Know Your Rights!

In sum: Do not talk to law enforcement! Not at your house, at the protest, never. The only thing you should ever say to pigs is “I am going to remain silent. I want a lawyer. I do not consent to a search. Am I free to go?”

Scenario: I was stopped by the police while protesting Your rights:

• Stay calm. Make sure to keep your hands visible. Don’t argue, resist, or obstruct the police, even if you believe they are violating your rights. Point out that you are not disrupting anyone else’s activity and that the First Amendment protects your actions.

• Ask if you are free to leave. If the officer says yes, calmly walk away.

• If you are under arrest, you have a right to ask why. Otherwise, say you wish to remain silent and ask for a lawyer immediately. Don’t say anything or sign anything without a lawyer.

• You have the right to make a local phone call, and if you’re calling your lawyer, police are not allowed to listen.

• You never have to consent to a search of yourself or your belongings. If you do explicitly consent, it can affect you later in court.

• Police may “pat down” your clothing if they suspect you have a weapon and may search you after an arrest.

• Police officers may not confiscate or demand to view your photographs or video without a warrant, nor may they delete data under any circumstances. However, they may order citizens to cease activities that are truly interfering with legitimate law enforcement operations. What to do if you believe your rights have been violated:

• When you can, write down everything you remember, including the officers’ badge and patrol car numbers and the agency they work for.

• Get contact information for witnesses.• Take photographs of any injuries.

• Once you have all of this information, you can file a written complaint with the agency’s internal affairs division or civilian complaint board

written by the American Civil Liberties Union

https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/protesters-rights/

Digital Self-Defense

Strategies & Tools:

Before anything: Threat Modeling! (see EFF site below)

Secure Messaging: Signal Private Messenger (texting), ProtonMail (emails), Jitsi Meet (video calls)

Safe Web Browsing (for both phones/computers): TorBrowser, Firefox, ProtonVPN or Mullvad VPN

Other apps/tools (for phone and/or computers): Privacy Badger, HTTPS Everywhere, DuckDuckGo, Riseup Pads, Cryptpad.fr, Jumbo

Security Culture conduct & agreements (see site below)

Other strategies: know-your rights, anti-doxing, social media, ephemerality tactics, & crypto-parties!


Key websites & Further reading:

PRISM Break prism-break.org/en/

Electronic Frontier Foundation: Digital Privacy (see “Tools”) — https://www.eff.org/pages/tools

EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defense –https://ssd.eff.org

Security in a Box –https://securityinabox.org/en/


Helpful Articles and Videos:

“What is Security Culture?”: https://crimethinc.com/2004/11/01/what-is-security-culture

“Your Phone is a Cop 2” (search up on):https://itsgoingdown.org

“Anti-Doxing Guide for Activists”: https://medium.com/@EqualityLabs/anti-doxing-guide-for-activists-facing-attacks-from-the-alt-right-ec6c290f543c•TROUBLE Episode 5 on Doxing and State Surveillance: https://sub.media/video/trouble-5-you-are-being-watched/

“Quick Tip: How to Mask up”: https://vimeo.com/183849378

“30 Day Security Challenge”: https://www.operational-security.com/category/30-day-security-challenge/page/3/


For more info about doxxing/stalking, contact: armageddon@protonmail.com

Security Culture

The central principle of all security culture— the point that cannot be emphasized enough— is that other people do not need to know sensitive information that they do not need to know. Don’t get too distracted worrying about whether people are infiltrators or not; if your security measures are effective, it shouldn’t even matter. Don’t ask others to share confidential information you don’t need to know. Don’t brag about illegal things you or others have done, or mention things that are going to happen or might happen, or even refer to another person’s interest in being involved in such activities. You can say no at any time to anyone about anything. Don’t ever turn your friends over to your enemies– never snitch! Don’t make it too easy for your enemies to figure out what you’re up to. Develop methods to establish the security level of a group or situation. Be aware of the reliability of those around you, especially those with whom you might collaborate in underground activities. Security culture is not institutionalized paranoia, but a way to avoid unhealthy paranoia by minimizing risks ahead of time. Security culture involves a code of silence, but it is not a code of voiceless-ness. Balance the need to escape detection by your enemies against the need to be accessible to potential friends. When you’re planning an action, begin by establishing the security level appropriate to it, and act accordingly from there on.

Treat your technology like an eavesdropping stranger. If you wouldn’t discuss it in front of a stranger, don’t talk about it online, on your phone, or better yet, at all. How we show up in the fight to abolish the current world isn’t for clout or social media likes anyway. In some cases, private or crucial information must be communicated by technological means, but always remember there are risks and this should only ever occur between trusted individuals. Talk to your homies and your family members to create a culture of awareness, so everyone knows their rights if the feds or the pigs knock on someone’s door. When you go to the protest, what are you wearing that might be traceable back to you? Are your tattoos showing? What alias will you use so people aren’t shouting your name for all to hear? What agreements have you made with people around you so that they do not accidentally dry snitch? Protecting ourselves is also protecting our loved ones and our comrades.

Other things to keep in mind for movement defense—

Mobilize legal support, raise money for bail funds and lawyers, track people’s cases through the court system, attend court support where possible, publicize cases as appropriate.

Offer protection and support for those who are targeted by the state.

Do not open the door if agents are at your door, you are not legally obligated to.

Do not spread rumors or conspiracies, do not act when given very little information.

If the feds visit your door, ask for their card and they should go away. Immediately notify your community and networks of what you said/what was asked of you verbatim.

Do not cooperate with grand juries, organize non-cooperation materially with networks.

Autonomous, Decolonial & Abolitionist Resources/Readings

BOOKS

The main two books we want to highlight are:

“Beyond Survival: Transformative Justice” by multiple authors

“The Master’s Tools” by Tom Nomad

Other strong suggestions:

“Burning Down the American Plantation” by Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement

“Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis” by Katherine McKittrick

“To Our Friends” by the Invisible Committee

“Our Enemies in Blue” by Kristian Williams


PODCASTS

First and foremost, we want to recommend the podcasts titled “On Resistance” and the “Black Autonomy Podcast” (both podcasts are available on spotify)

Resonance Audio — resonanceaudiodistro.org

Channel Zero — channelzeronetwork.com

The Final Straw — thefinalstrawradio.noblogs.org


USEFUL WEBSITES

An introductory article that we highlight recommend: “The Challenge of Autonomy: Prospects for Freedom Going Into 2021” found at bayareaintifada.wordpress.com

And also check out the resources complied at this list, especially the “Digital Resources” section— https://linktr.ee/FugitiveDreams

trueleappress.com

thisisbobbylondon.com

neversurrender.noblogs.org

blackautonomynetwork.noblogs.org

indigenousaction.org

iaf-fai.org

prolewave.noblogs.org

puraacracia.club

confrontacionesblog.noblogs.org

haters.noblogs.org


Other sites to explore:

sproutdistro.com

amwenglish.com

Theanarchistlibrary.org

Itsgoingdown.org

Libcom.org


VIDEO

SubMedia (Sub.Media)

