Lizzy Oh on the importance of organization, care as public safety, and class demands
"Socialism should make us more human."
Lizzy Oh is an abolitionist climate organizer living in Queens, New York. You can find her @breadpipeline.
This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
MH: How was Korea?
LO: Korea was so nice. I wanted to meet a lot of activists, but then the Itaewon tragedy happened, the crowd crush, so everyone was busy. But I was really impressed by the instant mobilization by Korean people being able to politicize that moment, articulating why there was no public safety, and connect it to the fact that the president had siphoned police to become his own security force by moving from the Blue House to Yongsan, which is a district that has a lot of US military personnel. All of these connections were being drawn almost immediately, and I was like, Wow, the US is so far behind when it comes to being able to politicize moments like this instantaneously.
In Colorado, Rick Jacobs, an Amazon worker, passed away on the job recently and they just asked everybody else to keep working while he lay there. How can we let that be a fact of life? If we know how dehumanizing it is to be a worker in our capitalist society, how do we politicize every moment to resist that? It's something that I want to explore more, how we're able to mobilize grief and anger and not dissociate, because that's sort of our go-to response in the United States.
And you feel like they know how to do that in Korea?
Koreans know how to really draw out that anger and disbelief into boycotting, action, or into public outrage against a company, against a president, against powerful forces. And in the US, that muscle hasn't been ingrained in us and it’s something we have to develop.
Why do you think they're better at that, that they’ve developed those muscles?
There are a lot of theories. There's this overarching emotion called han in Korea. It comes from the war. It's when you have this burning anger [laughs] and a burning sense of injustice. It's from war trauma, it's from the patriarchy, it's from capitalism squeezing out every moment of your day. We're very repressed as a society, so when you have these galvanizing moments, that's when it comes out. But Korea also has a deep history of labor movements fighting for democracy. And in the US, we don't have that built-in solidarity for the worker, we don't have a shared political awareness about exploitation and what it is to be suffering in the workplace. Whereas in Korea, this was critical when fighting against colonialism, the military dictatorship, and efforts to suppress democracy. Here in the U.S., we're starting to build it with unionization efforts like we’ve seen at Amazon, Starbucks, and that gives me so much hope.
How do you think about building that solidarity? Especially internationally.
My friend Jerrod went to Cuba a few months ago, and he came back completely changed. Because people in Cuba, they understand their conditions, they have political language. They are able to talk about politics with a lot of analysis. I think our role right now is to raise political consciousness, and we do that through organization—we need to be organized. That's the only way we're going to be able to build a historic bloc and do that narrative-building, do that solidaristic work. I really think our pathway to building anything is by being committed to building an organization. Join an organization and try to struggle with people, have a process in which you make decisions and you work to change the conditions in which we live.
I'm guessing that's a big difference with the US: people here don't know how to be in an organization, the messiness of it. No matter how good you think it is, there's always going to be a lot of challenges, especially when you have all these people who are new to that and aren't used to acting and making decisions collectively.
I read Grace Lee Boggs's Organization Means Commitment every few months because it's a good grounding tool to figure out what role I am playing in the organization. Is my vision aligned with the people I'm organizing with? And in relationship with other people, how are we developing ourselves and passing down the tools that we have onto others? This is where I'm at when it comes to commitment. I'm in an organization called DSA, I'm doing a shit-ton of work [laughs].
You were asking about the tweet. I was thinking about this because we had a comrade pass away recently, one of my comrades was diagnosed with cancer, some of our comrades are having babies. Not to be sappy, but we don't actually have that much time in the world. And the movement, if it's not sustainable because we aren't developing everybody in the organization to be loving, respectful, and committed to each other as much as we are committed to our vision, then we're just not going to win. If the people who were organic leaders die, or if we have only a few core representatives who've been doing all the work and we're not passing those skills down, then a few of us are just hoarding power and not actually growing the organization, growing the movement.
Yes, we are many and the capitalists are few, but in order to make sure that we are many, we need to be constantly in relationship with one another and be committed to developing ourselves to be in relationship with others. I think about this a lot because when I was first organizing, I saw a lot of formations fall apart, there was always some scandal. Like some sex pest did this, somebody raped somebody and then the organization covered it up. If these incidents are happening within our organizations, how will we build the left and not perpetuate the systems that we're struggling to abolish? That means that we need to be loving to each other, and we need to also exercise self-discipline in a lot of ways.
