“Antimilitarist DNA”
Antimilitarist DNA
In 2017, the founders of Dissenters gathered at twelve retreats and workshops across four cities—Chicago, Detroit, New York City, and San Juan—to dream about and develop an antiwar movement led by young people of color. This founding team of young people was frustrated with the liberal peace movement’s failure to center those most affected by militarism. The team included abolitionist organizers rooted in Black liberation traditions and the children of Iraqi, Korean, and Vietnamese refugees, all of whom were committed to resisting wars waged abroad as well as domestic wars waged by the U.S. police and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In these retreats, and in workshops with the movement incubator Momentum, the cohort of original Dissenters organizers created the foundational “DNA” of Dissenters.1
We use Momentum’s concept of a DNA, which refers to an organization’s story, strategy, culture, and structure. This metaphor refers to the way that DNA functions as the instructions for the growth, development, functioning, and reproduction of an organism. In Momentum’s words, “DNA tells the organism/movement how to grow in a healthy way. Movements are living organisms, which means they require strong DNA to be powerful in the world.”2
If the Dissenters’ antimilitarism movement is a living organism, then its growth depends on DNA that is anchored in the following vision statement: “Dissenters is leading a new generation of young people to reclaim our resources from the war industry, reinvest in life-giving services, and repair collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world.” This sentence is the horizon of our work, and we will know we have won when it is fulfilled. The ability to envision the future we are trying to create is crucial to securing material wins over the war machine.
Our DNA is both a set of core instructions for our members and a response to the following question: How do we build a movement that connects multiple struggles and is powerful enough to beat the war machine?
The story, strategy, culture, and structure documents included here are not only the components of our DNA but sites at which theory and practice constitute each other. We believe when individual members and our chapter groups are consistently guided by the Dissenters DNA, a powerful national movement will emerge and win. The following excerpts of the Dissenters DNA are annotated accordingly, including theoretical touchstones such as Antonio Gramsci’s theory of common sense and lessons on movement culture that we have learned over the course of nearly three years of organizing.
Figure 1. Our principles and the world we are trying to win.
Figure Description
OUR VISION
Dissenters is leading a new generation of young people to reclaim our resources from the war industry, reinvest in life -giving services, and repair collaborative relationships with the earth and people around the world.
WE WILL KNOW WE WON WHEN ...
War and militarism are stigmatized
The majority of young people do not want to be associated with war and militarism. Anti-militarism is the new norm for people under 35. It is a core part of youth political identity.
Politicians do not want to be associated with war and militarism. Politicians want to publicly distance themselves from war profiteers and be seen as an anti-militarist candidate in order to win votes.
Institutions and elected officials take sweeping actions to:
RECLAIM → Reclaim our resources from the war industry. Defund war and militarism.
REINVEST → Move resources toward life affirming services – good jobs, free healthcare, affordable housing, high quality public education, and the rapid transition to a sustainable economy (Green New Deal)
REPAIR → Repair relationships with the earth and with people. Commit to collaborative diplomacy and restorative justice. Take responsibility to increase global safety and security through joint demilitarization efforts.
Story: The Tides Are Turning
Our story reads as follows: “We have everything we need to be safe, but instead, political and corporate elites create endless wars for personal power and profit. They depend on us to make profit, so they use fear to keep us divided. But the tides are turning. We choose to be the generation that dissents. We are reclaiming the resources that belong to us; we are reinvesting in life and safety; and we are repairing relationships with the earth and people all over the world.”
The story document is our organization’s shared narrative. Our unity lies in the shared story of our struggle against militarism internationally. At the same time, our story document is both principled and flexible enough for our organizers to have autonomy so that they can use strategies that are best suited to their communities. Whether it is a college town heavily targeted by the army for recruitment or an immigrant neighborhood grappling with a rising ICE presence, each Dissenters chapter will exist in fundamentally different contexts, so their campaigns and direct actions will look and feel unique while being guided by our overarching story. Agitating for our demands is inseparable from telling our story, because this narrative is how we win public opinion, activate new people, and change what is politically possible in the country and beyond.
The story asserts that we have everything we need to reject the scarcity and division caused by political and corporate elites to turn the tide and reclaim our resources by defunding war. The evidence to support this assertion emerges through both empirical research and local experiences, as demonstrated in the full-length version of the Dissenters story in the images below.
Figure 2a. The first part of our story and who is to blame for the world we live in now.
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OUR STORY
This is the story we are telling the world. This is the meta-narrative framework to filter all your campaigns, direct actions, press releases, and personal stories through. When we win, everyone will feel the truth of this story and start to understand the world around them through this framework. This is how we win public opinion, activate new people, and change what's possible.
We have everything we need to be safe.
