I have spent about 10 years fighting Trump. When I saw an article making the same claim, and talking about lessoned learned, I was curious. When the author mentioned “Indivisible,” it was hard to keep going.
Emailing people asking for donations isn't organizing. Getting people to donate to the Democrats isn't fighting the system that produced Trump, it's perpetuating it.
The author mentioned blowing whistles against ICE, mentioned Alex Pretti, that is what organizing actually looks like. If you aren't risking death, you aren't a threat to this system. America is fascist. If you aren't a threat to fascism, you aren't actually doing anything.
Now, there are elements of that list I don't disagree with. There are things that are also critical to real organizing. You have to show up every day. That's true, no matter what you're doing. You have to keep going, no matter what. That's true, again, no matter what you're doing.
I'm glad we're finally talking about a general strike. That takes a tremendous amount of coordination and it would probably be difficult to pull off in the US without some org like Indivisible doing it. But we need a lot more, and any organization that's supporting the Democratic Party is, by definition, not radical enough to take on this fight.
You need to actually organize your community. You need to learn lessons that you can use, lessons with some fucking teeth, lessons that don't come from emailing people and asking for donations.
Here are some other lessons I learned along the way.
Space Is Critical
When fascists take over, the first thing they do is close down public space. They do this because people hate fascists. Everyone hates fascists. Fascists are creepy and weird. They say shitty things that no one wants to hear. They're racist. They're mysogynist. And they want to share that in ways that make everyone else feel gross. Fascists make people unsafe. When people make connections, when they are able to meet other folks, they will eventually meet someone who a fascist wants dead.
When people finally get to talking about fascists, they have a tendency to organize groups to get rid of them. So fascists have to keep people isolated. The best way to keep people isolated is to destroy physical spaces where people meet. This becomes especially true as “the algorithm” does so much of this isolation work in the digital space.
Organizing benefits a lot from being in person (of course accounting for differences in ability that may limit that). There's so much more communication bandwidth when you are in a space with people, when you can read their body language, when you can feel the interactions, when you can just say, “hey, why don't the three of us go after this to my house to start working on it?”
Some things are extremely difficult to impossible to do without space. We organized an anti-fascist fight club to train people on street self-defense against fascists. You can't learn how to throw a punch watching a video. You can't learn how it feels to break a grip without actually doing it. This isn't stuff you can learn remotely. You need space to organize in.
Space is one of the most important constraints on what you can do. You want shared supplies? Where do you keep them? We created a shared pantry. It lived at people's houses. Sometimes you need to store stuff. We started guerilla gardening. We reclaimed space to get some extra food for folks. Don't underestimate the importance of space. I cannot overstate it.
Fascists close down spaces. That's how they kill leftist organizing. Once they make organizing difficult, they ramp up killing people. They did this in Portland, shutting down the antifa cider bar. They do this anywhere they can find our spaces. But, really, they didn't need to do this much in the US because the legacy of Neoliberalism already did most of that work.
This is part of why I keep saying the problem is deeper. Trump didn't have to build a fascist police state. He found one with the door open and the keys in the ignition, running and warm, ready for him to just hop in and hit the gas. Yes, fascism is definitely a car.
Voting for Democrats may get him out of the seat and someone else driving, perhaps more carefully, but it doesn't shred the tires and light the car on fire. The car needs to be on fire. We are not safe until the that fucker is burning.
Ok, slight tangent, but yeah, where was I again? Oh right, space is important.
Show Up
When you organize, you just need to come. There will be no one there sometimes. You show up anyway. You show up and you keep showing up. You show up because people will miss things, people will want to go but not make it one time or another. Things will come up. But the longer it happens, the longer it goes, the longer you keep just showing up, you learn.
I have sat alone for an hour plenty of times. That's part of organizing. Because I kept sitting alone for an hour, at a predictable place and a predictable time, I stopped sitting alone. I kept talking to people, I kept putting the word out, other people kept putting the word out, and eventually someone else was there every single time. Then 5 other people were there (not the same people, but 5 people). Then 10 people. Eventually the room is full, or almost full, every time. Different people come, some other folks start being regulars. Eventually you can take some space and not show up.