IE Initiatives and Projects

Inland Empire, CA based projects and their Instagram handles:

Black Lives Matter IE                            @blacklivesmatterie

Feed the Block – Ontario                            @feedtheblock_ie

Liberate the IE                                                           @ltie846

More Hope Project                                     @morehopeproject

Take Action IE – Moreno Valley                      @takeactionie

Inland Empire Right Watch                                   @we.see.ie

IE Collective                                                       @iecollective

High Desert Mutual Aid                     @highdesertmutualaid

Eastern Coachella Valley No Se Vende!       @ecvnosevende

Wielding Active Power                                  @wapcollective

IE Migrant Abolitionists                  @iemigrantabolitionists

Desert Communities United                             @d.c.u

IE Brown Berets                                            @iebrownberets

The Spoonie Uni Project                          @spoonieuniproject

Four Directions Mutual Aid IE                      @ie4directions

Inland Empire Mutualistas                             @iemutualistas

OG Foods So Cal                                            @ogfoods_so_cal

Liberate Ontario                                           @liberate_ontario

Mountain Mutual Aid Network @mtnmutualaid


Other social media handles to keep up with:

Instagram:

i.e.uprising

roar_ara

abolish_time

frontlinemedics

blackpowderpress

possumkratom69

decolonialatlas

projectunsettlement

abolition.memes

thecomradecloset

anarchipelago.ko

copwatch_santaana

blackrose_rosanegra

 

twitter

909time

black_autonomy

AbolishtheUC

AbolitionF_ists

IAF__FAI

confrontacion_s

media_action

bbyanarchists

IGD_News

Abolish_Time

AshAgony

NOT_INTO_IT

anarchogoth

ztsamudzi

mutualaid815

RP_PLWC

Burn Your Ballot— Political Theatre Does Not Represent Us

Consider this comprehensive piece as the final word on the topic of voting. Voting for better politicians, mayors, police commissioners, policies, or presidents will never set us free. By voting, we surrender our own autonomy by recognizing the legitimacy of this shitty system through participation in it. We must refuse our involvement in the games of reforms or bargaining. What is most at stake in our participation in this settler-colonial, anti-Black political system is the issue of capture: if we participate and vote in this system, we are embedded even deeper within this decaying system (even if it is for “good” reforms), instead of separating ourselves from it. Only through a collective departure— or, mass non-participation—will we ever be able to become autonomous and self-determining. In the end, every vote for a politician is a vote for increasing state power: the politician’s power only comes from the barrel of a police officer’s gun. Are we trying to set our communities free through abolition, or increase the legitimacy of this police state? We must heed the words of Martin Luther King Jr. when he rightfully observed that political participation is just “integration into a burning house”. It will be on us to create the infrastructure and alternatives needed for us to finally desert this sinking ship.


126 million people do not care about political theatre.

There has been a lot of discourse over the upcoming presidential election this coming November. All kinds of people have had deep arguments revolving around the following concerns: “Why should we vote?” “What are the downsides of not voting?” “Reasons why we should never vote.” “Why voting is anti-Black and colonial,” etc. In the end, debates about all of these positions around voting re-center the American political machine, whether or not people feel sympathetic or apathetic towards the political institution itself. However, there has been very little discussion that mentions the large mass of people who do not vote.

Here are a few basic statistics:

  • There are about 330 million people living in the US.
  • There are about 16-20 million people who cannot vote because they are undocumented, felons, or ex-convicts.
  • There are about 246 million people who are eligible to vote in the US.
  • There were only about 136 million people who turned out to vote for a president in 2016.

So, these numbers and some simple math show that there were about 126-130 million people in the US who did not vote in 2016.

We argue that these people will never be fully absorbed into the system and its political institutions, and we should explore the potentialities that underlie this reality. In particular, we want to ask some questions about all the debates regarding voting: Who’s having these conversations about voting in the first place? Are we speaking to educated, college degree audiences? Are all of the debates on voting – whether defenses for or rebuttals against – even relevant to the over 126 million people who do not vote? If we all know that the political system is failing and dying, how can we side step and move beyond the need to center the political institution in the first place? If there are at least 126 million people who frankly do not care about politics or the nation’s political theatre, what can this mean for autonomous movement building?

The debates around voting tend to be very saviorist, which imply a desire to “save” others from acting “improperly.” This is a form of paternalism. We hope that we can one day render all political institutions (and the police that underlie them) irrelevant to our lives, and maybe that begins with the 126 million who are apathetic about politics – as we should all be.

Autonomy will never be achieved at the voting booths.

Time and time again, we see and hear the argument about privilege in regard to voting: the people who do vote are privileged and selfish, and the people who don’t vote are somehow also privileged and selfish. This argument is tired and premised on shaming people into action through condescension and guilt. So, who are these people who aren’t voting, and why don’t they vote, anyway?

Despite the opinions claiming that non-voters are the “privileged few” who have no critical stake in politics:

  • Voting trends in 2016 and 2018 both show that almost half of nonvoters are non-white, even though these communities compose only one-fourth of the voting population.
  • 56% of nonvoters are quite poor – making less than $30,000 per year – even though that income group constitutes just over one-fourth of the voting population.

People who abstain from voting do so because they are so misrepresented or entirely ignored by electoral politics and policies to bother voting. The solution to a corrupt system can’t be to just register these people to vote and provide information on candidates or policies, because the problem isn’t whether they have the capacity to vote. They choose not to vote because electoral politics have not substantially changed their lived realities. There is a correlation between those who choose not to vote and those who belong to the most vulnerable communities – people who are indigenous, Black, undocumented, queer, poor, and so on.

One of the most common arguments for “voting blue no matter who” is the fear of mass deportations and further xenophobia from the Trump administration.

  • 409,849 undocumented folks were deported under Obama in 2012.
  • A little over 265,000 undocumented folks were deported under Trump in 2019.
  • Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act states that law enforcement (local) can partner with ICE (federal) to deport people in a local community. This means that cities and counties can become subject to federal jurisdiction regardless of more benevolent local policies – and/or local elected representatives.

These local representatives and local elections are, on a smaller scale, comparable to “voting blue no matter who” when it comes to presidency. At the end of the day, local and federal electoral politics are just electoral politics, and this is just one snapshot demonstrating the neglect of one vulnerable group of people.

In San Bernardino, local elected officials are making six-digit salaries while the city recovers from bankruptcy for the past five years, and while most members of the community aren’t making even close to that salary range. How can it be argued that electoral politics and elected officials are designed to listen to and protect vulnerable communities, when these communities are the first to be exploited – even at the local level?

