Archive for category: Strategy

Fortunately for the United States, our national debt is in U.S. dollars. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan once observed, “The United States can pay any debt it has because we can always print money to do that. So there is zero probability of default.”

Paying government debt by just printing the money was the innovative solution of the cash-strapped American colonial governments. The problem was that it tended to be inflationary. The paper scrip they issued was considered an advance against future taxes, but it was easier to issue the money than to tax it back, and over-issuing devalued the currency. The colony of Pennsylvania fixed that problem by forming a government-owned “land bank.”

The post Only A People’s Monetary Reset Can Prevent A Feudalistic Technocracy appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

Many Left organizations are facing serious internal struggles as they work to balance a growing membership on the one hand and a myriad of political challenges on the other. Internal debate and conflict can be healthy, leading to sharper analysis and tighter unity. But conflict is often destructive and leaves us weaker. Indeed, many Left organizations have split or died because members were not…

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In memoriam Matilde Rodríguez Pérez (1934-2020)

Qe los cuentos de la abuela

de “en aqeyos tiempos de ante”

son los tiempos de aqí alante

disfrasaos con ropa nueba.

–Joserramón Melendes¹

Marcelino and the Never-ending Work Shift

In 1918, tobacco represented the second most important export of Puerto Rico after sugar cane. Its production continued expanding until imported cigarettes took over during the 1930s, causing a devastating decline in the Island’s tobacco production². By the mid 1940s, my great-grandfather, Marcelino Rodríguez, was a living fossil of the colonial Puerto Rican economy. Due to his birthplace and social upbringing, Marcelino had learned every single step of the tobacco economy, from the agricultural phase to its production and the curation of the crop. By default, his children learned the trade from an early age, as well. Marcelino was not a land or farm owner. His family belonged to the socioeconomic class of the agregados – that is, the bottom echelon in the workforce hierarchy who lived on a plantation as part of the remnants of the nineteenth century Spanish economy of African slavery, followed by notebook labor and wage labor³. It did not matter that the government’s land reforms of the time granted Marcelino a parcela, or land plot⁴, to build a small home for his children. This was not an indicator of significant progress, nor did it bring financial stability. Success was far away for any member of the working class.

Regularly, Marcelino boarded the now disappeared train from Barceloneta to San Juan during a time in which both locations were so distant, Borikén seemed to be three times its size. As a middleman in the tobacco economy, he spent the week in Barrio Obrero selling his product. There was no romance in Marcelino’s travels. The melody of Lamento Borincano⁵ did not occupy his mind. Marcelino’s reality kept him far from entertaining a popular song of the time. There was neither past in his memory nor future on the horizon, only a constant present. Marcelino’s wife, Masimina Pérez, died young, leaving seven children behind to care for. Thus, Marcelino’s most productive week at Barrio Obrero was not enough to meet the needs of his children. Neither was it enough to undo the family disruption that resulted from Masimina’s death. From early on, the children had to join the workforce. My grandmother Matilde became a domestic servant at age eleven. She had to bring a younger sibling to live in the house that became both her work and domicile. The older siblings had to migrate to the tomato fields in Utah, the factories in Chicago, and Nuevayol.

The circumstances of Marcelino’s life were parallel to the entire rural workforce in Puerto Rico. The 1940s are known to be a time of stark contradictions. The Island had hardly recovered from the social, political, and economic troubles of the 1930s^6, ^7, ⁸, which brought the Island economy close to collapse⁹. With the beginning of World War II, all imports and exports of the Island were affected to such a degree that the danger of starvation was a possibility for the Boricua working class¹⁰. During this time, most programs funded by Roosevelt’s New Deal, which were developed under the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration (PRRA) were on their way to failure. The Puerto Rico Glass Corporation and the Pulp and Paper Corporation, two of the most relevant industrial projects of the PRRA, are clear examples of how the oppressive dynamics of the colonialist policies of the United States, the hostility from capitalist private enterprises, and the colonial political opposition collided to sabotage government-run programs that could have brought some economic relief to a colonized country in crisis.¹¹ It is not surprising that the demise of the economic relief programs of the time came from the same colonizing government body that funded it in the first place. Later work by economic historians reveal that the great majority of the funds spent in all of PRRA programs were funneled back into the United States economy¹².

The 1940s ended, and with them, the hopes of generations of workers who were impacted by the power of colonialism and all its forms of oppression. The first fifty years of United States rule proved to be a continuation of the interventionist practices that plagued the Puerto Rican people for 400 years under Spanish rule until 1898. The absentee white-collar brutality of the United States colonialism¹³, the predatory power of capitalist corporations in the agricultural fields¹⁴, the servitude of colonial political parties¹⁵, and their mafia-like enterprises formed a maraña¹⁶ of power dynamics that stymied Puerto Ricans in their ability to express and exercise their own will as a people.

The journey of struggle and  suffering that Puerto Ricans endured for the first fifty-two years of United States occupation went on as if it never happened. All the abuses in the sugar cane fields, the political repression against pro-independence ideology, the sterilizing campaigns on women, these events that scarred Puerto Ricans for generations until present, were subjects that rarely made the headlines in the United States press. The American colonization brought an additional layer of isolation. Beyond the automatic isolation Puerto Rico is subject to due to its condition as an island in the eastern-most corner of the Caribbean, the island is also politically marginalized through its removal from the discourse that took place in the media from the beginning of the occupation. This isolation, perpetrated by the power of media and the ways in which history is documented, persists today in many forms, including language, the sanitization of historical facts, and other invisible barriers that result in acts of usurpation.

The acts of resistance against the power of United States colonialism of the 1950s through violence were a testament to the suffering that persisted for decades before. The promises of self-government of the time were not a reason for relief, but a reason for uprising in 1950¹⁷. For Marcelino, and so many rural workers, life had continued without a day of rest, without time to reflect about the political turmoil around them.

The Real Taste of Piña Colada

One typical morning in the 1960s, my uncle Saturnino, a pineapple-field worker in Barceloneta, Puerto Rico, got up to go to work without knowing that he would never return home. Saturnino was not a pineapple-field worker by choice; his fate was predetermined by his place of birth, his parents’ socioeconomic upbringing, their race. The relentless rain the night before had left the fields almost entirely flooded. Saturnino and his coworkers needed to work. The misfortune of their lives couldn’t afford a day off. They insisted on working because the behaviors of the plantation owners were known to be voyeuristically inconsistent. They were laid off frequently for no real reason, and despite the unsafe circumstances of the field due to exposure to wet powerlines, it would not be the first time the crew worked under these unsafe conditions.

Saturnino was the first worker to enter the field in defiance of the capataz. Shortly after, his body lay dead by electrocution. Work resumed once the waters receded. Others took Saturnino’s place in the field. His name was unimportant to the pineapple company. Then the pineapple economy that once scarred my family and the people of my barrio became insignificant in the capitalist agenda of the United States. When the pineapple economy collapsed, its demise was invisible to the colonizer. The fields were replaced with pharmaceutical companies, roads, funeral homes, and cemeteries.

