Organizing For A New World In A Time of Monsters
Mike Leyba shares a message with our community after 13 years with CLVU and 4 years as Co-Executive Director.
“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.”
— Antonio Gramsci, the Prison Notebooks
May 1, 2025.
Today marks two important milestones.
First, a personal one: it’s been about 4 years since Denise and I said yes to what was one of the most challenging roles I think either of us had ever done up to that point. In May of 2022 we were in planning mode, thinking about how to begin our time as co-executive directors and how we’d move this important organization forward. It’s been such an honor and privilege to work alongside Denise. I would write out all of the lessons and moments that she made me a stronger movement leader, but that would take up the next six pages. She is an incredible leader in her own right, and I’m so excited to see her continue to take the organization forward.
Second, today marks the end of Trump’s first 100 days. Trump’s first 100 days have honestly felt like years. His administration has brutally and cruelly implemented the most harmful policy agenda we’ve ever seen. He’s supported genociders and dictators abroad, while violently detaining innocent people here in the US. Thankfully the administration is not the most competent one. But more importantly, we’ve seen a massive push back against the administration by courts, institutions, and the people. This moment is important, and that’s what I wanted to write about.
Into the Interregnum
In 1911, Antonio Gramsci was a 20-year old man who had just won a scholarship that allowed him to study linguistics at university in Turin, Italy. Before the industrial revolution, Turin was a smaller city but now was quickly becoming a major industrial hub known for its metal work. This led to the expansion of industries like manufacturing, machine shops, and vehicle makers.
Turin’s economy at the time looked a lot like Detroit, Michigan. In Detroit, cars were manufactured in large factories by Ford; in Turin, cars were beginning to be manufactured in large factories by Fiat and Lancia. Many people moved from nearby areas to work in these factories who wanted a better life for themselves or their families. Factory work was incredibly difficult and dangerous at this time, and so trade unions were established to protect workers.
Then in 1914, World War I breaks out. It’s an incredibly destabilizing event for Italy and for Europe. This war led to economic pain, political chaos, and much like today, a government that spent years neglecting its duty of care for the people.
In the chaos, Benito Mussolini emerged as a strongman. He and his National Fascist Party took control of Italy in 1922. Fascism offered simple answers to complex problems. Nationalism was used to expand the country’s borders illegally. Mussolini blamed the high unemployment and political instability on communists, and labor leaders for “tearing the nation apart.” And Mussolini’s political enemies were arrested for speaking out against their factory owner or their landlord.
As the co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, Antonio Gramsci was one of the foremost critics of fascism. He was arrested by Mussolini in 1926 and he began writing the Prison Notebooks a few years later.
Gramsci covered a number of topics in the 30 notebooks that he wrote in prison, but one feels especially important right now.
The word “interregnum” refers to a time in between two systems or ways of doing things—when the old way is falling apart, but the new way hasn’t fully arrived yet. It’s a period of time of transition, but not necessarily in a stable way.
Gramsci used this idea to talk about how, during his lifetime, the old political and social systems were breaking down, but new ideas and structures haven’t quite taken over yet.
During this in-between time, there are symptoms of the crisis. That means all kinds of problems and dangerous forces can rise up— monsters that need to be defeated, like fascism, confusion, and violence—because there’s a power vacuum and people are looking for direction.
“Transition is inevitable, but justice is not”
At City Life, we often use the metaphor of “the sword and the shield” to describe our strategy. In the context of our organizing, this refers to our offensive strategy (our direct action, public protest, and organizing our neighbors) and our defensive strategy (our work with legal services partners to defend our homes in court).
But what if we were to zoom out and use this metaphor beyond City Life? We call City Life a movement organization, but the movement is much bigger than City Life. We’re just one organization and the movement is made up of many different kinds of organizations. Some organize tenants, but some organize worker cooperatives. Some focus their work in a specific neighborhood or even a few blocks, while some movement organizations are national or international. Some organize around housing, but others around environmental justice, reproductive rights, civil rights, racial justice, or economic justice.
Years ago in 2015, when I was traveling to the US Social Forum in Philadelphia, I sat with a friend who worked in the environmental justice movement. We talked about the idea of a “just transition” – in other words, what it would look like to transition out of this system of extraction (capitalism) that preys on our people and build toward a world that is more equitable and sustainable for us and future generations.
I remember that conversation because one of the things she used really stood out to me: she said “the world is changing. Changing for good and changing for bad. But our role in the movement is to make sure that the transition is directed in a way that creates a more just world. Transition is inevitable, but justice is not. Our political work over our lifetime is to have one foot anchored in resisting the harmful old system and one foot anchored in building something new.”
When is your movement birthday?
Have you ever done an activity where you had to work with a group of people to line up in order of your birthday? It’s a classic facilitator tactic to help a group break the ice and start to get to know each other.