But you have to start showing up. Show up. Show up to empty rooms. Show up to no one there. Learn what you can. Oh, I guess I need to send out a reminder email a week before and the day before. Oh, I guess I shouldn't try to organize on a Monday or a Tuesday, or whatever day it is. Oh I guess… learn, adapt, but the most important thing is keep doing it. Fail a few times before you change, and just keep going.
Keep going, keep showing up. Your life literally depends on it.
Listen
Organizing is a community thing. That means you need to listen to people you bring in. When my partner joined we had a group that was overrepresented by cis men. My partner pointed it out, pointed out that we didn't have a progressive stack, pointed out that some voices were dominating the group. We stopped everything and just listened. We changed the way we organized, and we brought a lot more people in after that.
Every time there was a problem, we stopped and listened. Listening didn't get in the way of doing stuff. It was doing stuff. We were building the network, the community, and that meant making it welcoming.
Some of our big community organizers are femme, queer, trans. They do a lot of work, and they tend to not be seen. We made space for them and they made the organization. Long after I left, the connections still exist. Some folks who had no experience are now organizers themselves, working on their own huge projects.
So listen to marginalized people, listen to elders (there are people who've been doing this longer than you that the police never captured or murdered, find them), listen to your community. Community organizing means organizing around the needs of the community, and it will be most successful when it is connected to the history of that community.
Listen to your enemies. They will often tell you how to defeat them, if you know how to listen.
Leverage Existing Resources Before You Try To Build Your Own
Some liberals put together a group to resist Trump. Thousands of people came out. They spent the better part of a year organizing a bail fund just for themselves so they could feel safe protesting. And the did it just in time to abandon it all and go back to brunch. Cool.
We started with a bail fund because we brought in people from the existing anarchist bail fund and asked how we could build out their capacity. We build so many different things. We had a Nazi watch. You know that video of a Nazi getting punched in the face in Seattle? We didn't punch the guy, but our folks were following him and recording him from a bus stop not too far away from where he lived all the way to his delicious face punching.
We knew his name within a couple of days. We found his shitty album. We helped get him kicked out of his apartment. We had eyes on him when he came back later.
We built a cop watch group that used public records activism for police accountability. We started an unarmed self-defense training group. We started an armed self-defense group, with an arisoft team. We started a food pantry. We did some shit. We did shit, not with thousands of people but with a handful that eventually grew to maybe a few dozen. We were able to do it because we focused on pulling together existing things towards a goal rather than trying to build our own.
We only built something new when it absolutely didn't exist or the thing that existed was so incredibly dysfunctional that it couldn't be salvaged. (Looking at you tanikes, with every project that won't move an inch until everyone finishes the The State and Revolution and agrees entirely with every word.)
By the way, this is called Social insertion and it comes from especifismo.
Imperfect Now Is Better Than A Perfect That Never Comes
See the previous section.
Anything you build gives you a chance to fail. You learn from failure. Failure is OK, as long as you take it as a learning experience and don't let it destroy your motivation. Strip every idea down to it's bare bones. Find a simpler scrappier solution. Keep going until you can't cut anything more, then do that. The more you build before you try to fail, the more factors you have to analyze to understand the failure, the harder the failure hits you.
Most things can fail a bit and it's OK. It is extremely rare that you will need to build something perfectly the first time, and when that thing comes up it will be obvious.
Maximize Autonomy
When we were organizing, we had regular meetings (I don't remember how often, no less than monthly). During these meetings we would talk about overall finances, we would collect dues (when we remembered), we would get report backs from committees, and we would allow new committees to be formed. Committees could ask for money. Funding was put up to a vote. We never tried to provide oversight within any committee, other than that required of the financial committee.
