From the Whirlwinds site:

Of Whirlwinds: Metaphor, Purpose, Intersections, 
                          Acknowledgments, Background & Dedication
                       
                    Team Colors Collective

This is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.  One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.)  But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent.  It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

                            James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963).

Purpose: “Whirlwinds” as Metaphor, Whirlwinds as Project

To understand the cycles of struggle and the more recent cycles of protest over the past thirty years, we propose the metaphor of ‘whirlwinds.’ Before ‘whirlwinds’ there was the fire that James Baldwin spoke about in 1963 with the publication of his work The Fire Next Time. This fire came to cycle through the United States and across the planet, but would become mere embers by the late 1970s. 

Since the 1970s, within the United States, there has been a series of salient whirlwinds: anti-nuclear; anti-apartheid and divestment; ecological; migrant rights; anti-racist; solidarity; worker organizing; the movement of movements in the counter-globalization struggles; anti-poverty; do-it-yourself (DIY) punk, hip hop, riot grrrl; feminist and queer struggles, amongst others. Looking genealogically, the above struggles have all contributed to the current crisis in capital and the state-apparatus, as well as to the forms of organization that populate the social field.

The whirlwinds that blow throughout the social field face consistent attempts by both capital and the state-apparatus to co-opt and infuse their efforts into strategies for maintaining social systems based in exploitation and oppression. When movements struggling to fulfill their needs and desires cannot be successfully co-opted or infused, they’re often targeted for dismantlement. Much of the time social movements face all of the above tactics of capture simultaneously.

Particular power relations—work (paid and unpaid; affective & material; productive & reproductive), racism, gendered forms domination and exploitation (including, but by no means limited to male-domination, heteronormativity, and the gender binary) as well as others—have been continually re-imposed in new ways, through new tactics, in response to struggles waged by those seeking to fulfill their needs and desires. In recent historic context the "new enclosures" and "the society of control" function as processes for the re-imposition of oppressive and exploitive relations.

Even considering the intensity of efforts waged against social movements, resistances to oppression and exploitation—as well as the construction of new ways of being— are found throughout society within the United States. We see the whirlwinds mentioned above, both those currently blowing and those in recent history, as weapons against defeatism. We also see such whirlwinds as spaces for potential explosions. We want tornados.

Our goal with this project is to inquire into and map some the current winds. Accordingly, we begin and end with one question: “Will you join us in the middle of a whirlwind?”

A meaningful and substantial answer to the above question is not to be found within these pages, nor is it found in rhetoric or posturing. The answer to this question is found on the barricades, and in the streets, fields, forests, gardens, homes, farms, community centers, workplaces and neighborhoods where we struggle everyday to create new worlds and new lives, together. Our small whirlwinds become tornados only in and through activity.

Whirlwinds is intended as an “intervention,” accomplished in form and content through an “inquiry” into contemporary movement; this project is not intended to be a comprehensive map of “the movement” or a ‘snapshot’ of movements. We don’t feel that it is possible to create a comprehensive inquiry into social struggles in the United States. However, many small inquiries are necessary and possible, and in summation such efforts help us all to understand the terrain on which we can build and intensify our collective resistance.

Our major strategic aim is for Whirlwinds to serve as a point of discussion of movement strengths and weaknesses, as well as movement purposes, tactics and theories. We hope that this project assists those who read it to better understand current struggles for liberation, and that this understanding helps build strategies for building movements capable of “winning.”