Our Strategy

"What do you want?" is an easy question to answer. "How are you going to get it?" is a much harder question. When we start organizing it is easy to give too much attention to articulating demands. We thirst for justice so much we often can't stop talking about the future we're trying to build. But what folks really need to know is what is our strategy for achieving those demands.

"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will."
--Frederick Douglass, 1849

No Justice No BART's strategy is to exercise our freedom of assembly in such a way as to disrupt the "business as usual" status quo, and to continue organizing such events until our demands our met. We will maintain lines of communication with riders and the media, to let people know of the potential for disruptions in service during upcoming demonstrations, to explain our demands, and to encourage people to join us in pressuring the BART board and elected officials.  

No Justice No BART takes media condemnation with a grain of salt. We take our lessons from history, and we know that when a strategy works, we see our tactics being condemned while our demands are being met. We know that when a strategy doesn't work, we see our tactics praised and our demands ignored. We are confident that what we need to do to win justice is to find the pressure points, and apply steady pressure.

No Justice No BART is not trying to be "yet another group". Ours are not "new ideas", our organizers have been part of this movement for a long time, and all of us are active in existing groups. This campaign has been put together in order to contribute our strategies and tactics to the broader movement's toolkit as we pursue our shared goals, all of us, together.

No Justice No BART is committed to:

• defending the idea that disruption is a necessary component of struggles for social justice.
• promoting and mobilizing people for movement events of all kinds (regardless of demands or strategy), and centralizing and publicizing a calendar for these events.
• encouraging movement unity and cooperation in pressing shared sets of demands.

No Justice No BART encourages all organizations to prioritize communicating their strategy as highly as they prioritize communication of their demands.