Everything that happens in Minneapolis will be extended to the rest of the nation. Minneapolis is the state selected to be the test bed for ICE's war on the working class.
We, as revolutionaries, should probably be in our communities preparing for these things: building our resources, reinforcing our networks, identifying bad faith actors, doing mutual aid, and knowing that the army of the regime is coming to take our neighbors. There are people in your community who are already actively against the status quo of armed terror in our streets.
These are things you cannot do if you are alienated from your community, yet we are tasked with standing up in this moment. This requires us to maintain an understanding of the contradictions we are navigating, to reduce egoism, and to use realpolitik (politics based on practical praxis rather than ideological purity) finesse to build and maintain dual power and cultural counter-hegemony within our local spheres.
If people who stand against this madness are loud and apply pressure, those who have no problems with it, or even support it, will have to be quieter about it. But the rightoids aren't the smartest people. They have this policy of "hiding their power level," wherein they know that their politics, beliefs, morals, and bigotry are morally unacceptable to others. In order to gain social power, they hide these beliefs and wear a mask. This is why they use dog whistles and wait until you're alone with them to show you their true colors.
The reality is, there are probably people within your community who are not allies but are hiding their power level. I've seen this in real time. Right-wingers are, for better or worse, actual understanders of how power moves: becoming indispensable, "irreplaceable," knowing people with social power, having monied connections, and doing things for people in order to ingratiate themselves to the community. Combine this with the dog whistles and 'back-alley' conversations, and those who discover that this person is indeed a bad faith actor will be met with, "He does such good work, there's no way!" or "He's too nice to be a racist," or "We need him because no one else is willing to do X." This logic allows the reactionary to test boundaries, recruit, and signal to allies while maintaining deniability within the larger, still-liberal hegemonic field.
Not to mention, rightoids will constantly use excuses like "hearing out both sides," "it's just dark humor," or "I just liked it ironically" to run fade for their beliefs and create more plausible deniability. They know that the majority of people are non-confrontational and do not want to create friction, because friction is bad for business. And then ICE shows up to abduct your food vendors at the show because the sound guy called them, and no one is going to know he called. No one is going to think that person was able to get that deep into a leftist circle.
And then, even if he's discovered, even if he's found out, retaliation becomes an issue. Especially if the person in question did have considerable social power within the community, they will feel wronged and perhaps "betrayed" for their beliefs. Will he call ICE and burn the whole spot? He loves guns and thinks the space is full of "black and brown savages" (the memes they engaged with said these exact things). Who's to say he's not a threat, especially given the racial biases of the justice system and how emboldened rightoids are with soldiers literally enacting their "day of the rope" dream on everyday people right now?
If the goal is to create a safe, or better yet, resilient community and community space, then this fear can very well have a chilling effect. The person who's worried about their safety due to their citizenship might feel even more threatened by the potential to be caught in the crosshairs of retaliation.
That's why, in theory, you have to have a zero tolerance policy for bigotry: for liking racist memes, for ironically posting shit about George Floyd, for making transphobic jokes, for engaging with right-wing content online. That's one of the easiest tells, because again, right-wing people are not that smart. Yeah, he follows five dozen white power accounts on IG, and people are seeing the memes he likes in their own feed because that's how IG works. They have poor opsec. When you start asking people in private, you learn, "He's showed me racist memes when we were alone," or "Yeah, we got into a debate about abortion and he got pretty heated about men's rights," or whatever the tell is.
Even still, the "he's just into dark humor" excuse has a lot of staying power; people do not want to believe people they place trust in are bigots. Furthermore, how does one distinguish between the necessary exclusion of a dangerous actor and the descent into sectarian purity spirals? How can community be built when there's limited room for growth and a purge-like logic is cast upon those who might engage in "wrongthink"?
Ironically, here, the 'business sense' created by the contradictions of a small business owner's position can be of use. The higher tolerance for ideological differences predicated by the need to maintain customers forces a longer-term sense of thinking, allowing those in that position to gauge the severity of risk with the person involved. There's a strong difference between someone who watches Fox News with their headphones on while sipping coffee in the cafe, and someone who is actively in a position to harm the community. Essentially, there's levels to this shit, and it would behoove you to understand this dialectically.
Most of our community in the US is based on small business locations: cafes, coffee shops, bars, venues, etc. This isn't a moral judgment; this is a material reality of our material conditions. There's a need to not create friction within these spaces due to the need to maintain customer base and profits. Ergo, there's a strong likelihood that these spaces will tolerate the right-winger who remains quiet about it longer than they will tolerate the revolutionary who is loud about having zero tolerance.
Just because you are trusted by members of the community doesn't mean you have power within that community to the degree where you can unilaterally make tactical decisions that create significant friction within the business that the community uses. Especially when you consider that the class position of the small business owner is often much closer to the position of the worker than it is to the banker/landlord class, often working shifts right alongside the workers. Even if they have the capacity to fire or exploit the workers, the levels of exploitation will vary.
