Left social movements have two big jobs right now. First, we need to organize to help people survive the devastating conditions unfolding every day. … - Dean Spade

Thin notions of volunteerism are about “feeling good” by “giving back.” I would argue that we need to feel more of the feelings that are labeled negative, like grief, sadness, anger, rage, and despair. ... Many of us feel so overwhelmed that we can’t imagine how we would begin to do anything effective. It can feel like the safest bet is to not even try. Or it can feel like we should go with a prescribed recipe for participating in charity or social services—volunteering at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, or attending one march or rally a year. Often these are efforts to quell the guilt and concern that plague us, rather than providing real opportunities for connection where we feel like we were part of meaningful change.

We must imagine and build ways of eating, communicating, sheltering, moving, healing, and caring for each other that are not profit-centered, hierarchical, and destructive to our planet. We must practice co-governing, creating participatory, consent-based ways of cooperating that are not based in militarism.

The systems we live under are focused on keeping us in our places and keeping the status quo going strong. That means that our resistance, frustration or sense of injustice needs to be channeled in ways that will make it minimally disruptive. Our sense that things are not right, that it is unjust for some people to have so much more than they need while others die of malnutrition and exposure, could be threatening if we got together to overturn a system that keeps concentrating wealth. That system would prefer that we go back to jobs that keep churning out that wealth for the top 1%, and volunteer at a soup kitchen on Thanksgiving, and feel like we have satisfied our concerns about poverty.