“… We must recognize how [these] systems have evolved to the point where you hardly have to keep someone from voting to keep their vote from having effect. The system evolves to protect itself, and privilege is the opposite of giving up on the belief it will self-rectify” – Hari Ziyad.

We can do more – and better – for ourselves than voting.

Flint, Michigan is still without clean water. Continuous accounts of state violence are being (badly) mitigated by Democratic promises of reform that will give more funding to police. Joe Biden himself has explicitly stated that he does not – and will never – support Medicare for All. The last post included deportation statistics under Obama vs. Trump; there is a reason Obama was labeled “deporter in chief” despite being a Democratic president. These problems don’t start or end with blue vs. red, and they won’t end just by flipping the White House. Even when Obama ran under a campaign that promised “change,” the most vulnerable populations still suffered and were placated by empty promises. Now, Joe Biden himself has assured Americans that “nothing [will] fundamentally change.”

For younger, self-identifying “leftists,” Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign was an initial exposure to “leftism.” If his 2016 – and his most recent – defeat should have taught his supporters anything, it’s that the two-party system is designed to maintain the status quo, and that even the threat of capitalism-lite (Sanders’ Democratic Socialism) is still threatening enough for Democrats to end it themselves. The 2016 email leak revealed correspondence between DNC officials stating that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) “tried to aid [Hillary] Clinton and hamper [Bernie] Sanders,” as well as discussed ways they could sabotage Sanders’ campaign and smudge his public appearance. Not only did this demonstrate the monopoly that the two-party voting system has over the United States, it also explicitly revealed that even the “progressive party” will refuse to move further left if it threatens the hierarchy.

That all being said, it’s safe to say that most of us are not represented or protected by electoral politics and politicians, even locally. When you trust the government and its legislation instead of yourself and your community, you unintentionally reinforce the need to appeal to the moral judgement of those in power. Voting cannot be our survival strategy when so many colonized and oppressed people won’t survive, even after they vote. We don’t need to ask permission to exist safely and live dignified lives. We deserve more than the crumbs of politicians and reformist legislature.

Many of the people who are up in flames about non-voters are people whose “activism” ends at voting and getting people to vote. A lot of these people condescend non-voters and sarcastically ask leftists, “Well then, what do you want me to do?” Which begs the question… What can you do instead of voting?

“White Democrats who are pushing for Black folks to save America from itself have demonstrated our relative unimportance by refusing to help us strategize around safety during participation in electoral politics.” – Brittany Lee Frederick.

White voters, what are y’all doing to ensure the safety of Black voters and the follow-through of white politicians? What are y’all doing to ensure the safety of BIPOC period? There’s more work to be done than just voting on the ballot and never doing any other work. Still, we don’t want to encourage defeatism or inaction by overwhelming people with the amount of work that needs to be done; that’s the opposite of what any of us should focus on.

It’s when we renounce electoral politics and also refrain from doing other work that we feel most defeated and eventually, guilted into “at least” voting… and the cycle continues. That guilt and impotence that stems from inaction is diminished when we get involved in our communities and see our power first hand. We can’t invalidate the work people are doing outside of the system just because they didn’t bubble in their ballots; that’s just one action in their lives as opposed to many. Even if we all bubbled in ballots, the real change will come from doing the labor and building support networks within our own communities. So much attention is focused on voter registration and information, especially with the upcoming elections.

But how different could things be if we reallocated our resources and numbers from politics and directly into the community? The refusal to participate in this system comes after divesting from the system itself, a slow process that comes after the realization that no politicians will come to your rescue because they simply don’t care. Instead of letting that instill fear and hopelessness in you, let it radicalize and empower you. Choosing not to vote isn’t fatalistic, as some believe; in fact, there’s more hope in trusting that our communities can fend for themselves without relying on puppets. When we redirect our idealism and hope from the system and into ourselves, there is a higher likelihood that our needs and the needs of our communities will be met.

The reality for most is that we don’t have the resources to fully invest in electoral politics and also resist them. The truth is that with jobs, school, families, and downtime to account for, most can’t fully invest in phone banking for politicians and still have the time and energy to commit to organizing in their community. When we talk about dismantling and defunding and abolishing, it’s easy to get lost in the commitment to destruction and forget that we also need to build and nurture. A big part of the fight lies in how we build support networks outside of the structures we hope to destroy. There are already people and projects across the IE getting involved and helping their communities.

Do you have clothes you never got rid of during spring cleaning because we got stuck in quarantine? Consider putting together a clothing drive or clothes swap with some friends. Do you have a space in your yard and like to garden? Plant some herbs and veggies and distribute produce around your block. Do you like crafting and working with your hands? Make some face masks and hand sanitizer to give out to the houseless population. Anything from skill sharing – cooking classes, financial literacy courses, political education, translation services, and more – to providing services – child-care, ride sharing, community gardening, running errands for the elderly (especially during COVID) – is useful.

Everyone has a skill, an interest, a talent. We can all build on what we already have and share it with our community instead of waiting on politics to save us.


References

– Clusiau, C. & Schwarz, S. (Directors). (2020). The power of the vote [Television series episode]. In Schwartz, S. (Producer), Immigration nation. Scotts Valley, California: Netflix.

– Greenwald, G. (2020, Apr 9) Nonvoters are not privileged. They are disproportionately lower-income, nonwhite, and dissatisfied with the two parties. The Intercept. https://theintercept.com

– NYT Editorial Board (2019, Jul 13) All presidents are deporters in chief. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/

– Department of Homeland Security (2020, Sep 30) Delegation of immigration authority section 287(g) immigration and nationality act. https://www.ice.gov/287g

– Ziyad, H. (2016, Oct 13) Not voting is not a privilege. Black Youth Project. http://blackyouthproject.com/

Ballotpedia (2016) Democratic national committee (DNC) email leak, 2016. https://ballotpedia.org

Higgins, E. (2019, June 19) Vowing not to ‘demonize’ the rich, biden tells billionaires ‘nothing would fundamentally change’ if he was elected. Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org


Further reading:

“Reaching Beyond ‘Black Faces in High Places’: An Interview With Joy James” from Truthout

“Socialist Faces in High Places: Elections & the Left” by Black Rose/Rosa Negra

“Voting is Not Harm Reduction” by Indigenous Action

Towards Communism and Anarchy in Rockford: A Historical Analysis from 2011 to 2020 of Revolutionary Movements in Rockford, Illinois

Written by The Lewis Lemon Committee for Revolutionary Abolition

The past year has been one of the most explosive in history. For Rockford anarchists and revolutionaries (old and new), we were amazed and overwhelmed by the militancy, mass participation and energy over the past year. A group of comrades wrote this analysis about 2020 and the revolutionary movements in Rockford over the last decade as a whole. Our analysis is not focused entirely on the uprising as in previous pieces written such as Notes from the Rockford Rebellion as we felt there were other important developments within the radical milieu over the course of 2020 in Rockford that were not tied directly to the uprising. By revolutionary, we mean that we want to see an end to racial capitalism and the State. We want an end to this anti-black settler-colonial world. We want to abolish the present state of things. We want communism and anarchy. Communism for us means a set of social relations where we are free and without needless hierarchy. We want a free and classless way of life. That is our goal. The revolutionary movements in Rockford we discuss in this text helped to develop strategies towards communism.