The land reform projects that began during the New Deal era and that dragged on with the beginning of the new colonial government of the Commonwealth continued to bring more disappointments for years to come. The initial idea of the land reform consisted of la tierra para el que la trabaje^{18, 19}. This political platform was radical in nature. In essence, it represented the Zapatista principles. The new colonial leadership of the Commonwealth, while instrumental in persecuting and imprisoning people of pro-independence ideology, also understood the reasons why Pedro Albizu Campos was successful in gaining the trust of sugar cane workers to lead the strike of 1934²⁰. As the leader of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Albizu Campos dedicated his life to anti-colonialist pro-independence struggle through armed resistance. His success in leading the sugar cane strike, his incendiary rhetoric, and relentless political strategy made him the most dangerous figure against US imperialism in the Caribbean, for which he faced persecution, imprisonment and torture until his death in 1965^{21, 22}. Colonial politicians knew Albizu Campos was right in defining both colonialism and the working conditions of la zafra, slavery^{23, 24}. The colonial government could see the abuses of the sugar cane corporations through their monopolies that dominated the Island. The land reform legislation attempted to break the sugar cane monopolies by redistributing and limiting the amount of land a corporation could possess²⁵. The colonial government knew that if they could not improve the conditions of agricultural workers, squashing the political opposition would be meaningless, an uprising could happen again, regardless.

The colonial government’s land reform initiative failed in its attempts at redistributing the land to make communities more self- sufficient. Nevertheless, it was partially successful in providing small land grants for working families to obtain property. This is how a lot of political loyalties were forged for generations to come. The sugar cane monopolies receded with the shift of the economy from agriculture to manufacturing. Corporations followed one key rule; if they were not controlling and exploiting the land, Puerto Ricans certainly could not either. The effects of this approach can still be felt in the present as Puerto Rico imports up to 85 percent of the food it consumes. With time, colonial governments hid their failure to include a sustainable agricultural plan in their economy by arguing that entertaining such a strategy represented a return to the past. Maintaining a negative perception towards agriculture on the Island was also effectively used for decades later as an axe against the independence movement. Today, Puerto Rico continues to feel the negative effects of capitalism perpetrated by the sugar cane monopolies that dominated the Island during the first fifty years after the United States invasion. United States Congress legislation from the distance has paved the way for the dysfunction of colonialism to continue pushing the Island into a dead end. Presently, the deaths of workers like Saturnino repeat themselves in nurses dying in car accidents while commuting to three jobs that are not enough to sustain a family. The death of Saturnino occurs again in entire communities poisoned by toxic coal ash from highly polluted waste landfills. The death of Saturnino repeats again in generations of people who throughout their lives, worked, retired, and died in poverty because their pensions were taken by vulture hedge funds and the politicians that benefited from these corrupt schemes. Throughout time, the power of capitalism and colonialism under United States rule have proved to be toxic to Puerto Ricans. Those who have obtained power through colonial privilege have become another piece in the game of abuse and corruption. Much of what we thought we gained as people had been lost by the means of a power that insists in controlling our way forward. Solidarity among ourselves is all we have.

Hurricanes and Solidarity

The word hurricane comes from the Taíno word, juracán. To the Taínos, juracán was a god capable of manifesting nature’s deadliest rage. For them, juracán was not specific to a powerful storm with intense winds. Juracán could have displayed its power through a severe drought, or perhaps an earthquake. This word became part of universal language the moment Europeans set foot in the Caribbean due to the high frequency of the storms. Hurricanes influenced the lives of the Taínos, and obviously, still influence the lives of Puerto Ricans and people of the Caribbean today. Hurricanes have the capacity to disrupt the normal routines of life. The destruction that comes with the rage of a hurricane is a rapid introduction to trauma. Psychologically, hurricanes make people aware of the realities they do not want to see or accept, including the deception of colonialism. Nothing can bring the people of the Caribbean to the remarkable collective awareness of endurance, resistance, survival, and solidarity like a hurricane. In fact, a hurricane in 1514 resulted in the first African uprising of the Americas²⁶. Taínos and Africans came together in solidarity to form a new Puerto Rican identity fighting against slavery. A hurricane also initiated the collapse of the government in the summer of 2019.

The Manatí river cuts through my hometown, Barceloneta. The river flows about half a mile from my old family home, where I was un chamaquito²⁷. When I first heard the high-pitch-screeching sound of the river like nails scraping metal, when I heard the snapping of trees being dragged by the stream in the middle of the night, I understood why the Taínos considered a hurricane like a god. After a big storm or a hurricane, my neighborhood and many others would always end up surrounded by water. Many others, under it.

I was about eight years old the first time I walked with my mother, my brother, and my grandmother into town after a storm to shovel mud out of my aunt’s house, followed by her neighbor’s. As I grew up, I repeated this same trip with my family carrying a shovel into town a number of times. After a hurricane or a big storm, actions like this one were very common in my community. One had to help with whatever was needed. Whether the work consisted in cutting tree branches, moving debris to open a road or a neighborhood street, or finding out where water, propane gas canisters, or other basic need items were available, mutual aid work becomes essential for community functioning and survival after a hurricane.

During the last several years, hurricanes and natural disasters alike have become notorious in exposing the corruption of colonialism, debunking false truths about dependency and the inability of communities to provide care for each other through mutual aid. During the aftermath of hurricane María, there were many narratives attempting to dominate the political discourse through the media. The narrative from the government of the United States attempted to minimize the impact of the storm by insisting that the aid provided by federal agencies was excellent. The colonial government tried to articulate that it had the situation under control. Both failed miserably. To this day, the two governments are unable to deal with the truth about the many deaths for which their neglect is responsible.

A narrative of powerlessness, of victimhood towards Puerto Ricans persisted for some time in the media after hurricane María. There is no denying that there was a humanitarian crisis on the Island. Hospitals were shut down. People were dying in them due to absence of treatment and care. Morgues were overflowing. Containers had to be brought in to store the bodies. The public paid for that. In many communities throughout the Island, there was no access to prescription medications, potable water, electricity, food, and other basic necessities. Despite these obstacles, it is undeniable that communities were doing the work of opening roads and making themselves accessible to receive and share aid when available. Both the colonial and federal governments failed in acknowledging the work communities facilitated for them. They continued to present a narrative of isolation and lack of access to justify their idle state.

Through the middle of the aftermath of the hurricane, several mutual aid initiatives emerged in different regions of the Island. These mutual aid efforts, sometimes known as autogestión²⁸, were ignited by many communities that were not in any way connected to the colonial government. All of them emerged organically without following specific political ideologies or theories. Still, their functioning based on collective solidarity while refusing hierarchical power schemes makes these organizations a model for how to decolonize from the root. The undeniable leadership of women, especially mothers and grandmothers, in these movements as agents of cultural change is essential in breaking old paradigms of oppression that mimic colonialist systems dominated by men.

Food and Crisis: The Great Unifiers

Not all mutual aid initiatives emerged as a function of a hurricane. For obvious reasons, however, hurricanes can produce the conditions of a crisis that would push communities to initiate sustainable mutual aid efforts. Food insecurity is probably the first sign of social stress that set communities in motion to provide care for each other in solidarity. The great majority of the mutual aid initiatives that emerged during the aftermath of hurricane María started providing food in impacted and isolated communities. This was the case of the Centro de Apoyo Mutuo in Caguas, Mariana in Humacao, Bucamaronesin Las Marías, and La Olla Común in Río Piedras, among many others. Presently, all these organizations have evolved to diversify the services they provide to their communities. In the case of Caguas, the one project I had the opportunity to visit and support shortly after the hurricane, they started with serving food but moved on to rescue (occupy) a building, and today the project provides with limited shelter: a food bank; a health and wellness center that includes acupuncture; an urban garden; workshops on earthquake preparedness, response, recovery and mitigation; and periodic people’s assemblies, among other services. All other organizations have taken similar approaches involving art, theater, and other forms of progressive education strategies for children. All of the organizations have collaborated with each other in various community events and have embraced all Puerto Rican forms of cultures such as Bomba and Plena as a way of defining a new decolonized identity.

