CN: Foul language
Elections are over. Those of us who are willing to vote have done so.
Democrats now hold a little more than half of the House and Republicans hold barely half of the Senate. If the Democrats have any fucking backbone, they will do their damnedest to stop the bleeding. Literally, the very minimum expectation at this point is for them to prevent bad policy from getting past the House.
Now, that said, I have seen too many on Facebook talking about "Getting back to the status quo," and "Finally forgetting about politics."
Sorry, but fuck that.
That is the exact opposite of what we need at this point. We have (hopefully) returned to the sort of stasis we had pre-2016, nothing more. Even that is not guaranteed.
No. It is time to take this moment of respite to begin organizing.
Yes, take your moment to breath deep and recuperate. Drop your pack. Take a knee, but stay armed and alert. Be prepared to move forward.
Yesterday was the voting. Today and tomorrow will be when the results are all shaken out. We got some impressive firsts out of this election. We showed the politicians that there is support for progressive candidates.
But we also had some losses. Some good stuff came out of this. Some bullshit did as well. It was far from a "Blue Wave."
That said, start looking at your social media feeds. Start looking at your local communities. You will see people who fought hard to make it this far, and have taken a moment to celebrate but are more subdued than most.
Those are your comrades. They are the ones who know the fight is just starting.
Those that are patting themselves on the back for a job well done, and proclaiming happily that things can get back to normal now can probably be depended on come election time in 2020, but until then, they are useless until they prove otherwise. But, if you find work for them to do, they MIGHT do it.
Now, we need to pull together and organize. We need to find what jobs need to be done and find a way to do them. We need to watch for opportunities to do the right thing and do it.
Mostly we need to start the work of building and rebuilding our communities.
We need to carve out space in this world that is safe for everyone. We need to carve out spaces that are safe for LGBTQ+ folk and people of color. We need to build spaces where food is plentiful and shelter readily available. We need to actively fight to create the world that we say we want.
We need to say fuck it and move forward.
As Socialists and Anarchists we rage against the system, but having been born into it, we are bound by it just as much as anyone else, and the idea of pulling away from those binds is frightening.
We stand in awe of those that actively fight the system, and we watch in horror as the system comes down like a ton of bricks on those who dare to live outside of it. This makes it scary. I am really not sure what to say about how we should combat that fear, but I think that voicing it is the first step.
I am not preaching armed rebellion at this point. That is still the path of most bloodshed. But I am saying that we should start building the world we want and be prepared to protect it when the Capitalist system takes notice.
Don’t fool yourself that we can just step away from the Capitalist world and go cold turkey. That would never happen even if there were a full-blown rebellion. We will have to use its tools to build the scaffolding for our new world.
As I sit here typing this, I am thinking to myself about what is needed to move forward. How we should proceed. What those of us with higher degrees of privilege can do to shield others in the process.
That last one is the most important part.
A good portion of the next part is going to be speaking pretty much directly to my fellow white Americans (Or pretty much any white person inside the Anglosphere for that matter).
Society is used to white liberals branding themselves as anarchists, and perhaps even acting on it a bit, either through Socialist organizations or a few years of Black Bloc… Then turning around, putting on their suits and ties, and settling down as happy corporate drones.
That is both our greatest collective sin and our greatest asset.
If you are a white person (especially a white man) and you don’t understand that your skin alone is both a badge and a shield, then I’m not going to say you are in the wrong place, but you have a lot to learn.
As we move forward, we MUST act as a wall between the system and our non-White comrades. In the American context, this is especially true of our black and Native American comrades. The clemency that we are born to take for granted will not apply to them.
We should also look to them for examples. They have been surviving as outcasts in the Capitalist system since their birth.
I am starting to run on fumes, and the post is beginning to run a bit long so I will leave it here for now.
I will leave it with this though:
This is meant to be the beginning of a conversation, not just a random rant. What needs do you see in your community? (Whether it be your neighborhood or your internet community)
What do you see that you would like to see happen?
What do you wish you could do, but don’t know where to start?
What resources are absent in your community?
What can WE as a Collective do to make your community more resiliant and less dependent upon the Capitalist system?