I truly feel like if you don't belong to an organization, then you're going to feel alienated, you're going to be angry all the time, and you're going to burn out. I was at that place too! Whereas if you belong to an organization, you have people you can lean on and there are times you can take a breather. We all need to take a break sometimes. A mentor once said when you're in a movement, you should consider yourself as part of a choir and you're holding one long note. At one point, you're going to need to take a breath, and then start singing that note again, but you have a whole choir with you, so if you take a tiny breath no one is going to notice. And the more people there are in the choir, the less your break is going to be noticeable [laughs].
I love being in an organization where so many people have developed me, have poured into me, made sure I know what they know. And then I now have the opportunity to pass that down. What's the point of socialism if it's not making you more human? If it's just making you angry and bitter, and not allowing you to exercise comradeship with people, exercise your principles with people? So socialism should make us more human. That's the tagline.
How did you get into organizing or climate justice?
I have a really deep connection to the immigrant rights movement since I was young; that’s how I first came to understand systematic injustice. I was organizing from a personal place with my community for comprehensive immigration reform and the DREAM Act. Back then, the statistic was nearly one in five Korean Americans are undocumented. But organizing for immigrant justice meant we were always trying to build a multi-racial national movement. Steeped in that type of organizing allowed me to see the connections with displacement issues in my hometown Queens, the necessity of abolishing ICE and closing detention centers and jails, for us to defend our communities to be truly safe and free.
But probably my most formative radicalizing experience was going through a Title IX hearing as a sexual assault survivor when I was in college. The hearing went as badly as you can imagine; these processes aren’t created to facilitate justice. And because I was facing somebody I knew who had committed harm to me and this person was denying this harm, unable to acknowledge the truth, I'm asking myself: what are the tools that we have in our society to confront patterns of violence, to confront patriarchy? Where the outcome is not the denial of wrongdoing or doubling down on victim-blaming, but acknowledging that harm has been done and there is an opportunity to rectify it? I read a lot in those days in order to heal and came into myself by reading abolitionists and Black feminists like Angela Davis. Upon seeing my rapist unable to face me and the harm he committed, and understanding how institutions will protect their own ass, that power—and the threat of losing one’s foothold in power—I saw that it shields one’s ego from being vulnerable and from developing as a human being, and that's why we have these overarching myths of patriarchy and white supremacy.
These myths are constantly affirmed with domination: policing, interpersonal violence, and exploitation of people. And then when we zoom out and see the US is able to use these myths to perpetuate our never-ending wars for extraction, to domestically suppress rebellion and kill or co-opt leaders who speak out against systematic injustice. So I was led to abolition as somebody who has been harmed, to imagine a world where we're really, truly bending away from violence and punishments and towards a process of care and abundance. Indigenous folks always talk about this: we're not apart from nature, we belong to each other. And Marx was able to theorize that with capitalist accumulation, we not only were alienated from our labor, and alienated from ourselves, but we were also alienated from nature because we were constantly exploiting nature for accumulation for the capitalists.
It's a specifically Eurocentric ideology of militarism and conquest and capitalist accumulation that's burning up the planet and bombing countries for further extraction and killing people who want to defend their land and their livelihoods. The outgrowth of that is, of course, the internal: the fact that police are armed to the teeth and terrorizing poor people, Black people, Indigenous land defenders, immigrants, women. So I don't view climate organizing as apart from our demand for a better world, for community, for time away from slaving away for capitalists. I really think that it is part and parcel with our overarching demand for socialism. The same ideology and structures used to exploit the land are the ones that are exploiting people, are exploiting our labor, and we want to resist that. We want to live in a world where we're not constantly at the whims of the rich, basically [laughs].
That would be nice [laughs]. So what are you working on now?
So this is really exciting: we're taxing the rich in New York this year. DSA is running a campaign to not only tax the rich but have New York State directly invest in public luxuries like transportation, universal education and childcare, housing, renewable energy. Taxing the rich is a class demand: these are the people who are privatizing all of these public goods and have been stealing the vast majority of wealth created for decades. These are the folks who are literally responsible for climate change [laughs] because of their embeddedness in extraction and militarism and financialization in the world economy.