Trillions of dollars are available for healthcare, education, housing, and a Green New Deal. People all over the world are ready to work together to make sure everyone can live in safety and dignity.
But instead, political and corporate elites create endless wars for personal power and profit.
Their wars look like dropping bombs on countries like Iraq, but also looks like police killings in Black communities and detention centers on the Mexico border. Their wars look like arms deals to Saudi Arabia, drone strikes on Somalia, and sprawling military bases occupying indigenous communities worldwide. Their wars look like military coups that force migration from Honduras, and nuclear testing that devastates the natural environment in Puerto Rico. Their wars haunt our families and bring violence into our homes and neighborhoods. Their wars are destroying our climate and life on earth.
They depend on us to make profit, so they use fear to keep us divided.
They tell us that war is necessary to keep us safe. They tell us that Black communities are criminal and dangerous, therefore police need military-grade weaponry to combat them; Protesters are disturbing the peace so they must be beaten and jailed; Terrorists threaten freedom and democracy, therefore the surveillance and harassment of Muslim communities is justified; Immigrants are drug dealers and thieves, therefore border security protects jobs and keeps peace. The very communities dying under militarism are the same ones we are told we should be afraid of. This leaves us living in fear of one another, and of the most marginalized among us.
Figure 2b. The rest of our story and how we can reimagine, and build toward, a world we want to live in.
Figure Description
But the tides are turning. We choose to be the generation that dissents.
We are the most globally interconnected generation in history, and we value life everywhere. We will not be divided. We know that real safety comes from caring for each other and our environment. We are the many. We are young, we are energized, and we are visionaries. We are Muslim, immigrant, Black, indigenous, undocumented, exmilitary, trans and queer. We are a generation of hope, of healers and creatives.
We are reclaiming the resources that belong to us.
We are taking back our resources from elites, and their violent wars, prisons, police, weapons, and walls. We demand that our institutions and elected officials join us on the right side of history, and defund militarism and endless wars.
We are reinvesting in life and safety.
Trillions of reclaimed dollars will go to transition to a sustainable economy, and to make sure everyone has a job, home, healthcare, and education.
We are repairing relationships with the earth and people all over the world.
We work through an abolitionist framework, adapted from Black liberation movements. By demilitarizing and reinvesting in real safety, we can build the collaborative relationships that we need to repair harm inflicted on people and the environment, here and around the world.
Strategy: Our Plan to Win
The strategy component of the DNA provides the direction in which the organization must move in order to build a movement that wins the changes that we need.
We use decentralized, nonviolent direct-action campaigns to win public support and force institutions and elected officials to divest from war and militarism. We have a long-term, multiphase strategy that begins with campus divestment campaigns and ends with sweeping national legislation to divest from militarism and war. The first phase is led by college campus chapters, currently numbering twenty-seven, launching national campaigns including Recruiters Off Campus, Divest from Death, and regional campaigns such as the #BoeingArmsGenocide campaign. The following phases will scale up and move beyond college campuses to cities and towns across the country.
Dissenters’ strategy rests on a theory of change informed by two steps. First, become the common sense. Second, make them follow. Force people in power to follow the new antiwar common sense.
Our goal to “become the common sense” draws on Antonio Gramsci’s theory of common sense or “senso comune” from The Prison Notebooks.3 The common sense refers to a society’s cultural and social conceptions and expectations of the world and a general sense of what is politically possible within that society. For Dissenters’ strategy, “becoming the common sense” means that by the end of this duration, the majority of U.S. young people would say that it is plausible to defund war and reclaim our resources from corporate elites. As Kate Crehan summarizes, Gramsci developed the idea of the common sense because it contains “the embryonic beginnings of new political narratives, narratives with the potential to challenge the existing hegemony in ways that go beyond mere defensive resistance.”4 Again, our strategy and story are fundamentally intertwined: going beyond reactionary responses to oppression, or “mere defensive resistance,” means developing a strategy to win public opinion and to crack open what is politically possible.
In our DNA trainings, we point out that outside actors—mainstream media, politicians, or corporations—are constantly fighting to control our worldview in order to maintain our allegiance. Elites use fear and misinformation to divide us and suppress our imagination as a society, flooding our screens and timelines with images and headlines to make us think that endless war and military violence are just the way things are. Our movement sets out to change this appearance of fixity: we need to disrupt and replace the elite-spun worldview of scarcity, fear, and control and make our vision for the world the new common sense, a vision in which resources are directed to support life, healing, and collaboration. By transforming the dominant worldview, including what we the people expect from institutions and policy-makers, we will transform ending war from a political impossibility to an inevitability.