A different kind of crisis birthed a mutual aid-like organization that has become one of the most trusted community agencies in Puerto Rico. Casa Pueblo started in 1980 in the town of Adjuntas as a self-sustaining environmentalist organization. Casa Pueblo was formed to combat an open-sky mining proposal that would have destroyed the entire town of Adjuntas, and parts of Jayuya, Utuado, and other adjacent municipalities. The initiatives of Casa Pueblo brought a sense of unity and community leadership against environmental destruction. Later on, the organization took on the management of the Bosque del Pueblo, the forested area that would have been destroyed by the mining project. Bosque del Pueblo contains one of the remaining ceremonial sites of the Taínos. Casa Pueblo was never known as a mutual aid anarchistic organization, but as an autogestión project, one that evolved to serve the people. Its success provided a blueprint for many of the mutual aid efforts that surfaced after hurricane María.

Despedida

The practice of mutual aid in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean is an ancient tradition. Due to our place in the world as an island with subtropical weather conditions, by default, we are set to live in open communities. Our windows are always open. Everyone can hear what is going on in the neighborhood. There is a constant entra y sale²⁹ of people in communities. There is a constant exchange of goods among neighbors and nearby friends in communities. There is a constant flow of information about what is needed and where it is available in communities. You just put the word out there, and it makes it to where it needs to go.

I see my grandmother Matilde, at 86 years of age, putting mutual aid into practice. She turns the stove on, cooks some guiso³⁰, shares it with who needs it, and whatever she needs, whether it is a ride to a doctor’s appointment, grocery store, or church, will be provided by someone eager to return the favor. It occurs organically, without political ideology or theory – just out of love and solidarity.

I return to the importance of mutual aid being initiated organically, with no political ideology or definition, because Puerto Rico is still finding the path towards its decolonization while it continues to be severely divided by political beliefs. Mutual aid initiatives on the Island have opened the doors of solidarity for communities outside of political ideology. Therefore, there are people of all political spectra, from leftist pro-independence ideology to right wing pro-United States annexationists, to apolitical disenfranchised people actively engaged in mutual aid efforts, or at the very least, receiving and relying on their services. At first glance, these mutual aid efforts do not appear to be direct catalysts of decolonization, but they bring people with opposite ideas together to share a common purpose, to see a reality, one outside of the divisions and falsehoods that colonialism has imposed upon us for more than 500 years.

Coming together as people to initiate efforts that reinforce the sense of dignity and self-determination is an important step towards destroying colonialism. For those who are engaging in mutual aid but still believing in the colonial solutions imposed by our colonizers, they are one step closer to breaking with that illusion. Nevertheless, we are running out of time. The colonialist schemes of the United States government and their colonial politicians on the Island have led us into a dead end where time has been wasted into failure. Mutual aid efforts are strategies that can bring solutions to both short and long-term problems. They can help us to dismantle a dysfunctional government that operates by stealing money from the people and throwing change from the distance without focusing on problem-solving or long-term progress. History demonstrates that the main goal of colonial projects is to benefit the colonizer’s economy. Mutual aid can be effective in helping us to finally walk away from colonial political party loyalties, which have caused the destruction of the Island. Mutual aid can help us finally understand that there will never be a better advocate for the Puerto Rican people than Boricuas themselves. This is what it means to decolonize.

Born in 1976 in Río Piedras, Puerto Rico, Pedro Anglada Cordero is a writer and member of the resistance community in Portland, OR. His writing can be found at Latino Rebels and in A Flash of Dark: An Afro-futurism Anthology.

This essay appears in the current issue of Perspectives on Anarchist Theory, available from the Institute for Anarchist Studies by clicking here.

Acknowledgements:

I dedicate this work to my grandmother, Matilde Rodríguez Pérez who passed away on July 10th, 2020. I would like to express my gratitude and love to her, and my mother, Madeline Cordero, for their lifetime support and family stories that are featured in this article. Thanks to my daughter Simone for all the love and laughter. Lastly, thanks to my wife Susan Anglada Bartley for all the love and camaraderie, the support with childcare and food, and for her criticism and editorial assistance before the submission of this piece. I love you!

Notes

Joserramón Melendes, Desimos Désimas(Río Piedras, P.R.: QeAse, 1994), 29–31.That the stories of the grandma / of “those times of the past”/ are the times here in present / disguised in new clothing. The author developed a writing style based on Puerto Rican phonetics where words are spelled to mimic the Puerto Rican collective voice. The poetry is meant to be sung or read aloud.

James L Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 116–19.
Ibid., 40-52.
Ibid., 200-201.
“Lamento Borincano,” Wikipedia, July 6, 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamento_Borincano.
Nelson A Denis, War against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony(New York: Bold Typed Books, 2015), 63–64, 116–20.
Pedro Aponte Vázquez, Albizu: Su Persecución Por El FBI(San Juan De P.R.: Publicaciones René, 2010), 5–60.
Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development,160–177.
Ibid., 201-206.
10. , 201.
1 Ibid., 191-193.
1 Thomas G Mathews, Puerto Rican Politics and the New Deal(New York: Da Capo Press, 1976), 323.
1 Denis, War against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony, 44-52.
1 Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development, 103-134.
1 Raymond Carr, Puerto Rico: A Colonial Experiment(New York: Random House, 1984), 107–36.
1 A tangled mess.
1 Pedro Aponte Vázquez, Albizu: Su Persecución Por El FBI(San Juan De P.R.: Publicaciones René, 2010), 89–183.
1 The land for those who work it.
1 James L Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 193-201.
2 Nelson A Denis, War against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony(New York: Bold Typed Books, 2015), 109-131.
2 Ibid., 157-261.
2 Pedro Aponte Vázquez, Albizu: Su Persecución Por El FBI(San Juan De P.R.: Publicaciones René, 2010), 5-302.
Denis, War against All Puerto Ricans: Revolution and Terror in America’s Colony, 109-131.
2 Ivonne Acosta, La Palabra Como Delito: Los discursos por los que condenaron a Pedro Albizu Campos 1948-1950, Editorial Cultural, 2000, 9-180. Albizu Campos was sentenced to nearly 54 years in prison for delivering twelve speeches between 1948-1950. The speeches were documented by the police and used as evidence against Albizu. They were maintained sealed for 40 years until their release in 1991 as part of a Lawsuit filed by Pedro Aponte Vázquez. Acosta published the speeches that same year.

2 Dietz, Economic History of Puerto Rico: Institutional Change and Capitalist Development, 193-201.
2 J. Sued Badillo and Angel López Canto, “Puerto Rico Negro,” Editorial Cultural, 1986, 175–185.
2 Youngster.
2 Self-initiative.
2 In and out.
3 Stew.

Most women helped by these charities are in their 20s.
Damir Khabirov/iStock via Getty Images Plus

Gretchen E. Ely, University of Tennessee

Donations to abortion funds are reportedly surging following the leak of a draft U.S. Supreme Court abortion decision that signaled the imminent end of legal abortion in much of the country.

The world has entered an epoch of escalating class struggle and mass popular protest as the global economy teeters on the verge of recession and international tensions reach the boiling point in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Revolt took off around the globe in the aftermath of the 2008 world financial collapse that put an end to two decades of the “globalization boom.” Popular insurgencies have since escalated on the heels of the pandemic and, although particular movements may rise and fall, there is no letup in sight. The first four months of 2022 saw mass labor strikes and unionization drives breaking out in industries and countries around the world.