Rockford is a small city with an nascent left let alone anarchist or revolutionary milieu. We find these analyses are helpful for us to develop better strategies to fight back against racial capitalism and the State. The document is a product of conversations and collaboration between a variety of revolutionaries in Rockford. Small cities are not typically the focus of revolutionary analyses and strategy. We were inspired by previous things written in 2020 about Rockford movement, so a group of us who have been struggling together decided to create this text. Creating a regional analysis inspired by communism-anarchism and a variety of autonomous revolutionary traditions (such as Zapatismo or Black Radical Feminism) is important to us as it helps grounds our politics in the material and strategic reality of our area. The text also allows a better entry into our politics, as many new militants are not currently politicized here with a theoretical orientation. This document is meant to provide history, analysis, and suggestions about revolutionary practice and strategy in our area.

History 

The history in Rockford is critical to relay so people who have entered the movement during 2020 can understand the contexts that revolutionaries have been struggling in over the past ten years.

The primary struggles in Rockford that have generated the most popular support in the community over the past ten years have been the mass struggles against the police and economic inequality. We chose these struggles as they show the central intersection of racial domination and class exploitation in Rockford and how radical movements have failed to grapple with these contradictions. While there have been moments of mobilization against racism and police brutality over the past ten years, they lacked an emphasis on class analysis as it relates to racialization. While at the same time, the seemingly class conscious Occupy protests were reductionist in how they approached the intersections of domination. Furthermore, movement participants struggled to develop a clear analysis of the role of the State within racial capitalism. All of this was compounded by the lack of strong radical organizations, affinity and collectives.

We feel that the protests around socio-economic inequality were most active during the Occupy Rockford movement. The importance of the Occupy movement was the focus on the capitalist and financial classes’ exploitation and the class system within our society. Additionally, the Occupy movement emphasizes how the political system was thoroughly controlled by capitalists. While we find that class analysis is essential for developing any revolutionary movement, black participants within the Occupy Rockford movement were often marginalized by the white participants through microaggressions and acts of outright racism. Furthermore, most of the Occupy Rockford participants were class reductionists. Much of the Occupy movement’s time in Rockford was spent trying to engage with the Tea Party.  The Tea Party was a reactionary formation within the Republican Party that was active at the time. These Tea Party activists have subsequently transformed into the fascist street movement which stormed the capitol on January 6th. It is critical that we smash fascism in the streets rather than tolerating it. In many Occupy camps across the country, fascist participants were chased out rather than tolerated. However, this did not happen in Rockford as some Occupiers spent time trying to engage with the Tea Party members. Most of the Occupiers went on to burn out or organize within the Democratic Party for personal career opportunities. Additionally, much of the Occupy energy from the liberal wing predictably went into local “progressive campaigns” as well as the Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 which served to undermine the few efforts at autonomous political action.

The anarchist and autonomous political roots of the Occupy movement were for the most part marginalized because there was no camp or assemblies. There was a division between the liberal wing of the Occupy Movement who essentially wanted to be the Left wing of the local Democrats (this faction eventually lead the Sanders campaign in 2016 but has remained marginal mostly in terms of political influence locally) which contrasted with the more anarchist wing of the Occupy Rockford movement which was based mostly in the punk house “Disastr House” on the West Side. Although punk can be a way to introduce anarchist politics, it cannot be the basis of an anarchist political movement.  In many ways, the anarchists of Disastr House were not taken seriously as a result of the association of anarchism with the subcultural punk movement. This differed from Occupy movements across the country which had anarchist politics that were grounded in historical traditions of class struggle and in some cases anti-racism and abolition. The electoral opportunism and subcultural politics are part of the reason that autonomous movements in Rockford have struggled to develop. Despite this, many militants taking part in contemporary struggles were politicized through their interactions with social democratic wing of the Occupy movement as well as the anarchist wing.

The movement against the police in Rockford emerges after the murder of Mark Barmore in 2009 at the Kingdom Authority Baptist church. The potential for rebellion was stifled by Jesse Jackson and the local Black counter insurgency. In the following years, there were more murders of black people by the police and private security which lead to a variety of protests which remained relatively peaceful compared to the rebellion we saw this summer in Rockford. In many ways, these protests were moderated by the white and black liberals who worked closely with the Rockford Police Department. The few attempts at black autonomous organization were often stifled through threats and repression.  It was very easy for the black middle class such as the NAACP to opportunistically use the deaths of black people in the community at the hands of the police to boost their own political careers in the city. Black middle class opportunists obscured their own roles in maintaining the power of the police which so it was difficult to build a movement that was resilient to back electoral and middle class opportunists. This is why we believe that class analysis is so critically important. Male pastors tended to dominate the leadership which marginalized the leadership and agency of black women as movement participants. In terms of the Occupy Rockford, the more liberal wing did not want to have anything to do with black organizing efforts against the police (as they felt it took away from their message) while the anarchist wing based out of Disastr House was labeled by the black counter-insurgency as “troublemakers”.  An alliance between anarchists and black radicals against the police (as it has developed in some cities) could have lead to a more militant and mass based movement but that did not happen. This was a missed opportunity which can be attributed partially to the subcultural politics of the mostly punk-based anarchist movement which tends not to be concerned a larger political strategy against racial capitalism.

One of the major failures over the past ten years within the Rockford movement has been to establish long lasting radical organizations, collectives and affinity groups that could organize with a radical political strategy in mind. To a large degree, this has to do with the lack of political education internal to the radical environment which led participants to not recognize why building long term radical formations was critical. This lack of radical organizations in Rockford led to a mostly informal mobilization-based culture driven by a few charismatic individuals rather than long-term movement building. The few organizations that did emerge were plagued with informal hierarchies and oppressive dynamics, such as anti-blackness and transphobia, that remained unaddressed until it led to these organizations fracturing. Many of us failed to create solid internal organizational structures for these groups which lead to a lack of accountability. Within these radical spaces, certain white petty-bourgeois people prioritized their own careers and academia ahead of movement building and direct confrontation with the State. The dominance of these petit-bourgeois attitudes created an opposition to militant direct action which ultimately hindered the building of robust movements in the city. Instead, much of the energy was funneled into “dual power” and solidarity economy projects. However, these projects were plagued by a lack of connection to mass movements against local class enemies such capitalists, landlords and police. The lack of a connection to struggle against the State and Capital by radicals is a major reason that the radical scene has remained mostly marginal and small. Instead of supporting and catalyzing mass movements in the city, the lack of an effective strategy meant that the radical spaces remained a social scene for the most part.

