Fascist policy has moved quickly in response to the recent solidarity encampments that sprang up to support Palestine. It seems like every state action right now is geared toward either making sure these camps can never again exist, or they can legally be crushed by any fascist who wishes to do so. I’m NGL, it’s a scary time to be an American with left views right now.
What’s happening just off the top of my head:
- Camps are being destroyed and dispersed by armed police, attacked by right-wing mobs, and harassed by Zionist propaganda shops.
- Positive coverage of the protests on mainstream media is near-zero. Same thing we saw during BLM protests in 2020.
- Individual protestors are facing consequences ranging from doxxing to harassment, to school suspensions, expulsion, and jail time.
That’s all run-of-the-mill, seen that before. What’s new:
- A man who was convicted, by a jury, of murdering protestors was just pardoned by the Governor of Texas.
- Protests continue to be attacked by fascists in vehicles.
- The federal government & many states are passing laws changing the definition of antisemitism to include the messages that the students were using at the camps, making it that much easier to legally suppress them.
- At least one state (NC) is about to change it’s mask law to prevent protestors from wearing masks to protect themselves from Zionist retaliation.
So… protesting is basically banned, extremely dangerous, and silenced due to media blackout, state oppression, and social media bias. I know showing solidarity is important but I am struggling with seeing the local camp my local org helped support, a group of peaceful students and activists, just utterly crushed. IDK what to say to the people who effectively lost their rights to free speech.
Any ideas on what to do? How to escalate? How to protest in a way that is more effective and safer for the folks involved? I know the state is scared of these movements growing because of the sheer amount of action it is taking to quell these. At the same time I see these tactics working. I am tired of seeing good people dragged into jail. I’m tired of seeing them speared under the false charges of “anti-Semitism”. I’m afraid of losing the life I have if I speak out. It feels like literally everyone is against us and it is depressing af.
I originally wanted to post a question about defending against vehicular attacks, but I remembered everything going on and realized there’s a lot more stopping protests than that. I don’t have the answers but hopefully we can collectively figure out some options.
having a bunch of random people gather somewhere to protest
having a group of workers shut down their workplace in protestThe ruling class views college kids and random protesters as basically expendable. The only thing protecting protesters from state violence is the thin reed of public opinion. Workers are necessary for the ruling class to actually function in their day-to-day life. Violent repression still happens but there are actual material consequences to beating & arresting your entire workforce.
The sum total of every vote you ever cast in your entire life is worth less to the state than one week of your labor at a job critical to the function of the economy, like an amazon warehouse.
Or a grocery store.
So organizing a one day walkout over shitty management was the most praxis I have ever done in my life (not counting all the mutual aid and feeding and housing comrades of course)
It feels like literally everyone is against us and it is depressing af.
No, they are pulling out these tactics to silence people because the majority agree with us (on Palestine at least). That’s why they’re amping up the fascism to give the impression of everyone being against us.
it’s never been a good time to be a leftist. Libs, conservatives and ultra right wingers are all fascists in slightly different shades of color. Stalin, as he often is, was correct.
Every day that passes really proves a lot of his writings were correct.
Organise with commies as much as you can and pray China wins
With stopping vehicles the issue is you have a massive object moving at speed and it needs an equal, opposite amount of force to stop it.
to stop movie vehicles is putting a massive object - another vehicle, deeply secured anti-vehicle bollards, tank traps (saw some during BLM20 no shit) between you and the oncoming vehicle. You can use terrain - position yourself somewhere a vehicle cannot easily go, or somewhere it will struggle to go. You could in theory use caltrops and tire poppers but the vehicle will still likely be able to move on damaged tires and you’ll need to place them far enough away for the vehicle to come to a stop.
I don’t think people are ready to steal heavy equipment and start building ditches and berms.