Meanwhile, civil strife and political conflict are spreading. As inequality increases exponentially and mass hardship and deprivation spread, global capitalism appears to be emerging from the contagion in a dangerous new phase, placing the world in a perilous situation that borders on global civil war.

In the two years leading up to the COVID-19 outbreak, more than 100 major anti-government protests swept the world, in rich and poor countries alike, toppling some 30 governments or leaders and sparking an escalation of state violence against protesters. From Chile to Lebanon, Iraq to India, France to the United States, Haiti to Nigeria, and South Africa to Colombia, mass popular struggles appeared in some instances to be acquiring an anti-capitalist character (although others were driven by right-wing sentiments). Anti-capitalist struggles brought together students, workers and often migrant workers, farmers, Indigenous communities, anti-racists, prisoners and activists against mass incarceration, democracy and anti-corruption activists, those struggling for autonomy or independence, anti-austerity campaigners, environmental advocates, and so on.

However, the “global spring” of 2017-2019 was but a peak moment in the popular insurgencies that spread in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse — a veritable tsunami of proletarian rebellion not seen in decades. The mass uprisings that followed the Great Recession, among them Occupy Wall Street (which started in the U.S. and sparked similar movements in dozens of countries), the Arab Spring, and the Greek workers movement, captured the worldwide popular imagination. Some of these struggles suffered setbacks and defeat. Still, the global revolt ebbed and flowed throughout the 2010s but did not die down, and a fresh wave broke out in 2017.

The pandemic lockdown pushed protesters off the streets in early 2020. But the lull was momentary: Within weeks of the lockdown, protesters were out in force again despite the quarantine and the dangers of public congregation. Alongside these mobilizations, protests against the police murder of George Floyd in May 2020 sparked an anti-racist uprising that brought upwards to 25 million mostly young people into the streets of hundreds of cities across the country, the single largest mass protest in U.S. history. Many Black Lives Matter protesters called for the defunding of police departments — and for investment in a broad range of social services and supports. This call for expanding a social safety net posed a direct challenge to neoliberal capitalism, which funnels state dollars out of working class communities and social welfare programs and into policing, “defense,” and corporate welfare. Moreover, the BLM protests spurred solidarity actions throughout the world as 2020 wore on.

The Pew Research Center has been conducting ongoing polls in the U.S. on views toward capitalism and socialism (although, of course, what people understand to be capitalism and socialism is not clear). According to its 2019 poll, a full 42 percent of U.S. respondents had a favorable view of socialism, although the Pew poll did not break down responses by age groups. But a 2018 Gallup poll found that 51 percent of those aged 18-29 had a favorable view of socialism. Seen in historical context, another Gallup poll found that support for socialism stood at 25 percent in 1942 among the U.S. population overall whereas this increased to 43 percent in 2019.

Revealingly, yet another poll found that support for socialism in the U.S. jumped by nearly 10 percent among young people in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic. This poll found that a full 60 percent of millennials and 57 percent of Generation Z supported a “complete change of our economic system away from capitalism.” Worldwide, a 2020 poll found that a majority of people around the world (56 percent) believe capitalism is doing more harm than good. On a national level, according to the poll, lack of trust in capitalism was highest in Thailand and India (75 percent and 74 percent, respectively), with France close behind (69 percent). Majorities rejected capitalism in many Asian, European, Gulf, African, and Latin American countries. In fact, only in Australia, Canada, the U.S., South Korea, Hong Kong and Japan did majorities disagree with the assertion that capitalism currently did more harm than good.

Masses expressed this anti-capitalist sentiment in an escalation of protest during the pandemic itself. A palpable radicalization appeared to take place among workers and the poor, a heightened sense of solidarity within and across borders that intensified during the pandemic. In the U.S., for instance, no less than 1,000 strikes ripped across the country in the first six months of the contagion. Workers mounted protests to demand their safety. Meanwhile tenants called for rent strikes; immigrant justice activists surrounded detention centers; anti-incarceration organizers demanded the release of prisoners; auto, fast-food and meat processing workers went out on wildcat stoppages to force factories to shut down; homeless people occupied empty houses; and health care workers on the front lines demanded the personal protective equipment they needed to do their jobs and stay safe. For the most part wildcat strikes were organized not by union leadership but from the rank and file.

COVID-19 was thus the lightning bolt before the thunder. “Just a few weeks after lockdowns were widely imposed, protests began to reemerge,” noted the Carnegie Endowment. “Already in April [2020], the number of new protests rose to a high level; approximately one new significant anti-government protest every four days.” And there was no letup to mass protest in 2021, fueled, in the words of the Endowment, by an increasingly authoritarian political landscape and “rising economic insecurity” that “brought public frustration of the boiling point.” It added that many countries that did not previously appear in the tracker registered protests that year. Then, as the global class struggle heated up, the first four months of 2022 saw mass labor strikes breaking out in industries and countries around the world.

Devastating Effects of Capitalist Globalization

In all of their diversity, many of these fights had — and have — a common underlying denominator: an aggressive global capitalism in crisis that is pushing to expand on the backs of working masses who can tolerate no more hardship and deprivation. Capitalist states face spiraling crises of legitimacy after decades of hardship and social decay wrought by neoliberalism, aggravated by these states’ inability to manage the COVID contagion and the economic free-fall it triggered. The extent of polarization of wealth and power, of deprivation and misery among the world’s poor majority, already defied belief prior to the outbreak. In 2018, just 17 global financial conglomerates collectively managed $41.1 trillion dollars, more than half the gross domestic product of the entire planet. That same year, the richest 1 percent of humanity led by 36 million millionaires and 2,400 billionaires controlled more than half of the world’s wealth while the bottom 80 percent — nearly 6 billion people — had to make do with just 5 percent of this wealth.

Worldwide, 50 percent of all people live on less than $2.50 a day and a full 80 percent live on less than $10 per day. One in three people on the planet suffer from some form of malnutrition, nearly a billion go to bed hungry each night and another 2 billion suffer from food insecurity. Refugees from war, the climate crisis, political repression and economic collapse already number in the hundreds of millions as the social fabric is torn apart and whole communities collapse in peripheral areas. The pandemic followed by the repercussions from the Russian invasion of Ukraine have heightened these conditions even further.

The international development agency Oxfam reported this past January that during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic the 10 richest men in the world more than doubled their fortunes, from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion, while 99 percent of humanity saw a fall in their income and 160 million more people fell into poverty. The World Food Program (WFP) reported in May that “the outlook for global acute food insecurity in 2022 is expected to deteriorate further relative to 2021,” a year which, according to the WFP, “surpassed all previous records.” The war in Ukraine “is likely to exacerbate the already severe 2022 acute food insecurity forecasts, given the repercussions of the war on global food, energy and fertilizer prices and supplies.”

Hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people, have been displaced from countrysides in the Global South in recent decades by neoliberal policies, social cleansing and organized violence such the “war on drugs” and the “war on terror,” both of which have served as instruments of mass displacement and for the violent restructuring and integration of countries and regions into the new global economy. Those displaced stream into the megacities of the world that have become ground zero for mass protests.

The International Labour Office reported that 1.53 billion workers around the world were in “vulnerable” employment arrangements in 2009, representing more than 50 percent of the global workforce, and that in 2018 a majority of the 3.5 billion workers in the world “experienced a lack of material well-being, economic security, equality opportunities or scope for human development.”

As digitalization now drives a new round of worldwide restructuring it promises to extend the precariatization of workers who have employment and also to expand the ranks of humanity excluded from the labor market, while the climate crisis will generate water and food shortages, displace hundreds of millions more, and increase exposure to natural disasters.

