On November 3rd, 2023, the Ready Reserve Force’s ship, the Cape Orlando, left Oakland for Tacoma, Washington, where it would be loaded with weapons for its final destination: the Zionist entity. In Oakland, after hours of picketing, protesters had noticed that the gate to the dock was not fully closed. They took advantage of this opportunity to storm the boat to keep it from launching. Eventually protesters were detained and the Orlando was permitted to continue its journey. At both West coast ports the ship was met with resistance, and in both cases this failed to block the boat.

    Working on intel reportedly leaked from a worker of conscience aboard the Orlando, organizations including Arab Resources and Organizing Center (AROC), Falastiniyat, Jewish Voices for Peace (JVP) Seattle, Students United for Palestinian Equality & Return University of Washington (SUPER UW), Samidoun Seattle, Resist U.S. Led-War, and The International League of Peoples’ Struggle (ILPS) Seattle announced that they would continue in Tacoma the fight Oakland had started. The Orlando’s docking was delayed, bumping it to Monday morning. Whether this was done in hopes of reducing the number of protesters able to join, as a way of pre-loading weapons onto the dock and staging police in advance, or both, remains uncertain.

    On the morning of November 6th, 2023, a crowd gathered hours before dawn at the Port of Tacoma to block the Cape Orlando. Despite the risks many working people may have faced from missing shifts, hundreds of people turned out at 5 AM in the frigid rain. Pickets were set up at multiple entry points to the relevant dock. Longshoremen refused to cross the picket lines, leaving the military to load its own boat. As the day wore on more people joined, with some estimates putting the turnout at around a thousand participants. On the water, Puyallup Water Warriors, an Indigenous movement focused on restoring Indigenous relationship to and law of land, launched a small canoe blockade in an effort to prevent the ship from leaving. The protest continued with an outpouring of support from the community in the form of delivered food, drinks, and supplies. Around midday, a protester at the northwestern picket spotted people moving weapons along the dock. After a frustrating conversation with an on-the-ground organizer, marked by a yellow safety vest and megaphone, the protester left the demonstration broken-hearted and demoralized.

    Unfortunately, despite massive turnout and early indications the boat was already being loaded, tactics remained much tamer than in Oakland. Between the layout of the port putting the ship approximately half a mile from the gate and police having staged in advance behind the gates, storming the boat wasn’t viable. Worse, the effort to block the boat from the shore had been outmaneuvered by pre-loading weapons onto the dock. Despite this early failure, there was no adjustment in tactics, no effort toward escalation. Instead, on-the-ground organizers announced victory late in the day, and told everyone to go home.

    In the days that followed a number of public criticisms circulated, primarily through anarchist publications and private social media accounts. (For publicly available accounts see Shutting Down the Port of Tacoma: Reflections from the Salish Sea, Critical Reflections on Recent ‘Block the Boat’ Actions in Tacoma, Another reportback from the Tacoma Block the Boat action, and Reportback from the Port Blockade in Tacoma.) Conflicted and confusing information circulated. There was one consistent through-line in every critique, however, which we firmly agree with: the declaration of success voiced by on-the-ground organizers, distinguished primarily by safety vests and megaphones, was a false declaration in the face of a clear and decisive loss. Though accounts vary on what was or was not loaded onto the boat, the fact is that tools of genocide were loaded onto the Orlando that day, bound for the Zionist entity. As the protester who spotted the weapons being loaded said between sobs: “I am seeing tools for killing people going on that boat, I’m seeing it with my own eyes. What the fuck are we doing here?”

     People had come to block the boat, not delay it an additional twelve hours. To hear loud declarations of victory while their own eyes told them they had failed left people feeling betrayed. The degree of demoralization that followed was a blow to the movement.

    Though the effort to stop the boat ultimately failed, this remains one of the largest direct actions for Palestine in the Puget Sound since the Al Aqsa Flood, both in terms of community turnout, support, and duration. For this reason it’s worth analyzing and learning from its successes and failures as we continue developing not only the movement for Palestinian liberation, but anti-colonial and anti-imperialist movements everywhere.

