Authors:
Members of the Black Rose/Rosa Negra Housing and Territorial Committee
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This is a basic guide on how and why to build structures for decision making and collective action at the neighbourhood level, what we call popular assemblies. We emphasize the need for popular assemblies to be rooted in a defined geographic area and aimed at organising the people who live, work, or stay there to develop the power to confront social problems together.
This guide draws directly on knowledge and experience of past experiments in building popular assemblies.
Source:
https://www.blackrosefed.org/how-to-organize-a-neighborhood-popular-assembly/
How to Organise a Neighbourhood Popular Assembly
by Members of the Black Rose/Rosa Negra
Housing and Territorial Committee
Introduction
Scroll social media or a 24-hour news service, and what do you see? Assaults on too-meagre social safety nets. Rollbacks of civil rights. Crumbling infrastructure. Immigration police grabbing people off the street. Politicians casually promising to eradicate entire peoples.
It’s a bleak moment in history, and there seem to be few avenues to escape it.
How did we get here? Elite politicians and businesspeople built their power over us, in part, by battering us with beliefs about our powerlessness. Isolation from each other internalizes those beliefs inside us. We encounter what feels like an unending crisis — alone.
We can catch each other, though — but only with the requisite nets of
mass organisations
.
Mass organisations can bring us together to identify, address, confront, and one day replace the ruling classes’ power over us in our backyards.
Stunned by Trump’s first election in 2017, communities across the United States turned to each other to figure out how to survive — and resist — the incoming administration. Long-time organisers and newly activated residents gathered in neighbourhood and sometimes citywide meetings to share their fears about the promised federal attacks and what they were going to do about them — together.
1
These meetings became the foundations of
popular assemblies
.
As one organiser with the central Los Angeles-based Koreatown Popular Assembly put it, a popular assembly is “an open decision-making space in a neighbourhood where people can come together [to] talk about their problems and how they are going to solve the problems together as a group, not just by lobbying the government.”
Despite widespread interest in popular assemblies as a strategy for resistance and revolutionary struggle, few materials answer why these mechanisms can get us there and how to organise a group of people to assemble one.
Drawn from conversations with organisers and related literature about these participatory experiments, this introductory article outlines some step-by-step instructions and general considerations to start building neighbourhood democracy from the ground up.
Fundamental Building Blocks
A popular assembly strategy for social change is built on a few fundamental assumptions.
Building Block 1:
Structures of domination, like capitalism and the state, exist at numerous levels, but ultimately exercise their power
locally
National administrations, transnational firms, and international governmental bodies shape on-the-ground social reality in outsized ways. With signatures and declarations, their decisions reverberate devastating consequences in far-off places. Ultimately, though, on-the-ground agencies, firms, and individuals must execute those decisions in specific locations like office space, governmental buildings, and hotel conference rooms.
For example, the Department of Homeland Security Secretary can set a policy from Washington, D.C. to increase migrant deportations across the country. Ultimately, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field offices deploy agents to snatch people from their communities. These operations continue in part because we do not see them unfold from our backyards.
It’s imperative, then, as one news service once put it, we know the facts and name the names. If we understand those facts and names, their patterns and addresses, we can disrupt them.