This social crisis is explosive. It fuels mass protest by the oppressed and leads the ruling groups to deploy an ever more omnipresent global police state to contain the rebellion of the global working and popular classes. As the global civil war heats up in the post-pandemic world, the social fabric is coming undone. The crisis generates enormous political tensions that must be managed by the ruling groups in the face of societal disintegration and political collapse in many countries. It animates geopolitical conflict as states seek to externalize social and political tensions and accelerates the breakdown of the post-World War II international order, increasing the danger of international military conflagration (witness the Ukraine conflict).

Pandemic Repression and Global Police State

COVID-19 was in certain respects a blessing in disguise for the ruling class. The contagion forced protesters off the streets momentarily and gave capitalist states a respite with which to gather their repressive forces and deploy them against restive populations. The wave of repression and brutality unleashed by these states against their own citizens simply cannot be explained by the need for these states to keep them safe. To the contrary, the pandemic provided an expedient smokescreen with which to push back against the global revolt.

The case of India is revealing. Up to 150 million workers went on strike in January 2019. This was followed later that year by months of protest against proposed changes to a citizenship law that would discriminate against Muslims and by a second general strike in 2020 that brought out 250 million workers and farmers — the single largest labor mobilization in world history. The pandemic curfew imposed by the government conveniently undercut the civic uprising. When the government began to impose strict local lockdowns as the virus spread, it singled out neighborhoods identified with the protests. In these areas, heavy police barricades locked in residents for weeks. The government also forced tens of millions of striking migrant workers to march to their home villages for lockdown there, enduring on the way pitiless state repression, involving extreme dehumanization, deaths in custody, and mass arrests (all this while Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, increased his wealth by $12 million per hour during the pandemic).

In the United States, a wave of worker mobilizations that spread even before the COVID-19 contagion, led by a number of mass teachers strikes in 2018 and 2019, exploded during the pandemic, thanks to dismal working and unsafe working conditions in schools amid the pandemic.

The monumental 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings were met with particularly brutal state repression. Fearful of losing control, the ruling groups left no holds barred in unleashing the state’s repressive apparatus against the largely peaceful protesters, leaving at least 14 dead, hundreds of wounded and some 10,000 arrested. (I myself participated in the protests in my city of residence, Los Angeles, where I witnessed the use by militarized police and national guard units of tear gas, stun grenades, taser guns, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and batons against protesters.)

Governments around the world centralized the response to the pandemic and many declared states of emergencies, in effect, imposing what some called “medical martial law.” Such centralized coordination may have been necessary to confront the health crisis. But centralization of emergency powers in authoritarian capitalist states was used to deploy police and military forces, to censure any criticism of governments, to contain discontent, heighten surveillance and impose repressive social control — that is, to push forward the global police state. In country after country, emergency powers were used to selectively ban protests on the grounds that they spread COVID-19, harass dissidents, censor journalists and scapegoat minority groups. At least 158 governments imposed restrictions on demonstrations.

In many countries, governments required citizens to carry documents verifying their “right” to be out of their homes during the lockdown. The idea seems to have been merely to get populations accustomed to producing papers on demand, to ask permission to exist in public space. In the Philippines, strongman President Rodrigo Duterte issued shoot-to-kill orders for anyone defying the stay-at-home lockdown, while his government stepped up its campaign of extra-judicial killing of thousands of supposed criminals. In Latin America, charged Amnesty International, governments turned to arbitrary, punitive and repressive tactics to enforce compliance with quarantine measures and clamp down on popular protest. “Added to the structural challenges and massive social and economic divides present prior to the pandemic, these measures only combine to perpetuate inequality and discrimination across the continent.” Such repression was widespread around the world. As I detail in my new book, Global Civil War: Capitalism-Post Pandemic, in country after country the pandemic provided capitalist states with a convenient pretext to crack down on the global revolt, tighten systems of mass surveillance and social control, and pass emergency legislation that gave them sweeping powers to repress the protest movements that had reached a crescendo on the eve of the outbreak.

While a major government response may have been necessary from a public health point of view, it became clear that the “new normal” as the world emerged from the pandemic would involve a more extensive global police state, including permanent mass surveillance and a new biopolitical regime in which states could use “public health” as a new pretext for keeping a lid on the global revolt. States used what international relations scholar Kees van der Pijl referred to as a “bio-political emergency” to further normalize and institutionalize state surveillance and repressive control in a way reminiscent of the aftermath of the 2001 attacks. In the wake of those attacks, 140 countries passed draconian “anti-terrorist” security legislation that often made legal the repression of social movements and political dissent. The laws remained in place long after the 2001 events.

Political Violence Pandemics

A recent report by Lloyd’s of London, a global insurance and financial conglomerate, warned that “instances of political violence contagion are becoming more frequent” and headed towards what it terms “PV [political violence] pandemics.” It identified so-called “super-strains” of political violence. Among what Lloyd’s deems as these super-strains are “anti-imperialist” “independence movements,” social movements calling for the removal of an “occupying force,” “mass pro-reform protests against national government[s],” and “armed insurrection” inspired by “Marxism” and “Islamism.”

State responses to this “political violence” are big business. According to a 2016 report, Global Riot Control System Market, 2016–2020, which was prepared by a global business intelligence firm whose clients include Fortune 500 companies, in the next few years there will be a multi-billion-dollar boom in the worldwide market for “riot control systems.” The report forecast “a dramatic rise in civil unrest around the world.”

Historically, labor militancy and mass protest unfold in waves, calibrated to capitalist expansion and crises, wars and major political changes. The ruling groups managed to beat back the last major cycle of worldwide mobilization from below, in the 1960s and early 1970s, through capitalist globalization and the neoliberal counterrevolution. But this time circumstances are different. Global capitalism is reaching limits to its expansion, given the ecological meltdown and the escalating threat of nuclear confrontation. The crisis is unprecedented and also existential. In addition, the global economy and society are more integrated and interdependent than ever, and global communications connect communities in resistance with one another across borders and on a planetary scale.

Short of overthrowing the system, the only way out of the social crisis for the mass of humanity is a reversal of escalating inequalities through a radical redistribution of wealth and power downward and through drastic environmental measures. The challenge for emancipatory struggles is how to translate mass revolt into a project that can challenge the power of global capital and bring about such a radical redistribution. To date, the global revolt has spread unevenly and faces many challenges, including fragmentation, absorption by capitalist culture, and for the most part the lack of coherent left ideology and a vision of a transformative project beyond immediate demands. To effectively fight back, disjointed movements must find ways to come together into a larger emancipatory project, and develop creative strategies to push such a project forward.

Under the slogan “Build the Workers Assembly Movement! Organize the South!,” nearly 80 workers from eight Southern states gathered in Durham, North Carolina for a Southern Workers Assembly Organizing School over the weekend of April 29 – May 1. Workers came to the school from Atlanta, New Orleans, Charleston, Tidewater Virginia, Richmond, Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Asheville, Eastern North Carolina, northern Kentucky, and elsewhere. Over the last year, the network of areas building workers assemblies across the South has grown substantially to include nine different cities, the development of several industry based councils – including Amazon, healthcare, and education workers – . . .

The post Southern Workers Gather to Build Workers Assembly Movement appeared first on Hood Communist.

My thoughts on the relevance of Trotskyist ideas to DSA By Sean Case A specter is haunting the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) — the specter of Trotskyism. Accusations of entryism and sectarianism are simmering. Talk of a dreaded split …

The post “What the Heck is Trotskyism, Anyway?” first appeared on Reform & Revolution.

