BEFORE YOU READ: Just a disclaimer. This piece is a stream of thoughts that came together during a period of time when Sunrise was assessing its overall strategy and path forward. Looking back, there are definitely some gaps in my analysis, or things missing. (I’m growing as a strategist :) But sharing as a way to bring you into the thinking behind Sunrise, and where we go as a movement to win on the Green New Deal. Also, for context, the audience of this piece, at the time, was the Strategy Team, a team of folks helping chart out the broader strategy in Sunrise.
Audience: Sunrise frontloading strategy team (in case folks aren't on that team but reading!)
I’ll try and keep this as brief as possible. But as my mind has wandered towards strategy, and winning a Green New Deal and how we do it, I thought I’d lay out some thoughts and things coming up for me. Also, the second thing I wanna say is, I wasn’t in strategy convos. So this is more of a way of me trying to do the exercise of thinking about strategy. It may be duplicative, y'all may have already thought about this, but my brain needs a way to see pieces together, so this is that!
In the following mini-piece (looking back, it’s not looking so much like a mini-piece), I'm going to lay out reflections on what we’ve done really well in Sunrise, why we’ve failed, how we can get sharper on the solution to the climate crisis (the Green New Deal) we’re championing, and a road ahead for how we win (theory of change) and how we do so within the fabric of the movement ecology. It’s also helpful to note, this is my assessment and reflections, building already off of where we’ve landed with the Sunrise 2.0 strategy & DNA.
One final note. I know big questions around the rise of fascism and the threat of democracy have come up as key barriers to winning climate legislation. I don’t feel equipped to respond to that question, so I will leave it aside. (Actually, because it’s hard for me to leave things aside, I put a section in the appendix on thoughts.)
What we’ve done well
We’ve mapped this out already! One of the core strengths around getting closer to passing federal climate legislation in Sunrise is that we have played a major role, nationally, in shifting the common sense around climate change, and positing the Green New Deal as the solution to meet the scale and urgency of the crisis.
To throw in another strength, we’ve also developed a political savvy that has allowed us to build relationships within the halls of Congress, to get core parts of our agenda into major legislation. (Say, with climate being one of the major components of BBB that didn’t shrink, but actually expand.) I do want to caution that this tactic is a shortcut. And I don’t want us to see this as a steady foundation with which we seek major, long-term, transformation in this country on climate.
Why we’ve failed at winning federal climate legislation
Some of our failures as a movement on passing federal climate legislation (there are a lot of barriers! Lol so don’t wanna put it all on us. Rather wanna get clear on how we can organize smarter) is connected to our 1.0 theory of change. First, we set out on building political power, and didn’t build enough to carry us towards a Green New Deal. We elected some Green New Deal champions, but the House and Senate support behind the Green New Deal wasn’t enough to get it passed. We backed Bernie Sanders, and then scrambled or struggled to have a clear plan of action when he lost. A great analysis on this comes here.
Despite our learnings and failure, we must win governing power to enact and maintain the Decade of the Green New Deal. We must have politicians in office who would both push and implement our political agenda. Also, we must orient to elections as a tactic, in a broader campaign to win Green New Deal legislation. The election is not the end, but the means, to getting what we what. Elections are key opportunities to both grow our membership and base (moments to absorb into our structures!), develop the skills of our membership and leadership (e.g., canvassing, phone banking, etc.), and make specific narrative interventions/push to make our ideas, vision, and platforms popular by pushing candidates to adopt them (e.g., popularizing Green New Deal through folks like AOC and Bernie Sanders talking about it to their supporters and in debates.)
Secondly, we’ve failed to have a power map that lays out the clear enemies and blocks on climate legislation. (And the fossil fuel industry is not specific enough.) Because while Democrats and Republicans fail to act on climate legislation, there are bigger forces moving behind them; the elite and ruling class. And those forces have names, faces, addresses, and corporations that we must disrupt, vehemently, to get what we want. As Frederick Douglas once said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.” We must make the right demands of the right people in power.
If we had a clearer power map of the people, corporations, and politicians who stand in our way, we might realize that banner drops, high school climate strikes, Wide Awakes and direct actions were not at all effective in moving those powerholders. (Yes, they may have targeted the public in powerful ways, but if winning material shit, not just shifting the common sense, is a core part of our theory of change, we must get clearer on how we think we build the power to win shit.)
The final mistake we’ve made, and are continuing to make, is around people power/collective power. In Sunrise 1.0, we said we needed to build people power. But who? What kind of people power? How do we wield it? In frontloading, we’ve gotten better at trying to answer this question, but we’re still missing the mark.
People, when organized, in society and our democracy, have power in several different ways: (I’ve laid out three, but feel free to challenge or push, may not be total.)
Mass protest & mass noncooperation
Example: Gandhi Salt Marches
Strategic disruption (strikes, boycotts, etc.)
Example: United Auto Workers engaging in sit-down strikes in Flint, Michigan
Through democracy & electoral system (mobilizing at the voting booths)
Example: AOC ousting Joe Crowley and getting elected to Congress (through the support of mobilization of working people at the ballot box). If an elected official isn’t accountable to the constituency, can try and re-elect them.
We must do all of these better! And by running local campaigns that tie to federal legislation, we can definitely achieve #1 and #3. But more specifically, we’re making a HUGE mistake by not thinking deeply about the working class movement we need to build, and what power we can leverage from the constituency. For, building a multi-racial, cross-class movement for the sake of building it, is not strategic or powerful. We should want to build a MRXC movement, with working class members, because working class people have the power in society to withhold their labor and disrupt capitalism. And that gives us and our movement leverage, to seek out successions on our demands. We must think deeply about organizing young workers, and doing so in strategic places that disrupt power holders who can give us what we want. A Green New Deal. Real, sustained, transformation in this country can only come from organization of the working class.
