As the director of the Budapest-based School of Public Life, I had the honor of being a fellow at the Kairos Center for Religions, Rights and Social Justice as part of the Professional Fellows Program sponsored by the US State Department. For over ten years, the Kairos Center has been working to build a movement to end poverty led by the poor through in-depth analysis, political education and strategic dialogue. During this fellowship, my main goal has been to find some guidance on the following questions: How can we build a movement that responds to the immediate needs of poor people while also fighting for systemic change? How do we support poor people in their development from clients into advocates and leaders? How can we develop the critical consciousness of people experiencing oppression? How can we turn anger and dissatisfaction into movement building and organizing? What is the role of pedagogy in movement building?
The Kairos Center has proved to be a perfect place to look for answers to these questions: its staff has been working on these very issues for decades as activists, educators, leaders, preachers and researchers. I had four main areas of activity while I was at the Kairos Center: 1) get to know the work of the organization, its guiding principles and practices through one-on-one discussions and participation in the Center’s activities 2) support the relaunching of the project on the history of the National Union of the Homeless 3) educate the Kairos Center staff and their allies about social movements in Hungary and Europe 4) support the organization of the Midwest organizing tour to reignite the Poor People’s Campaign and participate in the Detroit and Flint phase of the tour and 5) help compile a Global Poverty Factsheet for educational purposes.
In order to get to know the work and guiding principles of the Kairos Center, I had the wonderful opportunity to have one-on-one conversations with many of its staff members. To start me off, I had a discussion with co-director Larry Cox about human rights as a framework used by the Center in all of its work. Larry told me about the historical shift that took place in the ideology of Martin Luther King, a major inspiration for Kairos’s work, who after the successful passing of the Voting Rights Act declared a shift from the era of civil rights to the era of human rights. This shift was marked by a call for the Poor People’s Campaign, a struggle to attain the economic and social human rights need to put the civil rights won in the 1950s and 1960s in practice.
Larry also pointed out some of the political implications of using human rights as a framework for organizing. Importantly, after the Second World War, the International Declaration of Human Rights was supported by the US government with the assumption that it only applies to “developing” nations but never to the US itself. When in 1947 W.E.B. Dubois tried to hold the American government responsible for violating the UN Declaration of Human Rights in its treatment of Black citizens, it became clear that neither US government, nor the UN was willing to apply these principles to the US. Even today, talking about human rights in the US is a political statement that calls attention to the suffering of millions of people in the wealthiest country of the world and challenges the arrogance of the American government in its attitudes towards other “less developed” countries.
Larry also called my attention to the weakening of the human rights discourse in the past few decades as the field of human rights became highly professionalized, legalized and overwhelmingly identified with the United Nations. In his article titled The Power and the Crisis of Human Rights, Larry references the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the landless movements in India and Brazil, the struggles for democracy in Ukraine and Hong Kong, the Moral Mondays movement and “the sustained and bold demonstrations of outrage” in Ferguson, New York, Cleveland as human rights struggles, even if they do not necessarily fit into the conventional human rights practices set by organization like Amnesty International or the UN. “These are not what those who feel they are in charge of labels would call human rights organizations, movements or battles. They are, however, all fights for human rights. And they bring what has been missing far too much and for far too long from those who do wear the human rights label: the leadership of those most directly affected, in particular young people, from all walks of life; a refusal to separate moral vision and spiritual values from explicit political objectives; a growing understanding that the oppression experienced is not the result of a few individuals or bad policies but local, national, and global systems set up to benefit and enrich a tiny minority; and a spirit of resistance, often expressed in old and new song, that like the genuine spirit of human rights comes out of the deepest part of our very beings.”
I continued my learning about the Kairos Center’s activities by participating in a class on Peacemaking led by co-director Liz Theoharis at the Union Theological Seminary. At this particular class, we had guest lecturers from Communities United for Police Reform (CPR), a coalition of 60 organizations in New York City fighting for just and fair policing in the city. For the Kairos Center, this topic is important as they consider the intensified harassment of and violence against citizens by the police one form of militarism, an area prioritized by the Center in its model of social change. After introducing their model of structural oppression, the two representatives from CPR introduced their work around stop-and-frisk practices in New York. We discussed CPR’s victory in passing the Community Safety Act in 2013 as a first major step to end discriminatory policing, and the work CPR continues to do to enforce the existing legislation and promote new bills and practices to en all forms of police harassment and discrimination. After the presentation, Liz led a short discussion about the role of religion and morality in a struggle such as CPR’s and the ways in which religious people can be involved in thus struggle.
