We stand at a precipice, a fragile coalition of dreamers trying to find footing within the relentless machinery of empire. Many of us find ourselves paralyzed, lulled by the comforts of familiar oppression or overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all.
What lies ahead is frightening and seemingly without an end in sight. To build sustainable movements that will succeed—and we must succeed—we must confront ourselves with clear eyes and humility, taking stock of our challenges and opportunities. Not many things are within our individual control, and it often feels like decisions are made behind closed White House doors regardless of what we say, do, demand, block, encamp, or destroy. But we cannot let the despair of our enemies’ relentlessness, resources, and hollow halls of power impede what we do have control over: how we fight, resist, and build.
To that end, below are five primary struggles I believe we are faced with in the United States. This is not an attempt to enumerate obstacles but instead to map the architecture of contemporary power in our communities—the structures and mechanisms through which domination is reproduced and internalized, and, in overcoming these forces, find opportunities where resistance can be made triumphant. In other words, these challenges are roadblocks on the path toward our greatest realization of strength, reconfiguring the dynamics of power at large.
My reflections come from my experiences as an organizer and do not apply to every situation in every place. A single essay of a few hundred words will never be comprehensive or without gaps, and there is much nuance that is lost in abridged, written thoughts rather than in discussion with community. So, if you take any message away from this, it is to show up and participate in local and international community spaces to more deeply engage with these reflections and fill in the missing pieces.
1. Break free from silos and echo chambers.
Our communities and our movements are siloed, disjointed, and even at times framed to be at odds with one another. This is, of course, by design, and it is particularly beneficial to those in power under a capitalist economy rooted in logics of resource scarcity: convince people that climate change is unrelated to a genocide, and you have Palestine solidarity organizers and climate activists at each other’s throats competing for the same limited pool of resources, politicians’ time, media attention, and algorithmic favorability. The state need not expend resources to risk an overt show of force to repress us when it can instead permit us the luxury of self-suppression. Meanwhile, pessimists will scorn such calls for a borderless, intersectional world of transnational cooperation as a “radical” and “unrealistic utopia,” but they are blind to what already exists under our very noses. For example, with pipelines that heed no borders, sprawled with the arrogance as if they were the globe’s arteries, Chevron fuels Israeli genocide, climate change, and mass worker death in an intersectional collaboration with states and corporations across “issues” and “causes.”
The siloing of our movements depends on the internalization of individualism—a fundamental principle of our economic system, which thrives on values of competition over cooperation. Capitalism has disciplined our bodies and identities to act as isolated units, disconnected from one another and fighting in a system that promotes scarcity. Our identities are constrained to fit neatly into shipping containers, contorted to limited options under capitalism (“consumers”), and we see the limited possibilities of our power as individuals under capitalist logic. The result is that we view others not as partners in shared struggles, but as obstacles in our personal quests for survival. And within this framework, community becomes merely a theoretical concept, and in practice it is replaced by isolation, rivalry, and a narrow focus on individual gain.
As the walls of our silos grow taller, we develop our own sub-languages and modes of communication, facilitating our severance from broader movements and communities. Social media has become a primary way of speaking to and about our movement, and yet we are also faced with increasingly tighter algorithmic organization of our digital consumption. As a result, we’re stuck in what are unprecedented echo chambers. We’re getting worse at speaking to everyday people who are using different words to describe the same world.
Caught in a loop of individualized self-expression that lacks the substance to build true solidarity, we repeat the same cycles of shared social media posts to an audience of bots and algorithms, severed from the real lives around us. We become strangers in the neighborhoods we physically inhabit, unable to communicate with those who live next to us. This narrowing of language—and with it the shrinking of the imagination—is dangerous. Today, if the struggle facing you and your community cannot be framed within neatly packaged Instagram posts, oversaturated with words that trigger relevance, it becomes invisible. The aunties at the masjid who may not know the word “imperialism,” yet have certainly lived it, are doomed for a lifetime in the audience. It breeds a future where solidarity is synonymous with sameness, and using the right language becomes the arbiter of revolution.
Through pure social media activism we miss entry points and opportunities for connection, prioritizing immediate gratification of likes and comments over long-term, sustained movement building, thereby setting lower and lower expectations for what feels achievable. We buy into ideas of individual carbon footprints, swapping out calls to shutter Chevron for kitchen composting. In focusing on these tertiary, immediately achievable individualized actions, we only deepen our silos because we stray further from shared, common enemies and deeper into individual feelings of overwhelm and isolation. And until then—until we move away from a focus exclusively on plastic straws or reproductive rights and stop turning away from the gentrification of the neighborhoods we’re tweeting from because we see it as disconnected or competing for our time and attention—we will never win. Until we can have a messy conversation with our offline neighbors about shared needs and demands or meet people where they’re at, we will never win.