Anyone could start any committee. Anyone interested in an idea could start a committee, or join one. We didn't track membership. We didn't enforce any type of organization. We didn't restrict what people could do (other than the obvious ones of “don't talk about illegal stuff at our central meeting” and “don't claim responsibility for any illegal action under our legal org”).
If you wanted something to exist, then you were volunteering to make it happen. If you didn't like how something was being done, then you volunteered to join the committee that was doing it and fix it. People love to try to direct others without taking responsibility themselves, and this policy shut that down really quick.
It also helped turn people into organizers. Anyone could always ask for help, which created opportunities to share success strategies. People learned to organize because they cared about the things they were working on. They got the support they needed. They were allowed to fail, and always helped back up when they did. That combination of independence and resiliency builds good organizers. And you need good organizers, because there's far too much work for any small group to do.
By maximizing the autonomy of everyone in the group you will end up building things you didn't realize you needed, making connections you didn't think were possible, and solving problems you didn't even realize you had. You will build people from timid little mice into lions. None of this is possible unless you make room for it.
You Have To Let Go (And Let People Fail)
It's easy to feel protective of a project you work on, to want to make sure it goes well. It's hard to let go, to let things fail, especially when you care deeply about them.
But you can't carry everything alone, and you will eventually fail if you try. The only way you can actually do all the things is together as a group, and that means building other people up. You have to find some number of things that are OK to fail, and let other people own them. You will be surprised how few actually do fail in the end, and how much stronger those who do fail get from the experience.
All Cops Are Bastards
Fuck the police. Fuck them. Fuck them all. Fuck them straight into the sun. Fuck the cops. Every last one is a murderer or is covering for one.
Without the police, fascism isn't possible. They are the very manifestation of fascism every day.
When a Nazi terrorist group was putting up flyers threatening people, hundreds of police protected a fascist speaker (who later turned out to be a ghostwriter for Nazis and, apparently, an alleged sex trafficker who can't manage to not make “jokes” about the sexual abuse of children… but I digress). They could have shut it down to protect the queer fashion show that was happening the same day. They could have shut it down after I was shot, but instead they failed to clear the crime scene. A bunch of my friends told me they walked through my blood that night.
They even failed to implement their own active shooter protocols which would have required they shut the whole thing down. They bent the rules to keep the fash happy, and they told the queer folks that they should cancel their event to be safe.
Sometimes cops do the right thing. They have to, otherwise people would realize what they are and would shut them down. But when there is a choice between protecting the worst people and protecting marginalized people, they always form a heavily armored line with their backs to the former and batons to the latter.
This isn't related to any of the others, but some people think they can organize with cops or coordinate with law enforcement. The largest police union in the US endorsed Trump, twice. Police overwhelmingly support fascism, because, at the end of the day, they are the ultimate manifestation of fascism. If you can't make a cop not a fascist, because when they stop being fascist they stop being cops.
Your world is defined by trauma and terror
I got shot. My friends watched me get shot. Some of them were holding my wounds. My friends have gotten shot at, or shot. I have recognized more than one face or handle in a news release about someone who died, who was murdered, who killed themselves.
You watch police brutalize and murder people, because that's literally just what the job of “police accountability” is. They say one thing, you verify it, turns out the cops were lying. I've never seen them not lie. But even if somehow they were telling the truth, you still watch someone get hurt or killed.
I've watched videos of my friends being shot at. I've had at least 3 friends hit by cars. I've watched videos of cops trying to run over, literally trying to murder, people I care about (of course, with no consequences what-so-ever). There are no end to the stories, the videos, the brutality.
I have PTSD. I have PTSD from being shot. I have PTSD from being in the hospital. I have PTSD from watching cops murder people. I have PTSD from worrying about if my friends would be black bagged in Portland. I have been on the phone with friends while their houses got bombed by Nazis. I have seen some shit. I am, by far, not the most traumatized person doing this work. There are others, others who did far more before I joined and kept working long after I left, who have seen way more shit.
