What to do when the fascists take power.
Don't put your hopes in protests. Fascists won't be swayed by them. No march, hashtag or petition will change their policies. To fascists, protests are an opportunity to find our who their enemies are. Don't get caught up in the constant stream of online outrage either. Don't spend your time on every lie they tell. They want you overwhelmed and distracted.
Do organize material resistance. It can be flashy, like a large strike or organizing your whole neighborhood to block ICE. Or it can be quiet, like offering a spare bedroom to hide from raids, or making sure everyone in your trans community has access to HRT. But it has to be real, it has to be material. In some cases, you'll only be able to do it with a few you trust, but where possible: organize with people who are not like you. A lot of people who have never been into any kind of politics, are about to find out that politics is coming for them. Don't leave them to fend for themselves if you have a chance to include them.
just as a point of order, a strike or organization of the neighborhood to block ICE are both protests.
Marches aren't great, but blocking traffic is. chants are fun but a list of demands is better.
Remember your protest STARTS working the moment they declare it illegal.
I'm gonna have to disagree with you. Blocking traffic and making demands will do nothing against fascists and illegal protests very regularly fail to achieve anything meaningful. We've seen so many traffic blockades over the past years and they haven't even succeeded in convincing centrist governments to do a little more about climate change or to stop sending weapons to an ongoing genocide. To expect these tactics to stop a fascist government is ludicrous. It's doing the same thing over and over and expecting better results under worse conditions.
I'd also argue that thinking of real material fights like anti-deportation blockades and strikes as 'protests' is dangerous. It leads to organizers having the wrong priorities, valuing 'making a strong statement' over the real material goal. An anti-deportation blockade is only a win if you stop the deportation.
A second risk is that people who think they're in a protest instead of a fight, will act like they're in a protest. To quote Mia Wong this week in It Could Happen Here:
"We could look at the airport protests from the first months of the original Trump administration, where masses of people occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to release the people had detained in the airports. The power of those protests was that they directly located the site where power was operating, the airport, and took them. The weakness of those protests was that people went home, and they went home because they had been told time and time and time again by the ACLU and by other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave, and that the Muslim Bans would be defeated by the courts. The Muslim ban was never defeated by the courts."
I would argue that the weakness of the airport occupations was that people in it thought they were at a protest. If they had conceived of their presence there not as a protest but only as a material blockade of the means of deportation, then going home would never have made sense.
so what would you call it and how would that solve people accepting misinformation from sources like the ACLU?
I'd call a strike a strike and a deportation blockade a deportation blockade and I'd talk to my comrades on the strike or blockade etc. so that we're all on the same page and can form a collective agreement that we're not leaving until we've achieved the specific material thing that we got together to achieve. Seems kind of obvious?
In the past I would have used the words 'direct action' but that has been so completely co-opted by protestors that people use it for any action that breaks the law, even if they achieved nothing direct. 'Direct action' has become a pretty useless term as a result, unless you specify what you really mean.
The conversation I'm trying to have here is a conversation that needs to be happening everywhere. People need to get out of the mindset of change through influence and get into the mindset of change as something they produce with their own hands.
"form a collective agreement that we're not leaving until we've achieved the specific material thing that we got together to achieve." Yeah and how do you battle misinformation from sources like the ACLU? I feel like you completely bypassed any issues I brought up? More likely I am not really understanding what you are trying to say? I hear that you are trying to have a conversation but I am not really getting the differences, I need it spelled out a bit more.
Alright, I'll try. The great thing about material things, is that they're real, which makes them quite resistant to misinformation.
For example: when a group is blocking an ICE van that is trying to leave with migrants in it, the moment that you know you've won is when you see the doors of the van open and the migrants get out and disappear into the crowd (and then you hang around somewhat longer to give them plenty of time to leave).
Now, of course you can't always see every material thing that you're fighting for. The location can be too big, the thing you want can be difficult to observe, and you can have situations where a smart organisation is genuinely able to deceive the people there into believing that they've achieved a material thing which hasn't happened. But it's dificult.
It is a hell of a lot easier to use misinformation against people who think that their work will result in 'making a statement', that they're 'influence' the right people and will see a bill pass or a court decision get made at some point in the future (the not-here, not-now). Those people are easy to fool.
When people come in fighting for a material thing, a claim like "You can go home, we'll defeat them in the courts" will be met with "Ok, go do it. We'll be staying here and after all the raids deportations actually stop, we'll consider going home". Could those people be fooled? Possibly. But it's a hell of a lot harder.
I do think this is kind of a side track. We shouldn't go from protesting to material resistance just to become more misinformation-proof. We should go for material resistance because it's the only thing that actually works. To fascists, protests are nothing but an opportunity to find out who their enemies are. Illegal protests are an extra easy opportunity to find out who their enemies are because you get to arrest them all and make neat little files. So if you're planning on putting yourself in fascists way, make sure it's not to make a statement. They're not listening. Get something real out of it that was worth the risk.
Queeranarchism,
I get you point. To simplify it to Thetetra, you were saying that we shall organize strikes to intervene with an issue instead of to make an 'statement' protesting for a change (that would only be done through legal means at a court or by legislation).
However, I sympathize with thetetra in that they were still not finding a clear distinction between a strike and a protest. for the same reason I could not validate your example escenarion of blocking an ICE van for them to release the immigrants into the crowd. Real life situations like that aren't that easy. the most most possible outcome to that escenario would be the van driving over the crowd before they release the immigrants. I like however, your initial 'material' resistance example--of hosting immigrants to hide from ICE. that to me is realistic material resistance.
