Organizing for the Long Haul Means Remaining Open Minded

One vital quality for staying involved in movements is openness. This is a willingness to consider that we might sometimes be wrong, an eagerness to learn from our mistakes, an ongoing sense of curiosity about the world, and a receptivity to new developments and ideas. Openness means maintaining some critical consciousness about our habitual patterns in political activity while generously engaging emerging forms of liberatory action and thought.

Let’s be honest here: “open” is not a term commonly used to characterize people who stick around on the left. Indeed, aging radicals tend to be more frequently associated with the opposite: political rigidity. Most of us with activist experience won’t have trouble bringing to mind an emblematic instance of this: that time at a political event when the question-and-answer session begins and a gray-haired leftist (frequently white, usually a cisgender man) eagerly steps up to the microphone and lambasts everyone present with a list of why whatever initiative at hand is insufficient or misguided.

As we cringe at this, let’s recognize that it’s just the most overt version of something much more commonplace. I certainly recognize aspects of this rigidity in myself and others I know. Over the last decade, I’ve witnessed leftists my age and older dismissively discuss newer movement efforts, including the Movement for Black Lives, labor organizing campaigns, antifascist mobilizations, climate justice activism, Palestine solidarity organizing, and feminist and queer initiatives. Even if they don’t step up to a microphone, they don’t hesitate to lay out their criticisms in smaller discussions, all too often without closely looking at any accounts generated by these efforts or talking with any participants directly.

How should we understand this tendency toward political rigidity? I frequently come back to a helpful observation from the left historian Barbara Epstein: “people’s outlooks are shaped by the movement in which they first participate in a major way.” That is, our initial movement experiences—the political struggles and ideas into which we first seriously enter—have a long-lasting influence on how we understand and engage with subsequent developments. In my case, for instance, I know that the anarchist-oriented activist efforts I initially joined in the 1990s, building into the global justice movement, have left an enduring mark on me. Those experiences, in ways I’m sure I still don’t fully recognize, continue to impact how I think about collective action, power relations, education, conflict, and strategy, among many other things. Even as they fuel me, those experiences tie me to a constellation of habits of thought and action. They affect how I encounter new efforts—what I pay attention to, what I find inspiring, and what I worry about. If I’m not mindful, they can constrain my thinking.

This tendency is perhaps easier to notice in others than in ourselves. Indeed, any of us who have spent time with older activists and organizers can probably come up with examples: people romanticizing or demonizing the past, rehashing what feel like ancient debates, defending political formulations that no longer have much traction, and drawing overly generalized parallels between emerging movement efforts and previous initiatives. “Sometimes when us older people initiate things,” activist-scholar Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz once said to me, “we get hung up on issues and concerns that are no longer relevant.” Sometimes we have trouble reckoning with a present that is linked to our past yet different from it.

Reflecting on his own accumulated experience, the movement strategist Jonathan Matthew Smucker describes this dynamic: “When you hear about an idea, you can instantly foresee a million things that could go wrong. And when your concerns repeatedly play out, it is easy to grow a little cynical and even a little bitter.” This is how experience can drift into arrogance. You can come, continues Smucker, “to forget that revolutionary moments require an ingredient that you may now be running low on: a drive that once consumed you, but now pulses through the veins and brains of people younger than yourself, whom you are tempted to condescendingly dismiss as politically naïve.” 

Of course, critical discussion can strengthen movements, and helping to sustain collective memory is crucial. But let’s carefully consider the responsibilities of those of us who stick around in how we deploy our experience in relating with political activities, particularly the efforts of younger people and people newer to activism and organizing. Within movements, rigidity and dismissiveness are consistently harmful: they sap collective energy, promote fatalism, and fuel conflict. When we behave this way, we undermine possibilities for growing collective activity and reflection. We can do so much better—and go so much further—by cultivating openness.

In trying to learn how to do this, I look to experienced radicals who have solid track records of cross-generational collaboration. One of these people is Mariame Kaba, a longtime organizer in struggles against the prison industrial complex and for transformative justice. In a 2017 interview with the activist researcher John Duda, Kaba offered some advice that has stuck with me: “If you’re a veteran organizer it is your duty, I believe, to come into spaces with an open heart and an open ear and not to go in there with your arms crossed, ready to pounce, on how these young folks are doing everything wrong all the time.” The lesson I take from Kaba here is about intentionally developing curiosity about other people’s activities—and then encouraging those dimensions that seem most promising. So often clarifying questions are more useful than sharp critiques or aphoristic wisdom.

Additionally, many long-time activists advise us about the value of humility. This is important and also tricky. Relations of colonialism, racial capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism foster what we might understand as a form of humility that upholds domination. These power relations nurture docility and self-doubt, in differentiated but related ways, in all of us who face oppression and exploitation. They communicate a message that we—who we are, what we think, and what we do—are not as valuable as those at the top of ruling social hierarchies. This form of humility is damaging: it makes people smaller, undermining the confidence and capability that we need for transformative struggles. If we want collective liberation, we should wholeheartedly reject it.

When I listen to experienced organizers talk about humility, I hear them naming something different. This is humility as a practice of vulnerability in service of struggle, an ongoing understanding that what we know at any given point is limited and can always develop further. Perhaps more than anything else, this humility entails being courageously and compassionately self-critical. I have seen this up close: some of the greatest gifts I have received from older radicals have been frank reflections on their uncertainties, miscalculations, and mistakes. That kind of humility, especially in those who are relatively advantaged, is tremendously valuable. It encourages us all to examine what we take to be certain, and to admit when we’ve got something wrong. It also encourages each of us to recognize self-consciously how our past forms us, how it shapes our experience and understanding of the present in both limiting and illuminating ways. And most of all, it encourages us to continue learning and growing.

Aging on the left does not require us to become more rigid. Consciously cultivating openness, in fact, can help us to stick around in meaningful ways. When we, as older activists, show up with open hearts and ears, intentional curiosity, vulnerability, and thoughtfulness, we discover something vital: more often than not, criticism is the least useful thing we have to offer. There are so many other, much more significant, contributions we can make with our skills and experiences. Likewise, there is so much we can gain when we stay open to the dynamism of social movements and struggles, maybe especially when they upend our customary assumptions and practices.