Get Organized!

December 4, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us

 

You can have fun playing pickup basketball in the park. But if you want to win a serious tournament, you need a team. You need organization.

Teams bring to bear the different strengths of the individuals involved. They operate from a common strategy and common game plan. The people on the team know—or should know—how what they do is contributing to winning the game. The people on the team develop their skills and learn how to operate as a unit.

Coaches develop the game plan based on their understanding of the laws of the game, and of the strengths and weaknesses of the two sides. If she is a good coach, she lets the players know the game plan, inside out. She forges people into a team, with a common sense of purpose, based on this understanding. She enables the players to know how what they are doing contributes to the plan, and how to take initiative within that plan and on that basis to exercise leadership themselves. At key points, she sums up what they have accomplished, and what they need to do to go further and win. An important part of this is identifying and learning from mistakes, and from advances. And as the game develops, she leads the players to make the necessary changes and adjustments.

This is not a game we are playing. This is serious. We want to win. But we do need to be organized. We need teams like this, right now, in the struggle we are waging. And we have them.

The Stop Mass Incarceration Network is an organization—a team—whose goal is to end the whole way that this system unjustly imprisons, persecutes, tortures, abuses, and even murders Black people, Latinos, Native Americans, and other “minority” communities. If you want to be about this, get with this network and multiply your efforts.

The Revolution Club is a team that fights the power today and prepares, and transforms, the people to make revolution tomorrow—and make “tomorrow” come as soon as possible. If you want to do this—if you want to mobilize people to fight back and, at the same time, learn about and spread the word on the revolution we need—then you need to “join the team.”

These two organizations must grow right now. They must throw open their doors in new ways. Unlike sports, in the people’s struggle there is no limit to the number of players—in fact, “the more the merrier.” These organizations must act as a team at demonstrations and other mass outpourings, with a real identifiable and attractive presence, letting people know that there is somewhere they can go to make their energies count and to make sense of what they’re doing.

Join them!

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