Battle story

The battlefield is the hearts of the people

By Pierre Chopinaud

(Previously…)

After joy replaced fear in the hearts of these women, Alisa and Mirela asked them if they were ready to fight together for the lives of their children. They replied: “We are.” We had created the “Mom’ Collective.”

“Faith is the intangible element that connects people to form a radical political organization.”

Mirela, Alisa, Lucile and Emmanuelle formed what we call a “leadership team”: it is the small, highly structured group of people who will be the locomotive of the train that sets off, who will lead and train the others. Each had their role: Mirela and Alisa used their newfound power to gather and encourage, through words, the other women to take action; Emmanuelle and Lucile contributed all the knowledge they already had mastered (writing, fundraising, etc.), and I, the organizer, helped them to think, design, implement, and evaluate each step of the battle plan and the plan for building the organization. We spent at least two hours together twice a month and each time it was two hours of joy. From the beginning, we felt that a great force was blowing at our backs: for some it was faith in God, for others the thirst for justice: we were right and we had faith in what we were going to accomplish.

Faith is the intangible element that connects people who come together to form a radical political organization. It is also the element that gives each person the courage to take the risk of taking action. Faith, that is, confidence: in oneself, in “us,” in what we are going to accomplish. It often falls to an “organizer” to be like a prime mover, the one who will ignite faith, give confidence (in themselves, in each other) to the members of the leadership team who in turn will give confidence to each member of the organization. This confidence is what Pastor Martin Luther King (who is to “radical political organizing” what Bruce Lee is to Kung Fu) called “love.” It is this “love” that indicates, according to him, the meaning of the action, and the high probability of its success: because the change it calls for is in the order of true justice.

“If we needed faith in justice, we did not have time to wait for the end of time.”

To return to the “Collective of Mothers,” and more specifically to the leading team; the task before Alisa, Mirela, Emmanuelle, and Lucile was to write their battle plan, to devise their strategy. It was a bit like writing the script for the adventure they were going to lead the members of the organization into. They had to imagine the successive scenes—that is, the tactics—following a movement that would build to a crescendo. They had to write the film in which the women of the collective would be the heroines. And above all, they had to find a name and face for the person who would play the role of the villain: it’s always the same drama that plays out in radical political organizing: for every David there must be a Goliath. Not because it’s a matter of imitating a fiction, but because at the heart of all the stories that have been told since the dawn of time, there is the drama of injustice, and the power relations, the struggle, through which its resolution passes.

The first question the members of the leadership team asked themselves in designing their strategy was: what change do we want? The change the mothers of the collective needed was immense, as vast as an ocean, so immense that to accomplish it, a revolution was needed… or the coming of the messiah. But if they needed faith in justice, their children didn’t have time to wait for the end of time. They needed to accomplish real change now. This immanence is a necessary condition for radical political organizing: we must transform reality here and now so that the coming together of people creates power through love. And conversely: power is needed to create radical change in reality.

“How can we escape despair when we see the gap between the world as it should be and the world as it actually is?”

They had already put faces to this ocean: the faces of their children. The change they needed was for the lives of their children to have the same value as the lives of the children of powerful people. But faced with this ocean, what could be done? How could they escape the feeling of helplessness that exhausts the “weak” and discourages them when they realize the gap between the ideal and the harsh reality that crushes them, between the world as it should be (the lives of all children are equal) and the world as it really is (the life of a poor child is worthless to the powerful)? To prevent Mirela, Alisa, Lucile, and Emmanuelle from drowning in the despair caused by the immensity of the ocean, they had to start by isolating a small inland sea: for them, this sea was school! And in this small sea: a small island that they were going to be able to conquer, because there is a shore that can be seen on the horizon and that can be reached by a navigable route. This small island is what is called in the “radical political organization” a strategic objective. And this small island in the small inland sea that was the school, it was the discriminatory refusals of school registration in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis.

Now that they had their little island in sight, the second question Alisa, Mirela, Lucile, and Emmanuelle asked themselves was: What is our path, our waterway? Where will we go to reach our goal? After hours of looking through the telescope, the path appeared: the collective of mothers would pay the powerful the cost of a refusal so high financially and politically that it would dissuade them from disrespecting the lives of their children in the future.

“It will be a matter of forging the weapons, the sword, with which the mothers will begin to make the powerful pay the price of their children’s dignity.”

This path is what we call a theory of change. It’s the great movement of the drama that will be experienced and played out during the campaign of actions.

Now it remained to imagine the scenes that would make this movement concrete, the tactics through which the strategy would be realized.

Thanks to the action of another collective created, developed and organized by Conatus, (the #EcolePourTous collective) discriminatory refusals of school registration had become illegal several months ago.  So, for this adventure, we had the law on our side.

The lead team decided that Alisa and Mirela would have to convince the other women in the collective to engage in a “testing” campaign. It would involve going to the counters of town halls that practice covert discrimination in school registration, to find the evidence that would allow them to be convicted. It would be a matter of forging the weapons, the sword, with which the mothers would begin to make the powerful pay the price for their children’s dignity. Not only would they demand that the justice system condemn the mayors to pay in money, but they would also expose their misdeeds as widely as possible to shame them. Who can publicly assume the methodical and intentional practice of preventing a poor, racialized child from accessing school? Stigmatization would now be the price to pay for those who fail to recognize in their actions the equal value of the lives of all children.

“Our Goliath had no face or name… He was neither Godzilla nor the Joker, no one had heard of him yet, so we had to make him a character.”

Since the tactics included legal and public actions, the leadership team needed to bring journalists and lawyers on board. It turns out that one of the spokespeople for the #EcolePourTous collective that had made school enrollment refusals illegal had since become a lawyer. She was Anina Ciuciu. And she herself had been a victim of this discrimination as a child. Alisa and Mirela couldn’t have found a better ally. She was one of them. She valued the dignity of these children as much as her own. In turn, Anina brought with her one of her colleagues, Anna Stoeffeneller, in whom she had great confidence, as well as Lionel Crusoé, who had recently convicted a mayor in a similar situation in Essonne. It was Lucile who was given the challenge of reporting the story to the general public and, above all, shedding light on the villains’ infamous misdeeds. They dreamed of a great battle, so the audience had to be strong: a major newspaper was needed, and their ally was a journalist from Mediapart, Faiza Zerouala. Lucile revealed elements of the plan to her. Her values ​​were consistent with theirs: the lives of all children are equal. Their victory would be hers. She was in the boat.

ela

Was everything ready for action? Everything? No! The villain of the story was missing. Our Goliath had neither a face nor a name. There were candidates for the role: most of the mayors of the 93. But if there are too many characters in a story, we no longer understand the drama. In a strategic campaign, there only needs to be one villain. It’s a target. It must be unique and fixed. If it is multiple and moving, you have a good chance of missing it. It was the needs of the legal proceedings that helped decide: the target would not be all the mayors, nor the minister, it would be in the middle, at the right height: it would be the head of the academy. There you go, the villain would be him. The problem was that it was neither Godzilla nor the Joker, no one had yet heard of him, so it would be necessary to make him a character. Mirela, Alisa, Emmanuelle, and Lucie printed a photo of him, investigated his career, and guessed his values: they had cast their own character. The casting was complete: the group of mothers was about to begin combat training and take on the challenge…

(More in the next episode….)