Under finance capitalism, we can exert power by collectively leveraging not just our labor but also our debts. This May Day, let’s think about worker organizing and debtor organizing as part of the same struggle.

Debt Collective activists demonstrate in Washington, DC, on April 4, 2022. (Debt Collective)

On April 5, the Biden administration announced a fourth payment pause extension on federally held student debt. Like the historic Amazon Labor Union victory a few days prior, that payment pause extension was the result of hard organizing — in this case, not by a labor union but by the Debt Collective, the nation’s first debtors’ union, and our allies.

Student debt payments were set to resume today, May Day. Debtors’ union organizing not only extended the pause; it also brought us closer than we’ve ever been to full student debt abolition. In mid-April, White House press secretary Jen Psaki announced publicly that Joe Biden will either extend the pause again or announce cancellation. And just last week, Biden told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus that “he’s looking at different options to forgive most, if not all, student debt for those with federally-backed loans.”

April’s victories in worker organizing and debtor organizing alike are historic — and their proximity in time is not a coincidence. It’s evidence of a slow but unmistakable resurgence of multiracial working-class collective power.

What is the potential of worker organizing and debtor organizing in the age of finance capitalism? Debtors’ unions maintain that our leverage is both in the workplace, where we can withdraw our labor, and in credit and debt relations, where we can withdraw our debt payments. Under finance capitalism, poor, working-, and middle-class families are increasingly forced to debt finance everything from medical care to higher education, housing, and even their own incarceration. In this climate, our debts leveraged collectively become a form of power, just like our labor.

This May Day, let’s think about worker organizing and debtor organizing as part of the same struggle.

Beyond the Debt-Labor Analogy

At base, the provocation of a labor union is that, as individuals, workers are at the mercy of their bosses, but together they can exercise power over their workplace — and, in a social justice union model, far beyond that. The provocation of a debtors’ union is analogous. As individuals, debtors are at the mercy of their creditors (banks, landlords, the government, hospitals, insurers, courts, bail companies), but together we can exercise power over the creditor class.

Our leverage is both in the workplace, where we can withdraw our labor, and in credit and debt relations, where we can withdraw our debt payments.

The two modes of organizing have different targets but complementary aims. Where labor unions focus on sites of production, debtors’ unions focus on circulation, or how money flows and to whom. Labor organizing targets the employer, demanding higher wages, benefits, and more. Debtor organizing targets the creditor (which, in the era of neoliberalism, is also often the state). It fights against predatory financial contracts and uses debt as leverage in the fight for the provision of reparative public goods, including health care, education, housing, and retirement, so that people don’t have to go into debt to access them.

Who better than medical debtors, student debtors, tenants, or carceral debtors to exercise collective leverage over the systems that exploit them — and to use that power to demand health care for all, housing for all, education for all, and incarceration for none?

Under finance capitalism, debt has replaced wages as a form of social provision. Therefore, workers and debtors (who are often the same people) must work together to exercise our leverage in concert, in no small part because debts are wages of the future.

One need only look at how people spent their pandemic stimulus checks to see the intimate relationship between debt and wages or other forms of income. The New York Fed reported that US households spent an average of one entire stimulus payment paying down debt. Households making less than $40,000 annually used 44 percent of the checks to pay down debt, compared to just 32 percent for households making over $75,000.

Universal basic income (UBI) programs run the same risks of merely serving as debt-repayment programs. Debts for everything from education to incarceration disproportionately impact poor people of color; as a result, UBI money would likely pass through the fingers of lower-income people of color and, in the case of carceral debts, “into the coffers of jurisdictions most aggressively criminalizing poverty.” In other words, without debtors’ unions, what gets offered as “relief” for the working class just becomes a gift to the creditor class.

Similarly, unless we change how we provision our basic needs, any broad victories won by a rising labor movement (a $20 federal minimum wage, for example) will result in more money trickling up into the hands of the creditor class instead of a better standard of living for workers. If housing remains horrifically expensive, if adequate medical care remains out of reach for most without incurring deep debts, and if even public college demands skyrocketing tuition and fees, then increased wages will simply mean increased capacity for debt repayment.

Without debtors’ unions, what gets offered as ‘relief’ for the working class just becomes a gift to the creditor class.

So while labor unions are using their leverage to fight for imperative minimum wage increases, debtors’ unions must use their leverage at the same time to fight for publicly funded housing, health care, and education.

The Company Store

There is a final, structural connection between workers and debtors. Financialization has not only been a public policy shift — in which services once provided or subsidized publicly through the social safety net (even as its benefits, often withheld from or inaccessible to marginalized people, were never truly universal) were transformed into private contracts and individual obligations — but also a shift in corporate practices. If workers once shared factory floors while debtors shared creditors, today the corporation is often both factory floor and bank — both an industrial and financial entity at once.

For instance, every time I’m at Target the cashier asks me if I want to sign up for a Target credit card. In fact, cashiers are required to try to sell customers company cards at often exploitative rates. The Gap has a 21.7 percent starting interest rate on its credit cards, and $27 to $37 late payment fees for debtors who fall behind on payments.

Target and the Gap are not alone among retailers. Macy’s raked in $771 million worth of credit card revenue in 2019, accounting for more than half of the company’s operating income. The company’s profit model is twofold: both conventional retail, in which Macy’s workers sell clothing at a profit that accrues to the store’s owners, and financialized, in which Macy’s workers sell credit to consumers at a profit that accrues both to Macy’s owners and to the banks that issue the cards on Macy’s behalf.

Even in the archetypal industrial capitalist firm, the car manufacturer, we see this same shift toward financialization. General Motors’ financial services arm, the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (GMAC), was involved in everything from financing customers’ new and used vehicles to loaning money to their own dealerships and to the mortgage market. Strapped for cash during the mid-2000s downturn, General Motors sold GMAC to a private equity firm in 2006, and still couldn’t avoid bankruptcy in 2008. But this has not deterred the company from betting again on the financialized business model, buying up AmeriCredit (renamed GM Financial) in 2010. In 2021, GM Financial’s net income surged 89 percent, to $3.8 billion.

Many firms today are making money by both lending money and producing commodities. As a result, labor unions have less power over the means of production than they did before, since much of their bosses’ profits come from credit, not production. But when workers’ unions and debtors’ unions organize in concert, then financialization becomes a new source of leverage for the working class.

Today the corporation is often both factory floor and bank — both an industrial and financial entity at once.

For example, in 2019, we saw a nationwide GM strike across fifty sites, concentrated in Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. Workers won some demands and lost others. Now imagine if all GM debtors — those who had financed their new and used vehicles through GM — were in a debtors’ union and could withhold their auto loan payments in solidarity with workers’ demands. This would exercise far more material leverage over the corporation, and make workers’ demands that much harder to ignore. Finance would no longer be a secondary profit stream over which workers had no power.

And this brings us back to Amazon. As we support Amazon workers in their struggle to unionize warehouses, let’s also remember that Amazon offers not one but four distinct credit cards. Credit extended to Amazon Prime customers alone, via JPMorgan Chase, totals roughly $20 billion. These kinds of credit card deals between major brands and major banks are “some of the most hotly contested contracts in the financial world . . . because they instantly give the issuing bank a captive audience of millions of loyal customers who spend billions of dollars a year.”