Our people, the ones who have been in the street this whole time and longer, have so many scars. Tear gas isn't a toy. It's a chemical weapon, and it gets regularly deployed against people who do this type of work. Protest medics breathe it all the time, and it's not good. There are lots of folks who have hearing loss from blast balls, and others who have brain trauma from being beaten by cops and street fash. I have a scar from my sternum to under my belly button. My solar plexus does not exist anymore. It was annihilated by the bullet. I am not the most scarred person I know.
A lot of us died in the fight. More of us will die. That's how it is. We have been brutalized, more than you can possibly imagine unless you've been in it.
I can't even really inventory my trauma. I just remembered, minutes ago, a medic training after I got shot. I had to stop. I stood there shaking a bit. That was when I realized I couldn't go to protests anymore because I was just too much of a mess to be helpful. Blood never bothered me before, especially not fake blood. But the exercise we did during the training was too much. I was standing there. That's when we heard about the murder of Heather Heyer. I cried, recognizing how close I came to being another martyr. We are all inches from death, every one of us who stands up. There's so much trauma, of my own, of so many others. I have a whole blog where a good chunk is just devoted to exactly that. Again, I'm not anywhere near the most traumatized person in this. Not by a long shot.
And that trauma creates so much conflict. A lot of organizing is just managing people's trauma, keeping people from triggering each other, keeping things together through the conflict, through the outbursts that have nothing to do with this actual situation.
It's not just your trauma, it's everyone's. Everyone has it. Everyone shares it. We all have to organize with it and through it.
Over that whole time, at least half of the energy of organizing went into detangling that trauma, de-escalating, mediating conflict, trying to understand the intersections of the socialized trauma of gender, generational trauma of race and class, of colonization, and that Gordian knot of intersecting and conflicting traumas that continually interrupted our other work.
They Use Trauma To Stop You. That Tactic Can Backfire.
Police can kidnap anyone. They can kill anyone. It's considered “OK” for them to “make mistakes.” If there is a warrant, they can kidnap you, they can beat you, they can light your house on fire with tear gas (yeah, those are actually really hot), they can shoot your dog. Even after you are acquitted, or never even charged, they don't have to fix any of that (what could be fixed, anyway).
If they happen to be able to kill someone for “resisting,” or just like, having something in their hand, they will. Thats one less dead enemy. This is all legal, because that's how “qualified immunity” works in the US.
This is a weapon that they use, regularly. Organizers can be kidnaped and held for weeks, then charges will be dropped when they know they can't actually win at trial. But by that time people will have already lost jobs, have paid massive legal fees, will have been traumatized, will still have to fix their smashed front door.
The point of all this is to elicit the fight/flight/freeze response. When harassed or threatened enough, some people will snap and fight. They can be killed or imprisoned and that action is generally seen as legitimate by the average person (see Mumia Abu Jamal, everyone in prison with the last name “Africa,” Leonard Peltier, Willem Van Spronsen, Christopher Monfort, Benjamin Song, etc). Even when these are absolutely and unquestionably justified or self-defense, even when they were literally saving other people's lives, the average person will accept their neutralization.
Others will run, will leave the country, like I did, like so many others did. People who are forced out are generally not a threat. Organizing requires an understanding of the community in which you're organizing. When you leave, you lose contact with it. I'm in such a radically different time zone that it's really hard to even talk to the folks I used to organize with. But I left because I have kids, and they aren't old enough to consent to being part of this. They deserve a life outside this fight, and so do many of the others who also left.
What they are counting on is that everyone else will just freeze. You will lay down and stop fighting. And so many people have, haven't they? Every day you have to keep living, have to keep paying rent, have to keep paying taxes, have to keep this machine going so you can keep going. It's all way too much, isn't it? So people give up, roll over. The original Nazis were always unpopular, as are all dictatorships, but they all use the same tactic: apply overwhelming violence and terror until the population lies down and takes it. Trauma can do that, if they can keep it going long enough.
