Robert Ascherman
Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement South Africa
South Africa
It’s March 31 at 11:30 PM and I’m staring at a blank white box. I probably should have started this blog much earlier, but organizing and being a student has just been so intense. This summer in South Africa with Abahlali baseMjondolo (Shack Dwellers) Movement seems like a far cry from now because of my involvement with several campaigns: Truth for America: How Teach for America is Ruining Public Education; the first ever International Campus Worker Solidarity campaign, organized by United Students Against Sweatshops; the student debt movement, organized by NYU Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM); and Fight for $15.
There is not an immediately clear connection for most folks between climate justice and advocating for $15 and a union. The conversation I had with an organizer from NYU Divest, which demands NYU’s divestment from the fossil fuel industry, presses against my mind like a heavy weight. Using the language of the Black Lives Matter movement, I said, “Let’s have a rally and speak out inside a McDonald’s while protesting, ‘We can’t breathe on $7.25,’ and then go to NYU protesting, ‘We can’t breathe without climate justice.’”
I wanted this first blog post to be about my understanding of human rights and my approach to upholding them, and this sounds like exactly the right thing to say.
Lives matter. Lives matter more than profit. Lives matter here in America for teachers, for students, and for everyone without $15 and a union, just as they do in the Persian Gulf and just as they do in South Africa, where people struggle for housing rights.
Lives matter more than anything, and no one should be poor (the state of living without the material goods necessary to survive), but we are never going to win the global struggle for human rights if we’re all divided into our little single-focus organizations. Justice will only be achieved if we can unite across all lines of divisions and form a broad, mass-based movement to demand the end of all injustices.
Indeed, Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King set the road ahead of us when he stated the following:
“The dispossessed of this nation—the poor, both white and Negro—live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty. The only real revolutionar[ies], people say, [are those] who ha[ve] nothing to lose. There are millions of poor people in this country who have very little, or even nothing, to lose. If they can be helped to take action together, they will do so with a freedom and a power that will be a new and unsettling force in our complacent national life.”