Shooting the engine won’t stop the vehicle. You need at least 12.7mm/.50 bmg to have a chance of damaging the engine enough to stop it and you need a lot of warning. Similarly, shooting the driver won’t stop the vehicle unless the driver takes their foot off the pedal. At which point the vehicle will coast to a stop.
Significant barricades - sand bags, tired full of dirt, stacks of concrete barriers, things of that nature will likely dissuade most vehicle attackers and cause significant damage to most civvy vehicles.
Any serious defense is going to bring the cops out but I guess that’s just the game we play now.
Any serious defense is going to bring the cops out but I guess that’s just the game we play now.
we talk a lot about the Cool Zone
This is actually it. We are not prepared for this from an organized armed resistance standpoint and we need to get there. I am gonna take some coworkers shooting soon and while we are hanging out outside work I have been educating them on What Is To Be Done
another vehicle
tbh the easiest and least provocative step is for protesters to get mechanized. An environmental catastrophe and terrible for OPSEC but we gotta utilize this car centric society where we can
Word. Having a bunch of cars in front of, behind, and in the middle of a protest makes ramming attacks less attractive. Plus, they can carry water and play “fuck the police” really loud.
Protesters in Brazil use stacks of old tires lit on fire. It’s funny how every society has their protest traditions.
Rubber burns for a long time and puts out a lot of thick smoke. Works in a pinch.
tire fires are a great way to block a road and make it impassable for a while until it’s cleaned up and the road repaired.
Keep doing it until forced underground.
Then operate underground.
Go armed, oh wait some dude will kill you for that then get pardoned
This is why we need organization as well as being armed
I’m talking spotters keeping watch on counter-protestors, communication specialists to keep information moving swiftly and lines clear, field medics to treat injuries and above all else, plans in place for when (not if) shit hits the fan
A bunch of fingers can do a lot of things, but nothing hits harder than a fist
Except maybe a sweet roundhouse kick, but that’s letting the metaphor get away from me
The Dutch model has seen some success. Smaller, roving support protests that immediately disperse at the first sign of police involvement. Cops got spread thin and couldn’t envelop protestors because they couldn’t concentrate their forces enough to make arrests.
At the same time, these roving protests were a threat to police backlines that theynhad to respect.
Riot police are elite heavy infantry. They’re perfectly suited to marching in formation and being absolutely unstoppable from the front. They have seige equipment to limit the utility of set fortifications too. Protestors need skirmisher support
i’ve been seriously thinking about how to apply late 15th century infantry tactics to protests lately. that kind of tight coordination of different specialists.
yours is straight Roman legionary tactics though and i think just as useful
What do the 15th century tactics look like
on the 15th century battlefield it was basically tight coordination between different types of infantry. pikemen, gunners, light skirmishers, light and heavy cavalry, etc. everyone had a role.
it’s trying to apply this kind of specialization to urban protest “warfare” that i’ve been thinking of. it breaks down not to the weapons of the 15th century guys but their purpose. pikemen kept heavy infantry and cavalry at bay, formed a “mobile fort” to retreat to, gunners would form up outside this formation, fire, and often reposition or retreat inside it. skirmishers could dive under pikes and infilitrate the human fort. cavalry existed to take down infantry out of formation.
what would the modern analogs to this be? if riot cops are basically just a block of heavy infantry. they might have vehicles (cavalry). rubber bullets, etc (their own gunners)
you can’t just match in firepower them because people will get killed
so the question is would some kind of mobile human fort (basically a modern Tercio) be useful? or would it just be a liability?
Don’t directly engage the heavy infantry with your light infantry. Use your light infantry/skirmishers to their advantage.
