How We Win Pt. 2

Here we are: part two of question mark of a series on how we can resist the rise of fascism in a non-violent manner while we grow support for a popular movement. This week, I promise, we're going to talk more minutia about concrete actions we can take with our groups. Remember the idea is, for the moment, to keep things non-violent and relatively un-counterable by the state.

It feels forever ago, but we grew up in an age of revolutions. There are many people around the world who tried and succeeded–and failed, which provides lessons too–at upending their governments. As with all things, we do not need to reinvent the wheel in order to begin our work; we can, and should, build on the shoulders of the giants that came before us. The Black Panthers, Otpor!, Common Ground Collective, Mutual Aid Street Solidarity, Food Not Bombs, and on and on, have come before us and done phenomenal work that we can replicate.

Let's dispense with the throat-clearing and get into it.

Actions

As we are building a big tent, I want you to remember that while much of what we think of when we say "action" brings to mind doing work out in the street, it's not necessarily the only or best use of your energy. We're taking all kinds, and that means you get to lean on your experience. It's also important to remember that if you're not able to do the kind of on-the-ground actions we're going to be talking about, there are still plenty of ways to contribute. So if you are a teacher, for example? You can, for example:

Teach Workshops: Find a space that will permit you to hold workshops and promulgate the information you're learning here and elsewhere–and upon which you can surely expand.

Latchkey Programs: With space, again, organize a latchkey for local kids and read to them from the wealth of radical literature available.

Disseminate Literature: Make zines, drop USBs full of radical literature, print flyers–get the word out through various media.

But let's build out some more of the direct action we hinted at in last week's letter.

Humor: Referred to in Blueprint for Revolution as..."laughtivism," a lot of what Otpor! had going for it was taking the piss out of Slobodan Milošević. As Popović puts it, the state is forced into a lose-lose scenario when properly faced with humor. How, for example, does JD Vance address all those baby-faced memes of him? He can't, put simply, as the internet doesn't forget and bringing attention to the meme only spreads its reach. Another, more concrete example would be the following tactic used by Otpor! to make the Serbian police look like a laughingstock: one day, Otpor! activists dropped a metal bin and bat in a heavily trafficked square. The bin had a picture of Milošević on its side and instructions that said for the equivalent of a dollar, one might take the bat and bash the picture of Milošević, which people began to do. With no suspect in sight and no crime being committed, all that the police could do is confiscate the bin. It's not exactly shooting the vent in the Death Star, but it's cheap, it's easy, and it hurts the public image of the enemy. Again–we're not looking to topple the regime with goofassery in one night; we're trying to weaken the regime bloodlessly.

Mutual Aid: In its normal forms, the weakness with standard mutual aid endeavors in this environment is that they're not invulnerable targets. A program to provide hot meals in a public park can get shut down; houseless camp defense can get muscled out. So, here's how to turn that around: make shutting down your mutual aid a lose-lose situation for the state. Publicize it, involve amicable media, loop in older folks and younger folks so that use of force becomes all but impossible. Imagine you and your group of knitters have joined forces with your mother or grandmother's group of knitters to serve meals. Adorable, well-publicized, maybe you've got a contact at a news station who could bring out a camera? It's not that the police won't shut you down, necessarily, it's that doing so enrages your community and adds support for your cause. Lose-lose.

Direct Action: There are a lot of other options, some we've discussed, but let's talk about protesting.

1. I've said this before, for sure, but I'm going to phrase it another way: the way we've protested in the past is to bring the government to account. We can't do that anymore, because that requires functional systems that can be cajoled into our interest, and we no longer have those. Effectively, we can no longer protest. What we can do, however, is hold streets, occupy space, and otherwise jam up the gears of government and economy in the hopes of weakening the system.
2. A tip I learned and forgot more times than I wish to recall (oh, I hope I didn't write this already) is to break up your protests into mini-protests. That is, if you've got 1,000 people, you protest at ten different locations. This works to our advantage in two ways: police support infrastructure isn't meant to handle multiple events of scale–sure, a city dispatch can handle its usual shift action and then some in emergencies, but the sort of response it would take to handle ten separate protests? It's just not feasible, not in the way officers on the ground would want, anyway. And speaking of those ground officers, when split ten ways their forces become less fearsome, while ours remain capable and, honestly, more flexible.
3. Keep an obtainable objective in mind. Do not protest aimlessly because it's the only action you can think of. Your protest should achieve something–it should pressure a specific politician, occupy a particular space to disrupt a particular activity, or gin up enough attention as to materially affect your cause. The morale and energy of your people is a finite resource and we cannot afford to waste it, so while shit happens and we will lose and waste time, that outcome can't be because we didn't think things through on our end.

A Concrete Example

Let's say you live near a weapons manufacturer that supports Israel–it's easy to say this, because you almost certainly do. To push back against them, you would begin your baby step likely by wheatpasting the Palestinian flag, or maybe a keffiyeh-patterned fist, around town. You could, and in this example probably should, include the death toll in Gaza to date, which is well in excess of 50,000 and almost certainly much higher, and maybe in an alternate poster mention the forced starvation of Gazans. From there, your next step would likely be a second pasting campaign with more directed information: Boeing, or whomever, is providing X and Y for bombs or guns.

There are options for next steps. Many a brave activist has been arrested blocking roads into warehouses and factories, but we're trying to avoid normal action and for the time being are trying (trying) to remain in legal territory. So rather than trespassing on private property, you figure out a handful of the folks in charge of this particular factory–critically, a handful–and you organize protests at their home addresses. Do so simultaneously if they live within the same city limits. If not, you simply clear out when the cops roll up to the first address, and caravan to the second, and third, and so on. The idea here is not that you force these bigwigs to suddenly grow a conscience, as we can assume that ship has sailed; no, we want to humiliate them. Make sure their neighbors know what they do. Make sure their kids know. Make sure the neighbors' kids know. Create an environment so toxic for them that they find their job difficult, perhaps impossible. Repeat. No, you haven't toppled Boeing. No, you haven't saved anyone–not yet. But you've made the work of the evil empire harder. And that's worth the effort.