cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/8046839

Organizing, Not Merely Mobilizing

We have all heard and seen the mass demonstrations, marches, and walkouts that erupted in the Twin Cities, signaling the start of this year of struggle. We’ve heard the tramp of ten thousand people marching against the occupation, the sounds of mobilization; but beneath it, and lasting beyond, for those who know to listen, is a steadier sound — like whispers, like chants. That of the organizers standing sentry on street corners in the aching cold, coordinating grocery runs, rapid response to raids, and transporting students and workers safely. These bands are built by grassroots organization, and it’s precisely the last lesson our enemies want us to learn.

Five years ago, Minneapolis erupted in response to the murder of George Floyd. For that summer, it seemed every city in the world became an uprising, as Democrats scrambled to take a knee and corporations writhed to retire racist brand mascots and grant better media representation. USU spoke with a Communist on the ground in Minneapolis who has witnessed the sweep of 2020 to the present moment. “During this period, it felt like people were taking power in a way that’d be much bigger,” they told us. “Living in south Minneapolis, a police precinct being lit and set on fire, grocery stores looted and turned into mutual aid sites, 200 buildings going up in flames – that was a lot happening. In that short period of time, it felt more than a moment, but it quickly went away.”

All the energy to abolish the police, or even defund them, was funneled by liberal counterinsurgents into tactics that either wasted the time of great masses of the oppressed, or narrowly appealed to the upper classes of the nationally oppressed through job prospects and investment opportunity.1 The “moment” that was 2020 evaporated into an utter defeat for the oppressed, and a complete victory for the settler-colonial ruling class that ensures daily the death of a countless unnamed Floyds. The only price paid: a handful of temporary concessions this current regime has already pried back with vengeance, and a single sacrificial pig.

As our comrade in Minneapolis said, “As Communists, we were not organized enough to win the masses over when they were ripe to be captured.”

It is the general consensus of principled Communists that this was a watershed moment wasted. Every failure is a lesson, data in the experiment of social revolution; but if no one is keeping track, if no one is recording the results and learning from past efforts, the movement might as well be hurling human lives at the wall to see what sticks and looking away at each impact. But, as it turns out, something has stuck. Something has lodged itself firmly in the communities of Minneapolis, that all resulting efforts to resist occupation have been able to grow from: organizations, persisting from the embers of 2020 to now. It’s our responsibility to learn from them.