Best of The Forge: 2020

The notion that we could reclaim our innocence through this election was always naive. We inherited a knotty, intractable, bloody, painful, and extraordinary political project of determining whether or not America will become a multi-racial democracy. It is a project that remains unfinished.

We won, but we still have a lot of work to do to build the breadth and depth of electoral power our movements need to durably govern.

Elections can be won at the margins; progressive movements and campaigns would do well to invest in rural America.

Through all of the darkness that this year has brought, we are closer than ever to achieving justice. 

Two new books on how to strengthen the labor movement end up showing something very different — that we don’t know why or how unions succeed or fail, and we don’t have any clear sense of how to do better.

Two of the architects of the narrative turn in organizing talk about the changes in community organizing that they’ve helped to spark over the past thirty years. Now that organizers have embraced narrative work and begun analyzing political and economic systems, they argue, it’s time to talk about ideology.

Organizers from the Dream Defenders on why we must defund the police and abolish prisons if we want to dismantle racial capitalism. 

Money making money is a third pillar of racial capitalism. In this audio article, we talk about the racialized financial systems that have given us “socialism for the rich and rugged capitalism for the poor."

James Burch of the Anti Police-Terror Project talks about organizing during the uprisings and the “need to be bold and principled” in this moment

This is the story of the workers and organizers in Chicago — most of them women — whose efforts to build an organization of downtown workers helped to spark the national and global Fight for 15 movement.