floods, and forest fires might turn into moments not only for acute catastrophe response however for sustained relationship-building and communal resilience, geared toward repairing the societal fissures that worsen excessive climate occasions.

Final month, the Kairos Middle for Religions, Rights, and Social Justice, the place we each work, revealed a brand new report on the idea and follow behind this method to grassroots organizing, A Matter of Survival: Organizing to Meet Unmet Needs and Build Power in Times of Crisis. Authored by our colleagues Shailly Gupta Barnes and Jarvis Benson, it describes how — starting in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic and persevering with as we speak — dozens of grassroots organizations, congregations, mutual-aid collectives, artists, and others have been constructing tasks of survival and fascinating in communal acts of care.

Over the approaching months, the Kairos Middle plans to attract inspiration from such tales as we launch a brand new and bold nationwide organizing drive among the many poor. The “Survival Revival,” as we name it, will join with and hyperlink the often-siloed survival struggles of the poor right into a extra unified power. Collectively, we’ll research, strategize, sing, pray, and take the type of motion that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once put it, may be “a brand new and unsettling power in our complacent nationwide life.” Collectively, we’ll raise from the underside, so that everybody can rise.