Now imagine if those “loyal customers” were unionized. Not only could they renegotiate the terms of their own credit contracts, or use their debts as collective leverage to push Amazon in all kinds of directions, but they could also use their leverage to support the demands of unionizing workers. Down the line, this powerhouse combination could even leave the company vulnerable to a worker-debtor takeover.

And that — the socialization of Amazon — is a worthy horizon for workers and debtors to imagine and organize toward this May Day.

Andreas Malm’s book How to Blow Up a Pipeline, with its call for the environmental movement to start sabotaging fossil fuel infrastructure to save our planet, has sparked a vibrant discussion on the left about direct action tactics and eco-sabotage to address the climate crisis.

Verso has put together a free, downloadable ebook of essays, Property Will Cost Us the Earth, from activists and writers around the world grappling with the idea of direct action and eco-sabotage, survey climate activism around the world, and argue for the necessity of building a fighting global movement against capitalism and its fossil fuel regime.

Moving from Mozambique, the Niger Delta, and the coal mines of India to the forests of Ecuador and the watersheds of North America, Property Will Cost Us the Earth details the global scale of climate devastation as well as active struggles around the world to halt further extraction. From this come tactical and strategic questions: how can local direct actions relate to political work forcing states to end reliance on oil, coal, and gas? What kind of protest movement can we build that reflects the urgency of our moment? What does a direct action–based movement require from those on the frontlines of struggle?

With contributions from: Alyssa Battistoni, James Butler, João Camargo, Jen Deerinwater, Ben Ehrenreich, Madeline ffitch, Frente Nacional Anti-Minero (Ecuador), Bue Rübner Hansen, Siihasin Hope, Tara Houska, Jessie Kindig, Benjamin Kunkel, Anabela Lemos and Erika Mendes from Justiça Ambiental! (Mozambique), Andreas Malm, M.O.T.H. Collective, Vanessa Nakate and Amy Goodman, Brototi Roy, Andrea Sempértegui, Richard Seymour, and Adam Tooze.

Madeline ffitch’s new essay, “A Frontline Response to Andreas Malm,” is reprinted below.

By the time I read How to Blow Up a Pipeline, I had already seen its neon cover around, the unmistakable title plastered across the front in large block print. I had seen activists reading it, but not the activists I’d expected. These were well-heeled and buttoned-up types, people from environmental nonprofits, people I would associate with a permitted rally rather than an act of eco-sabotage. When I showed the book to one of my movement elders, a far less well-heeled person, they grimaced. “Who the hell comes up with a title like that?” they asked. “Does he think this is a game?” This movement elder, known for being grumpy and speaking plainly, is a decades-long veteran of direct-action eco-defense, a walking repository of tactical knowledge and movement history. They’re also an old Earth First!er. I’m a slightly younger one.

In his sensationally titled book, Andreas Malm tells us that between 1973 and 2010, Earth First!, the Earth Liberation Front, the Animal Liberation Front, and related groups pulled off 27,100 separate acts of direct action and sabotage. These would seem to be laudable examples in service of Malm’s central proposal, which is that climate activists must be willing to escalate tactics and consider property destruction. Yet Malm includes these actions only in order to disqualify them. “All those thousands of monkeywrenching actions,” he writes, “achieved little if anything and had no lasting gains to show for them. They were not performed in dynamic relation to a mass movement, but largely in a void.” Malm goes on to say that these actions “petered out just as the climate movement came into its own.”

Malm gets a lot right in his slim neon polemic, but when he dismisses existing traditions of militant eco-defense, he undermines his own good ideas. Direct action is not made relevant by its link to mass movements. It is the other way around. The more out of touch the climate movement is from what is happening on the frontlines, the more irrelevant it becomes. The frontline might sound to some like revolutionary jargon, but it’s simply another name for the often rural and sparsely populated places where people must defend their homes and lifeways from being sacrificed to industrialization. Here, theory is put into practice. There is real work to do—dishes, chopping wood, hauling water, physically stopping a pipeline from being built—and this means that the abstractions that bog down mass movement participation (ideological pacifism, climate fatalism) are less likely to gain a foothold. If the climate movement is looking for direction, as Malm claims, it would do well to pay attention to the tactics and strategies of those who defend the land and water far away from major centers of commerce and policy, often with only a handful of people and by whatever means necessary. In comparison to mass movement maundering, the ethical and strategic clarity on the frontlines is bracingly refreshing.

Malm bases his dismissal of monkeywrenching on his able take-down of Deep Green Resistance (DGR), a nasty little clique whose trans-exclusionary and bizarre authoritarian principles have made them a pariah of nearly all serious organizing, militant or non. Malm actually gives them more page space than they deserve, since they mostly exist on the internet or in the self-regarding books they always seem to be promoting. To conflate DGR’s apocalyptic cosplay with Earth First! and similar shoestring models of direct action is to misunderstand the history, function and possibilities of frontline eco-defense. Sure, some people choose to fight in small or decentralized groups because they have a vanguardist fantasy with an unsavory dose of dehumanizing supremacy ideology. But far more people, especially those who are rural and land-based, take action with only a few people because that is what is practical and, dare I say, strategic. One Earth First!er I spoke to put it this way: “What we can accomplish with 30 people and fifty bucks, the mass movement drags 5,000 people to and most of the time can’t accomplish it anyway. They overthink it and decide that it would be better and less alienating to just take a photo or have a concert or something, maybe a gentle mass trespass, leave when asked and go home. We shut shit down. We stop the destruction. And by doing that, we’re building relationships and power in small communities where people are fighting for their lives.”

In fact, many of us live in the remote areas where the pipelines or pump stations or power plants are actually being built. Because of this, we know that the fight to stop them cannot wait. We will not wait for NGO support, grant funding or photo opportunities. We will not wait for porta-johns, a PA system or a celebrity speaker. We will not wait for the climate movement. We will fight now with the people and resources at hand.

Earth First!’s current iteration was born out of the forcible confrontation of fascist tendencies within its ranks during the 1980s (yes, it’s true, we anarchists and queers took Earth First! away from Ed Abbey and we’re not giving it back). The fact that Earth First!, with its checkered past, now emphasizes its rejection of fascism, racism and colonialism is as significant as it is aspirational, imperfect and ongoing. This is another area where the mainstream climate movement might take note. The white supremacist roots of Western environmentalism are well documented. Environmental groups, particularly if they are white dominant, must make their anti-racist and anti-fascist stances clear or be left behind. Earth First! as it exists today is not an organization. It’s more like a direct-action solidarity network and an embodied compendium of generational tactical skills. As my friends like to say, there is no Earth First!, there are only Earth First!ers. And most Earth First!ers spend their time supporting frontline resistance.

A crucial lesson Earth First! has learned is that if we really want to “stand for what we stand on,” as our slogan goes, we must act in practical solidarity with people who belong to the land. From the Wet’suwet’en blockade against Coastal GasLink to the fight against Enbridge Line 3 on Anishinaabe territory, from Standing Rock to Oak Flat and Thacker Pass, from Bayou Bridge to the O’odham and Kumeyaay campaign against the border wall, Indigenous people are inventing and sustaining the most potent direct action against industrial infrastructure. Earth First! has long embraced the slogan No Compromise, but fighting alongside Native land defenders has deepened my understanding of this concept.