Early on in my fellowship, I got introduced to the Poor People’s Campaign by Liz Theoharis and Shailly Barnes, who also showed me some social movements the Kairos Center is currently working with. The New Call for a Poor People’s Campaign aims to reignite the work started by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1967, which was violently interrupted by his murder in 1968. For King, the main idea behind launching the campaign was to focus on ending economic oppression by building on the successes of the civil rights movement. As a result, following in the footsteps of King original call, the Kairos Center aims to build a movement organized around an analysis of class that aims to end poverty not through charity but by developing the leadership of the poor.
When the Kairos Center refers to the poor in the Poor People’s Campaign, they mean everyone who does not own or have control over the means of production, which is the vast majority of the residents of this country and the world. However, if we consider a more narrow sense of the term, the poor make up 40% of the American population including those who live under the federal poverty line or are considered low income by official statistics. As Willie Baptist and Liz Theoharis put it in a recent article titled “Questions Must Be Raised”: Who Are the Poor? Why Are We Poor?, “Indeed, whatever our particular occupation, whether we are employed or unemployed, whether we are students or graduates or dropouts, whether we are homeless or housed, whether we are immigrants or nonimmigrants, we are in the same economic relationship to this exploitative system as the “beggars.” However this is not how we have been led to think about our own economic situation or that of our neighbors. We have been led to think of “class” differences as meaning only differences in income and not deeper economic and political inequality, or a relationship of domination and exploitation. These relationships are manifested in income inequality but are more fundamental than it.” For the Kairos Center, in addition to organizing people who see themselves as poor, one of the strategic goals is to raise the political consciousness of hat part of the middle class who may be doing OK at the moment, but who are in fundamentally the same structural position as those who are the most obvious losers of capitalism and win them over for the Poor People’s Campaign: “As the ranks of the poor and dispossessed continue to grow, indicating both the values and direction of our contemporary society and, therefore, the future of broader sections of the “middle class,” this remains our task today. We have to build a big movement to solve a big problem, and we need a lot of leaders or “builders,” coming from different social strata bringing different social skills and resources to carry this out. As King did in his time, we must raise the basic question of why does poverty exist in the richest country in the world. And we must also raise the question of the relation between poverty in the United States and poverty worldwide. Answering these questions precisely is a necessary step in awakening the consciousness of the ‘sleeping giant’, the mass of the American people.”
In addition to the uniting analysis of class, the New Poor People’s Campaign has four main areas of intervention identified the Kairos Center following King’s lead: economic exploitation, racism, militarism and ecological destruction. These are often referred to as the “four horsemen” in reference to the Biblical story of the harbingers of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. Through Shailly’s presentation, I got to know some example of social struggle in all four areas. The Moral Mondays Movement of North Carolina has mobilized tens of thousands of people in resistance to the oppressive and unjust laws introduced by the Republican majority in the state that curb the right to vote, violate women’s rights and undermine public education among others.The Free Your Voice campaign organized by the Baltimore-based United Workers successfully stopped the building of the largest garbage incinerator in the country in the close vicinity of residential neighborhoods of people of color. Our Walmart is organized by employees of one of the most profitable companies in the world who fights for a $15/hour minimum wage and decent working conditions. Iraq Veterans Against the War is an organization of veterans demanding that the US pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, pay compensation to the residents of these countries for destroying their land and provide adequate support its veterans at home. Finally, I learnt about the unacceptable public health situation in rural Alabama where many poor residents don’t have sewer systems and the fight to obtain appropriate public services by the Alabama Center for Rural Enterprise as well as the situation of the Gulf Coast, where residents still suffer from the consequences of Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill.
I had many great discussions with Willie Baptist, scholar-in-residence at the Kairos Center, who took part in the Watts uprising in 1965 and was also a major organizer in the National Union of the Homeless, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union and the Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign among others. With him, most of our discussions revolved around his experiences with the National Union of the Homeless and the lessons that can be learnt for organizing homeless people in the US and Hungary. Willie’s probing questions, critical analysis and global perspective was very useful for me in reflecting about the future of The City is for All, the only grassroots housing advocacy group in Hungary.
Some of the issues we discussed included the significance of developing leaders within the housing movement who are affected by housing poverty, have a sense of political consciousness and are deeply committed. Many people who participate in movements exhibit one or more of these features but, as Willie pointed out, movements greatly benefit from developing all three in their leaders to be sustainable and effective. We also talked about addiction as a form of structural oppression that can destroy poor people’s organizing efforts (as in the case of the National Union of the Homeless), the difference between militant do-goodism and movement building as well as the role of crucial role political education vis-à-vis popular education in developing people’s critical consciousness.
For Willie, the question is always: what is at the root cause of the problem and what are the solutions that arise from our analysis? Taking action without studying the root causes leads to a lot of activity that do not necessarily address the real problems. One of his most important critiques revolves around the fragmentation of social struggles as everybody is trying to address one particular problem while the larger questions of economic exploitation and inequality are largely left untouched. Of course, he is not implying that every single activity people have to organize around the deepest structural issues of capitalism as their immediate needs and more mundane concerns are just as important, but he insists that our analysis has to go deep and that we have to join our struggles into larger movements in a strategic way.
