Mie Inouye is a doctoral candidate in political science at Yale University, where she’s writing a dissertation on theories of political organizing in the twentieth-century US labor and civil rights movements.
Just last month, social movement scholar Frances Fox Piven predicted “waves of mass protest” in the US. She was right. In an interview with Jacobin, Piven discusses why disruption must be central to protests, the thorny questions of violence and property destruction, and how organizers should and should not see their role in the streets.
The rise of a twenty-first-century socialist movement has raised the old question of what it means to be a “comrade.” By building comradeship, we forge a new kind of collective subject, different from friendship or being an “ally” — one that can change the world.
For decades, the Highlander School has nurtured some of the most important radical movements by pushing a simple idea: ordinary people can act as agents of change. It’s an idea that’s threatening to the Right — and it should be.