Resist: Seven Months Against ICE
Winning the Battle
Build a Party of the 99%
ICE began terrorizing our country on June 6. Seven months and one day later, they murdered Renee Good in cold blood… galvanizing Minneapolis and the whole country.
In that time, We the People have found new ways to exert our political will. We do not have to wait on the electoral process.
Immediately, in Los Angeles, on June 6, mutual aid groups formed to protect neighbors and communities. These rapidly grew into Rapid Response Teams, which then broadened into community self-defense teams, which soon affiliated into many city-wide networks. Then they went online.
Community responses became more pointed when ICE invaded Washington DC and have sharpened ever since, in every city that has been invaded: Portland, Oakland, Memphis, New Orleans, and now Minneapolis.
By the time ICE spread its terror campaign from DC to other cities, every community in the country had online access to training videos, large-scale Zoom discussions, ways to digitally track, locate, and harass ICE, incorporating constant efforts to trade tactics, and many powerful resources. The Stop Ice app was the most sought-after app in the country… until Apple, a private corporation, pulled it off the market.
The public is exercising its political power in ways never before seen in this country. We all need to appreciate this new and interesting direction.
We, the people, give our public power to government, which is supposed to protect and extend our interests, guaranteeing essential human needs. If we give it, can we withhold it? Can we reclaim it?
So, what is public power? Political power is the power to compel and shape events and institutions to do specific things. Public power is the power of groups, even entire economic groups with the same economic interests, to come together in public action to enforce their will.
Fascism expresses the political will of the 1%, those who own the factories, corporations, and Artificial intelligence (AI). AI is predicted to take half of existing jobs.1 Just in the last year, since Trump came into office, something less than a million people have lost their jobs in government or in the economy.
Fascism cannot help but tear apart the fabric of society. Its mission is to divide us into groups against ourselves and then criminalize each of us separately.
When the government loses the support of its people, it turns to naked force and compulsion. It attacks its people in order to enforce acquiescence and cooperation. Fascists today are doing this across the country. When they resort to violence, they want us to resort to violence. We don’t have to react the way they want. In this moment, we are creating daily new ways to apply social force.
The response to ICE, the massive level of public response, all amplified by social media, shows that the people of the United States are already involved in fighting for their interests against fascism.
Revolution is in the air. Every drama reaches a dramatic conclusion. We can fight and win, and the next step is to organize a political party of the 99%, those of us who must work for a living, we who sell our labor power to the 1%. Building our own political party is needed to go on the offensive to win the fight for a society where everyone has what they need and looks out for each other.
The fight against fascism is a fight for basic human needs for all, for democracy, for the control of government, and for the future of humanity and the planet. By taking the offensive to defeat fascism, the working class can pass over to the offensive against capitalism and private property, the seedbed of fascism.2
Footnotes
- Eloundou, Tyna, Manning, Sam, Mishkin, Pamela, and Rock, Daniel. 2024. GPTs are GPTs: Labor market impact of potential of LLMs. Science 384 (6701): 1306-1308.
- https://lrna.org/program-m/
