Michigan Student Power Alliance has been organizing people, issues, emerging movements, and ideas in Michigan for ten years. In this time, we’ve reflected on our work and on the system in which we live, and have reached some conclusions about the needs of our movement–that is,  the people’s movement that demands human dignity, equal access to resources, and justice for ourselves, our neighbors, and all peoples across the globe whose struggle we share in. After years of local struggles, statewide campaigns, electoral organizing, it seems clear to us that “resistance” or “reform” will never address the structural issues at play in our state and our world. It is not enough for us to oppose what is happening in our world, or to seek to sand off the worst excesses of our society. The ruling political/economic system is dynamic and evolving: Opposing it at any single point or on any single issue at best results in fleeting breathing space. We will never build a new world until we identify the root causes of the current one, and break their power.

We are a student power alliance because to recognize the exploitative conditions of the world we live in, educational empowerment (within or without the institution) is fundamental. Education happens in a wide variety of classrooms, with a vast array of good teachers and co-educators. In the forest, in the factory, in living rooms, sidewalks, galleries, children’s museums, art museums, buses, waiting rooms, bills in the mail, school hallways, the DMV. In these places and more we learn about what we have, what we don’t have, who has what we need, and why that is. We define students more broadly than subjects in the academy–additionally, we see students as active collaborators in building knowledge to see our society and the world as it is, and to share this knowledge with others, indiscriminately of class, age, race, ethnicity, or ability.

Michigan Student Power believes that our society is confronted by large scale structures of oppression, including racism, cishetero-sexism {cissexism}, and capitalism. We believe that the key systems of oppression that operate in our lives are all inextricably linked. These systems have been shaped by each other over time and cannot be broken up and defeated in isolation. We have to fight for a better world–we define this world by the term “Co-Liberatory Socialism.”

Coliberatory Socialism is a theoretical framework that Michigan Student Power Alliance developed pre-2020, during years of key change in collective political consciousness in our state as residents of majority poor, Black cities organized in response to hazardous neglect from state officials in needs as basic as water. We continue to see this as a relevant manifesto in continuing to build community power. Our theory of co-liberatory socialism is derived from two (probably obvious) key ideas:

Socialism is an economic system where the ways of making money (factories, offices, etc.) are owned by a society as a whole, meaning the value made belongs to everyone in that society, instead of a small group of private owners (like in capitalism); and where these resources are democratically controlled by the people who work and depend upon them. Under this definition of socialism, it cannot exist without the dismantling of capitalism.

Co-liberation is the idea that liberation is not a process that can happen to an individual or even a single group of people, but must be a collective and interconnected struggle. A strategy for ending oppression that honors intersecting marginalized identities. This strategy recognizes that the struggles against oppressive structures are interconnected. People who are coming from impacted communities must be centered in these strategies.

Co-liberatory Socialism is the combination of these two ideas. We need to build a future that fundamentally transforms who controls the wealth and institutions in our society. We believe that the world we are trying to build will take the form of some kind of socialist society: where value is not defined by an individual's profitability, where reparations are made for the centuries of oppression that have come before, where no private individual controls the lives of others through jobs or wealth, where we are able to labor to meet our needs and democratically control our future. This theory of change comes from a long tradition of Black, indigenous, POC, socialist, anarchist, and communist thinkers reaching back centuries, and seeks to build an understanding of past movements as we continue the work today.

Michigan Student Power Alliance sees the struggle for a socialist future as a critical part of our work because of the way that capitalism works within our society. While there have been tomes written on this subject that go into much deeper detail, at the most basic level capitalism creates the material conditions that oppress people. Organizing is, in our practice, the activity of building collective power to enact material change to the benefit of all marginalized peoples. 

The defining characteristics of capitalism are private ownership of the means to produce wealth, and their application to produce a profit for their owners. In this system, regular people (the vast majority of us) are “free” to work for the wealthy, or to risk grinding poverty and death. Human beings are turned into instruments of labor, valued only for their ability to produce. What does the freedom to choose your boss mean when there is no other choice but for your livelihood to depend on your boss?

Capitalism is a system based on the extraction of surplus value from labor and the environment for the benefit of a few individuals. By reducing human interactions to those of the market, and building them upon the wealth derived from centuries of exploitation, capitalism incentivizes and concretizes the devaluation of human beings–in particular women, femmes, and people of color. It replaces human relationships and cultural institutions with a single relationship–the market. It shatters and distorts our communities and family relationships, forcing us to exploit the labor of our family members (especially women and femmes), and to live more selfish and individual lives. Within capitalism our society doesn’t ask the question, “What do we need?” It instead asks the question “What is profitable?” and more specifically “What is profitable for wealthy people?”

