Sinking Deep Roots of Solidarity and Resistance

by Michael Novick, Anti-Racist Action Los Angeles/People Against Racist Terror (ARA-LA/PART)

     Bloody repression is hardly a new phenomenon in the history of the US. From the wars of extermination to carry out the thefts of Indigenous lands and the genocidal enslavement of millions of Africans and African-descent people, from the invasion and conquest of northern Mexico to the lynch mobs that enforced white supremacy after the Civil War and Reconstruction, from the massacres and executions of working people and labor organizers to the assassinations of scores of Black Panthers, Chicanos, American Indian Movement members, and Puerto Rican independentistas by COINTELPRO, from mass incarceration to deaths in custody, executions via the death penalty, and extra-judicial killings of Black, Brown, Asian and Indigenous people by law enforcement, the US federal state and its component state governments have always been willing to take lives to enforce settler colonial capitalism and its global empire.

     Nonetheless the second Trump presidency marks a qualitatively more intense and troubling willingness by the Empire to violate all norms and restrictions in regards to civil and human rights and the use of military forces inside the US. ICE agents have been recruited with white nationalist slogans and unleashed not only on migrant workers but on anyone who expresses solidarity with them. Red-baiting depictions of even the mildest dissent or protest as domestic terrorism, and as an internal enemy that must be extirpated, emanate on a daily basis from the White House, enforced and implemented by executive orders and by military, paramilitary, and vigilante forces. These attacks are justified as “protecting the homeland” from external threats, while military adventures like the invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its president and first lady are justified as using the armed forces to execute a Department of Justice arrest warrant.

     Under these circumstances, it is vital to overcome the weaknesses and illusions that have held back the movements of colonized, oppressed and working people in this country. The worst of these continue to be white supremacy, male chauvinism, and identification with the oppressor and the empire. One example, is that, even in Los Angeles, rallies that denounced the ICE murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis failed to even mention the New Year’s murder in LA of a Black man, Keith Porter, by an ICE agent. (One positive sign is that most of those demonstrations linked the issues of ICE repression and war.) The failure to take note of Porter’s murder reflects a debilitating disregard of the Black freedom struggle and its critical importance in the US, historically and today. It’s paralleled by the relative disregard of the genocide in Sudan compared to the concern about the genocide in Palestine. This is a potentially fatal flaw, because the underpinning of all Trump’s lies is the big lie of white supremacy.

     We need to internalize how to function under conditions of increased repression, techno-fascist surveillance, and untrammeled and dictatorial presidential power and war making. These have been augmented by “civil society” operations and reactionary political formations targeting thought crimes, labor organizing, education, communications media and journalism. We need to internalize “security culture,” learn how to operate below the radar, figure out how to encourage and protect whistle-blowers, and work on building organic connections and solidarity in communities, workplaces, schools, prisons, and even within the military and paramilitary state organizations. These are lessons that anti-colonial movements inside and outside the US have learned through bitter experience, and that leadership must be recognized and absorbed by the peace, labor, gender equity, and environmental movements.

     We also need to recognize that “fascism” implies and is based on not merely dictatorial measures by the state apparatus but the activity of a mass base. That base includes white Christian nationalists in the MAGA movement and open neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates, because white supremacy is central to the settler colonial and imperial project.

     But it also incorporates right-wing elements within many immigrant communities — “gusanos” among Cuban-Americans who have carried out acts of terror; right-wing Venezuelan emigres who welcomed Trump’s attack on their home country; monarchist Persians in LA who want the US to place the Shah’s son in power in Iran; anti-communist Vietnamese in the US who have killed opponents; former members of Central American death squads or Eastern European elements that collaborated with the German Nazis; Zionist thugs who served in the Israeli military and have attacked Jews and others who support Palestinian rights.

     On all those fronts, we must define wedge issues that can begin to split away some of the base of the MAGA movement and other reactionary formations, just as a younger generation of Cuban-Americans has sought to end the blockade of Cuba, or many young US Jews have denounced Israeli genocide and settler colonialism, and sought to end US support for it.

    Anti-globalization struggles once united “teamsters and turtles,” environmental struggles have created “cowboy and Indian” alliances. We can and must rebuild such solidarity and revolutionary inter-communalism. Simultaneously, we must enable solid, rooted, and transformative organizing in working class communities, Indigenous nations, and among people of color in the US. Black and Brown leadership and unity will be vital in that regard. These combined efforts must help heal the urban/rural breach. Start by listening to as well as speaking  to the concerns and needs of working people, whether blue collar, white collar, pink collar or agricultural, overcoming isolation and division with a pro-social, anti-capitalist approach.

     If white, Black, Native, and Mexican prisoners in California and other penitentiaries could overcome their own differences and the strategy of guards and prison authorities to foment racism and division as a way to maintain control, and thus unite — thereby ending self-defeating racism, internal strife, antagonistic gang identifications and other hostilities — those of us out here in minimum or medium security should be able to do the same.

     Fascist-like conditions and dictatorial power have always existed not only in the prisons and jails, but at many workplaces and in many schools. These include the use of snitches cultivated and rewarded by authorities, the use of the carrot and the stick, repression and cooptation, and the use of privilege to divide and control prisoners, workers or students. Fascism has always promoted masculinism and sought to confine and coerce women, LGBTQ and non-binary people.

     Bullies, as is well known, are actually cowards, and the fear that they seek to induce in us is a projection of the fear that they feel. This is true of Trump, Vance, Stephen Miller, Bannon, Musk, Peter Thiel, and the rest of the techno-fascist crowd. They understand better than we do the potential power of the people to bring this system down and to replace it with a new and different society and economy, one that is not at war with the planet but promotes regenerative and restorative agriculture and other productive enterprises that are democratically determined to meet human needs in a sustainable way. Trump et al cannot brook any opposition, because they understand in what critical condition and how brittle and vulnerable their system actually is.

     Mutual aid, cooperative economic projects, communal child care and kitchens, urban eco-agriculture, community self-defense, restorative and transformative justice procedures, popular assemblies and budgeting processes, defense of political prisoners of earlier periods and support for the new resisters facing frame-ups and set-ups, and similar activities, can prefigure that future society. They give people an empowering sense of what we are fighting for and what we are capable of creating.

     Boycotts and general political strikes can give our exploiters and oppressors the feel of our teeth and of our capacity to undermine their power and wealth. We need our own media, our own technology, and our own means of defending ourselves. We need people-to-people solidarity on a global level, exemplified by efforts like medical and other aid to Cuba, to Palestine, and other front-line targets of imperialism. Solidarity begins at home by upholding the self-determination of Black, Chicano/Mexicano, Indigenous, AAPI and other struggles and movements.

     The flailing of the dinosaur, though deadly, is a manifestation of its weakness, and in fact its death throes. In the words of the old Motown song, the darkest hour is just before dawn. We can and will build a new world atop the ashes of the old. Only a rooted, revolutionary resistance based on solidarity can overcome fascism.