By the Political Education Leadership Development (PELD) Team

Put People First! PA is building the power of the Pennsylvanian poor and dispossessed through uniting across difference and taking action together. In the struggle for our basic human rights, we come up against the most powerful groups in our society, who profit from our poverty and hold onto their power through our disunity and disorganization. We have a strong opposing force that we have to defeat and overcome if we’re going to win.

This means that we have to be smart about how we organize: That our best intentions aren’t enough. Fighting against an enemy means that we have to learn about where they’re strong and where they’re weak; we have to know where our own strengths and weaknesses are, how we get stronger, and how we can make our enemy weaker.

We know that our basic strength is in our numbers: there’s far more of us poor and dispossessed people than there are people in the ruling class. We also know that our numbers are only really a strength if we’re organized. This means we have to learn how to organize ourselves in a massive way, across differences.We learn about all of these things – who we are, who our enemy is, our’s as well as our enemy’s weaknesses and strengths, how to organize, get stronger, and build our numbers – in many different ways.

We learn them through studying history and theory, and actively applying what we’ve learned to the present. We look closely at other efforts to organize the poor, and we study and reflect on our own work, activity, and history as an organization.

All of these ways that we learn what we need to know are connected to each other, and they rely on us actually taking action together.

There’s no way for us to really know what it’ll take to organize massively and across differences besides going out and trying to do it. There’s no way for us to really know how far we’ve built our strength, or if we’ve correctly identified our enemy’s weaknesses, except by actively struggling for our rights.

That’s what it means when we say “struggle is a school.” We make our struggle a school when we draw lessons from our organizing. We make our organizing stronger by reflecting on what we’ve done in light of what we know from our own experiences, from our study of history, politics, the economy, and lessons from other efforts to organize among the poor. 

Through all of these efforts taken together we elevate “struggle is a school” from a concept, to a reality of our organizing that is inherent in all actions taken through organizing. That way “struggle is a school” becomes an active part of our organizing culture, so that we are constantly assessing where we were in the past, so we know where we stand in the present, and can take constructive and educated steps moving forward.

Making our struggle a school means learning from our successes, and failures, our victories and shortcomings. That means having the maturity and the discipline to be honest with ourselves as an organization, and the wisdom to know that we’re in a long process with many steps and stages to it. Making struggle a school isn’t limited to just learning about how to plan better actions, or how to get better at running meetings or knocking on doors or meeting with representatives, though those are all important parts of it. It’s also taking the time to reflect on what we’re learning about our enemy and what it’ll really take to defeat them: What it’ll take to build an organization that can last and can win.

A necessary part of making our struggle into a school is taking the time to collectively evaluate the things that we do as an organization. Evaluation means more than asking what went well and could be better in the future. It also means drawing political lessons from our work: Lessons about what we need to do to strengthen the unity, organization, and leadership of our class in the face of the determined and sophisticated opposition of those in power. Below are some general questions and guidelines for doing evaluation as part of the practice of making struggle a school:

  • What were the goals of the activity being evaluated? In what ways did and didn’t we accomplish those goals and why? Were they the right goals and/or was this right kind of activity for advancing our organization’s strategy?
  • What did we learn about how to build mass, politically independent, organization of the poor today?  
    • What Leadership Across Difference challenges came up during the preparation for the activity and the activity itself?
  • What did we learn about how to lead across difference?  What did we learn about the ruling class’s strengths and weaknesses? What did we learn about our class’s strengths and weaknesses?
  • How can we apply what we’ve learned?

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This content originally appeared in Put People First! PA’s semi-annual newsletter, The Keystone. The Keystone is a great introduction to Put People First! PA, our work, and our community. It’s all written by our members for our own communication and education, and for supporters and new relationships to get to know us better. Each issue features reports from our work, news about our victories, stories about the health care system and the other issues affecting our communities, and poetry and artwork. Check out past and present editions here: Newsletter Archive.

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