Solidarity in the End of Times

“You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.”

Angela Davis — from a lecture delivered at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, February 13th, 2014.

Two weeks ago, when things were ramping up here in Australia, I was telling some teachers I work with that this all seems eerily similar, even though none of us has ever lived through this before.

Because isn’t this how every apocalypse movie begins?

At that time, Italy had gone into lockdown and the U.S. was getting hit. Australia was seeing cases but not a lockdown.

Two weeks later, here we are, in a full scale shut down.

I guess this is what living in the end of times feels like and the reason it is both wholly new and very familiar is because we have all felt all these feelings watching one of the countless apocalyptic and/or dystopic films in the world.

I was tutoring two weeks ago and my fourteen-year-old student said, “None of us knows what to do. I guess we are going to have to watch all the apocalypse films and take some notes.”

I don’t know about that, because one of the things these movies leave out is the process of what happens next. The movies are all, “people die and then we are all suddenly in some dystopia.” But what happens in the in-between? How did these communities come together at the end of the world? How did they decide who does what and what happens and how society looks like?

The movies don’t show it, but I’m pretty sure they organised.

And we are starting to see this all over the world. We see tenants organising and refusing to pay rent. We see workers organising against big corporations that refuse to pay them or give them healthcare and other benefits.

And many of them are doing this without actually having to be in the same place! The old Marxist requirement of pounding the street and knocking on doors is over. Organizing can now be done while maintaining social distancing!

The world we thought we were living in is over.

It is supposed to be over.

Thank God, it is over.

Suspend capitalism NOW and do not resuscitate.

So what does solidarity mean in the end of times? We need to be disciplined, focused and committed. Organizations do that.

Organize, organize, organize.

Unity presupposes organization. Many brothers and sisters think they are in unity with the people but they don’t belong to any organization at all. All the time.

Unity presupposes organization. If you’re not in an organization, you’re not united with your brothers and sisters.

History will not be denied. You can either be part of the historical process, come to take the serious task of organizing your people on a day to day basis, or you can come every Wednesday night, clap, feel good, jump up, say you were there, and go back, and wait until next Tuesday night.

Our people are looking for direction and the conscious must provide that direction. The people are looking for unity, let’s give them unity. the people are looking for power, let’s give them organization. The masses want unity, let’s move from mass mobilization, to mass organization.

Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) The unconscious and the conscious and mobilization vs. organization.

The first step is to organize. The second is to organize.

Support people who organize. Organize yourselves. Join an organization. Make an organization. Become an organization.

This is the time for mass scale organizations, and you don’t even have to leave your home. The time is ripe. Look at all the concessions the ruling class is making: rent freezes, eviction freezes, healthcare benefits, airfare price plunges, working from home etc.

Your job now is to organize and push to make these “concessions” a permanent reality. Why are they able to do this now? And so easily? Because their wealth depends on us working and paying and consuming.

Because they could do it all along but just did not, because they did not have to.

Suddenly now, without us, they are helpless.

Remind them that they will remain helpless without us. Remind them that without meeting our demands, what seemed like the end of the world for them will remain the end of the world. As Tim Horras pointed out this is spectacular post, once the virus is over, you’re going to see mass evictions and lots of other things that they will quietly try to sneak back into our lives after the pandemic.

Organise and do not let that happen.

Here are some types of organising possible in the pandemic:

1. Legal Action (lawsuits)
2. Political Lobbying (getting laws made or changed)
3. Fundraising (to pay those doing the work)
4. Education (teachers are already doing entire lessons from home! Collect all their tools and learn from them!)
5. Workshopping (gathering with other activists to discuss solutions)
6. Creating and running events online (meetings, etc.)
7. Consciousness-raising
8. Solidarity work (getting people from different oppressed groups to support one another)
9. Storytelling

…having grown up marching on union and civil rights picket lines, taught the rest of us that mass movements need clear goals, and strategy to achieve those goals — that the purpose of organizing is to involve more people in the movement, to get them to take some sort of action to end the war.

Make the goal. Work out a strategy. Put it into action, and do it together.

This is a time like never before, never let our children say we wasted it.