In general, there has been a lot of pessimism amongst Rockford revolutionaries towards movement building over the past ten years. This led to a lot of resentment, distrust, and anger within radical circles. The attitude within Rockford radical spaces was often that “radical organizing is happening elsewhere”. The immense task of building the radical infrastructure in Rockford to many seemed an impossible task. Often times instead of trying to organize events in Rockford, people would go to larger cities. In fact, many people left Rockford to organize in Chicago and other major cities who had already developed infrastructure. These attitudes are counter-revolutionary and idealistic. There cannot be a commune realistically in the Midwest without connections between major metropolitan areas, small cities like Rockford, and the rural areas that surround small cities. Autonomy, in a way that is meaningful, will mean massive regional networks around food and production. The pessimistic attitudes towards possibilities of radical organizing in Rockford led to the weakness of the relationships formed between revolutionaries as well as our relationships with the communities we exist within. Many revolutionaries, with self-proclaimed radical orientation saw compromising and working with Democrats as a good strategy because “radical organizing couldn’t happen in Rockford”. It was there hope that by doing this they would not “alienate” anyone. People were content to hope that Bernie or some politician would win then fix it rather than taking action against oppressive forces ourselves. The electoral strategy is opposed to building radical cultures and communities outside of those already state-approved channels. Instead, we must focus our energy on building strong, militant, and resilient autonomous movements in our city against racial capitalism.

Strengths, Highpoints and Accomplishments

We want to highlight a number of things since there were many victories worth celebrating in 2020. First, the most amazing thing that happened over the course of 2020 was the heightened intensity of direct action. The scale and militancy of the rebellion on the weekend of May 30th was something unseen in recent Rockford history. During that weekend of revolt nationwide, Rockford (mostly black and brown youth) took to the streets. They fought police, vandalized District 1, damaged police vehicles, and expropriated goods across the city. This sudden revolutionary fervor was an inspiration to many revolutionaries here though we felt unprepared for the scale and intensity as we had never seen anything like that in Rockford before. For many comrades that was the highlight of the past year. We want to be clear however that although many of the marches and protests after the rebellion were symbolic, movement participants had a new understanding of what direct action is. Numerous actions disrupted the flow of capital, attacked State institutions, contested the monopoly on violence the Rockford police enjoy, and scared politicians out of their homes. Finally our comrades felt that the May Day demonstration prior to the rebellion, where families of prisoners inside of Winnebago County Jail drove their cars around outside of the jail to protest conditions was really powerful and very different tactically than anything we had seen in Rockford up to this point.

Following the #TyrisJones shooting, demonstrations resumed during which militants threw fireworks at the jail, graffitied state property and blocked roads with barricades. The use of car tactics in the massive demonstrations, following May 30th, to shut down large city streets such as East State and Forest City Plaza was another exciting development locally in terms of tactics. Although we have critiques of the City Market demonstrations, we found that the first protests that disrupted City Market, a key site of gentrification in downtown Rockford, was a valuable tactic as it directly targeted capital and whiteness. For many long time Rockford organizers, disrupting City Market had been a goal and we were happy to the spell of “development” broken. One comrade has remarked that simply the number of non-permitted autonomously organized marches that happened was a big success in their eyes as previous to this summer, that was a rarity in Rockford.

We felt that the relationship building that happened internal to the movement over the course of the past year seemed to be some of the best that happened in our memories. Much of this relationship building happened informally during actions, and we found that building relationships through creating affinity groups, collectives and organizations was  prioritized by radicals throughout the city. At the time of writing, there are several radical organizations and collectives, with a variety of different politics and goals, that have emerged out of the rebellion and the pandemic. We hope that these organizations and collectives continue to organize amongst themselves and build long lasting relationships. We need more specialization and decentralization in our movement. Our movement is propelled by the strength of the relationships that we have with our comrades and our larger communities. While we do not feel that everyone needs to be friends (in fact we are critical of friendship as the sole basis for political affinity), we do feel that deepening relationships and trust with those who you share political affinity is necessary step towards building strong radical movements.

Finally, the emphasis on political education and theorization was a major improvement in the movement over the past year. A noticeable emphasis was placed on education within formal organizations, radical spaces, and informal organization. Numerous actions we attended had explicit calls for political education alongside zine distros. At the beginning of 2020, there were discussions about how the lack of attention to radical political analysis in our region had led to stagnation of radical politics. We have been pleased to see more attention to local radical history, such as the history of the Rockford Black Panther Party, as well as more written analysis about our region over the course of the past year. Numerous strategy and reading sessions about abolition, revolutionary strategy, and anarchy occurred which were deeply critical. Our hope is to see more groups creating internal education to their group in an effort to develop a clearer political analysis of our city’s reality. In the coming years this needs to be intensified especially in regard to comradely self-reflection.

During the height of the protests around #TyrisJones, radicals build relationships with his family and organized alongside them. Organizing with directly impacted people is critical. The organizing alongside prisoners inside of Winnebago County Jail was another deeply important development of this year. We hope to see more of that in the future. Finally, it is important for there to be personal boundaries within radical communities. Over the course of the past year, organizational and personal boundaries were a major priority for radicals in the area and we hope to see people continue to respect and think about inter-personal dynamics. Understanding personal boundaries is critical especially when dealing and preventing harm and abuse in our spaces. Through every jail support, reading group, revolutionary gardening workday, and de-arrest, we built a closer relationship with our comrades. We feels that finally the foundations of radical infrastructure are starting to take shape in Rockford.

Weaknesses and Criticism

The three primary criticisms that emerged repeatedly within our conversations were the presence of activist/clout chaser personality types dominating movement spaces, symbolic protests with little substance, and the divide between radicals and the larger Rockford community.

A lot of the movement work this summer and overall in Rockford has been centralized around charismatic people. This is our critique of the clout chaser dynamic especially as radicals interested in deconstructing hierarchy. We feel that this dynamic is central to many of the criticisms internal to radicals doing movement building in Rockford. We feel that this clout chaser dynamic has only been exacerbated by social media which uplifts particular personalities based on an algorithm. The social media centered activism has lead to a toxic culture where people who are not constantly “out there” in a physical sense are often shamed for not being “radical enough”. A dynamic like this emerged at the City Hall Occupation after the police shooting of Tyris Jones where people who did not participate were perceived as “less radical” or not “going as hard”. This was particularly problematic as it has effectively silenced critiques of movement tactics that were ineffective. The critique is ableist as being “out there” through supporting demonstrations is not the only actions or way to participate in a movement. We feel that to a large degree that the charismatic personalities dominating has to do with oppressive gendered dynamics internal to the movement spaces where critical labor is done by women and oppressed genders while it remains invisible and unacknowledged. Men have taken up a lot of space and media attention during actions while not doing many other types of tasks. The problem of misogyny in radical spaces needs to be confronted in Rockford. There are men who are still allowed in movement spaces despite being creepy and exhibiting sexual predatory behavior towards comrades and minors. Revolutionaries in Rockford must not tolerate this in any form overt or not.