This division keeps us weak: we are starving for community, connection, and direction, yet we have what we need if we just take the time to look beyond the contours of our divided issues. There we can find not only common ground and pooled resources, but information: instructive histories, lessons from wins and losses, and intergenerational insights. Today’s movements have much to learn from the history of Black power movements, indigenous resistance, and militant worker organizing, and in particular, where these movements overlap. To win, we must seek to connect these struggles once again.
2. Don’t chase power, build it.
Our movements are distracted. Specifically, we are so distracted by chasing power that we seem to have forgotten how to build it.
Power is not inherent, it is constructed. “Structures of power” are only structures that we have chosen, whether consciously or not, to submit to. We keep trying to build power with the same hierarchical structures that the state uses to disempower us.
Yet what are we demanding that we do not already have the agency to act upon ourselves? Power is not a top-down force, but a fluid, renewable resource that can be built, transferred, or pledged allegiance to. Empires are merely collections of organized people, just as corporations, governments, communities, collectives, neighborhoods, and families are. People make capitalism run, and people can bring it to a halt.
Why would a president or congress have more power to enact an arms embargo than workers? Is the president himself constructing bombs on factory floors? Is he sitting behind a truck or a ship transporting them? So, why are we asking him? There are no bombs to drop if there are no workers to design them, build them, or transport them. In other words, we are asking when we can instead be acting on our own.
Instead, we should focus on tactics that build power for us, for short-term wins and long-term disruptions of power. We should be asking ourselves: How can we build trust, agency, and accountability among our local, in-person communities? In crafting our demands and targets, can we skip the middleman (often politicians or bureaucrats) and identify other sources of power such as factory workers, longshoremen, land ownership, in a manner that is sustainable and long-term rather than campaign-specific?
3. Cultivate a culture of imagination and articulation of what we actually want.
Third, we have profoundly disinvested in imagination and prioritized crisis management over the production of a transformative possibility. Crisis, as a modality of governance, becomes both the pretext and the constraint—conditioning our movements to operate within its temporality, dislocating our bodies from a more natural regulation. We struggle to balance responding to the conveyor belt of crises, keeping us from developing offensive strategies.
Instead, we focus on the small things that feel achievable, foreclosing our right to dream. Movement spaces become sites of releasing a pressure valve, rather than transformation, rehearsing critiques of power without actually constructing new forms of social relations. We are reacting and responding to crises, rather than proactively creating them for those who profit from our oppression. We are staging protests only after the deportations have captured our loved ones, instead of gathering intelligence on their strategies and preventing raids before they start. Instead, we should dare to imagine and articulate what we really want, and challenge the biopolitical management of time itself—a reclamation of futurity as a space of possibility rather than foreclosed inevitability, doomed for perpetual reactivity.
As we reintegrate our movements and step outside our echo chambers, can we build points of collective convergence around shared articulations of the world we are trying to build? How many of us can articulate the world we are fighting for? What does liberation truly mean? How might we reconfigure the relationships that sustain our collective life beyond the logics of scarcity and exploitation? What practices of community care, collectivism, and trust building can defeat the machine of carcerality and criminalization?
I believe it’s hard to articulate what we want because we—and our movements—have been dislocated from our identities. Not in a neoliberal sense of manufactured categorization based on shared experiences of oppression, but an identity forged in connection to our collective histories, our various native lands, and the sacred. The archive of who we are and where we come from is not merely a historical resource but a source of values and practices that we can draw from to locate, interpret, and practice liberatory movement building.
The refuge of our spiritual practices is not a retreat from the political but an extension of it, a recognition of the spiritual as a site of resistance and possibility. To reconnect with these traditions is to contest the erasure of meaning that undergirds systems of domination, and to reimagine the conditions under which liberation becomes realizable. The rejection of all else—fear, money, the state’s claim to a monopoly on violence—for the submission to a most compassionate and merciful Creator, is both an instruction and a practice for liberation in and of itself.
What is a better source to imagine and articulate what we are fighting for than through building a reflection of the divine?
4. Don’t simply act; strategize.
The glaring asymmetries of information, resources, and institutions between “us” and “them” demand that we move strategically. We tend to cling to what is familiar, the same worn-out tools and tactics that our movements have used for decades—e.g., chaining ourselves together with lock boxes, blocking roads until arrest—now rituals repeated without pause to ask why, and, is this still working? We’ve called the state by the same name for over a century, but it is not a static machine—it’s shifting and adapting. Our movements are well positioned to be nimble in the face of these changes yet have not even acknowledged that these outdated tactics aren’t working.
