Tootfinder

The #IWW #GDC as an antifascist organization was always kind of a hack. It was a beautiful hack and it worked well for what it did.
In 2016, as Trump was rising, I found info from the Twin Cities GDC. They were super organized, building an amazing community defense organization. When we (Seattle) went to set up our chapter, following their lead, they were extremely supportive. When I got shot, Twin Cities folks were at my house keeping my partner safe. They literally flew people out to support us. They very much remain in my mind when I think about what mutual aid looks like.
Unionism is an important strategy of a larger fight. But it's important to realize that it's not the other way around. The GDC was built to defend the union, because there wasn't something larger to do that work. It filled a gap.
When we organized against Trump, we tried to make the GDC the greater thing. We tried to make the GDC into the vehicle for social revolution against the fascist threat... And it sort of worked. We were able to do a lot.
But that was never what it was built to do. It was always built as an appendage of the IWW. This contains its own problem. If Unionism is the revolutionary movement, then it becomes impossible to build a truly revolutionary society. Unionism centers "workers" which implicitly decenters those who can't work in the traditional sense (the young, the elderly, those physically or mentally able to work). It also decenters care labor that hasn't yet been widely commodified. Sure, there are all types of hacks to patch the holes, but the fundamental construction starts from the wrong assumptions.
It felt, for a while, like things could go another way. Like that our ability to bring members in could shift things a bit, maybe set the GDC on more equal footing with the core focus of the IWW. But that was always an illusion, far less important to think about than the crushing terror of the regime we were fighting.
Now, I will absolutely trash talk the IWW on occasion but in the end I do think they're doing good and important work. Any criticism I have should be taken with a grain of salt... And I know I do have a lot of salt. Again, Unionism is an important strategy. It's useful both in improving immediate material conditions and as part of the most powerful weapon we have against the capitalist system: the general strike. It's important, I can't say that enough. But it's not sufficient.
I've been thinking about this a bit recently, and I wonder if there are any other GDC organizers or former organizers who might be feeling the same. Feel free to DM me. I'd like to get some more perspectives and see if my understanding from several years ago deviates significantly from what other folks are feeling right now.
I'd also like to bounce some ideas around that come from my own organizing experience.

Uh, Cait - we probably need to talk about your bodycount. . .
#Fallout4

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Strange concrete sculptures circa 1960 near that big cluster of trees in the Arboretum
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For two decades, the media defaulted to portraying
Chief Justice John Roberts as a moderate institutionalist,
pointing to high-profile decisions
—to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census
—in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy.
But those decisions were always the exception.
Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian aut…

This is all John Roberts’ fault
Trump owes his corrupt and abusive reign to one man.

Some leftists have criticized #NoKingsDay2 as useless. Though it was the largest protest in US history, it didn't change anything. I would go further to say that protests like these generally won't change anything. Dictators aren't forced to step down by 2% of the population coming out for one day. If they're forced to step down by protests, those protests are sustained. They are every single day. They are accompanied by general strikes.
We've been watching that happen all over the world. Portland in 2020 gave us a taste of that in the US. The George Floyd Rebellion was the type of resistance that actually brings down dictators like Trump. Occasional protests, no matter how large, can simply be ignored. That is precisely the reason the US developed a militarized police force in the first place. You need more, more than the largest protests in US history, more than Occupy, more than the resistance of the 60's and 70's, more than, and different from, anything we've seen in our lives.
And yet... Each protest has grown, and grown bolder. Some have grown more persistent. If you think of protest as the path to achieve change, you will lose. It is not. But it is a path to escalate. Some people, some otherwise comfortable white folks, came out for their first time. Some people got pepper sprayed for the first time. Some people questioned authority, stood up for the first time, and have had an experience that will radicalize them for the rest of their lives.
Protest is not useful in and of itself. It is training. It's making connections. Authoritarian regimes rely on the illusion of compliance, so visual resistance does actually undermine their power.
Liberals like to teach that non-violence is all about staying peaceful no matter what, that there's some way that morality simply overwhelms an enemy. I remember reading Langston Hughes' A Dream Deferred in high school. I said it was a threat. My teacher said, "you're wrong, he was a pacifist." Pacifism is a threat. If you can spit at me, beat me, shoot me, and I will not move, if I have the strength to absorb violence without flinching, without even rising to violence, what will happen when you push me too far?
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
For peaceful resistance to work, there must be ambiguity. It must not be clear if or when the resistance will stop being peaceful. Peaceful resistance with no possibility of escalation is just cowardice.
My critique then is not so harsh as some other anarchists. If you think that protest alone will work, you're probably going to lose. If you are prepared to escalate, if you are prepared to absorb violence without flinching, then it could be possible for protest alone to topple the dictator. The cracks are already beginning to show.
And then what?
The problems that lead to the George Floyd uprising were never resolved. The problems that lead to Occupy where never resolve. The DAPL was built, protesters were maimed, it leaked multiple times (exactly as predicted). Segregation never went away, it only changed forms. The fact that immigrants have different courts and different rights means that anyone can be arbitrarily kidnaped and renditioned to an arbitrary country. We never did anything about the torture black site. FFS, people can still be stripped of their voting rights and slavery is still legal in the US. The people who control both parties in the US are killing our children and grand children with oil wars and climate change.
Toppling the dictator does nothing to resolve all of the problems that existed before him.
No, #NoKingsDay was absolutely not useless. #NoKings and related protests are extremely useful but they aren't sufficient. But, I think we still need to challenge the movement on two points:
How do you escalate after you're ignored or brutalized?
What do you demand after you win?
#USPol

