OUR PRINCIPLES
“Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.” - Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
At YCFA, We Stop the Harm, Make Corporations Pay, and Build A Liberated World.
1: We are clear in naming the real target: fossil fuel imperialism and racial capitalism.
“We urgently need to unmask all the abstract answers, which attempt to blame all of humanity. These abstract answers disconnect the current situation from the historical dynamics which have emerged from fossil fuel (coal, oil, gas)–based industrialization, which causes global warming, and the logic of capitalism, which is sustained by the private appropriation of wealth and the conquest of profit. Profit at the cost of social exploitation and ecological devastation: these are two faces of the same system, which is the culprit of climate catastrophe.”
- Declaration of the Ecosocialist International Network before COP20 held in Lima, Peru, December 2014. Excerpt From Ecosocialism by Michael Löwy
Racial capitalism and fossil fuel imperialism drive the planetary crisis we are in, and are the very fabric of our current society. Radical systems change is required; to win is to change everything.
Being bold and clear in naming the villains and our plan to win lights a clear path forward. It lets our co-conspirators and opposition know exactly where we stand. Vagueness and evasiveness won’t help us win, especially as we resist trends in climate-centered organizing that celebrate technocratic solutions, carbon essentialism, individual consumer responsibility, and a ‘green’ capitalism.
We commit to building toward eco-socialism and internationalism as organizers based in the imperial core. We align our struggle in solidarity with all movements working to dismantle the root causes of this crisis and we leverage our position in the so-called United States in service of global liberation.
2: We know the only way forward is together.
“If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
— Lilla Watson
Our movements actualize the death of the old world and of the birth of a new world centered on the liberation of oppressed peoples across the world.
All of our struggles are linked together by the toxic threads of racial capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, colonialism, and ableism. Therefore, our mass movements should not merely support each other as allies, but join our voices in a unified call for liberation.
As we struggle and fight to build this new world, we must shed any and all vestiges of these oppressive systems, recognizing how we’ve been socialized to reproduce and uphold these harms. We commit to resolving these internal contradictions and give our movements and ourselves the gift of transforming into a fuller humanity.
3. We take direct action that confronts and interrupts ‘elite’ power.
“Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored.”
- Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Letter from Birmingham Jail
Direct action meets the urgency of our crisis, striking at the heart of real power. We interrupt ‘elite’ people and institutions, imperialists, fossil capital and their enablers - to re-assert and grow people power by challenging power imbalances and the hoarding of resources. Our efforts and tactics are focused on those most responsible for our current crisis. We don’t target those we could be building with; instead we move our peers to better positions.
4. We are not afraid to break and disrupt, but look first to build and create.
“Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories.”
- Arundhati Roy
As we work to interrupt harm and hold those responsible to account, we do not lose sight of the world we are trying to build. We lean into a creative spirit in everything we do, building the world we want to inhabit by growing the relationships and systems required to sustain that vision. It is joyful, cross-disciplinary, ever-evolving. When harm occurs, we seek to repair relationships and to move through conflict in generative ways.
5. We are fierce and relentless in our hope for the future.
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
- Rebecca Solnit
Motivated by love and compassion, we do not lean into despair, but instead lead with a courageous spirit to build what could be for our world, our communities, and the planet we love.
We are solutions oriented but we are not distracted by false or short-term fixes. We look not only to what will happen tomorrow, but how today’s intention can make the day after tomorrow better. We take the responsibility of the present seriously to sow fertile ground for the seeds of the future to blossom. We make these commitments because we know that we will win and that brings us joy.
6. We are a chorus, building a leaderful movement.
“We must not cultivate the spirit of the exceptional or look for the hero, another form of leader. We must elevate the people, expand their minds, equip them, differentiate them, and humanize them.”
- Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth
We believe that the work of an organizer, above all else, is to win. The best leaders leave more leaders in their wake and their egos at the door.
We will build a leaderful movement, equipping ourselves and those around us with the skills, capacity, and motivation to step into our leadership, thus enabling us all to commit to our collective future. Striving for connection over perfection, we meet each individual where they are to inspire democratic ownership of our cause.
7. We take pride in discipline and structure.
“The more unstructured a movement is, the less control it has over the directions in which it develops and the political actions in which it engages.”
- Jo Freeman, The Tyranny of Structurelessness
We abide by our commitments and stick to our decisions. We are accountable to each other, creating cultures of honesty, feedback, and acknowledging when we fall short. To win requires scale, and to scale requires structure. To build a movement that is truly democratic, that can analyze itself and respond to feedback, we must have clarity. We structure our work because we owe it to ourselves, our comrades, and our communities to be effective agents of liberation.
8. We lean into possibility with curious minds and open hearts.
“There could be no creativity without the curiosity that moves us and sets us patiently impatient before a world that we did not make, to add to it something of our own making."
- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of Oppressed
We take inspiration and lessons from, but are not bound by, our close and thorough study of historical struggles, movements, and tactics. We value political education, reflective learning, and feedback. We know that sometimes we will not know enough, occasionally we will be wrong, and often we will need to change. We believe in and celebrate growth, pluralism, and evolution.
To win is to change everything; it is our duty and our sincerest excitement to live up to this extraordinary potential.