Yes, there are small business tyrants that abuse their workers, use churn tactics, and pay minimum wage; these do deserve scorn. Yet there is a minority of business owners who, despite being beholden to the exploitation inherent within the capitalist superstructure, are using their position within said superstructure to provide infrastructure that is inherently praxis-oriented. Being a resilient space within a sea of reactionary oppression is praxis in its own right. Taking the same wage as your worker is a form of solidarity.
We exist within late-stage capitalist neoliberalism wherein the entire model has been individual business ownership as the primary source of strengthening your own material conditions. One way we can look at this is: one group seeks to become the multi-millionaire exploiter, to join the capitalist class; the other group seeks to, as Deng put it, "build our productive forces." We cannot build revolution if we have no place to organize, and our superstructural constraints—the material conditions within America—dictate that the bulk of these spaces will be small businesses. Perhaps a significant portion of the material resources will come from this same minority of principally aligned petit-bourgeoisie. This was true for the IRA, after all.
The revolutionary must engage these contradictions dialectically, not dismiss them dogmatically. It's the revolutionary who is tasked with threading the contradictions between the capitalist superstructure that requires the community to use a business space, the need for the business to maintain profits, and the ideological allyship of the small business owner in relation to the class conflict with the business owner. This means that even if the small business owner is operating on the same principled line of zero tolerance, community safety, mutual aid, and queer protection, they are still beholden to the contradictions created by the superstructure. They have to maintain some level of profit because the rent has to be paid; it's really that simple sometimes.
The revolutionary, the activist, the organizer, is not beholden to the same contradictions created by this class position, which enables a higher degree of personal risk. But this personal risk cannot translate to the rest of those who are ideologically aligned with the revolutionary. Someone who has two kids to feed is going to inherently move differently than someone who has no children. Someone who started a business to create infrastructure for the community has no choice but to navigate those class contradictions, but those contradictions do not inherently prevent their allyship based on principles.
Realpolitik means understanding these different positions within the class structure and forming alliances based on a clear-eyed assessment of these constraints, not on ideological purity. You must understand this.
As I've learned, maintaining an internet presence and being a known person creates its own set of superstructural contradictions. Protester logic and purity culture create an air of inability in terms of real network building. Are you confusing militancy for martyrdom?
For example: You, as a trusted member of your community, learn that another member of the community is living in moldy conditions with children. You tell this person you'll do whatever you can, and you mean it. Again, militancy or rashness? Because you quickly learn that the landlord also owns a small business downtown. Before the community member who's a lawyer can even walk the person through all of the legal options available to them, you're making Instagram posts, tagging the business, mobilizing people for a potential action. All of this doesn't come to pass because the mold gets fixed. Pyrrhic victory? Yes, the mold issue is resolved; a working-class woman and her kids are sleeping safer. But you've just burned bridges with people who have considerable 'social clout' within the larger local power structure.
Other comrades tell you exactly the truth: There are people in the community who could have fixed the moldy drywall without ever involving the landlord. There are people within the community who can speak to the landlord one-on-one without ever making a public call-out, and there are people who can provide legal support for the renter to help them get their rent back. One might immediately jump to the "fuck landlords" bit, or even claim that the class contradictions here are too great, and thus only the most complete "razing of the ground" is an acceptable tactic. That's the dogmatic thinking, and in a sense, egoism, that prevents long-term praxis from fermenting. Is your goal to build dual power, or to win a single victory? There is a fundamental difference between the revolutionary and the activist in this sense, even if so much of our political messaging confuses activism for revolutionary action; you cannot make the same mistake.
As I've learned, if you want to protect your community, you have to be able to manage the friction you're going to create within that community. For example: You know that at least one person in a position of power within the space is engaging in the type of content I mentioned above, and you have people who are coming to you, telling you that this makes them uncomfortable, or perhaps even unsafe due to their citizenship status. You're being told this because you're a trusted person within the community who knows the stakes in a real way. Another person in the community with no social power or clout is also found posting racist memes, maybe posted up online in a racist shirt. Again, someone else in the community brings this to you because you're trusted and treat the space like it's your own. But perhaps that is the issue, no one can "own" a community, irregardless of principle, trust, or class position. This is the egoism in play.
You decide to use your social capital within the community to call out this person loudly at an event, with the intent of using this person as an example to showcase the zero tolerance principles. A reasonable strategy? Maybe, maybe not. If you burn your social capital in an explosive move, you could find yourself alienated from the community you intended to protect. The mutual aid infrastructure is more important than winning a single confrontation. Every action must be weighed against its impact on that capacity. Every action must be weighed between the potential for actual material praxis, and the potential to fuel the very egoism that can destroy that which you seek to build.
The friction created by this call-out, especially at an event, alienates the customer base of the business that the community (and its pantry, and other mutual aid related projects) rely on. Think of it like a video game meter; the meter gets too high, you fail the mission. Even if the call-out works, perhaps damaging the reputation of the person in question or causing others to rally against their beliefs, there will be others who are alienated by the directness. Those people might also be people of considerably higher standing within the community, who might feel that this sort of escalation of tactics in the short term damages the long-term stability of the infrastructure that is, again, needed to maintain essential mutual aid work.
Ergo, the revolutionary needs to operate with more finesse. Realpolitik is the most challenging of politics. It is, as Gramsci put it, a war of position, not of maneuver.