There's a book called To the American Indian: Reminiscences of a Yurok Woman. It describes Yurok beliefs, as she held them. One that she described was about the afterlife.
When people die, she explained, they meet an old woman with dogs. If they were good, they will be able to pass by unharmed to the afterlife. If they're bad, their soul will be eaten by the dogs. But some people will run. They will come back from death. Through their life, they will be chased by the dogs until the dogs finally get them. It's hard to find a better way to describe the experience of PTSD from a near-death experience.
But a funny thing begins to happen with Trauma. It can become a fuel. In quiet moments the thoughts can creep in. But they don't if you never have quiet moments. You can avoid dealing with trauma by continually being re-traumatized. At a certain point the dogs stop chasing you, and you start chasing the dogs.
There is a reason people keep going back to war, keep joining new conflicts, become mercenaries after they're done with their military careers, become medics, become street medics, stay street medics. Trauma begins to provide clarity. It becomes the water in which you swim, the water you need to keep swimming.
There comes a certain point where inflicting more trauma doesn't bring the people to heel, but drives them harder. At a certain point, this weapon turns against them and explodes in their face.
This is happening in Twin Cities. I'm starting to see indications of this happening across the US. There will come a time when all trauma they can inflict on us will only fuel our resistance more, and I wonder if that time has already come.
But even after this is over, the scars don't go away on their own. There is a debt, and it has to be repaid. At some point, you will have to heal.
All Cops Are Bastards
I have nothing new to say. I just needed to point that out again.
Get Body Armor
That's it. Just be ready to get shot. It may happen. Be ready. Hospitals suck and body armor is relatively cheap.
About Guns…
I'm not gonna say anything new, just watch this video
Leaders Are Vulnerabilities. Centralization Is Death.
This is just history. Learn about how movements are dismantled.
There's a pretty standard infiltration play book, and it goes something like this:
- Identify the leader.
- Create conflict in the chain of command.
- Sow paranoia.
- Get as many people killed as possible.
- Kill, discredit, or arrest the leader.
If you don't have a leader, you disrupt #1. It's much harder to disrupt a group that doesn't have a leader, and it's much easier to identify and neutralize threats. See the next section.
Feds, cops, and civilian fash all intuitively understand hierarchal organizations. They can't actually imagine any other way of organizing. They have a deep understanding of how to disrupt and destroy organizations with leaders. They struggle to even comprehend leaderless organizing. By organizing without leaders you immediately increase the difficulty of infiltration.
We saw this first hand. The IWW largely dismantled the GDC. The fact that this was even possible reveals a major flaw in how the IWW is organized. But if the IWW hadn't done that, the state could just as easily have seized all IWW bank accounts to neutralize the threat of GDC community organizing.
Centralization makes it extremely easy to attack organizations. The 60's and 70's showed us repeatedly how easy it is to just murder leaders and break organizations. A lot of people have died learning this lesson. Listen to their ghosts.
It Doesn't Matter If Someone Is A Cop
One of the tools of those trying to crush activism is paranoia. The FBI knocks on the doors of anarchists every April just to let them know they are being watched. Police and FBI regularly infiltrate groups, or pay informants (sometimes literal child rapists) to do so. One of the things they do to create conflict is to suggest that other people are informants.
But the people who are actually informants or police tend to have very specific behaviors that make them problematic anyway. The thing is, at the end of the day, someone being a cop or not doesn't actually matter. If their behavior is causing problems then you need to address the behavior. Infiltrators generally won't be able to change their behaviors.
But sometimes they do. Some number of cops actually quit the force and become anarchists after infiltrating anarchist groups.
For most cases, the primary risk from infiltration is destabilizing the group. But we already do that pretty well ourselves, with all that trauma I've already mentioned. Groups will burn a lot of effort wondering if so-and-so is an infiltrator. That effort is better spent talking about how to hold people accountable.