This last point was referred to by Daniel Jones as “tactical diversity – strategic unity” with whom I had a very interesting discussion about the University of the Poor. The University is somewhat independent from the Kairos Center in that it is run exclusively by volunteers and focuses on the in-depth study of the economic and social conditions producing poverty and the struggles around it. Members of the University of the Poor study three main texts in their discussions: Marx’s Capital, W.E.B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction and the Bible, especially Jesus’s work and ideas as a social movement leader. As the concept paper of the University of the Poor states, the rationale behind its operation is to learn from the lessons of the past to build a strong movement for the future: “A key historical lesson that has emerged from decades of struggle and study is that education and training institutes are indispensable forms of organization in developing and uniting (clear, competent, committed and connected) leaders who understand the need to unite the poor so as to end poverty. This is especially pressing today, while we witness and experience an expansion of poverty in a time of plenty. As forms of organization, these institutes are inseparable from establishing bases of community and operation, media infrastructure, and other essential elements of building a social movement to end poverty. As one such form, the guiding purpose of the University of the Poor is to develop and unite a base of conscious, organized and moving leaders, so as to encourage and strengthen the widespread growth and consolidation of grassroots anti-poverty organizations and their community bases. The University of the Poor is committed to the further study and exploration of these and other essential elements in the building a social movement to end poverty and the inseparable relationship between these forms of organization.”
As I spent more and more time with the Kairos Center, I became increasingly interested in the role they attributed to religion in movement building. A good opportunity to talk about this came with Adam Barnes, who coordinates the rights and religions program of the Center and wrote his dissertation about spiritual leadership and organizing in a Muslim community in. He started out by explaining to me the basic principles of liberation theology, which is at the root of Kairos’s work, as a form of reflection on lived faith and not a set of doctrines. In this context, religion is a set of guiding principles that offers a clarity of what is right and wrong and a vision for social action. In this vein, Kairos’s mission is to reinforce the role of religious or moral principles in movement organizing stronger and develop a model of leadership that is firmly based in morality. In Adam’s study on the spiritual leaders of a sufi Muslim community, the two leaders, or mystics as he called them, provided clear and deeply rooted guidance on issues of morality of the whole community. At the same time, personal interest was nonexistent in their work as they focused on bringing the community together to address its deepest problems such as hunger, poverty and lack of education. At a more general level, Kairos Center emphasizes the significance of finding a deeper meaning of why someone is involved in the struggle for social justice instead of focusing only on self-interest or practical outcomes. For more on the connection between morality and organizing, see The Spirit of Struggle: Writings on Religion and Human Rights.
Charon Hribar is the coordinator of the series revivals that will take place throughout 2017 and lead to the re-launching of the Poor People’s Campaign in December, 2017. The revivals are a multi-day communal-spiritual experience that involve concerts by famous and local musicians organized in cooperation with Sankofa.org, political education workshops, spiritual service, reality tours and truth commissions. According to Kairos’s vision, revivals will take place in seven different locations across the United States and will draw tens of thousands of people. The revivals have at least four main goals: 1) find a place for artists in the movement to end poverty, 2) engage the creative mind and spirit 3) provide a spiritual basis for struggle and 4) develop the “program” of the Poor People’s Campaign, or the main issues that it will focus on including housing, education, health care and veterans’ issues.
As part of my fellowship, I also had the opportunity to take part in a meeting of Chaplains on the Harbor, a faith-based community organization in the poor and largely deindustrialized Grays Harbor County in Washington State that has organized local communities to stand up against the police harassment of homeless encampments and organize homeless people. They invited me to participate in one of their meetings online as they evaluated an event they had organized the day before on the “State of the Streets” in Grays Harbor County. There were about 10 people at the meeting, most of the homeless or formerly homeless and they considered the event of the previous day a big success. They had a great turnout (around 120 people) and they managed to start some in-depth public conversations about poverty. At the event, they had asked poor people to give their opinions on various topics from health care to the justice system. They also distributed a survey about participants’ experiences of abuse and harassment, the results of which they will use as a basis for further organizing.
The evaluation meeting itself was a great source of learning for me as the group took ample time to reflect on the homeless and formerly homeless participants’ good and bad experiences, their feelings about speaking out in public and listening to others as well as ways to further improve such an event. Members of the group were also very interested to hear about housing struggles in Hungary as I shared some of the strategies and tactics we use in The City is for All. It was an honor to participate in this meeting, which I thoroughly enjoyed and we agreed that we would organize a meeting where members of The City is for All and Chaplains on the Harbor online to further discuss some of our common issues and learn from each other.