Within capitalism the accumulation of wealth over generations is a way to launder the benefits of all interconnected oppressive systems. White supremacy is carried on not just by mental attitudes of white people, but by the hoarding of material wealth passed down through generations of people benefiting from their position in a racist society (similarly with centuries of patriarchy, homophobia, and other systems of oppression). Furthermore, these systems are themselves activated by the powerful within capitalism, used to divide working people, devalue communities, justify wars, and crush resistance of all kinds. Capitalism is intertwined with all other forms of oppression, giving financial backing and incentive to maintain the dominance of the few and powerful. To break their power, we must break capitalism.

It is possible to redistribute resources within capitalism, but these efforts will never change the exploitative and oppressive logics of the system for a while. Money that is redistributed without taking control of the means of producing wealth will only be extracted once more by the wealthy and powerful. A universal basic income helps no one if your landlord can raise the rent, your boss can drop your wages, and your insurance can raise the rates. These temporary fixes may alleviate suffering in the short term, but they fail to challenge the power dynamics that created and maintain oppression in our society.

This is a struggle not for wealth, but for power and self determination. It’s not just about getting some of the things. It’s about having the power to take, keep, and circulate the things we all deserve.

Our theory of change, at its core, is a series of resistance tactics and community practices that can shift power from the dominating human-market relations to human-human relations. In tandem, we can sustain and take care of ourselves and our family, friends, and neighbors while also actively disintegrating the roots of capitalism in our everyday lives. The goal of employing these tactics and practices as organizers is to enact what we call CO-LIBERATION, which refers to a world liberated from racial capitalism, labor exploitation, patriarchal violence, and the war/carceral industrial complexes. Co-liberation is a continuous and community-oriented struggle that is enacted and maintained by the people, and that amounts when we work together to account for our own safety, education, health, and autonomy. 

TACTICS

relational organizing → power building → electoral accountability → grassroots direct action → deep healing

RELATIONAL ORGANIZING  is the practice of power building founded upon connections, experiences, and issues we share as human beings in order to address the demands of an issue or movement. It is an organizing practice that centers on strengthening the relationships that we already have, building new connections, and utilizing those contacts to achieve our political ends.

POWER BUILDING  is the creation and maintenance of individual and group relationships based on mutual support, accountability, direct action, and identifiable points of unity.

ELECTORAL ACCOUNTABILITY is the practice of holding elected officials accountable to their campaign platforms, and ensuring that elected officials are listening to the changes that the majority want through grassroots direct action. Electoral accountability also involves using voting as a tool to demand concrete promises from those elected in order to ensure that elected officials are in relationship with their constituents, and not put on a pedestal of power and hierarchy. Everyone, regardless of their political alignment, benefits from electoral accountability, which ultimately is taking issue with the fact that very few people make decisions for the many.

GRASSROOTS DIRECT ACTION is the activity of making collective demands visible (through protest, signage, or other means) in order to make clear the consequences when people in power ignore the demands of the collective. Grassroots direct action is also a collaborative activity among the leaders, participants, and members of a frontline community or movement–trust and relationship-building is a priority among those who make possible or  take part in a direct action.

DEEP HEALING is the process of listening, documenting, and processing violence and/or traumas, and restoring a sense of safety, trust, and support in a community.

PRACTICES

educational empowerment → equitable + plentiful access to basic needs → bodily autonomy → political autonomy → revitalizing local economies → healthy + robust community building

EDUCATIONAL EMPOWERMENT is utilizing space, time, and resources to provide curricula that are culturally relevant, encourage discourse and critical analysis, and teach practical skills and knowledge necessary to fully participate in society, such as: literacy, financial management, historical context, and health. Discontents with society often start as movements that students visibilize, and then may become the locus of broader societal attitude shifts toward liberatory ideas. For this reason, we start with educational empowerment as part of the path toward co-liberation.

EQUITABLE AND PLENTIFUL ACCESS TO BASIC NEEDS ensures that all people, regardless of socioeconomic status, age, or identity, ought to be able to share in the available resources necessary to live in a world where hoarding is no longer acceptable or necessary.

BODILY AUTONOMY refers to the uninterrupted ability to make decisions regarding the physical safety, appearance, activities, and medical treatment of one's body.

POLITICAL AUTONOMY refers to the vested responsibility in each of us to not wait for elected officials to shape or address local politics and crises. In addition to naming needs and crises in our communities, we ourselves can facilitate their change. We are necessary and capable of learning and generating independent political thought outside the bounds of what our elected officials choose to believe and share with us. 

REVITALIZING LOCAL ECONOMIES is significant to our theory of change because we want to exist in a world where what we put into our communities is what we then get out of our communities. We do not require mass shipping, waste, and exploitative labor to live, eat, and create–to live in a more environmentally sustainable world, it is critical that we localize our production and consumption as necessary to ensure both equitable access and employment opportunity. 

HEALTHY AND ROBUST COMMUNITY BUILDING are activities which generate and maintain infrastructure for connection, support, and interpersonal accountability.