    As we move through this critique we want to acknowledge the amount of conflicting information that has circulated. Furthermore, the time elapsed since the action has resulted in foggy memories with limited ability to confirm finer details. Paired with a stark lack of transparency from organizers, this makes a robust critique difficult. There may be missing details in some areas and an inability to corroborate details in others. Nonetheless, we feel a study of this action can provide valuable insight despite gaps. This action was significant in the region’s movement for Palestine, and sits within the context of the region’s long history of port blockades and direct action. There were also social-cultural elements present that have proven to be recurring barriers to building sustained and sustainable movements for liberation more broadly that we feel are important to better understand. To glean important insights from this action we wish to celebrate the successes we did see, and provide constructive criticism to improve future actions.

    Liberation will not come without collective action that effectively mobilizes the will of the people, whose labor power sustains the economies of genocide we’re fighting against. Participants dragged themselves out of bed before dawn not to work in service of capital, but to march into the frigid and cold Puget Sound autumn. In the wake of the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, it was uncertain what would unfold or what level of police repression should be expected, and still people came. Unfortunately the tendency to prioritize the symbolic over the material was on display in the false declaration of victory. This left participants visibly distraught at being unable to do more and vocally infuriated at being misled. The will exists, yet many people remain uncertain where to begin or how to become engaged with more meaningful action. As such, they are easily co-opted into liberal actions that primarily seek symbolic rather than material wins.

    Energy and passion such as that seen at the Block the Boat action must be effectively stewarded, organized, and directed. This is best done by a well-organized revolutionary vanguard party with a strategy accounting for regional particularities in culture, material conditions, and needs. Our goal in writing this critique is to contribute to a body of knowledge drawn from direct experience and critical analysis, a body of knowledge which we hope will support the strategic elements of building just such a party.

Mobilization

    Much of the success of this action was in mobilization. Riding high on Oakland’s courageous attempt to stop the boat, the people of the Puget Sound were eager for their chance to take direct action against colonial imperial forces.

     Despite delays and fairly miserable conditions, around a thousand people turned out to stand up for Palestine. Given a deeply ingrained risk aversion that limits the capacity of many mass actions, and an uncertainty about how police would respond, this is a win. Actions such as this can be seen as opportunities to begin developing much needed risk tolerance. In addition to the value of building theoretical knowledge and experience via praxis, building risk tolerance is crucial in moving the masses toward greater revolutionary potential. No clash happened that day, but it remains significant that people were undeterred when police donned riot gear. Even more so, those experienced in the brutality of the George Floyd Uprisings were observed talking less experienced participants through ways to navigate violent escalation. This kind of cognitive practice can be effective in eroding risk avoidance and building confidence in those otherwise inexperienced in such risks.

    The longshoremen’s respect for the pickets led to an additional twelve-hour delay and forced the military to deploy their own personnel to load the ship. This was widely understood as the primary success of the action and demonstrates clearly the strategic utility of keeping up-to-date knowledge about local union protocols. Identifying points of union influence in key industries and developing an understanding of how to apply pressure to these points can bolster our actions with minimal additional effort. Wherever we can build working relationships with local union members across diverse industries, all the better. Given the sharpening contradictions locally, nationally, and globally, building these inroads now may create future opportunities to re-capture union power that has been co-opted by neoliberal imperialism.

    An additional success to be noted is the cost that both the delays and the need to bring in the military to load the boat must have incurred. While no hard numbers are available for assessment, the raised cost of business is important in sabotage-oriented strategies, which we’ll return to later.

Indigenous Leadership

    The day prior to the action there was an impromptu pre-brief facilitated by the Water Warriors. This came about due to community members missing updates about delays to docking and arriving early. The Water Warriors demonstrated exemplary leadership by calling all who had arrived together, namely representing Freedom Road Socialist Organization and Unity–Struggle–Unity Press as well as some others who were unaffiliated.

    The Water Warriors laid out a detailed plan while avoiding over-disclosure to preserve security. Their outlined plan for a water-based canoe blockade prioritized concrete, material impact and demonstrated strategic foresight and a commitment to effective communication, collaboration, and action. They shared their plan to take their canoes into the bay and hold the line for as long as possible. They also shared with the group how they could be supported, including keeping watch from the land and sharing pre-brief information with comrades so other protesters could plan accordingly. The meeting was brief, perhaps twenty minutes or so, before the Water Warriors departed for a prayer ceremony, which meeting attendees were invited to join.

