“No permanent allies, no permanent enemies” contrasting team-based activism and eco-system activism

Increasingly activism is defined by whose ‘team’ the activist is on. There is extensive research on the increasing role of partisanship and ideology in forming identity, and the ways this political identity influences voting behaviors. There has been less research on how such identity formation impacts organizing and activism more directly. We argue that this ‘teams’ orientation permeates the logic of community organizing and drives policy positions that are reactive to who the policy benefits politically, with negative effects for progressive organizing. In this essay, we draw from ethnographic data of community organizing in Camden, NJ to better understand the impacts of teams-based activism. We use the motto “no permanent allies, no permanent enemies” to propose an alternative organizing principle: eco-system activism that centers values, not teams.