We tend to feel that many of the actions in 2020 have been completely symbolic. As we mentioned earlier, we supported City Market protests initially but upon reflection, those protests remained completely symbolic, non-violent, devoid of a larger strategic goal and resulted in needless arrests. Though the authors of the document have varying experiences with the actions at City Market in terms of participation and consequences for that participation, we felt that the post by the group Rockford Radical Abolitionists for Change was particularly insightful about those protests.

“There were avoidable mistakes made. These mistakes have led to the predicament we are in now. Multiple nonviolent protestors who are being targeted by the police and the “justice” system are at risk of losing their freedom due to the way police handled the situation AND there being a lack of diverse tactics to respond with. Every week it was to be expected that there would be brutality and excessive force used by the police and at times it felt as if the collective were waiting for it to happen instead of taking control of the action by working together.”- Rockford Radical Abolitionists For Change

While we disagree with the qualification of protestors as non-violent, which seems to be a supposed attempt to set them apart from the “violent” protestors, we think this analysis is very spot on. We agree that the lack of diverse tactics was a problem, we attribute this back to the loudest people in the movement getting attention and dictating tactics on the ground.

Tactics must be changed when they are clearly ineffective. Instead of symbolic protests centered on politicians , revolutionaries should be putting their energy towards organizing along class lines. We need to be present in neighborhoods, workplaces, and homes. The basis of a revolutionary movement is building a strong base of support within communities. We must organize with the intent to grow power and education in our communities rather than to make symbolic gestures with hope that politicians will “hear” us. That is not a revolutionary strategy.

​​​​The divorce between the radicals and the community has been a big issue. The failure to contest this clout chasing tendency has led to a lot of problems internal to the movement with certain “activists” not wanting to take critique and change their behavior. This led to certain individuals with clout begin to police tones and actions. Some of our comrades felt that the demonstrations at City Market had become white spectacle that was unconnected to the realities of black people on the West Side dealing with the everyday violence of the police. This was voiced when revolutionaries talked to people in the community. However, due to the activist mentality, there was a refusal to acknowledge those critiques because the people making them simply “didn’t realize the problems”. The refusal by activists to have humility is a serious problem.

The role that mutual aid has played in building our movement in Rockford has been vital. Mutual aid formations developing nationwide at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic has allowed for renewed relationship building within radical circles and more broadly. However, It is imperative that our mutual aid practice remains connected to a larger revolutionary strategy. The strength of the mutual aid formations and autonomous mutual aid efforts is they must not be disconnected from the larger radical movements. Ideally, mutual aid networks can serve as a bridge between radicals ourselves and the communities we that live in. We must be developing new relationships as they will be necessary to move beyond capitalism. Many people in Rockford already practice mutual aid. There is a long history of African-American mutual aid history that we should draw from. One of the mutual aid formations in the city that emerged would drive in a car caravan around neighborhoods to give food to folks, to do cop watch and build relationships. Despite this, some of the work called “mutual aid” over the past year was more transactional than in a true spirit of mutual aid. However, we do think that building survival programs is critical. It is deeply important to distinguish what mutual aid actually is. This model of mutual aid, that emphasizes organizing against the state and capitalists, is critical for the future struggle. It is our hope that more survival programs develop within the next year that are independent and antagonistic of the State.

We need to think about movements in terms of relationships and collective power rather than an individualized effort. This philosophy is encapsulated well by the Chairman Fred Hampton’s quote “You can jail a revolutionary but you can’t jail the revolution.” We need to think about movement beyond reactive mobilizations lead by a few of charismatic personalities. Individuals can be jailed, corrupted, and change whereas collective power softens the blow the movement receives overall from poor leadership. Smaller scale actions should be planned with some tactical goals in mind. Radical spaces must stress the necessity of building infrastructure to explicitly support class revolt. Although there was a lot of education about racial capitalism and its relationship to the State over this summer, there has been little education on how to fight back against those systems strategically and effectively. Very few skill trainings were held and those that were only dealt with how to respond to State violence and not counter it.  Revolutionaries who had experience organizing marches and rallies failed to share releveant skills with new comers. Without this skillsharing of expierence amoungst radicals in the city many newly politicized milatants were left developing necessary skills on their own. There was little thought about what actions could look like beyond marches to nowhere that ended inevitably in last stand arrests. We need to understand that revolutionary movements must be sustained over the course of lifetimes, not just weeks or months, but lifetimes. Understanding this need for longevity will make us understand the necessity for sustainable strategies to avoid burnout.

The Future

What does the future look like? Ultimately, the future is up to us. Through our conversations, we have generated a few ideas that we would like to see develop in the community and amongst revolutionaries in Rockford.

One of the most important things we feel that needs to happen in Rockford is a physical space for the movement to meet, strategize, learn, and build. We feel that a physical political center could provide a base for food distribution, a permanent zine distro, a library, a forum for radical speakers, movie screenings, potlucks and numerous other events. These types of events will allow us to develop the necessary relationships with the community. We hope to see this infrastructure to take root sooner than later. Infrastructure is something radical movements in Rockford need more than anything. In our discussion, we felt that creation of more food projects in the form of cooperatively owned farms and community gardens in our neighborhoods and surrounding areas could help build autonomy and stop us from relying on the State and Capital for our food.

We cannot stress enough that collectives, groups, organizations and affinity groups must develop strategies for accountability internally with the people involved. We would like to see the movement more willing to criticize and hold one another accountable. We have found that the lack of accountability around actions within these groups is a major problem. Internal to these groups, there must be some kind of way to relate to one another that is principled and creates cultures of accountability.

We hope to see the emergence of more organizing projects that are based in the neighborhood, workplace, and the home. Organizing in these areas will mean that we can fight back directly against class enemies such as bosses, the police, and landlords rather than symbolic protests which target city leaders who are mostly figureheads. Tenant unions and workplace unions are very needed here especially with evictions on the rise. While most workplace unions in the area tend to be very racist and entrenched in the Democratic Party, revolutionaries should focus on organizing distribution centers (for companies such as Amazon) which have become a common job in this area. A revolutionary movement necessitates the ability to disrupt and block capital.