    Despite the explicit request of the Water Warriors to communicate information from the pre-brief to comrades, concerns later arose about a lack of effective communication and coordination between organizers and the Water Warriors. Many protesters on the ground had no idea that the Water Warriors were going to be conducting a water-based blockade. While it’s not always necessary for every protester to be kept in the loop about every move, the request of the Water Warriors that information be passed along clearly indicates a desire for as many people as possible to be kept in the loop. (While this author recalls reading a critique focused on this subject, it has since proven elusive so we’re unfortunately unable to provide additional citations. If any readers are familiar with this critique we ask that you share it.)

    Here we again see a need for improved communication, as well as an increased attunement to Indigenous leadership. There is also a clear indication for non-Indigenous organizers and participants to ask Indigenous leadership how to best support their action(s). We must endeavor to gauge the willingness for escalation as well as the degree of violent retaliation oppressed parties are willing to bear. This is key not only to following Indigenous leadership but to centering the most oppressed and therefore most affected among our ranks.

    The lost potential of this pre-brief to improve collaboration and communication reminds us of the importance of pre-briefs. Pre-briefs have repeatedly proven to be vital to participant coordination and collaboration as well as action success in other instances. For this reason, we should always strive to coordinate an accessible and well-communicated pre-brief as an expected part of praxis. This is best done with a structure that facilitates effective communication and cooperation not only between participants but also between participating groups, and even across ideological lines. This creates opportunities for improved collaboration toward a much-needed united front.

    The settler-colonial relation continues to determine the form of advanced capitalism we organize against. The sovereignty of Indigenous nations everywhere is routinely violated to bolster capital and facilitate further violations elsewhere: the sovereignty of Adivasi nations in India is violated to plunder resources that fuel weapons production. The Puyallup nation’s sovereignty over their own land and water is violated by the transit of military weaponry made using those same resources. All this for the purpose of violating the sovereignty not only of Palestine, but of West Papua, the Philippines, La Guajira, and many, many more. For this reason it is vital that revolutionary groups and movements build solidarity and coalitions with the Indigenous nations whose territories we are collectively struggling on. Colonialism and capitalism are symbiotic, violent, extractive dynamics which threaten us all, regardless of skin color or national origin, due to rising fascism and the worsening climate crisis. As such, revolutionaries must build strong coalitions with all of their natural allies. The success of the social revolution hinges on the liberation of all oppressed people.

    An apparent lack of intentional and direct collaboration with the Water Warriors fundamentally weakened this action. A parallel failure to broaden the scope of the struggle for Palestine by centering the relationship between Palestinians and the Indigenous nations of so-called America was a failure to bring to light the underlying causes of genocide faced by both peoples. Explicit and intentional collaboration with the Water Warriors undoubtedly would have strengthened this action and elevated both its material and social-cultural impact.

    Bearing in mind that Indigenous communities are not a monolith, those of us who are settlers must endeavor to connect with and build good relationships with the nations whose lands we occupy. No opportunity to engage with Indigenous nations should be missed. Social investigation to not only better understand the priorities of Indigenous nations and leadership, but also to locate and build coalitions with the most politically advanced individuals and groups within these nations, is necessary. Their knowledge and perspectives should shape the struggle against imperialism in the belly of the beast. This is especially vital given that this struggle is unequivocally a struggle against the foundations of settler colonialism as embodied and enforced by the so-called United States both locally and abroad. Even if Indigenous peoples aren’t able to participate in the action itself, inviting an opening ceremony led by representatives from local nations (as seen in Seattle’s Marches for Palestine collaboration with radical members of the Duwamish nation) supports the building of these much needed relationships and coalitions.

Community Care

    There was an abundance of care on display at this action. Car shuttles, coordinated autonomously in some cases and with support from Democratic Socialists of America in others, decreased worry about parking, walking long distances, towing, or surveillance by police. Overall this increased accessibility. Hot drinks and food were coordinated, as well as supplies such as umbrellas, dry socks and gloves, and hand warmers. Community members made multiple supply drops and participants helped distribute these across pickets.

