Greg Jobin-Leeds
– Artist’s Website –
A few years ago I was covering a panel discussion for Hyperallergic featuring members of Gran Fury, an ACT UP affinity group focused primarily on producing what group members themselves called “propaganda” against a government hellbent on isolating, vilifying, and smugly looking on as tens of thousands of their citizens died of AIDS. There were a number of young people in the audience at the event and more than once the hand of one of these audience members rose to ask how they could do something similar — how they could employ similar tactics and ideas in political struggles happening today.
Cover of ‘When We Fight, We Win!: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World’ (courtesy The New Press)
Cover of ‘When We Fight, We Win!: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World’ (courtesy The New Press)
Reading the book When We Fight, We Win!: Twenty-First-Century Social Movements and the Activists That Are Transforming Our World by Greg Jobin-Leeds and AgitArte, with input from Rinku Sen, Antonia Darder, and David Goodman, felt, in certain ways, like an answer to those questions.
The book, released in January, looks at examples of organizing around six different struggles in the US, from prison abolition to immigrant rights to minimum wage and income inequality fights, among others. In addition to commentary and exploration in text, the book, through AgitArte’s participation, includes numerous examples of visual and cultural production tied to those struggles — from posters and photographs of artworks to interviews with artists and cultural activists. While the book spends time homing in on some of the particulars of each fight, the overarching message is that the leading edge of social justice today is a swelling network of affinity groups that, despite focusing on an array of different issues at any given time, are in fact aligned around an insistence that their ultimate fight is against the roots of all injustice — things like racism, exploitation of people and the environment, economic inequality, and militarization.