This revolutionary moment
If history had a soundtrack, we’d be in a loud part. It might sound like a red alert on the Starship Enterprise. The cracks in the dam are starting to open. All systems are failing. 140 million people are poor. ICU’s are overwhelmed by the global COVID-19 pandemic and the
Before Covid-19, there was another health crisis grabbing headlines in our country. An estimated 128 people in this country die each day from an overdose of opioids, a class of drugs that includes legal prescription medications like oxycodone and illegal substances like heroin. Prescription opioids gained popularity in the 1990s when drug companies manufactured new medications such as OxyContin and marketed them as having a low-risk for addiction. Many users of prescription opioids go on to abuse them, then turn to heroin and the much more potent and fatal fentanyl. While opioid prescriptions have fallen in recent years, deaths from heroin and synthetic opioid overdoses continue to rise. Every demographic group has been touched by the opioid crisis, although low-income whites are the most likely to be prescribed opioids and die from overdoses.
For the past two months, leaders from the Kairos Center’s Reading the Bible with the Poor Cohort have been convening a weekly online gathering called the Freedom Church of the Poor. This formation brings together leaders from different frontline battles like the fight for living wages, immigrant rights, healthcare, and housing. We are Christian, Jewish and non-religious; leaders with the Poor People’s Campaign, scholars and clergy; and we come from every region of the country. By taking the name of Freedom Church of the Poor we join a much longer history and tradition of resistance to ideological and religious forms of control and domination.
Noam Sandweiss-Back During the 1970s and 1980s, a wide and diverse socialist movement emerged across the United States. Known as the New Communist Movement, it encompassed tens of thousands of revolutionary organizers who were inspired by popular revolutions across the globe and committed to building working-class power at home. One of the many groups involved was the Worker’s Viewpoint Organization, later renamed the Communist Worker’s Party (CWP). The CWP organized across racial lines and among the working class in communities and industrial settings throughout the country. They were also the target of a brutal and infamous massacre that left five
The dispossessed of this nation — the poor, both white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.The only real revolutionary, people say, is a man who has nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.Rev. Dr. King wrote these words for a series of lectures he gave in December of 1967. The passage is one of the clearest statements of how he saw America’s political and economic situation at that time; as well as the vision and strategy behind his call for a Poor People’s Campaign. Looking closely at it can help us understand that vision and strategy, especially the idea that the poor — as a united social force — can and must lead the rest of our society.That idea is more true today than ever. The current technological revolution is transforming every part of the economy all over the world. Because of our “cruelly unjust” class-based society, this revolution is bringing more poverty and violence instead of shared wealth. The poor are feeling the effects first: they’re becoming totally unnecessary, from the perspective of those who own and control the economy. This puts them in position to lead the “middle class” to political independence and clarity, as they face the trauma and fear of downward mobility.
Alicia: One of the goals of our movement is to develop the leadership of the poor as a social force. What is the significance of the Poor People’s Campaign: a National Call for Moral Revival (PPC) in developing the leadership of the poor as a social force? Emily: There are not many movements or organizations that explicitly name the poor at all, nor are they specific about the need to organize the poor as a social force. So just introducing that framework is an important intervention in the movement landscape. As well, we shift from the common community organizing model of identifying local, winnable issues and instead start with an analysis of multiple systems and work to build a movement with broad goals and a shared analysis. That shared analysis enables the poor to be organized as a social force.