It was towards the end my fellowship that I had a chance to talk to Liz Theoharis about the different models of organizing. She explained to me the long division within organizing among those who focus more on building power to address specific issues (closer to Saul Alinsky’s style) and those who focus more on political education and movement building (more the tradition of Myles Horton). While some of the distinctions between these different approaches were not always so clear cut to me, it was very important for me to learn about the dangers of organizing around specific issues without developing a broader strategy involving many different kinds of people to address structural issues. I also took away from this discussion a renewed conviction that organizing skills have to be developed at the same time as political consciousness and that one cannot take precedent over the other: skills without consciousness will lead to burnout and too narrow of a focus, while consciousness without skills may lead a lot of futile activity and endless discussion. Importantly, Liz also emphasized the significance of radical imagination in organizing and the ability to have a greater vision that goes beyond specific issues.
The last few days of my fellowship were the most painful and at the same time most influential part of my experience – the encounter with activists from Detroit and Flint. Both cities have suffered the consequences of the global restructuring of the economy. With increased automation in the auto industry, which for decades has been the leading industry in the region and displacement of jobs and production to the South, the residents are these cities lost most of their basis for a dignified existence in the capitalist economy. Our trip to these two cities were a part of the Kairos Center’s Midwest organizing tour where more than 20 activists and movement leaders participated in reality tours, through commissions and strategic dialogues about the Poor People’s Campaign.
While I was impressed with the radical history of labor organizing in Detroit, I also witnessed the extent to which human labor has been replaced by machines in Ford’s Rouge Plant, which raised serious questions about the future of labor union organizing. At the people’s tribunal organized by the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, which has played a leading role in organizing people in the face of mass water shut-offs, I was shocked to see a city that so clearly prioritized business interests over human needs. One very clear example of this that even though the corporations represent most of the delinquent accounts in Detroit’s Water and Sewage Department, water service has been cut off from very few corporate clients while tens of thousands of residential households were denied water service. At the same time, it was inspiring to see the outpour of solidarity and support for people whose water had been shut off, which signals that residents are more acutely aware of our real priorities, which can be a sounds basis for further organizing. For more information on the water crisis in Detroit, see the collection of resources by the Kairos Center.
The situation of Detroit and the kinds of political and economic responses offered to “solve” the economic problems of the city reminded me of the Northeast of Hungary, which has many of the same characteristics as the urbanized Midwest. The Northeast of Hungary had been a highly industrialized region under state socialism, which collapsed almost totally after the regime change. Today, it is a wasteland of abandoned buildings, towns, villages and people with a rising tide of violent racism against Roma people. It was exactly in this context that the local government of the city of Ózd tried to shut off public water faucets in neighborhoods, where they were often the only source of water for the mostly poor and Roma residents of the city. Due to a large public outcry, the ordinance was finally repealed and the public faucets were re-opened, but the pattern seems to be the same as in Detroit: the local elite’s reaction to economic decline that affects everyone is to punish the most vulnerable part of the population without any consideration of basic human needs and dignity.
My visit to Flint, however short, was a very painful one. On the one hand, I was greatly impressed by the memorial park that the local chapter of the United Auto Workers created in honor of the 1936-1937 sit-down strike, and the way the union cherished its radical history. It was also great to see the emphasis they put on the crucial role of women in the strike as men occupied the factory for more than 40 days. On the other, I could not fail to notice the absence of a real vision by the union for the workers in Flint.
The testimonies by local residents about the Flint water crisis, where people have been poisoned with lead and other contaminated materials because of the criminal negligence of the city manager and other local politicians outraged me as previously I had not understood the extent of the damage it has caused to the 100,000 residents of the city. It was particularly important to see how the skyrocketing water prices and consequent water shut offs in Detroit were directly related to the mass poisoning of people in Flint – all in the name of austerity and balancing the budget. I was also struck by both the specificity and radicalness of the demands voiced by Flint activists who so clearly connected issues of social rights with real democracy in their call for medical coverage for everyone affected by the poisoning and the reinstitution of representative democracy in Flint.
In closing, I am grateful to all the staff members of the Kairos Center who took time to discuss their work and insights with me. I would especially like to thank Colleen Wessel-McCoy for being a caring and attentive mentor and for putting together this amazing program for me. It was a special privilege to take part in their Midwest organizing tour. I was greatly inspired by the example of both the Kairos Center and the social movement leaders I met on thus tour as they stand up for dignity and justice amidst the most difficult circumstances. Martin Luther King’s call for a revolution of values rang very true to me throughout this fellowship: it is important, but not enough to engage in the small battles that come our way as we try to get closer to an ideal society, but we also have to engage in a revolution that produces a system where the needs of human beings are always a top priority, no matter if we are in Hungary, India or the United States.
Tessza Udvarhelyi