Revolutionaries and militants must continue to form their own groups to build autonomous projects while coordinating with one another. We believe that communication between different groups and individuals could improve. A good way to do this would be to host a monthly spokes council meeting for Rockford abolitionists, anarchists, and revolutionaries. A spokes council is effectively a place to share ideas, upcoming actions, and plans. In the Rockford case, we feel it should not be a decision-making body but a place to share strategies and tactics.

There is a need for more community defense-oriented groups to emerge. In the midst of Back the Blue rally in Rockford, there was no formal anti-fascist formation to organize the opposition to that demonstration. It leads to the resistance against Back the Blue not being militant enough in our view. We need anti-fascist organizations and affinity groups. We hope that these community defense formations train in a variety of defense tactics against fascists which could range from unarmed combat to armed combat training. We need it all.

We’d like to see the movement to develop robust cultures of non-cooperation with this State. This means organized Copwatch programs and ICE watches. Rapid response networks to respond to police brutality, violence against queer people, domestic violence and ICE raids. These rapid response networks should be working alongside the community defense formations. Non-cooperation means robust anti-repression networks that support our comrades facing prison time for taking radical action against the State. This is gonna be important for us to support our comrades and everyone throughout the next year as they face charges for rebelling against the State.

Finally, we believe that it is deeply important for revolutionary movements in this city to develop revolutionary cultures. One way to do this is by commemorating revolutionary holidays. We could do this by doing community events/vigils/actions on revolutionary holidays such as Juneteenth, African Liberation Day or May Day. For instance, there was recently a call for NYE noise demo outside of a jail in Rockford. One of our comrades suggested that we should coordinate vigils or demos on birthdays of people murdered by the Rockford Police Department so that people in our community do not forget the violence of the State. We cannot stress enough that even small events that build radical community here are going to be essential for propelling larger mass movements.

We need to rise to the occasion to build our revolutionary movement here. Will we rise against the police and right-wing fascists and defend our community?  What will you and your comrades do? What is the next step in your revolutionary practice?

Recommended Readings:

Let Empire Collapse: Why We Need a Decolonial Revolution by Mohamed Abdou

Notes from the Rockford Rebellion: Black Revolt in the Rustbelt from a New Afrikan Anarchist Perspective

Fire on Main Street: Small Cities in the George Floyd Rebellion by Shemon, Arturo and Atticus

The Combahee River Collective Statement by the Comahee River Collective

Communization and Decolonization by Ediciones Inéditas

For Anarchy, Not Anarchism by Ediciones Inéditas

16 Things You Can Do To Be Ungovernable by Indigenous Action​​​​​​​

The Progressive Plantation by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

Anarchism and the Black Revolution by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin

Political Theatre Does Not Represent Us: Part 4

Many of the people who are up in flames about non-voters are people whose “activism” ends at voting and getting people to vote. A lot of these people condescend non-voters and sarcastically ask leftists, “Well then, what do you want me to do?” Which begs the question… What can you do instead of voting?

“White Democrats who are pushing for Black folks to save America from itself have demonstrated our relative unimportance by refusing to help us strategize around safety during participation in electoral politics.” – Brittany Lee Frederick.

White voters, what are y’all doing to ensure the safety of Black voters and the follow-through of white politicians? What are y’all doing to ensure the safety of BIPOC period? There’s more work to be done than just voting on the ballot and never doing any other work. Still, we don’t want to encourage defeatism or inaction by overwhelming people with the amount of work that needs to be done; that’s the opposite of what any of us should focus on.

It’s when we renounce electoral politics and also refrain from doing other work that we feel most defeated and eventually, guilted into “at least” voting… and the cycle continues. That guilt and impotence that stems from inaction is diminished when we get involved in our communities and see our power first hand. We can’t invalidate the work people are doing outside of the system just because they didn’t bubble in their ballots; that’s just one action in their lives as opposed to many. Even if we all bubbled in ballots, the real change will come from doing the labor and building support networks within our own communities. So much attention is focused on voter registration and information, especially with the upcoming elections.

But how different could things be if we reallocated our resources and numbers from politics and directly into the community? The refusal to participate in this system comes after divesting from the system itself, a slow process that comes after the realization that no politicians will come to your rescue because they simply don’t care. Instead of letting that instill fear and hopelessness in you, let it radicalize and empower you. Choosing not to vote isn’t fatalistic, as some believe; in fact, there’s more hope in trusting that our communities can fend for themselves without relying on puppets. When we redirect our idealism and hope from the system and into ourselves, there is a higher likelihood that our needs and the needs of our communities will be met.

The reality for most is that we don’t have the resources to fully invest in electoral politics and also resist them. The truth is that with jobs, school, families, and downtime to account for, most can’t fully invest in phone banking for politicians and still have the time and energy to commit to organizing in their community. When we talk about dismantling and defunding and abolishing, it’s easy to get lost in the commitment to destruction and forget that we also need to build and nurture. A big part of the fight lies in how we build support networks outside of the structures we hope to destroy. There are already people and projects across the IE getting involved and helping their communities.

Do you have clothes you never got rid of during spring cleaning because we got stuck in quarantine? Consider putting together a clothing drive or clothes swap with some friends. Do you have a space in your yard and like to garden? Plant some herbs and veggies and distribute produce around your block. Do you like crafting and working with your hands? Make some face masks and hand sanitizer to give out to the houseless population. Anything from skill sharing – cooking classes, financial literacy courses, political education, translation services, and more – to providing services – child-care, ride sharing, community gardening, running errands for the elderly (especially during COVID) – is useful.

Everyone has a skill, an interest, a talent. We can all build on what we already have and share it with our community instead of waiting on politics to save us.

 

Further reading:

“Reaching Beyond ‘Black Faces in High Places’: An Interview With Joy James” from Truthout

“Socialist Faces in High Places: Elections & the Left” by Black Rose/Rosa Negra

“Voting is Not Harm Reduction” by Indigenous Action

Political Theatre Does Not Represent Us: Part 3

Flint, Michigan is still without clean water. Continuous accounts of state violence are being (badly) mitigated by Democratic promises of reform that will give more funding to police. Joe Biden himself has explicitly stated that he does not – and will never – support Medicare for All. The last post included deportation statistics under Obama vs. Trump; there is a reason Obama was labeled “deporter in chief” despite being a Democratic president. These problems don’t start or end with blue vs. red, and they won’t end just by flipping the White House. Even when Obama ran under a campaign that promised “change,” the most vulnerable populations still suffered and were placated by empty promises. Now, Joe Biden himself has assured Americans that “nothing [will] fundamentally change.”