Any formation that they detect, they can crush. Any leader that they identify, they can shoot or arrest.
as soon as you said bees i just imagined a bunch of protestors sitting on a cop until he overheats and passes out
Tercios seem like they take a lot of coordination to manage
yeah this wouldn’t be something you could just get everyone on board with. this is like “we are now at the level of having an actual vanguard party of trained, professional agitators”
I don’t know fellow leftist gun owners that well and the leftists I know that well aren’t militant in the slightest
Protests were never really effective anyway. It seems like an unforced error on their part to take away liberals pressure relief value
Exactly. Peaceful protests don’t work because they can be ignored and they violently attacked and destroy them anyway. In this case it’s about the narrative, can’t have people reminded that amerika is doing ANOTHER genocide. But they could have just blasted them in the media like they always do.
If the democratic powers that be won’t stop enabling genocide, we have to physically prevent the arms from getting to where they’re meant to go. Some countries are refusing port access to arms shipments, maybe a similar action at various US ports like have been reported on some indie outlets would be in order.
Its pretty hard core, but I don’t see what other options we have. Its possible that some kind of political reform could make a difference, but I imagine that would have to be done as part of a mass anti genocide movement. The timeline for that doesn’t really work though and we can’t resign ourselves to saying its too late.
A coordinated strike/boycott by the ports would be hitting the empire where it really hurts. Radical labor actions by a coalition of the transportation sector would be devastating, imo.
Organize unionize strike
Only withholding labour has any power to change things IMHO
The UAW strike authorization is a start.
In Bevins, the “successful” protests almost always also required labor in tandem with the protests.
As Lenin said: Учиться, учиться и ещё раз учиться!
Study, study, and study again!
Read theory.
It is never enough to protest, or even doing armed struggle. You will lose.
The liberal capitalist class has prepared and perfected their tactics for this very moment for over a hundred years, ever since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
Look at the Italian communist movement, crushed by fascists since 1921. Look at the German communist movement, crushed by the social democrats and fascists since 1919.
Fascism is liberal capitalism’s answer to Leninism, and they have since perfected fascist violence across Europe as post-war Gladio operations, and as far away as in Indonesia in Asia and in Chile in Latin America, just to name a few.
The predicament of the Western left is made exponentially worse by the fact that there is no organized left in the West, which is partially why there hasn’t been fascist violence systemically enacted against the toothless Western leftist protests, yet.
You are facing against the most brutal and violent political machineries that have murdered tens of millions over the past century. They will not hesitate to do the same at home when the situation calls for it.
The fact is that we are heading towards the rise of fascism in the West once more, just like it did a hundred years ago in response to the contradictions of capitalism and the proliferation of leftist movements, and you better believe that they - the capitalist class - are more than prepared for this.
Don’t fool yourself into thinking that the capitalists are incompetent and stupid and will trip themselves over. Just look at the history of the past 100 years and tell me they’re not ready to murder millions more to brutally enforce the free market against any opposition.
That’s why it’s no longer adequate even for armed struggle. You need to take Lenin’s advice to heart and “study, study and study more!” to learn how to defeat not just the capitalist class, but their fascist opposition against socialism.
Marx and Engels gave us the tools of dialectical and historical materialism. Use them like Lenin and Mao did to emancipate their countries from the yoke of capitalism!
What would be the most helpful theory to read for today’s situation? Especially if it can be shared with “baby” leftists in my friend group?
For the accessibility alone, on top of being very relevant, I recommend Blackshirts and reds by parenti
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That one is on my reading list… maybe a future book club for my local org?
If the state is going to crack down on these actions with military force then these protests need to be organized and armed to match it if they want to sustain themselves. First and foremost that means ideological training and disciplined organization. Later that means weapons and tools to protect their comrades. This doesn’t necessarily mean immediately escalating to shootouts with the state but even something as small as maintaining a formation will protect a lot of people in a fight with cops.
vote
Malicious compliance is more strategy than tactics but there are lots of ways to play within the rules while subverting them provided that you are creative.
The other option is to get more serious about things and start hitting operations with strikes and stuff like coordinated sabotage.
Keep organizing. Build affinity groups and deep movements. Get to know the cool people in your communities, and help each other. Theory, sure, but also read history and tactics. Learn to shoot and other new skills.