    This coordination additionally provided an avenue of participation for community members otherwise unable to directly attend without undue risk (parolees, for example). Such care-taking and socially reproductive labor maintains momentum and morale not only in one-off actions but for revolutionary movements more broadly. The importance of this often overlooked labor cannot be overstated: this socially reproductive labor is the backbone upon which sustainable and effective revolutionary movements are built. Without this labor, actions such as these become non-viable, and networks of communication, including organization relationships and coalitions, disintegrate. This is the work that can and should move us from spontaneous action toward long-term, structured organizing that sustains movements. This is the work that, when strategically and intentionally undertaken, can close the gap between who can and can’t join us in struggle.

    However there were notable strategic and structural gaps in care. For example, while chants and rousing speeches are important parts of keeping people engaged at actions, we’ve spoken with many who report that these become draining and redundant at longer actions. While plenty of people on the ground encouraged one another to rest, there weren’t concerted efforts to create rest zones. Providing intentionally structured time and space for people to rest and recover also opens opportunities to invest in education and agitation. Similarly the construction of small fires to serve as warming stations supported participants to stay longer on a very wet and cold day. With improved structure and organization, such spaces could easily have been utilized toward social investigation and much needed coalition building.

     Small educational groups bolstered by hot food and drinks could have elevated rest zones into spaces for reproductive labor in support of broader movements for liberation. As Mao said in The United Front in Cultural Work, the cultural and educational work required to “to transform the thinking of the masses” cannot be undertaken in haste, and must primarily center the needs of the masses. Meeting the basic human needs of food, drink, and rest at an action where the masses are present and already politically engaged is a prime opportunity to initiate this work. Pairing the tending of basic needs with education and agitation has a long history in revolutionary action globally, from the free meal programs of the Black Panther Party to the cross-caste Communist organizing of post-colonial Kerala, India and beyond. The potlatch of Pacific Northwest Indigenous peoples, of which sharing feasts and giving gifts are important aspects, were long banned in part due to their potential to facilitate the organizing of Indigenous resistance to occupation. These historic lessons should not be forgotten.

    We must constantly ask ourselves, who are we implicitly excluding from our movements? Better understanding who we implicitly exclude and how we do so is vital to building a robust foundation for revolutionary care and reproductive labor. This must necessarily go above and beyond ensuring meals and water are available during lengthy actions. Increasingly working people don’t have the resources necessary to support taking time off work to participate in the struggle. If we’re not finding ways to address this, our actions and our movements will stagnate or shrivel. To this end we must consider what our organizations can do to support worker participation in our actions. What is needed to make our actions more accessible to workers who can’t afford to take the time off work? How can we organize to address those needs? In collaborating with Indigenous and other oppressed peoples, how do we ensure that we are safe and principled collaborators? Taking considerations like this seriously demonstrates that we do care about these communities and will devote time, energy, and labor not only to addressing their needs but also to making our movements accessible to them. This is key to building the foundational trust required for building meaningful relationships and effective collaboration.

        At actions like these plenty of people deeply entrenched in liberalism will be content to march in circles, chant, and go home. What we saw on the ground demonstrates that these are not the only people showing up. The despair we witnessed as people realized weapons were being loaded, and the rage, bitterness, and even disgust expressed as people realized the failure of the action and dishonesty of on-the-ground organizers, tells us that there are many, many people whose passion needs a home. Even more than this, they deserves competent, professional leadership that is able to effectively direct that passion toward revolutionary ends. This means on-the-ground leadership capable of discerning these dedicated individuals from those entrenched in liberalism, who are able to conversationally engage them without succumbing to the pitfalls of lecturing or proselytizing, and get them plugged in to revolutionary organizing above and beyond the event that brought them into the streets. (We recommend Secrets of a Successful Organizer for specifics on what this can look like.) Vitally, we must ensure that our organizations are already well-structured, with clear programs outlining immediate goals and work. This will prepare us to meaningfully direct the time, energy, and labor of these individuals toward gaining material victories, enabling them to see the strength of their own impact sooner than later. This is necessary not only for getting buy in, but for meaningfully developing these individuals’ political consciousness and revolutionary potential.

        As contradictions continue to sharpen, we must see it as our responsibility to connect with the people who are willing to put their bodies on the line, but may not know where or how to begin. These are people who are primed to develop a revolutionary analysis of current conditions and a robust understanding of what needs to be done to make meaningful change. With well-developed, experienced, accountable leaders and a well-structured party, we can be the leadership they deserve and prevent them being co-opted by liberal and/or reactionary forces. Too often we’ve seen Communists and Communist organizations regarding the politically underdeveloped masses with something like pity, or worse, disdain. These attitudes result in missed opportunities for meaningful education, agitation, and effective organization that can build out a revolutionary base in the pursuit of escalating revolutionary action. This is crucial as contradictions sharpen toward a breaking point.

