Okay another thing the Trump admin didn't plan for in Minneapolis:
Do you know how electrifying collective action with united purpose can be? Do you have any idea the heat generated by the fire that ignites in people's hearts when they look around and see all their neighbors out there with them, scared but determined?
That is not a feeling our enemies want us to learn & get used to. It's frankly addictive. Once you've felt it, you're going to want to feel it again.
A lot of people looking at Minnesota right now are fucking jealous too.
Not jealous of the brutality. Not desirous that it would come here.
But jealous of that amazing feeling of unity. People are getting hungry for that thrill. People are stunned by the beauty & power of collective resistance. We *want that* where we are.
Minneapolis's resolve strengthens all of us, & people have been shown what is possible.
They can't undo that. They can't make people unsee it.
I believe we are in the midst of a global effort for liberation.
People are hungry for justice & we know how many of us there are.
Protests against Israel's genocide in Palestine have been sweeping the globe for a couple years now. And what has it gotten governments to do? Fuck all. And only slightly better success with individual corporations & organizations.
Everyone in the goddamn world knows that things need to change & soon! So we watch each other & learn & get bolder & try more things.
Sure, it's been years of "eat the rich" & guillotine fantasies, but during that time things have not been sitting still. The temperature has been rising. People are becoming impatient.
And people are also *imaginative*. And we are sharing our resistance with one another. Plenty of people in other countries receive news from Minnesota as *good news for all of us*. It's good news for all of us wherever people unite to help each other & resist oppression.
What is happening in the world right now is not like anything that has ever happened before because it isn't the same world.
Change is constant. Adaptation is neverending.
The fash, the neolibs, the capitalists, all those fuckers: none of them are fucking ready. None of them fucking know how hungry the world is for change or that we can't stop dreaming of a world where we all look out for each other.
There is nothing simple or easy here. There is no painless path forward.
But y'all, we are not the people they thought we are. Not just Minnesotans or Americans or...
It's all of us. Humans are not what they think we are.
This is not the fight they think it is.
And that's why they will fucking lose.
They should have just given Americans free healthcare & a decent social welfare system.
They should have made concessions to Free Palestine protestors.
If they wanted to appease people & make them docile, they should have let more people continue in the fantasy that slow positive change would continue to slowly roll out forever.
But corporations got so fucking wildly greedy & obsessed with the next quarter's earnings report that they forgot that they were supposed to be lulling us to sleep.
"Authorities" in pretty much every goddamn country in the world have been dropping the myth that the systems could change & become better.
They needed that myth believed. We needed it gone.
They removed it for us.
Seriously, the almost total lack of movement on Palestine? What did they think they were teaching people? That we were powerless? They just taught us that we need to get serious.
The whole goddamn world learned that making our voices heard could never be enough from the continued refusal to stop the Palestinian genocide.
People in general the world over are getting a lot more interested in disruptive direct action.
They announced loud & fucking clear "the only way change will happen is by force."
So we look at the millions & millions of people the world over who have been screaming for this to end & think, "ok, force is it? There are more of us than there are of you."
The more people who see direct action, mutual aid, & solidarity at work, the more people are going to think "yeah, this is really what I want!"
The more they push us to unite, the stronger we get.
It's always important to communicate & educate & try to change minds & bring people along, but seeing & participating in more community actions is going to do more to transform people's thinking & imagination than anything that could be said alone.
"Free Palestine!" is a scream from all of us globally!
It's not the only thing we're fucking screaming, but in 2023, Netanyahu & his cronies decided they weren't stealing Palestinian land, killing Palestinians, & destroying & erasing their culture fast enough. They decided to speed it up.
And now the entire goddamn world is watching. And the entire world is screaming.
Motherfuckers, what did you think would happen?
You thought because you could pull this before, you could pull it forever? You thought that we wouldn't *talk to each other*? You thought we wouldn't demand that it end? You thought we would give up & forget?
This isn't the world it once was. Change happens, motherfuckers. Get used to it. Nothing remains the same forever. Nothing.
The fascists rose up too late.