For younger, self-identifying “leftists,” Bernie Sanders’ first presidential campaign was an initial exposure to “leftism.” If his 2016 – and his most recent – defeat should have taught his supporters anything, it’s that the two-party system is designed to maintain the status quo, and that even the threat of capitalism-lite (Sanders’ Democratic Socialism) is still threatening enough for Democrats to end it themselves. The 2016 email leak revealed correspondence between DNC officials stating that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) “tried to aid [Hillary] Clinton and hamper [Bernie] Sanders,” as well as discussed ways they could sabotage Sanders’ campaign and smudge his public appearance. Not only did this demonstrate the monopoly that the two-party voting system has over the United States, it also explicitly revealed that even the “progressive party” will refuse to move further left if it threatens the hierarchy.

That all being said, it’s safe to say that most of us are not represented or protected by electoral politics and politicians, even locally. When you trust the government and its legislation instead of yourself and your community, you unintentionally reinforce the need to appeal to the moral judgement of those in power. Voting cannot be our survival strategy when so many colonized and oppressed people won’t survive, even after they vote. We don’t need to ask permission to exist safely and live dignified lives. We deserve more than the crumbs of politicians and reformist legislature.

References

Ballotpedia (2016) Democratic national committee (DNC) email leak, 2016. https://ballotpedia.org

Higgins, E. (2019, June 19) Vowing not to ‘demonize’ the rich, biden tells billionaires ‘nothing would fundamentally change’ if he was elected. Common Dreams. https://www.commondreams.org

1.2. The Role of the Inland Empire Within BIPOC Liberation

Key Take-Aways:
The U.S. Empire uses poor, BIPOC regions of California to test its newest systems of governance and because of this, Inland Empire residents must pay attention to the way unique problems in our region present themselves (for example, the emergence of the logistics sector and its ensuing warehouse construction).

– Autonomous organizing is not one-size-fits-all, and for this reason, we must analyze the IE’s unique material, geographical, historical, and demographic conditions to center our unique struggles and find methods of resistance that can liberate us accordingly.

The preceding blog post in this series explored the intersections between uprisings in the outskirts, the urgency of organizing in overlooked racialized regions, and parallels between the material conditions in the Inland Empire and Ferguson, Missouri, home of one of the largest insurrections of the 21st Century. This post will explore the new forms of autonomous organizing that can potentially arise from non-urban regions like the Inland Empire. This post argues that we must pay special attention to the intersections of race, lived experience, material conditions, geographic specificity, and class to appropriately experiment with autonomous methods crafted specifically for unique places and contexts.

California (and the IE): The Birthplace of Strategies for State Repression

The state of California is a unique place for many reasons. Unfortunately, history has taught us that California’s most unique trait is that this state is the literal laboratory for American empire to test out new mechanisms of oppression. California is full of examples of attempts to implement stronger forms of racism, refine police tactics of repression, among other advances in the science of population governance. It has accomplished these things primarily through its manipulation and shaping of space and land. Specifically, these are spatially-based solutions to perceived or crafted crises. In other words, this state has historically controlled BIPOC populations via territory, such as (but not limited to) its creation of the following: racist state technologies of power, segregation, redlining, prisons, policing, environmental racism, gentrification, border militarization, and so on. California is the testing lab for improving the operations of this American machine; it is the birthplace of what we now recognize as SWAT teams, created in the first place to repress revolutionary Black organizing in the 1960s. These advances in repression-via-territory are first piloted and beta-tested in the poorest and predominantly BIPOC areas or regions, and then spread everywhere else.

The Inland Empire, likewise, has been the battleground for new forms of racial capitalism, such that the IE has literally become a key part of the infrastructural backbone of the entire United States. We will continue to elaborate on these arguments in other blog pieces, but basically, the IE plays an essential role in the actual logistics of this empire through its distribution, transportation, storage, and production of commodities. However, the IE has not always had to play this significant economic role for the rest of the US. Those who govern the state, capitalists, and other planners collectively created and shaped a new, emergent form of capitalism in the 1980s onward; a new, logistical racial capitalism in the region known as the IE. This coincided with many global capitalist restructurings, migratory patterns, and changes in racial demographics that have given the IE’s BIPOC communities their primarily working-class characteristics. The logistical racial capitalism that has only recently been birthed in this region is the beginning of a new state solution, one aimed to more efficiently govern and discipline the people in the IE.

De-centering Unrelated Societal Paradigms from IE Struggles

This brings us back to the possibilities of autonomous organizing in a place like the IE. We should center indigenous resurgence and Black liberation as the main goals of our autonomous movements and analyze the possibilities of their attainment. However, autonomous organizing methods are not a one-size-fits-all formula or program. For example, we can see the shortcomings of urban-centric forms of organizing and the organizing done in white-dominant spaces for their inability to effectively translate into different environments and with different communities. We must not assume homogeneity in the ways that racial capitalism, the state, patriarchy, etc. have gripped different spatial landscapes and regions. For these reasons, we should shape and transform our organizing methods to best suit the particular contexts we find ourselves in.

Similar to how we must contextualize organizing based on unique geographies and material conditions, we must also de-universalize Eurocentric notions of liberation and freedom. This is not about forcing ourselves to fit the mold of conventional (i.e. urban-centric and white-dominant) organizing but rather, centering ourselves, our stories, and our experiences first by using autonomy as a blueprint that can be applied to unique contexts. By situating our struggle in Black, Indigenous, and subaltern ways of knowing and experiencing racial capitalism and the state, we can understand the necessary forms of resistance that will be based on our firsthand, lived realities. Who else can better understand how to get free than those who are directly oppressed?

Re-centering our Region’s Particularities in our Fight for Liberation
As we consider adjusting autonomous methods, we need to look at the ways that systems of oppression operate differently in places that are non-urban and predominantly non-white, such as the Central Valley, the High Desert, or the Inland Empire. We argue that we can come up with effective strategies by first grounding our analysis of different manifestations of state, capital, and cis-heteropatriarchy as they vary across geographies, place, and time; this allows us to anchor oppression spatially within its unique geographies. Thus, the strategies and intentions of resistance and escape must change based on spatial contexts. The following diagram is a visual explanation of the kind of elements our organizing methods should be paying attention to:
In the same way that the state experiments with new forms of governing mechanisms, the forms of resistance that are taking place and will take place here also serve as a testing ground. The re-appropriation of autonomous methods in the IE can be a presentation of potential forms of resistance that can inspire and push other regions to set new bars for what fighting back might look like. In the end, we want to think concretely about how to best organize ourselves here. We want to think about the potentials for autonomy in the ‘burbs, such as: the ability to engage in autonomous movements, building hubs and networks, mutual aid dispersal, inter-regional coordination, dynamic and tactical mobility, as well as other possible and inter-related spatial strategies of freedom that center BIPOC. Every crisis is an opportunity, and given the current lack of initiatives in the IE, the possibilities are all around us, waiting to be actualized.