    Care for the people in our movements also requires honest and transparent communication. A false declaration of victory triggered rightful feelings of demoralization and grief. It prompted significant suspicion from those who had given their time and energy: were the organizers even on our side, on the side of Palestine? Some of the organizations involved here have been involved in other direct actions, such as AROC Bay Area organizing the more militant Oakland Block the Boat, or SUPER UW’s short-lived occupation of a Boeing-funded engineering building at the University of Washington. JVP Seattle is well known for their civil disobedience and non-violent direct action, including blocking the doors to Seattle’s federal building, and have supported more militant actions such as those conducted by SUPER UW.

    However, it was unclear who the on-the-ground organizers were. Whether those individuals who carried radios, megaphones, and marked themselves with safety vests were members of the organizations who made the call remains unclear. While the spirit of community care would indicate a need for the kind of honest communication and effective critique that builds bridges rather than burning them with regards to the orgs that called for the action, it remains unclear whether on-the-ground organizers were “on our side.” We wish to treat these organizers not as enemies of the people, but as individuals with good intentions who were and are still learning how to most effectively translate those intentions into meaningful impact (as most of us are). Yet the lack of clarity with regards to on-the-ground leadership makes effective discernment here difficult to impossible. This indicates further the absolute necessity of ensuring leadership transparency. This isn’t only an essential aspect of ensuring that accountability is viable, it’s also essential to preventing the very real risk of infiltration and sabotage. The security risk of being unable to verify the affiliation of on-the-ground organizers cannot be overstated.

    Without assuming association or alignment of on-the-ground organizers with any of the named organizations, the failure of these organizations to engage in critique of on-the-ground organizer conduct is important to note. This avoidance of critique in symptomatic of an organizing culture that prioritizes friction-less “unity” and relationships without tension. This betrays an internalized liberal tendency described by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail as a preference for “negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” We need more than just friction-less relationships at the next action. We need a sustainable, long-term movement capable of learning from its mistakes and growing into a force that can stop a genocide. This is not possible in the confines of a negative peace. It requires generative tension, and leadership mature and experienced enough to navigate such tension without allowing it to devolve into infighting, drama, and movement fracturing.

Goal Construction and Considerations

    Unclear or unattainable goals and ineffective strategy leads to confusion, failure, and disillusionment, and will negatively impact participants, actions, and the movement as a whole. As organizers we must ensure our goals are realistic and achievable, have sound strategies for achievement, and clearly communicate them to participants.

    The prominent belief among protesters was that they were stopping weapons from being loaded onto the boat, which turned out to be non-viable. Even if weapons hadn’t been pre-loaded onto the dock, it’s important to be realistic about the military’s willingness to escalate against civilians standing between them and their weapons. A goal of fully stopping weapons loading with a blockade was likely a nonstarter – unless, that is, protesters had been ready and willing to escalate. In light of this we have to ask: were protesters prepared to escalate, and to what degree were they prepared to escalate?

    This is incredibly challenging to assess on the ground, especially when you’re dealing with hundreds of people coming together across a range of ideologies and levels of political development. While there were those in attendance whose readiness and willingness to escalate was on full display, these individuals were in a stark minority. Realistically, a significant portion of new allies to the Palestinian cause in the Puget Sound are, by the nature of the region’s demographics, white and middle class. While these demographics are experiencing increasing politicization under fascism, worsening climate change, and increasingly sharpening economic contradictions, it’s important to understand where the political development and consciousness of these demographics is and the ways in which they’ve been historically shaped by liberal and reactionary politics. Despite their willingness to come out in the cold and rain and face police in riot gear, it’s safe to assume that the majority of protesters weren’t prepared for a violent escalation, let alone leading or participating in such an escalation themselves.

    There were additional, physical factors curtailing the possibility of escalation without militant organization. The layout of the port made charging the docks difficult without individuals able and willing to scale fences, or alternatively cutting through the fence. Beyond the fence, the distance to the dock was such that making it to the boat without being intercepted was unlikely. The port overall is also particularly susceptible to kettling, and this would have been especially true on the dock.