What should we be demanding of the Green New Deal
For a minute, I've been asking the question, What is the Green New Deal we’re fighting for? I’ve also been trying to reflect on that, and have thoughts.
Green New Deal, redefined: All future Green New Deal policy, can be tested with new framework, core outcomes & values listed below:
Decarbonization: GND policy should drive towards meeting the goal of full decarbonization, and 100% fossil fuel free economy and society.
Socialism: Any Green New Deal policy seeks to deliver a death blow to capitalism, a system that hoards wealth, capital, and resources in the hands of the few, at the exploitation of people and the planet. This includes the process of decommodification, the belief that housing, energy, healthcare, food, should be human right, not good to be traded in “free market”
Abolition: Abolition of violence institutions and structures, including fossil fuel industry, military, ICE, prisons, etc. All of these institutions seek to serve the ruling class, and allow them to continue in the playbook of control, harm, violence and exploitation in service of growing profits.
Decolonization: Giving land and power back to Indigenous peoples, who are the original stewards of this land. (There’s probably more here, but pulling from Red Deal)
Internationalist: Any Green New Policy seeks to make connections between the climate crisis, and exploitation of countries in the Global South. GND policy passed should push for the United States to pay climate reparations, and open borders for climate refugees, who are often migrating due to US interventionist policy, and our role in the climate crisis.
What’s our theory of change
So given all of these, what do we do? What shifts and interventions can we make in 2.0, given all the work we’ve done frontloading?
Here are my takes:
We slightly shift our theory of change by adding strategic disruption, for we don’t win a Green New Deal if each of these separate gears to move together:
Continue shifting common sense (selling our politics & getting public to believe in problem, solution, and path to change)
Collective power (specifically building working class power)
Includes mass movement building, expanding beyond professional middle class activist networks
Strategic disruption (strikes + mass protest)
Winning state & governing power: long road, electing GND champions
Though we don’t take responsibility for these things, must consider role we play:
Organizing labor to see GND as necessary (especially teacher & healthcare unions); strategic disruption. Labor was critical in history and during the New Deal Era, in passive massive legislation, and will be critical in the fight to win the Decade of the Green New Deal.
Grow People’s Alignment, specifically thinking about the work it will take locally to win GND campaigns (coalitions of community orgs, indigenous, local EJ, labor groups, etc.)
Sunrise Strategy to Get There
So, given the theory of change, what’s the best strategy? My take is that we make the choice to do the Green New Deal Communities, and embed GND for Education within that. Here’s why:
A GND for Communities campaign would allow us to take advantage of the opportunity (and strategic thing we need to do) to bring union organizations into the fight for a Green New Deal, and leverage their power to win. By doing a GND for Communities campaign, and embedded GND for Education Demands within it, it allows us to work with teachers unions, while also making sure that the fight for good education isn’t siloed, but packaged within the fight for broader transformation in cities across the country.
We’d have the opportunity to select Priority Locations (based on the power map exercise we do this time, and maybe 70% capacity going towards supporting this in org) and determine where we need to build power and engage in strategic disruption across the country. We should also think more deeply & seriously about a worker constituency within those locations, beyond teacher unions. One example could be a young transit work constituency, that’s work to organize transit unions in support of demands like Universal Public Transit. We should see this is something incredibly new, experimental, but a choice in the right direction towards thinking more deeply about power, and the kind of power we need to build to win.
Opportunity, given money coming to local and state governments through federal funding that’s become available through BIF (and maybe BBB), to run campaigns during funding towards Green New Deal pillars
With a goal to continuing to shift the common sense on climate and the Green New Deal, the broadest and most appealing campaign will do that; not a Green New Deal for Education
If we want a policy that supports WWII style mobilization around climate, we need policy that appeals to the broadest subset of the public. That’s a GND for Communities.
We need to win shit locally, and shit that will have material impacts on peoples lives. A GND for Communities will most do that. And build the case that the government should be and can be effective in providing real change for working people.
Finally, to win massive climate legislation, we need to continue vying for state power, through the election of GND champions. By supporting our entire movement on GND for Communities campaigns, we can see it as a deep investment in getting towards this goal. But we must do it right. We must see community organizing as a long-term strategy, and set our movement's sights, in their local Green New Deal campaigns, as organizing opportunities towards the 2024, 2026 and 2028 federal elections. And the metric of our success; can we use our organizing locally, as a sort of structure test during federal elections? (e.g., can we mobilize our movement during these critical elections? To elect GND champions, and to set us up to mass federal climate legislation.)
Conclusion
First, if you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading! I want to wrap by saying that over break, I spent an hour crying my eyes out, terrified that all our efforts, all our organizing, all this work, would be for not. That we’d be unable to stop the capitalist class, unable to stop the fossil fuel industry, from turning society into a hellscape rife with disaster, mass death and devastation.
And then I got my shit together, and said well dammit. If the ruling class can plan, can be strategic, can build and maintain power, can get what they want, so can I. So can we. So can the working class. And so can like Left. Organize, don't antagonize. And these reflections come from that place.
In writing this, my hope isn’t that this analysis is right or entirely correct or spot on, but that it sparks a convo between us, as leadership in frontloading, as leadership in Sunrise, to be think about how we can be as strategic as possible, in making choices about how we think we pass massive federal legislation. About what we think our best shot at passing massive federal legislation to avert climate catastrophe is.
For, the fate of the world, and future generations, could depend on our movement (and movements now, working on climate legislation) getting that right.
DP