We’re approaching the summertime and that means we have plenty of opportunities in the next few months to build our base memberships.
One of the most certain ways to do this is by holding free Family Movie Nights at a local library or community center. Programming is extremely easy, overhead should be less than $50, and it creates a great chance to meet your neighbors while showing them the Green Party is an organization that exists for much more than just their vote.
Based on my own personal experiences, here are some suggestions:
Don’t insist on purely agit-prop programming
It certainly makes sense that one would be inclined to create a program based solely around progressive political issues. However, that’s not the proper way to think about this. While you and those in your age demographic might find documentaries featuring Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn fascinating, children don’t. They want something fun and enjoyable. So include in your program enjoyable materials.
Your program should span approximately 3 hours and include both a feature as well as some shorts.
Your event should be formulated as if it were an old fashioned day at the cinema. Before the advent of television and home video, the going to the cinema was a daylong affair. You had newsreels that updated viewers about current events the in same fashion that the news broadcasts function today. The theaters would also show a series of cartoon shorts produced by the film studios, such as Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies (Warner Bros), Silly Symphony (Walt Disney Studios), and Hanna-Barbera (MGM). Then came the features, usually two but sometimes more depending on the circumstances. There was first the B-level picture, a low-budget film with minor stars. Then you had the A-level film, which had the major Hollywood actors and a large-scale budget.
You can easily adapt this to contemporary times, particularly with the birth of screening forums like YouTube, Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Vimeo. These on-demand web-based platforms provide a wealth of short film resources for your efforts. One potentially useful resource, if you want to include some ecological programming, is the DisneyNature film label. These are family-friendly nature documentaries, not unlike the old National Geographic films, but with an orientation towards families.
Spend a few dollars on some food for those in attendance.
A few pizzas and drinks go a long way.
Include your accountability partners in the planning.
This is a great way to build, strengthen, and solidify these relationships within your community. You want to avoid parachute activism behaviors here and that means you need to be building from and with the grassroots level in your community. Jey Ehrenhalt at Teaching Tolerance writes:
Parachuting perpetuates two major myths of white supremacy. First, it bolsters the problematic mentality that white people are called upon to “save” underserved neighborhoods of color. While individual actors often possess good intentions, entrenched structural racism means that these intentions can be tainted by this “savior” mindset. The result? White-led organizations try to “fix” communities without consulting its members about their needs or recognizing the expertise of the people closest to the issues. Second, “parachuting” relies on white supremacist ideology similar to Manifest Destiny: the notion that whites not only can, but are destined to, explore and settle any region of their choosing. White privilege, in other words, comes with a sense of entitlement to enter into any culture that, to the “explorer,” is not native, and then leave again as they see fit.
Karen Washington notes how this phenomenon is similar to colonization, exploiting people and land for profit. “That’s using people for something under the auspices of social justice,” she says. [Emphasis added]
Above all else, have fun doing this.
This is about building community with your Green Party local serving as a facilitator. You need to go into this with the understanding that building these relationships will take time. Remember this is a long-term project and move forward from there.
Be sure to keep in touch with us and stay active this summer. This is the chance for us to build substantially this summer and we want to help you do this. Feel free to contact us via the homepage and let us know how things are going.
John Bellamy Foster is the editor of Monthly Review and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Oregon. His research focuses on economic, political, and ecological problems of capitalism and imperialism. His recent books include The Ecological Rift (with Brett Clark and Richard York), What Every Environmentalist Needs to Know about Capitalism (with Fred Magdoff), and Marx and the Earth (with Paul Burkett).
Howie is a Teamster and Green Party activist in Syracuse, NY. He has been an organizer in movements for peace, justice, labor, the environment, and independent politics since 1967.
On this day, known as International Workers’ Day, the Green Party Power Project (GPPP) expresses its solidarity with workers in the United States and abroad and re-commits itself to the historic task of building an independent political formation that centers the values, needs and aspirations of the working class and poor.
We also say without any equivocation that any political party that is serious must center an unrelenting attack on the four interrelated issues that confront humanity in general, but specifically workers and the poor in the United States and abroad: White supremacy, neoliberal capitalist exploitation, war and ecological devastation.
