Solidarity is a Strategy

While our human family is being kidnapped off the street by the enforcers of fascism, other elements of that enforcement are assassinating elected officials. Political violence comes in many forms.

Still: THE RESISTANCE IS EVERYWHERE.

In my life, I have learned that despair is not our enemy. Sometimes it is an opening, and it is inside devastation that our politics and sense of purpose are rearranged. This is the purpose of grief, to re-organize us after loss. As we experience loss after loss, let it radicalize. Let it rearrange.  Grief serves as revolution serves, to upend the previous order and bring us closer to an organization aligned with our free-est and best selves, our highest purpose. 

As we are disorganized by loss, let us reorganize around a new understanding of solidarity.

We do need to have hard conversations about anti-Blackness, both in Black communities and between Black communities and other racially oppressed groups; just as we must have hard conversations about citizenship and nationalism, about American exceptionalism and internationalism, about class struggle and what a Left movement is and what its fundamental shared characteristics are. I believe in principled struggle.

But, may grief open us to this truth: solidarity is a strategy, not a transaction. We don’t give it because someone earns it, we give it because a) it aligns with our principles and vision for the world, b) it aligns with our analysis of power and conditions, and c) it is required for groups in the minority to win against groups in the numerical and positional majority. Just as we must find solidarity with the Global South because we cannot win America without the world participating. The way we talk about solidarity needs to change.

I am going into the streets because I know your freedom is bound with mine, and becauseuse our teachers taught us the purpose of freedom is to free somebody else. 

From Los Angeles to Palestine 

From Congo to Oakland

From Brooklyn to Iran

We are everywhere. 

#nokings #resist #studsense