We deserve better. What would happen if we actually took back the money they've been stealing away from the state, took back the exponential growth they've seen by price gouging, keeping wages stagnant, and invested in things that we can all share, we can all take part in and enjoy?
I’ve also been grieving and reflecting on how to respond to Tortuguita's murder alongside the mass shooting at Monterey Park in LA. These incidents are connected. The necessity of an abolitionist horizon is becoming so clear. Our forests, our water, our people must be defended.
I always understood the US's gun culture as an inevitable outgrowth of militarism and the hollow death drive of white supremacy and patriarchy. As is the way police execute and lay siege on Black, migrant, and poor communities and put us in cages. For us to fight for a livable future, we must fight the cops, the rich, the powerful, and defend our land, our people, and those who are and have been on the front lines.
Right now, I'm in a campaign to fight austerity and the constant deference to capitalists. It is degrowth to demand more childcare workers, educators, and electricians and demand those jobs be well-paid, unionized and pave the way for future generations. Our time and labor should be rooted in care and a vision of the future that's not privatized and co-opted for profit at every turn.
How are you thinking about the present political moment and the most useful ways to intervene?
The fun thing about Tax the Rich is we have this very clear demand that articulates our class enemy. “Tax the rich, seize our future,” that's our slogan, talking about all of the things that we deserve and that we can fund by taxing the rich. It’s important to broaden our horizon and articulate our vision and what is possible over and over again. That's our goal in the present political moment.
I think our imagination is always under threat because our political leaders are constantly seeking to protect capital, and seeing that as the only avenue to do politics. Our role is to articulate a much more beautiful, broader vision for everyone. For us, it's not enough to defund the cops; we deserve resources in our communities to truly allow for public safety.
There's a certain conception people have of what public safety means, and that's something that's constantly created and reinforced by the media, by politicians, that public safety means cops and jails. What is that alternative version of public safety?
It's homes for people who are houseless. It is a ton of mental health resources and healthcare for all so that people have somewhere to go when they're sick. It's a robustly funded public education system with after-school programs so that kids are learning and in community. It's universal childcare so that parents who need to do wage labor for survival can safely know their kids are being cared for by trained childcare providers. It's all of our public libraries being funded, it's more—especially with the climate crisis—opportunities for resiliency and making sure that we're prepared for catastrophe. It's economic and social security in a world that is defined by crises and disruption, in a time when these crises will become much more frequent and, in turn, cause more volatility and fuel more reactionary elements within society. But if people know that they still have these fundamental things that they can lean on despite everything that's happening with the economy, if they know their rent isn't going to double, that shit is public safety.
Disinvesting from social services is directly correlated with an increase in crime, because when people need resources and don't have them, they'll choose the options that allow them to survive. So public safety is public investments in our communities, in these social institutions that have been disinvested from over time. It's also providing alternative time and space away from anything that produces profit. Urbanists talk about third spaces like libraries or your local community center, and we need to bolster those institutions with public money because capitalists don't have any interest in making those things happen for us.
So we understand that there's so much we need to change but we're relatively powerless right now. We have all these crises that are so urgent; we have to change so much in so little time. How do you think about navigating those contradictions?
If you belong to an organization, and you understand that the conditions are against you but seize every crisis for politicization and recruitment, then you are no longer afraid of powerlessness because you are doing that work of engaging with the world, confronting the crisis, and using that to build power in some way.
We feel like we don't have years or decades, but actually we should commit to the long haul. Any seasoned organizer will tell you mobilization is not the answer; you don't want to just turn people out to a rally without engaging them in a process where they can continue to build on that politicization and continue to recruit, build power, and confront power. We have to think in terms of our lifetimes—in 10 year, 20 year, 30 year segments—because that’s how long we’ll be struggling. We really are not going to be winning these things until we build power. But the only effective way that's going to happen is if you have a whole group of people who are doing that; it's not just you shouting into the ether or shouting onto Twitter. How do we build a base of people who are willing to create something else?