We shared too much information with each other, we healed too many wounds & grievances, we unlearned too many lies.
I said yesterday, the "damage* of diversity & education on injustice & oppression that has already happened can't simply be undone. They can try desperately to hold onto the people they do have, but we're not going back. And not only that. We will be pushing forward.
It's too late, motherfuckers. You violent monsters are going to force us to go through hell to get to our better future.
You will never let your slaves go willingly.
But we will be free.
They are going to panic the world over. Crackdown on crackdown on crackdown.
But it's too late, & we are too many.
The path forward isn't linear.
It's not a constant march to victory.
But we learn, we strengthen each other, & we keep going.
And being decentralized, with no commander, no generals, no fucking rigid fucking hierarchy or slow bureaucracy, we will be impossible to stop.
They can hurt us. They can slow us down.
But they can't cut the head off a beast with billions of heads, & where this is going, it will eventually be *billions*.
I cannot believe what rigid, inflexible thinkers the fash & their ilk are.
They are using tactics that are so out of date they almost look cute & antiquated.
They aren't ready for this because they can't imagine this.
They are hierarchical thinkers. To them, freedom looks like chaos & "anarchy" makes them piss their pants in fear. It doesn't even fucking compute to them that our strength is the lack of hierarchy, the fact that we are all in this fight, & no one commands us.
Despite what we have seen in Minneapolis that is giving a lot of us hope, they will continually underestimate us. They will never understand us.
They will learn some of our individual tactics, but they will never be able to predict what's next, because we have imagination, & they don't. We roll with change & adapt, & they can't.
We are agile & decentralized. They are slow & hampered by rigid structures.
adrienne maree brown uses murmurations of starlings as an example.
Starlings move together individually to create these formations & patterns. They react instinctively to the presence of predators & move all at once, but totally independently, to protect the group. They don't run into each other, because each bird maintains the right spatial relationships with its neighbors.
We can do that too. We are adaptive & alert & learning to work together without a master or commander.
@artemis Perhaps relatedly: I’ve heard it argued that a lot of the reason behind social-democratic reforms post-WW2 was that there was a very obvious alternative in the USSR. Capitalism had to be seen to make people’s lives better than communism did, otherwise people might be tempted to try the alternative.
And similarly, the reason for having legalised and regulated forms of industrial action is that the alternative is: it happens anyway but without the negotiation and regulation.
Which in the USA, since the NLRB runs union law, and does not have quorum...
That social contract is null and void.
@crankylinuxuser @artemis I'm not sure I'd go that far. But then, I don't think it's a binary choice. The social contract is intact to precisely the same extent that labour law is still effective. To the extent that people can still rely on its protections, they won't attempt any extralegal measures (wildcat strikes, etc).
The government's attempt to undermine the NLRB *does*, however, show their *intention* to destroy that social contract, even if they haven't fully succeeded.
(If I've misunderstood US law or the current state of affairs, my apologies — my knowledge of this is second-hand at best. But I'm assuming that not every application of labour law requires the active involvement of the NLRB.)
The NLRB has already been sabotaged. They only have 3 of 5 members for their top board. Because they do not have quorum, ANY disputes that go to the top are not legally permitted to be adjudicated.
Trump (spit) is responsible for filing those spots. And surprise surprise.
Therefore, the NLRB is defunct for the time, and thus the social contract backing NLRB and "legal unionization" is null and void.
@artemis I keep coming back to this. There just isn't enough hate in the world.
Their whole scheme is built in unifying people's anger and hatred. They nurse that hatred in private when no one they hate is actually in sight. They tell stories to manufacturer anger. They tell one story to one group and another another to intentionally feed those divisions and that anger. Then they say, "Give us power and we will be your agents of hatred. We will avenge your anger."
But when people are confronted with their actual neighbors, they just don't hate them that much. Sure, some do but most don't. They're bigoted and maybe even assholes, sure. But that level of hatred? No.
So when Trump puts his hatred and that of a tiny minority of people on naked display, it's pretty obvious who the bad guys are. He fucked up. He dropped the mask.
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