Sometimes people talk about illegal things because they haven't learned security culture. Sometimes people start conflict because they have unresolved trauma. Sometimes people just need support and they can change their behavior. None of this is ever helped by hours of conversation about if they're a cop or not.
The more open and welcoming you can be, the more people you can invite in, the stronger your organization will be. Trying to weed out cops just makes things harder. Operate as though your organization is compromised and live with that assumption.
Twin Cities has shown us that, if your network is big enough, if you have enough people doing stuff, then infiltration doesn't matter because they literally can't arrest a whole city. You are safer being radically open than being 100% locked down.
It's fun to play secret squirrel like your banner drop really matters, but the fact is that different operations have different security profiles. You need to actually assess the risk to yourself and others based on the actual situation. Security practices can and do hinder you. Sometimes the cost of those practices can actually erode your real security (again, see Twin Cities rapid response networks).
There are, occasionally, cases where this is not true. There are operations that do require security. There are times when it does matter if someone is a cop. I'm not going to talk about those. Go check out No Trace Project if you really believe you're in that type of situation. I don't organize that way, so I don't have any input on it.
People Only Care About Certain Types Of Violence
A lot of people have been injured, disappeared, and killed over the last several years, but, overwhelmingly, there are only certain types of violence that get attention. I don't need to explain to you what they are, because you already know.
The more privilege you have, the greater your responsibility is to be in front. If you don't put privilege in the way of cars and bullets, the deaths will largely go unnoticed by the majority of people still following mainstream media. This is a brutal reality, but it's important to face.
ACAB
I'm just adding it one more time so we're completely clear. Go read “Our Enemies in Blue” if you have any follow-up questions on this item. I was reading it when I got shot. Great book.
Again, not really an organizing thing, but I feel like it's important to mention when I can work it in.
You know, the burning of the 3rd precinct was more popular when it occurred than any presidential candidate last election. Just, you know, something I want to remind everyone of whenever I'm able to.
You Already Know How To Organize
Just listen to this podcast. I'm not going to say anything else. Just listen to it.
It's Never Too Late To Join The Fight
We are all bloody, and broken, and so incredibly proud of Twin Cities and all the resistance that has been coming up. The real resistance, not the shitty electoralism, but people breaking laws to save lives. That's real. That's it. So many of us have died, have been brutalized, have been traumatized, and have, at least once, thought that normal people would never fight back.
It has always been up to the weirdos, the queers, the crazies, the ones who came in to this already traumatized, the ones who had to build a new world because we have been so beat up by the one that exists. But so many people reading this are not like us, and that's the real inspiring thing. That's what gives us hope. It has always been a tiny portion of the population keeping the Nazis at bay with baseball bats in the night, running from cops (cops and klan). But here you are now.
I remember the night I got shot. I expected I might get hurt. I was ready to be injured. I was ready for death, if it came down to it. What I wasn't ready for was the disparity. In the moments before I got shot I saw a huge crowd of people cheering on fascism, waving flags, welcoming the suffering that would be inflicted on so many people. And I saw a tiny group of maybe a dozen people standing in the way, risking their lives to stop it. And I saw the liberals, far off at the edge, wagging heir fingers at “confrontational” tactics like literally standing in one place and letting themselves be pepper sprayed repeatedly in the face without raising their hands to stop it.
It would be easy to be salty, to ask “where the fuck have you been this whole time?” But the truth is that, I think, we're mostly just really glad you're finally here. We are tired, and we need you.
Welcome to the fight. It sucks, but it's worth it.
Fight like your life depends on it, because it does. All of our lives depend on this.
Some of the linguistic structures for the sentence “The little star's beside a big star”, from Jackendoff's «Foundations of Language» (2003) The more obvious linguistic forms I've listed are the tip of the iceberg; this figure illustrates the processing your mind does constantly, every time you hear a few words. Only linguists have abstract mental models detailing how all these structures are set up, but every human being can competently juggle all of them, instantly and without thinking; just like only biologists study scientific models of how muscles and tendons work, but every human being can move their own body.
