Resistance is everywhere — it just isn't getting enough attention
Nepal, Greece, Indonesia, Italy, Madagascar, and the United States
Over two million people poured into the streets of Italy on Friday, and millions more skipped work as a general strike was called in solidarity with Gaza and the Global Sumud Flotilla. Trains, flights, the metro and buses were shut down in many parts of the country. Schools closed, highways were blocked, access to some ports was denied. What started with dockworkers in Genoa threatening to shut down shipping if Israel intercepted the Global Flotilla while it tried to bring aid to Gaza grew into the country’s largest union, with over 5.5 million workers, and numerous other unions calling a massive general strike for Gaza.
We can’t know what comes next. Other workers across Europe have talked about joining the call from Italian unions to shut down commerce for Palestine. Italian workers have talked about extending this general strike. The recent flotilla, the biggest yet with 46 boats, may mark a turning point, a point where people around the world see Israel rapidly moving toward a ‘final solution’ in Gaza and refuse to stand by. We do know that another flotilla has already launched. Just 48 hours after Israel captured the final boat of the Sumud flotilla, the Marinette, which almost made it to Gaza, another 11 ships have set sail packed with aid and humanitarians.
It doesn’t feel like it, but we’re in an era of uprising and resistance. The horrors and bad news can be overwhelming, but born out of necessity, born out of horror at genocide and disgust with fascism and being fed up with poverty and oppression, people are rising up around the world. In Greece a general strike this week against a 13-hour workday proposal brought the country to a halt. In Nepal a Gen-Z led uprising recently overthrew the government. An August wave of mass protest in Indonesia against corrupt elites shook the system to its core. In Madagascar protests against the government’s inability to provide basic services like water and electricity currently have the President on the verge of stepping down. France is, once again, wracked by huge nationwide protests against austerity.
Maybe none of this is news to you. Maybe you aren’t overwhelmed by the constant barrage of fascist encroachments. Maybe the blitzkrieg of oligarch and far-right attacks on our government and society writ large doesn’t dominate your news sources. But for so many of us it’s easy to miss the good stuff, it’s easy to miss that people are constantly fighting back the far-right and the oligarchs. In this media ecosystem it can be a little too hard to notice that people aren’t taking late-stage capitalism and fascism lying down.
So we should be clear — resistance is everywhere. Both around the world and in the U.S. people are organizing and fighting back. The tech oligarchs who are on the verge of controlling every major social media platform, and an increasingly large chunk of conventional news sources, certainly aren’t interested in you knowing that the resistance is constant, an inevitable response to the forces of oppression. But while they may try to stop us from learning about strikes and uprisings around the world, they can’t stop us from organizing and protesting and fighting back.
And it’s not just international. People across the U.S. are showing up to resist the kidnapping of their neighbors, and their own kidnappings. People are pushing back against ICE everywhere from Portland to Chicago to LA. Right now Broadview, Illinois is a site of constant confrontation between ICE and the local community. On Friday federal agents led by border patrol chief Gregory Bovino attacked protesters outside the Broadview ICE facility. They attacked a priest, they used tear gas, and they’re raiding houses in the middle of the night. But here’s the thing — the protests aren’t stopping. They’ve been ongoing for weeks and if anything they appear to have gained steam as national attention focused on the Chicago suburb.
We’ve seen this phenomenon before. Repression breeds resistance; it often leads to the exact opposite of what the repressive forces intend. This dynamic played a huge role in the uprising of 2020, in the recent uprising in Nepal, and in countless other movements for liberation. And right now we need to seize upon this dynamic and build mass resistance in response to increasingly violent repression.
Now is our moment. We know that the fascism and oppression are bad. That part is clear. Everywhere you look there’s increasingly overt fascism. ICE is getting billions to attack our communities. The Trump regime is trying to use the shutdown to fire hundreds of thousands of government workers, they’re attacking free speech on multiple fronts, they’re treating progressive ideas like terrorist ideologies, and they’re lying their asses off to spin every mass shooting as a left-wing terror attack to justify crackdowns.
We know it’s bad. The terrible news gets wall-to-wall coverage. But what it can be harder to see is that each fascist development is also sparking resistance. It’s not enough, yet, but each action from the fascist regime, and from the neoliberal order that constantly seeks more profit to feed the capitalist beast, is sparking a response. We must foster and grow and build that response into a movement capable of toppling and replacing the current structures of oppression, and to do that we need to understand that we are alone and that massive resistance is already underway.
While the world undergoes a series of uprisings and general strikes, the harsh reality is that the U.S. isn’t there yet. What we are seeing, though, is widespread protest, widespread organizing, and a left-wing populist shift. Capitalism is less popular than it’s ever been in this country, according to Gallup polling, while a growing chunk of Democrats in particular approve of socialism. This development coincides with soaring inequality, where the top 1% hold $52 trillion in wealth and the poorest half of the population collectively hold just $4 trillion. But it also coincides with a string of left-populist candidates announcing campaigns for Congress to mass approval. Every week a new candidate announces a campaign built around an anti-billionaire, pro-worker platform.
This wave of campaigns is just one sign of the times, one site of the seismic shift starting to shake this country. Even more inspiring is the new wave of organizing, of power building rising up from the grassroots in response to the crushing inequality we’re living under. Tenants are the perfect example here. Everywhere tenants are launching radical and potentially transformative projects, and their efforts are often flying under the radar.
The Debt Collective and tenants of Equity Residential, the nation’s fifth-largest apartment owner, just announced that they’re going on rent-debt strike. Tenants in trailer parks are organizing and forming tenant unions like never before. Multiple tenant unions are working together as the Tenant Union Federation, and one of their big fights is an effort to unionize everyone who lives in housing owned by mega-landlord Capital Realty Group, a New York-based private equity firm. They own over 18,000 homes.
This is just a small sample of the countless organizing efforts being conducted across the country. People are forming community spaces, rapid response groups, cooperatives and more. For every article you see about an awful development, there’s another story that typically gets far less attention where people are working to build a better world and fight back and organize their coworkers or neighbors. There’s millions of people resisting in countless ways. There are millions of people organizing and protesting and fighting fascism in the U.S. and around the world as we speak. We can’t lose sight of that in these dark days.
I know it’s easy to be cynical. It’s easy to succumb to doom. It’s easy to think you’re being edgy and “clear eyed” when you dismiss hope. But we can’t afford that right now. We don’t have the luxury of giving in to nihilism. Just the other day Logan Grendel said it best:
“Ignore anyone who says we’re cooked. That doom and gloom shit is exactly what they want, and we’re not giving it to them. There are no prizes for believing the least in what is possible… Instead, believe… Expand and connect with other pockets of possibility that people are building. And even if that sounds like idle poetry, it’s not. It’s a literal organizing strategy, because we’re not going to be able to do this all in one big go. We’re gonna have to do everything we can, find others that are doing and keep expanding and expanding until we win.”
Like Logan, I’m not interested in promoting a passive optimism. This is not a piece about hope grounded in the idea that things will magically get better. It’s about the fact, the reality that people are struggling against fascism and late-capitalism around the world. I take heart in seeing people fight back against the violence of a system that commits genocide and profits off it and tries to feed us all into the grinder to make a buck. I take heart in people organizing and resisting in the face of brute force and crude hatred and callous indifference. The message of this piece is not just to hope, but to do. Find others, go beyond observation, and get involved in the fight to save yourself and countless others. - JP
Thanks for pointing this out, J.P. It's important for all of us to be aware of how much resistance there is in the world right now.
Thank you. Informs, confirms and inspires.