Malm casts decentralized direct action as fatalistic. I will readily admit that we do not fight with the strategic arrogance of the mass movement, where hubristic road maps to victory are a dime a dozen, from the XR handbook to the punditry of Bill McKibben. It is true that on the frontlines, we act in the full understanding that we cannot know the outcome, that there are no guarantees, and that our determination to resist is not governed by the likelihood of success. The “success condition,” as Malm would agree, rings even uglier when Indigenous resistance is setting the tone, representing a 500-year tradition of disregarding the odds. I asked one Indigenous frontliner why they continue to fight pipelines even when we lose more often than we win. They answered my question with a question. “What does losing mean?” they asked. “Is it failing to stop the pipeline? Or is it failing to fight back with everything we’ve got? If the consequences of losing are unacceptable, then fighting is your only option. I’m here because my ancestors fought back. Did they win? If they’d won, then the US wouldn’t be here. But if they hadn’t fought back then, I wouldn’t be here and neither would my children. As Indigenous people, we have that same responsibility to the land. We are the land. There is no option of not fighting back.” You will find no fatalism here. What you will find is humility, bravery and realism. This is another reason why it makes sense for the climate movement to take its cues from the frontlines.

It’s also a misrepresentation to suggest that the militant eco-defenders of the past did not operate in “dynamic relation to a mass movement, but largely in a void.” Earth First!ers like Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney were famous for building solidarity with the labor movement. Tree sitters in the early 2000s held off timber companies until the legal injunctions filed by more mainstream environmental groups could stick. One Native organizer reminisced about his grandmothers from the Warm Springs reservation in Oregon who organized with Earth First!ers to defend their territory from logging in the 1980s. I could go on. There have always been alliances and collaborations.

It wasn’t climate fatalism that marginalized militant eco-defense in North America, and it wasn’t that there was no connection to movement organizing. So what happened? Why were there nearly thirty thousand instances of militant direct action during the ’80s, ’90s and the early part of the twenty-first century, and why did they then, as Malm says, peter out?

The answer is, of course, that they didn’t. What actually happened was an era of industry-sponsored, state-enforced backlash against environmental activists in North America. September 11, 2001, turned nationalistic paranoia mainstream. The Department of Homeland Security was created. Surveillance and crackdowns on all manner of dissent increased exponentially. Eco-defenders experienced waves of arrests, accusations of terrorism, steep charges, COINTELPRO-style infiltration, lengthy prison terms, suicides and deaths. Many activist networks and communities were scattered and destroyed. We are still recovering. What Malm calls petering out, we call the Green Scare.

During the Green Scare, Earth First!, which mostly engages in public direct actions such as tree sits, equipment lockdowns and rural blockades, refused to denounce sabotage and supported activists swept up in the raids. In contrast, mainstream environmental groups disavowed property destruction and in many cases any form of confrontational action. They did not defend or support targeted activists, but publicly rejected them in order to maintain an image of civility and to prioritize negotiating relationships with power brokers. Ethically, this was bankrupt. Strategically, it was disastrous. The mainstream movement’s willingness to compromise and make deals with politicians and industry while abandoning escalatory eco-defenders has done nothing to decelerate the warming of the planet. In fact, if I may repurpose Malm’s words, it has achieved little if anything and has had no lasting gains to show for it.

All of this leads me back to my movement elder, the grumpy one. Why would they be so down on Malm’s book, which they hadn’t even read? They are not a pacifist. They are not an acolyte of the XR handbook. They are like me, a direct-action land defender, someone who might wholeheartedly agree with most of Malm’s central suggestions. They were reacting to Malm’s title, to the design, to the byline on the inside flap where Malm’s publisher claims that he is a “saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines.” My movement elder is someone with scars. They have learned to be suspicious when it seems that someone is approaching the prospect of sabotage in a boastful, cavalier or rhetorical manner. This, too, should point the climate movement in the direction of the frontlines, because this should be understood: the Green Scare has not broken us, but it has changed us. We have had to learn how to exercise what we call “security culture,” a set of practices to outwit surveillance. If we know people who say they want to slash SUV tires or sabotage coal mines, we remind them not to talk to us, or anyone else, about it. We don’t talk to the police, let alone thank them. We continue to support our friends and loved ones in prison. We seek ways to outmaneuver state repression and to outwit industry. We take care of each other and build on what we’ve learned.

Malm’s failure to even mention the Green Scare, let alone examine it, confounds me. Frankly, it makes it difficult to evaluate his seriousness. To highlight hard-won lessons that already exist would signal that Malm believes in his own proposal, rather than simply launching a neon-colored provocation. There is something just a bit convenient about introducing pearl-clutching liberals to the idea that nonviolence might not be the panacea they believe it to be (a revelation most frontliners had a long time ago) while at the same time skimming over the deeper discussion about grand juries, infiltration, prisoner support and security precautions. Yet the perspective of battle-weary land defenders is vital if Malm’s book is to be taken as something more than sensationalism. Recently, the counterinsurgency tactics and brutality documented against frontliners fighting Enbridge Line 3, Water Protectors at Standing Rock, and Appalachians fighting the Mountain Valley Pipeline in West Virginia have been characterized as “the new Green Scare.” When climate scholars propose sabotage, seeking generational movement perspective is not only respectful, it’s necessary.

Malm’s book illustrates convincingly how everyone from letter writers to saboteurs contribute to effective resistance. Time is of the essence, he reminds us, and none of us have the luxury of ideological or tactical purity. I don’t mean to polarize or attack (no, not even Bill McKibben) but to invite and to challenge. Here is my challenge: If the climate movement lacks a strategic compass, it can find that compass on the frontlines. What if the mass climate movement was focused on supporting frontline direct action? Not advising frontline struggles, not evaluating them, not launching snide critiques, not delivering lectures on civility and proper messaging, not handing down smug analysis about what works and what doesn’t. I mean real support. Throwing out their handbooks. Refusing to denounce militant tactics. Asking frontline campaigns what they need instead of telling them what they should do. Funneling resources, amplifying actions, asking blockaders to share our ideas instead of telling us to be nice. Allowing the movement to be transformed by the urgency of the moment and the bravery of the people we are honored to fight beside.

“At what point do we escalate?” Malm asks. “When do we conclude that the time has come to also try something different? When do we start physically attacking the things that consume our planet and destroy them with our own hands? Is there a good reason we have waited this long?” Malm asks these questions in order to urge the climate movement to escalate their tactics. At the same time, he bets against himself by giving short shrift to direct action traditions that already exist. To answer Malm’s questions sincerely, the climate movement must look to the frontlines for guidance and must grapple with its ongoing failure to support militant resistance. The climate movement’s strategy of abandoning its staunchest fighters in favor of the optics of respectability has failed.

After I talked to my movement elder, I thought again about the people I’d seen reading Malm’s book, and suddenly it began to make sense. They were indeed people more accustomed to rallies and marches, letter-writing campaigns and street theater outside the White House, people who might be used to thanking the police. This is by design. Malm is, in fact, not talking to my grumpy mentor, to those already escalating tactics, to those who have tried it, to those who have paid the price. His audience is the mainstream environmental movement, people who have never considered sabotage, or direct action, people who are outright against it. For such an audience, Malm’s book is an important intervention. But I also hope that his audience will understand that the climate movement should not act in a void, and that in order to achieve lasting gains, it must act in dynamic relation to frontline direct action. There they will find communities who uplift a diversity of tactics; act with ingenuity and humility; make systems to protect each other from repression; support escalating action with clarity, spontaneity and integrity; and most importantly, have the fortitude to face the aftermath together.

While the land relationships that dominate this society have implications for every relation in society, the recent crisis of gentrification and forced removal in low income Black communities, along with the volatile boom-bust real estate cycles, has made the struggle for adequate housing the most pronounced battleground in an increasingly intense war over the vision for the future of how we relate, prioritize and manage access to land. . . .

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