While the state continues to adapt, learn, apply, and reshape itself to better anticipate and neutralize dissent, we’re predictably exchanging the same twelve lock boxes passed down from generations. Mass arrests were once a tactic to clog the arteries of carceral machinery. Yet with the evolution of carceral technology, willingly handing oneself over to the state today is a generous donation of biometric data and creates a black hole for collective resources (lawyers, bail, and other mutual aid efforts) to advocate for release. Do we continue to willingly get arrested at protests despite the burden on our resources, because we are uninterested in developing more imaginative, unpredictable, and effective strategies to achieve our goals?
We cannot organize carefully marshalled marches on empty, Sunday downtown streets and call it resistance. We cannot aimlessly run ourselves into the machine and call it martyrdom. Our goals should not be reduced to “making noise” or getting the perfect shot for our social media feeds, but a practice of cultivating demands and winning them, while building our long-term collective power. By no means am I suggesting we abandon the streets. Rather, the evolution of the state requires a corresponding adaptability and evolution in resistance, aligned with short-term and long-term strategy. As the revolutionary Bill Ayers instructs, after each action we have to always ask ourselves—what did we learn and what did we teach?
The practice of identifying the right targets, building campaigns, and executing strategic actions is part of lifelong learning, adapting, and revising. If we ensure that every action we execute strategically both advances a demand and helps our communities build power, we will continue to grow.
5. The revolution will not be brought to you by nonprofit organizations.
The revolution will not be televised, and it will certainly not be cosponsored by nonprofit organizations. Nonprofits—I run two—are tied to the whims of funders: the rich, the corporations, the institutions that are themselves symbols and sites of oppression. With few exceptions, these institutions do not fund movements to dismantle their power; they fund movements to feel good about themselves, to control the narrative, and to make sure our demands never grow bigger than their pockets. Today, Black lives, apparently no longer trendy post-2020, have become a liability—and funding has dissolved accordingly. Self-assembling to align with state designations of the “enemy” (undocumented people, pregnant women who seek abortions, Muslims, Black and brown communities, queer and trans people, and others), our foundations have reverted back to post-9/11 priorities. They are scrapping funding for the “justice” category for trite narratives of tolerance and coexistence in hopes that they won’t be targeted by the state. Nonprofits, in turn, must adapt or die.
At the behest of the nonprofit industrial complex, we trade our rage for polite proposals, our urgency for sustainability plans, and our struggles for a precarious dependency on the benevolence of the powerful. The result is a revolution shackled, dimmed by the calculated constraints of philanthropy. It forces us to water down our demands, to shape our movements into something fundable rather than something revolutionary. We must ask ourselves: at what cost? What do we lose when we reshape our dreams to fit the priorities of funders, shifting with each succeeding viral social justice moment, repackaged for board approval?
And, inside most nonprofit organizations, dissonance is omnipresent. Paid organizers work nine-to-five jobs, their commitment to the struggle confined to office hours, while volunteers, unpaid and overextended, constitute the invisible labor force that sustains the facade of collective action. This hierarchy reproduces the capitalist relations of exploitation that nonprofits claim to oppose, creating a microcosm of the very systems they critique. Movement building, in this context, becomes a profession, a career path, prioritizing legible outputs and LinkedIn updates over relationships and power building. We celebrate the metrics, the deliverables, the neatly quantifiable victories, while the deeper, slower, and messier work of liberation is abandoned. Who are we accountable to: our people or our board members and funders?
The challenge for the left, then, is to resist the seductions of this model and to cultivate practices of solidarity and struggle that are irreducible to the logics of philanthropy and labor exploitation. We need to grapple with how we build sustainable movements in a time of increasing wealth disparity and inaccessibility without relying on and reproducing hierarchies of power and money. We need to dislodge ourselves from what is easy and normalized and endeavor to grow into what has yet to be done.
As Islam teaches us, tomorrow is not guaranteed. What we are promised is an end—to our lives, the material world, and the states that claim to govern us. We owe it to our beloved communities and our own, brief lives to be audacious in our fight to win.
Movements, by their nature, are messy, difficult, and uneasy. But it is when we sit with discomfort, wrestle with contradictions, and sharpen ourselves from the stumbling, imperfect steps we take that we learn how to win. That is where transformation lives—in the tangled, chaotic process of fighting for a world that feels impossible until it is real. And it will not come unless we can transform our biggest challenges into our most powerful opportunities.