Just finished "Beasts Made of Night" by Tochi Onyebuchi...
Indirect CW for fantasy police state violence.
So I very much enjoyed Onyebuchi's "Riot Baby," and when I grabbed this at the library, I was certain it would be excellent. But having finished it, I'm not sure I like it that much overall?
The first maybe third is excellent, including the world-building, which is fascinating. I feel like Onyebuchi must have played "Shadow of the Colossus" at some point. Onyebuchi certainly does know how to make me care for his characters.
Some spoilers from here on out...
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I felt like it stumbles towards the middle, with Bo's reactions neither making sense in the immediate context, nor in retrospect by the end when we've learned more. Things are a bit floaty in the middle with an unclear picture of what exactly is going on politics-wise and what the motivations are. Here I think there were some nuances that didn't make it to the page, or perhaps I'm just a bit thick and not getting stuff I should be? More is of course revealed by the end, but I still wasn't satisfied with the explanations of things. For example, (spoilers) I don't feel I understand clearly what kind of power the army of aki was supposed to represent within the city? Perhaps necessary to wield the threat of offensive inisisia use? In that case, a single scene somewhere of Izu's faction deploying that tactic would have been helpful I think.
Then towards the end, for me things really started to jumble, with unclear motivations, revelations that didn't feel well-paced or -structured, and a finale where both the action & collapsing concerns felt stilted and disjointed. Particularly the mechanics/ethics of the most important death that set the finale in motion bothered me, and the unexplained mechanism by which that led to what came next? I can read a couple of possible interesting morals into the whole denouement, but didn't feel that any of them were sufficiently explored. Especially if we're supposed to see some personal failing in the protagonist's actions, I don't think it's made clear enough what that is, since I feel his reasons to reject each faction are pretty solid, and if we're meant to either pity or abjure his indecision, I don't think the message lands clearly enough.
There *is* a sequel, which honestly I wasn't sure of after the last page, and which I now very interested in. Beasts is Onyebuchi's debut, which maybe makes sense of me feeling that Riot Baby didn't have the same plotting issues. It also maybe means that Onyebuchi couldn't be sure a sequel would make it to publication in terms of setting up the ending.
Overall I really enjoyed at least 80% of this, but was expecting even better (especially politically) given Onyebuchi's other work, and I didn't feel like I found it.
#AmReading

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One of the things that made organizing a lot easier with the GDC was a thing called "GDC in a box." It was a zip file with all kinds of resources. There was a directory structure, templates for all kinds of things like meetings and paperwork you had to file (for legal reasons) and "read me" files.
We had all kinds of support. There were people you could talk to who had been there. There were people you could call to walk through legal paperwork (taxes). Centralized orgs are vulnerable and easy to infiltrate. They're easy for states to shut down. But there are benefits to org structures.
I think it's possible to have the type of support we had with the GDC, but without the politics of an org (even the IWW). I hope this most recent essay has some of the same properties. I hope that it makes building something new, something no one has really imagined before, easier.
This whole project is something a bit different. It's a collective vision and collective project, from the ground up. Some of it has felt like a brain dump, just getting things that have been swimming around in my head down somewhere. But I hope this feels more like an invitation.
Everything thus far written is all useless unless people do things with it. Only from that point does it become a thing that lives, a thing with its own consciousness that can't be controlled by any individual human.
Tech billionaire cultists want to bring a new era of humanity with AGI. That is definitely not possible with LLMs, and may not be possible at all. But there is a super intelligence that is possible, though it's been constrained by capitalism: collective human intelligence.
The grand vision of the tech dystopians is that of the ultimate slave that can then enslave all humans on their behalf. I think we can build a humanity that can liberate itself from their grasp, crush their vision, and build for itself a world in which people will never be enslaved again. Not only do I think it's possible, I think it's necessary. I think there are only two choices: collective liberation or death.
And that's what I plan to write about next time to wrap this whole project up. Today things often feel impossible. But people talked about the Middle Ages as though they were the end of the world, and then everything changed in unimaginable ways. Everything can, and will, change again.
"The profit motive often is in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."