my friend 1000 miles away hit me up this morning and asked me if they could vent bc they were stressed out. I’m like, sure. they tell me they’re about to drive a couple states and many hours away to help a mama and her three babies escape a monstrously awful situation, and they’re wary of doing this alone and on cold medicine after a 7 hour drive during a pandemic. you know, reasonable, but they don’t want to leave this family in this situation. planning this sort of thing is delicate and volatile. but this is what they do.

so they’re just venting, right? but I’m like whoa whoa wait, where? I got people around there—good people, solid people. I’m thinking of a few people.

so I talk to some people and they’re like yeah you can connect us with your friend, and also here’s this other person who may be able to help.

and suddenly my friend’s venting is becoming pretty physically productive.

this reminded me of a situation a couple years ago where a friend in one place hit me up and said that some comrades from another place were in trouble in my city—people I’d never met. they’d run afoul of some pigs, and really needed some help. on the pretext of nothing more than the word "comrade" coming from someone I trusted, we all ended up that day in another friend’s apartment, now with a new friend having a terrible time, and were able to provide support. we’re still in touch. they came to help out with the hurricanes later that year.

then I think about this blog post I’d read around that time. some fascist or other writing a warning to his fellow fash that he wouldn’t count us out in a civil conflict. that they take it as a given they’d win, and he thought that was a dangerous mistake.

among the reasons he listed for this, the primary one repeated in different forms over and over and, to me reading this to "know [my] enemy", from the standpoint of, essentially, the person[s] being written about, it was pretty clear what he saw as our greatest advantage.

he said something like, the left won’t just build something. they’ll travel around and build more of the thing, and more importantly, they’ll hold trainings teaching other people to build the thing, they’ll write books about how to build the thing, they’ll make zines, they’ll hold teach ins, they’ll have study groups. they’ll replicate and connect and grow. he pointed to our survival programs, our mutual aid and rapid response networks, our fast turnaround on mobilization, our fundraising and relationship building.

this is what he saw as our greatest strength and their greatest weakness. and you know? that’s a smart fash. he wasn’t wrong.

but there’s also nothing that the right can do to address this weakness, because it is ultimately the weakness at the heart of their entire ideology, the weakness of their entire worldview, their lack of imagination, their individualism, their core identity. so, to address the weakness to the extent they would need to to accomplish a strength, they’d, by necessity, no longer be reactionaries at all. and they can’t do that.

what do we have that they don’t? solidarity. unity, even when there’s so many reasons to look around and feel like we don’t. even when there’s so much we could be doing better historically and now and always. we understand that we survive together, and we build our relationships and communities with that understanding. even when we fail. it’s still an attempt rooted in greater and greater understandings of that basic truth.

something else I was reading recently said that the right is a multi-generational operation, and the left isn’t so much, and that’s why they can handle failure better than we have, and why we see every moment as urgent almost to our detriment. and I don’t disagree with that. it was insightful, it was helpful to me, and I think it describes a lot of the attitudes on "our" side. but I also don’t think it’s the whole picture.

while we may certainly be less likely to have red and black diaper babies as a political bloc than say, evangelicals, and we don’t have the ruthlessness required to see raising an army of children as a good thing, that doesn’t mean we don’t understand ourselves in a multi-generational way. I think all the most insightful commies do. we understand that we are standing on foundations laid generations before us and that we are laying bricks for the next. we understand this is the work of history, and that we may not see it through to completion.

I think there’s so much defeatism on our side, and I get it, I’ve been pretty pessimistic at times, so take it from a fash who was scared enough to write an essay—don’t count us out.

and to that dude? good luck with your bunker in the woods, filled with beans and ammo. you’re fucked, you’re alone, you’re cut off and murderous of the only hope you have—other people. we’re all so very fucked, if we’re alone.

but we have solidarity.

mutual aid is, among many things, a factor in evolution, a verb, the natural inclination of any successful life form—it is also an inversion of logics and modalities of fascism. relationship building, community building, too. fascism, like the pit of capitalist realism it emerges from, thrives on fear and isolation and brokenness and desperation. it thrives when the people are without hope, and without connection.

and we have solidarity.

a lot of people ask me how we make xyz happen, and I so frequently get tongue tied around those kinds of questions because it’s so easy for me to say "I don’t know, it just happened", but that’s not true. what is true is that it happened because of connection, and an understanding of our inherent interdependence, and a commitment to collective care. that’s always, at heart, how it happened. just talk to people. build relationships. if you can’t do anything else where you are, you can do that. and you have no idea where they could take you, or what you may be able to do together.

solidarity is what we have that they can never have.