As this vision becomes the new common sense, Dissenters will compel institutions and policy-makers to move resources away from war and toward life and healing. By challenging the common sense of permanent war in the arena of culture and discourse, we increase public consciousness of our material connections to the war machine. For example, we may build an art installation about the staggering amount of our tax dollars that go to weapons manufacturers. Or we may run a mass canvassing campaign to talk to our communities about how much money we could be diverting from death-making institutions into free health care and education. Our challenges to the common sense are therefore directly connected to our campaign goals. Our role as an organization is to clarify the destructive material relations between everyday people and militarism. Through mass noncooperation and disruption, we provide opportunities for millions of people to resist war and take action. This is how we will transform widespread support into public pressure on decision-makers. This is how we turn the tide against endless war and militarism.
Structure and Culture: Principled Culture
Finally, we draw on our principles to answer the question of how to build a new common sense, one that counters the hegemonic culture of scarcity, fear, and control. We move beyond a reactionary leftist defense by proactively modeling new cultural values within our organizing spaces. At the Dissenters’ Founders Training, we did not simply facilitate sessions on how to run a campaign or an antiwar direct action. Instead, we opened with song and altars to remind us who we fight for. We closed with resonating activities grounded in storytelling and relationality and with a talent show full of joy and tears. This culture informs how we battle oppression and defund war and how we build new ways of being.
Figure 3a. The first part of our principles, the values all Dissenters members hold and use to guide us.
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OUR PRINCIPLES
These are the values and practices that guide all our work. To be a Dissenter means to commit to uphold these principles.
We are working to end war and militarism. We are forcing institutions and elected officials to divest from war and militarism, reinvest in life, and repair relationships. We come together for this shared goal and strategy, and we are clear that war-mongering elites are our opponents. We focus our energy to win the world we deserve.
We practice joy and we appreciate each other every day. This can be hard work, but when we see each other, appreciate each other, and celebrate often, our joy will carry us forward. Even on hard days, we do our best to stay grounded in our hope, joy and gratitude for each other.
We believe everyone has a role to play. To take on powerful elites and end to war and militarism, we need everyone! Whether you organize campaigns 10 hours a week, chip in a few bucks each month, or donate space for a training, you are playing an important role. We honor all roles and contributions.
We grow our power by talking to new people. We can't just talk to people that already agree with us. If we're going to win, we have to talk to millions of new people and invite them to our side. That means meeting people where they are, identifying shared values, and speaking in ways that people can understand. We know that changing minds can be a long process, so we are patient and don't expect it to happen all at once. When we plan an action, an op-ed, or a tweet, we always ask: how will new people hear and receive our story?
We lead by supporting new leaders. To be a leading Dissenter means to recruit and develop new leaders. The more you grow as an organizer, the more you teach and support others to do the work that you used to do. Handing away the megaphone is how we sustain our work, and how our movement exponentially grows and wins.
Figure 3b. The rest of our principles, the values all Dissenters members hold and use to guide us.
Figure Description
We uplift the voices and leadership of those most often at the margins. Communities who are surviving under oppression carry the solutions. These are the collective stories and strategies that will bring healing and safety to all of us.
We embrace experimentation, reflection, and growth. We know that to win the world we deserve, we have to try new things. That means we celebrate risk-taking and imperfection, and prioritize reflection in service of growth. After every event or action, we take time to reflect and integrate lessons learned into next steps.
We recognize our wave is just one part of a growing movement. We aren't alone in this abundant movement for safety and healing. What a relief! We are always connecting to other struggles and campaigns to grow stronger together. We know and stay focused on our role, rely on and uplift other struggles, and trust that together we are all going to win.
We move toward repair. We believe in our worth, our right to heal, and our ability to transform. Even when we try our best to love and support each other, we still have conflict, make mistakes, and cause harm. We understand conflict as an opportunity to grow and deepen relationships through honest communication. In contrast, we recognize shame, punishment, and disposability as tools of war that seek to dominate and control. Instead, we approach conflict and harm through a transformative justice framework: everyone deserves the opportunity to heal and transform.
We practice interdependence, we take care of ourselves and each other. We depend on each other and make sure others can depend on us. We know that when we each take care of our bodies, minds, and spirits, we're taking care of the collective movement. That includes knowing our limitations and being honest about them, and offering and accepting support.
Figure 3c. Launching Dissenters all together, imagining a better future for us all.
Notes
1. “About Momentum,” Momentum, https://www.momentumcommunity.org/about-momentum.
2. “What Is Frontloading?,” Momentum, https://www.momentumcommunity.org/frontloading.
3. Antonio Gramsci, The Prison Notebooks (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992).
4. Kate Crehan, Gramsci’s Common Sense: Inequality and Its Narratives (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016), 49.
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