One time I was able to do this activity with a multigenerational group of organizers from around Boston. But instead of lining up in order of the day we were born, we were asked to line up in order of the year they became politically active. As we went down the line, folks shared that they were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Antiwar protesters fighting against US aggression in Vietnam and El Salvador. Folks who got involved during the WTO protests in Seattle.
As for me, I consider my “movement birthday” to be 2014 because of two crucial moments.
I first became a part of City Life in 2013, during the tail end of the foreclosure crisis. Homeowners were losing their homes and their life savings due to unfair loans or unfortunate circumstances, and many were fighting back as tenants in the homes they formerly owned. The cruel irony was that for many of our folks, the agencies that were foreclosing were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which are owned by us, the taxpayers. So in other words, our tax dollars were being used to displace our neighbors in favor of investor owners who would often buy up these foreclosed homes for a fraction of what they were worth.
One CLVU member who I met was Olivé Hendricks, who was a steelworker and Union member like my brother. He was fighting to keep his home in Hyde Park. When it came time for the constable to come and evict Olivé, members of CLVU decided to blockade the front door of the house. Some of our members had agreed to get arrested in defense of Olivé and our neighbors. The rest of us protested outside and demanded that Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Bank of America to work with homeowners to keep their homes instead of pushing them out.
A little later that year, the CLVU arts committee was working on a project that recorded the sounds of their home. I remember listening to Kenny’s recording, and you could hear birds singing outside, a TV on faintly in the background, while Kenny chopped some vegetables for dinner. Once they had these recordings, they wondered, what could we do with them?
We decided to occupy an empty home that was owned by a former CLVU member on Norwell Street. We installed a 20ft tall radio antenna on top of the roof and started broadcasting a radio station from a makeshift studio in the former dining room of this empty house.
We filled the rest of the first floor with art, buttons, stickers, and photos while people came from all over the state to tell the story of their homes over our radio station. We called that action Noises over Norwell, and the demand was for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to stop displacing black and brown residents. We were there for a week, and had cookouts in the front yard, movie screenings with a projector, and a lot of laughs. Eventually the BPD came and told us we had to vacate, but it was an example of how we, as a community, could come together in support of each other’s struggles.
While we never won the full demand that we were asking for – universal principle reduction for homeowners, we did force banks and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to work with some homeowners, and in some cases, to donate or sell their home to nonprofit organizations. That’s how the Boston Neighborhood Community Land Trust started.
There have been many other beautiful moments of direct action over my time at City Life. Every action like this we did would serve a purpose: to bring new people into the movement, and to organize our neighbors to fight with us. Our goal was not to prevent displacement, although we were pretty good at doing that. Our goal was to build a beloved community for people to step fully into their power and make a difference, and we did that.
Organizing In A Time of Monsters
Right now, I would like to think we’re in an interregnum. We’re at a moment where the old systems are failing us, and the new systems have yet to fully take shape.
But right now the federal government has stepped into the vacuum and is shifting the conditions. They are using the same tactics that Mussolini did – scapegoating, lying, intimidation, violence – as a way to put forward a vision of a world that they want: a world that considered anyone nonwhite as “noncitizen;” one where women are second class citizens; one where LGBTQ+ people are unacceptable; and a country that uses economic and physical violence to take what it wants, regardless of the impact on regular people.
Their goal is to get us to wear us out and curtail our right to resist. But now is not the time to give in. Now is a time for holding the line. We must hold the line to defend our civil rights, women's liberation, and queer rights.
Unfortunately this is not without risk. Not everybody is in a position to take on the risk of organizing in this moment. We have to be careful about that. If this is you, the answer is not to stop organizing, but rather to take it underground. Make it as much of a part of your daily life as you can so that those with more privilege can take on the riskier parts. And those allies who have been alongside us, now is the time to tap back in.
To conclude this, I wanted to share a list of thoughts for my beloved City Life / Vida Urbana community:
1: Don’t struggle alone. Self care feels nice but community care will sustain us. Always lean into having someone, a friend, a relative, and neighbor, who you check in with regularly and get the worry out.
2: Relationships are the lifeblood of our movement. Time spent organizing a cookout for your neighbors is an investment in the community!
3: Safety is paramount right now. We’re in a new moment with increased risks both for our members and volunteers. Spend the time to make a safety plan with folks you trust in case something happens. Better to be prepared and not need it than have to scramble in the moment if you do.
4: Look beyond Boston. Boston can be a bit of a bubble… but there is really amazing tenant organizing happening around Massachusetts, in other states, and even across the globe. Always be open to inspiration and root for each other’s success!
5: Make more movement birthdays! Getting our friends and neighbors involved in the movement is how we keep it going and more importantly, how we win!
I’ll be rooting for you.
With love and solidarity,
Mike Leyba
Well Said Mike ! Thank You For Sharing Your Exceptional Knowledge, Wisdom and Solidarity in Helping to Build This Part Of The Movement We Call City Life/ Vida Urbana.
Mike , Keep Fighting Until We WIN. ::::: and So Will I .
Always ::: Heather G.