The more than 2 million viewers of Web anthropologist Michael Wesch's "Machine is Us/ing Us" learn that a new blog is born every half second! For Mass Global Action and, no doubt, hundreds of other activist groups, the utility of the blog form as a means of communication and therewith a gateway for challenging the ruling ideas has yet to be established.
In a world of trade offs between resourcing our organizing (i.e. targeted tactical and strategic communication) on the one hand, and engaging in a broad based challenge to the "big picture" of corporate globalization and militarism, on the other hand, the former usually wins out.
So it is that Mass Global Action can spend time and resources organizing antiwar activities like the Boston March 24 action marking the 4th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq or supporting the Stop the Wars Coalition, but at no point does it articulate its perspective on the war or how we may build a peace movement.
Similarly, we may help organize a Day of Action for the rights of migrant workers on May Day--as we've done for the last several years--but we do not yet present a perspective on how the rights of migrant workers are fundamental to the well being of all working people.
In recent times, we have helped organize large delegations for the World Social Forum (WSF), but only in exceptional cases have we shown why the WSF is important for grassroots organizing and activism. More importantly, as the debates over the meaning and future of the WSF have raged widely, MGA has not found a way to intervene in these despite our promotion of the process, up to and including the Boston Social Forum and the United States Social Forum.
Our history and activism around water is somewhat more developed from an discursive point of view. Nonetheless, the two campaigns, "Our Communities, Our Water" and "The Color of Water" still require an elaboration of our perspective on human rights and the fundamental nature of water.
From the foregoing, a further explanation seems necessary: the rationale for working on these diverse issues in the context of a single organization is not immediately obvious to the outsider. This is especially true in a culture of single-issue organizing and the world of the 501 (c) 3 tax exempt organization.
For political parties that organize coalitions articulating this range of issues seem natural. But MGA is not a political party nor does it aspire to be one. In some ways it is similar--in its range of concerns--to the large right-wing think tanks (see People for the American Way for old study of the origins of these think tanks). However, unlike these entities, we lack the financial clout and, more importantly, we are deeply committed to uniting the research and theorizing about social issues with the taking of effective action to change social relationships.
As a new relatively new form, a distinctively 21st Century one, we believe that the blog may be an economical way to address the aforementioned gap between our values, theories and activism. For this reason, we will take our turn this half second to resume the MGA blog!
