Movement Building Means Building Movement

Marcie Bianco’s essay, excerpted from Breaking Free: The Lie of Equality and the Feminist Fight for Freedom, asks what it takes to turn a commitment to freedom into collective action. Her point of departure is a problem within feminist politics: gaining admission to an institution does not, by itself, change the relations that make that institution oppressive. Freedom therefore needs an account of how people act together, rather than a story in which exceptional individuals escape on their own.

What makes an action a movement?

Bianco turns to Black Lives Matter and ACT UP to discuss organizing that persists beyond a single public event. She draws on Alicia Garza’s account of movement building and Sarah Schulman’s history of AIDS activism. These examples connect participation to the work of maintaining relationships, creating organizations and taking responsibility for people whom existing institutions fail.

This changes how a march or a widely shared slogan can be evaluated. Visibility can help people find one another, but its political significance also depends on what happens afterward: who follows up, how newcomers become participants, and whether a group can keep making decisions when attention moves elsewhere. An account based only on attendance or online reach leaves that infrastructure out of view.

Freedom and responsibility

Bianco’s emphasis on collective freedom raises a demanding feminist question. If a person’s advancement relies on others continuing to perform undervalued work, whose freedom has increased? The question makes care and accountability part of political organization rather than rewards to distribute after a victory. It also invites scrutiny of exclusions inside movements, including racism, ableism and hostility toward queer and trans people.

There is a tension worth keeping open. Legal equality can provide urgently needed protections, even when equal access leaves deeper hierarchies intact. Reading Bianco need not mean abandoning every demand framed as equality. It can mean asking whether a particular reform expands people’s capacity to act together and challenge the conditions of their dependence.

The essay is especially useful alongside histories of organizing. Its argument becomes more concrete when readers ask who supplies meeting space, time, childcare, money and continuity. Freedom then becomes a practical question about the conditions of participation, as well as an ethical commitment.