A 22 yr old in my org got drunk tuesday night and kinda shit on the fact that I'm running a community cleanup for our chapter. Said something along the lines of "i didn't join up to pick trash." Which really bothers me and it took me a while to figure out why. The whole point of the community cleanup is that we're returning to the neighborhoods where we knocked doors for A4 to help clean up their streets and provide material improvement for free in an effort to build inroads with those neighbors.
Like... if your socialism doesn't include picking uo trash, I'm guessing it also doesn't include doing the dishes, babysitting, or anything else that is important but not prestigious. Idk man, fuck off with that shit. You'll pick up trash and you'll like it until you understand why picking up trash isn't anyone's job but your own. I hate that attitude. If helping and doing activism was always fun and visible and impressive, everyone you know would already be doing it.
The first thing the new york chapter of The Young Lords (Puerto Rican American communist civil rights group(Worked alongside the black panthers))did upon forming their group was reach out to their community in east harlem, they asked their community what problems needed to be addressed and consistently the number 1 problem brought up was the trash.
In their chairman Felipe Luciano's words, “So we’re on 110th Street and we actually asked the people, ‘What do you think you need? Is it housing? Is it police brutality?’" Luciano says. "And they said, ‘Muchacho, déjate de todo eso—LA BASURA!” [Listen kid, fuggedaboutit! It’s THE GARBAGE!] And I thought, my God, all this romance, all this ideology, to pick up the garbage?”
And so the young lords responded to their communities needs and they picked up the trash. This was at a time (1969) when there were literal tons of garbage lining the streets, trash collectors would pick up some garbage every now and then but would leave most of it behind, they also refused to sweep the streets, and only allotted 6 big dumpsters in that entire 40 block area. This was due to racist/classist stances held by the almost exclusively italian american trash collector union.
The young lords stepped up in this situation, they go and ask for brooms and bags from the trash collectors union and get refused and insulted. They go back later and steal the brooms and bags, and get started cleaning their neighborhoods. This is a band aid and it doesn't fix things but it does show their community these people care, these people will listen and put in the work, these people are our people, it was the basis of community organizing, building trust and responding to people's actual needs.
While this did help and build trust the problem persisted and so the young lords came up with a program they called the garbage offensive (or maybe the trash offensive i forgot). They started sweeping all of the trash onto the side of the street and waited for the trash collectors to come by, when they refused to pick it up, the young lord would pile that all into trucks and haul it off to 3rd avenue in Manhattan(a much richer whiter area that gets high traffic). They dumped the trash into the middle of the street (not just bags of trash, we are also talking furniture, broken sinks, etc.) and then hauled off and they did this almost daily. They forced people to pay attention. The whole community started to get involved in this, kids, young men and women, and older community members too. They all started to join in on dumping the trash in the richer parts of the city to make people care and pay attention.
These protests got larger and bolder, they would sometimes pile up the trash high and then light it on fire, over turn cars and make a party out of it sometimes too. Police were called and showed up and attacked as they do but the protests persisted.
The Young lords published their demands and sent them out in a press release and their demands were listened too. In that years mayoral race every single candidate had to address the trash problem and promise solutions.
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This is an important lesson that direct action often pushes reforms, if we want reforms the best way to get them is to act and make the state react to us and catch up with our demands.
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Their demands included increased sanitation workers, hiring black and puerto rican sanitation workers, increased dumpsters, increase in pay to sanitation workers, end having to pay off your sanitation workers to ensure your trash gets picked up etc. Many of these demands were met and in the coming years the trash does end up getting picked up regularly and the problem does get dealt with.
The Young Lords end up going on to do so much more. They occupy hospitals, steal supplies from the government, and try to build towards a revolution in america. But it starts here, it starts with the trash it starts with all the small menial hardships. We can talk about revolution all we want but if our neighborhoods are unsanitary, our neighbors hungry, our needs uncared for nothing will come of it. The revolution you want to build however radical you are must start rooted in your community, their wants and needs. And part of that is picking up the trash, starting a community run daycare, and all the little unglamorous day to day struggles that weigh people down.
Thank you for this addition! I'm going to read it to the volunteers who come out to trash pick with us today 🤘
UPDATE: The person in question who I posted about came out and picked up trash! They had a good attitude and were respectful.
I doubt many people will see this update, but I wanted to make it anyway because another important part of activism is welcoming people to to the table, even after they've said something crappy or have a bad attitude. It's important to give someone an opportunity to change, or at least to show up and do the work anyway. And we happily welcomed them and hey, they did the right thing!
Ultimately it's what you do, not what you say. Big thanks to my young comrade for coming out, and for the careless comment that spurred this discussion. Who knows if they had a change of heart because of what was said today, or because of the crowd that showed up to pick up. They may have left still thinking that they'd rather have been doing something else on at Saturday morning—but they showed up and helped and that's what I'll remember about this situation, not the drunken comment!
if you want to learn more about the young lords, this is easily one of the best books i read in my entire history MA program:
Against the backdrop of America’s escalating urban rebellions in the 1960s, an unexpected cohort of New York radicals unleashed a series of
This is an excellent example of identifying a real community need, investigating its underlying reasons for being, and pursuing solving it. It took multiple kinds of organizing, multiple kinds of labor, and multiple strategies to pull off. That’s the work!
