Spadework #01: Becoming Organizers

“Spadework” is a podcast dedicated to circulating the practices and mechanisms that make resilient, rewarding, and effective organizations and movements. In this very first episode, Daniel Gutiérrez and Antje Dieterich will be talking to Sharmeen Khan and Chris Dixon. Sharmeen is a longtime community and union organizer out of Toronto, where she’s also a trainer at Tools for Change, an organization that trains people to become better organizers and movement-builders. She’s also an editor at Upping the Anti, a radical journal dedicated to grassroots theory and action. You can find her on Twitter @colonizedmutant. Chris is an educator and organizer in Ottawa, and the author of Another Politics: Talking Across Today’s Transformative Movement, an incredible work that uncovers the problems facing the anti-authoritarian left across the US and Canada and the emerging strategies they’re developing against them. You can find him on Twitter @withmovements. In today’s episode, we talk to Sharmeen and Chris about the difficulties that define organization and movement building; all the different labors that make up organizing and how organizing is about building the capacities and capabilities of as many people as possible; thinking through the organizational effects of the bad habits instilled in us by capitalist social relations and that come with us into our “self-organized” spaces; how this will necessarily develop conflicts and the need to meet those with those care; and how so much of organizing today has to mean rebuilding cultures of solidarity that neoliberalism has destroyed. We’d like to thank Amanda M. Priebe (https://www.amandapriebe.com) and Tyler Daughn (https://tylerdaughnx.bandcamp.com) for their artwork and music, respectively. We’d also like to thank the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (https://www.rosalux.de/en) and the Roar magazine (https://roarmag.org) for their support. ABOUT SPADEWORK Spadework is a forum dedicated to circulating organizing and movement-building know-how by uncovering the practices, techniques, and mechanisms that make resilient, rewarding, and effective organizations and movements. Spadework is an educational project developed by Werkstatt für Bewegungsbildung (https://werkstattbewegungsbildung.com) – a movement school located in Berlin, Germany. Spadework is an educational project of the Werkstatt für Bewegungsbildung – a movement school located in Berlin, Germany, dedicated to providing ordinary people with the tools and space necessary to build the organizations and movements we long for and need. The hosts, Daniel Gutiérrez and Antje Dieterich, are both co-founders of the Werkstatt and involved in grassroots politics in Berlin as members of Die Linke. Spadework will be offering three different kinds of formats: 1) interviews with organizers about organizational problems, solutions, and questions they’ve developed or uncovered in their respective terrain; 2) “call-in” shows where listeners can talk to an experienced organizer about a specific problem they’ve encountered in their own political work; and 3) short “how-to” episodes that outline specific practices, techniques, or mechanisms that listeners can consider introducing into their toolbox.