May 1st became a symbol of working-class resistance beginning in 1886, when workers organized to fight for the basic human rights of fellow workers in Chicago. Their efforts for a decent and humane work day of eight hours a day were met with fire and steel from the defenders of capital. The workers that lost their lives in those days of struggle after, in those first few days between May 1st and the 5th, were re-born every year in the hearts and minds of countless workers from around the world who went to the streets every May 1st since 1886.
And although the capitalist class in the United States has sought to extinguish May 1st from the memory and consciousness of U.S. workers, new generations of resisters have continued to emerge, have claimed the day and have created new political and programmatic connections that have brought new forms of struggle and have included broader sectors of workers.
Nowhere was that more dramatic than in 2006 when tens of thousands of immigrant and migrant workers mobilized on May 1st to demonstrate that a new force of workers had arrive on the political scene. Created out of the contradictions of neoliberal globalization that uprooted millions of workers, the workers from the nations of the global South devastated by neoliberal penetration of their economies and forced to migrate to the United States demanded they be treated as human beings according to internationally recognized rights.
But after putting tens of thousands in the streets in 2006, what happened to that movement?
Like a recurring nightmare that haunts progressive/radical activists and movements in the United States over the last forty years, the story of the immigrant rights movement is one in which the final chapter was predetermined as soon as it allowed itself to be influenced by the paternalism and conservative politics of the liberal non-profit industrial complex and the interests of the Democratic Party.
That is why the GPPP is committed to building an independent political instrument that workers can relate to and use outside of the two-party system. Without independent organization, the gains made in short-term defensive battles can be easily reversed or co-opted.
The GPPP believes that aligned with the oppressed, the Green Party is independent, multi-national, anti-oppression electoral party and people’s movement that is committed to people-centered human rights, self-determination, authentic decolonization, and a politicized global perspective that understands the contradiction of global capitalism and imperialism, which push and pull people across national borders.
On this International Workers’ Day, we pledge to re-double our efforts to agitate for and build that party.
We say:
End white privilege and class collaboration with the ruling elite
Demand a living wage for all
Protect the right to organize independent unions
Stand in solidarity with exploited workers
Ajamu Baraka on behalf of the Green Green Party Power Project.
This piece was also published on the national Green Party website
Written on behalf of the Green Party Power Coordinating Committee.
Momentum toward war is escalating dangerously with new additions to the Trump war cabinet, John Bolton as national security adviser and Mike Pompeo as secretary of state. Bolton is a war criminal for supporting torture and lying to justify the Iraq war. He and Pompeo oppose the Iran nuclear deal. Pompeo is an aggressive war hawk who would rather seek regime change in North Korea than de-nuclearization.
There is a bi-partisan march to militarization. After the Pentagon requested a record amount of spending on war, Congress almost unanimously added tens of billions to the military budget, which is now 57% of US discretionary spending. ‘Russiagate’ continues to foment hatred at Russia and President Putin, and the recent use of a nerve agent to kill a Russian émigré and his daughter in England are leading to talk of greater conflict with Russia.
These are very dangerous times. People must organize now to stop the movement toward more war.
The Green Party’s platform opposes militarization at home and abroad. Nonviolence is one of the four pillars on which the Green Party is built. That’s why Green Party members are involved in leading and organizing these initiatives. They provide opportunities for Greens across the country to live our platform and demonstrate how the Green Party differs from the war parties.
— End U.S. overt and covert wars, drone wars, sanction/embargo wars, and death squad assassination wars.
— Close of all U.S. bases on foreign soil. Dismantle all nuclear weapons.
— Bring all U.S. troops home now. Self-determination not military intervention. U.S. hands off the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America. End military aid to apartheid Israel. Self-determination for Palestine. The U.S. cannot be the cop of the world.
– Trillions for human needs… for jobs and social services, quality debt-free education and single payer health care. No to anti-union legislation. For $15 and a Union Now.
– Defend the environment against life-threatening fossil fuel-induced global warming. For a just transition to a 100 percent clean, sustainable energy system at union wages for all displaced workers.
— No to white supremacy, police brutality/murder. End racist mass incarceration. Black Lives Matter
— No human being is illegal. No to mass deportations. Yes to DACA and TPS (Temporary Protective Status)
Visit NoForeignBases.org for more information on planned actions and to list your action if you are organizing one. Let’s hit the streets and show that the Green Party opposes militarism at home and abroad.
