We want the participants to leave this event with the following ideas:

• Activists can go beyond perpetual battle against the pro-corporate tendencies of the state, while gradually planting seeds of change culturally; the work we each do now can be part of a movement aimed at making the state our own. That is, our goal can become creating a massive movement that will eventually run the country itself, using government as our people’s own means for organizing our collective resources in support of peace, social justice in all its forms, a sustainable approach to the natural environment, and creating a society that is supportive of the needs of the human spirit.
• Wherever such revolutionary change has happened, it took more than a popular movement, and it certainly took more than separate movements. Conscious, ongoing organization enables the dialog that permits different movements to learn from each other, develop a unified strategy, and take collective action.
• While continuing all our forms of political and cultural work, we can together build a massive and effective political party to fulfil this role. This does not mean something that looks like the two main parties of U.S. politics, which are scaffolds on which ambitious individual candidates—willing to follow the politics of corporate funding—hang their campaigns. It may not even mean today’s alternative parties, which, to many, look like just another means of expressing protest. It can be an organization which will
• train and support members—ordinary people—in recruiting others in their neighborhoods, workplaces, and religious and spiritual communities
• create its own mass media of news and culture
• work most of all at consciousness raising and mobilizing popular power, viewing any appropriate electoral work as at best a tactic in the work of creating a force that can overcome the current power structure, whether within or outside of the electoral framework.
• There being several visions of what an effective party looks like and how to build it, the sooner we clarify these visions, the sooner we can mobilize and coordinate the massive, creative energies that ignite spontaneously when our constituencies see that there is real hope for deep change.

When we imagine the day that governmental institutions are our people’s means of harnessing our collective resources to further the humane values that are dearest to us, and then imagine the way to organize ourselves to reach that goal, we will have already started something unstoppable.

Format: This workshop will include a panel discussion, with representatives of Third Party Forum, the Independent Progressive Politics Network (IPPN), the Green Party, and the Peace and Freedom Party. Ex-Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney will join us for part of the session if she can.

The speakers will make explicit what are sometimes implicit visions of party-building. They will address what an effective party will look like and how it will operate; the role, if any, of spirituality in politics; the relationship between electoral work and other means of mobilizing political power; and when and how to begin (or continue) the process of creating such a party.

Engaging Participants: The program will begin with all in the room silently envisioning what life would be like if our government were ours. After panelists make presentations, half the session will be devoted to dialogue between the audience and the panelists. Panelists and audience members will brainstorm ideas for followup action. The sponsors intend this session to contribute to a sense of hope, possibility, enthusiasm, and joy.

Connection to Cross-Cutting Themes: People who understand the systemic causes of oppression and other problems in our world and the consequent intersections of oppressions are not hopeful about deep change being created by corporate-funded politicians, no matter how much pressure we put on them. This session directly addresses the consequent impulse to build a unified movement, one that consciously employs “all available resources” in “educating others and ourselves.” Moreover, a historical and internationalist perspective provides many potential answers to the question of what kind of unifying organization we need.

Language, etc.: English-only, no handouts expected.

Biggest Challenges/Adversaries: Short-term—The beliefs that all we can do is fight government for what we want; that it takes beings who are somehow more powerful than we each are, to be among those running our country; that third-party politics is a politics of protest and pressure, engaged in only by people who are activists by nature; and that we can never be strong enough to play more than a “spoiler” role under winner-take-all election laws or win a few offices here and there. Long-term—the political, cultural, and repressive apparatus of those who wish to keep the world safe for corporate profits.