    Given these material realities, blocking the loading of weapons onto the boat was probably not achievable, even if it was an admirable intention. It’s clear in hindsight that there was a gap in understanding between many protesters and organizers on what blocking the boat meant exactly. Specificity would have set clearer expectations and may have prevented or reduced demoralization over the outcome. It could also have provided a clearer roadmap to what needed to be done to meet goals and what strategy and tactics would have best supported a successful and effective action. For example, a better understanding of what it would take to meet stated goals may have highlighted the tactical value of a water-based blockade, and thus the necessity of effective collaboration with the Water Warriors (though, as previously stated, this would ideally already be on the forefront of organizer’s minds).

    Furthermore, establishing a clear metric for success would have better enabled organizers to assess and communicate the state of things. This would additionally have supported protesters in interpreting the outcomes on their own.

​Setting the Terms of Engagement​​​​​​

    Under the above conditions “blocking the boat” simply wasn’t tenable, but that doesn’t mean all disruptive action was a lost cause. Making something as costly and inefficient to do as possible is a useful mechanism of sabotage, made clear by the CIA’s own Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Successfully undertaking such a strategy requires first and foremost an honest assessment of our capabilities and limitations. In our assessment, a core factor undermining the ability to effectively execute such a strategy comes down to this simple fact: organizers allowed the enemy to set the terms of engagement.

    The public call to block the boat in Tacoma allowed authorities to coordinate a preemptive response, as evidenced by pre-staged police with riot gear and advanced loading of weapons onto the dock. When delays were announced, organizers also delayed the onset of the action. In other words, the state was permitted to set the day and time of the encounter, which enabled them to pre-load weapons onto the dock and put cops in place to guard them. This ensured any attempt to block loading couldn’t be successful.

    While it’s safe to assume there was planning behind the scenes during delays, there were tactical adjustments that could have been made during this time which were overlooked. Again, explicit collaboration with Water Warriors during this time may have brought to light alternate approaches, including a better supported and more robust water blockade. There are certainly more than enough people in the Puget Sound with their own canoes and kayaks who could have been recruited for deployment of a water-based blockade under the leadership of Water Warriors. On land there was significant risk of kettling, with the layout of the port providing little option for tactical withdrawal in the case of police or military escalation. Scouting during delays could have supported the development of more robust strategy including more tactically effective deployment locations, courses of action, contingency plans, redundancies, etc.

    One alternate approach could have seen a blockade of railways leading into and out of the port (taking inspiration from the 2017 railway blockades in Olympia) deployed on the intended day and hour, refusing to capitulate to the state’s delays and endeavoring to prevent the weapons from being loaded onto the dock. With this approach, protesters could have been alerted to and prepared for a multi-day blockade. The community networks that mobilized could have additionally prepared for supporting a long-term blockade.

     Bringing more tactics to bear would also have strengthened the action. There was functionally one tactic at play: a picket blockade. Without a robust strategy for escalation utilizing diverse tactics and an ability to adapt to changing conditions on-the-ground, this approach is extremely limiting. We’ve seen through other actions that multiple tactics can be deployed at once or at a steady escalation, reserving the ability for those unprepared for escalation to remain engaged at a tactical level matching their ability and risk tolerance. What we saw at this action was functionally a “green” picket with mass-mobilization, but this could (and should) be expanded on. While those ready to participate but not yet ready to escalate could continue participation in a green picket, a “yellow” option could have formed a buffer between “green” and “red” roles. Yellow roles could have occupied space in the form of die-ins or sit-ins, retaining the option to comply or refuse cooperation with dispersal orders. In this formation, “red” teams could build barricade structures (such as those built using pallets and other debris sourced from the port itself) and establish body-based blockades utilizing chains, sleeping dragons, and other tools to hold space for a much longer duration. In tandem with a water-based blockade, these different tactical approaches would have supported one another for a more deeply entrenched and militant action. As noted in our A15 critique however, it’s important to research the capabilities of local state actors when it comes to “apparatus removal,” and adapt accordingly. It would also be necessary to have contingency plans in case of preemptive arrests and suppression.

     It’s important to critically reflect on factors that may lead to early arrests and how to mitigate these in order to hold the barricade for as long as possible.* Inspiration should also be taken from strategies and tactics such as those that allowed a 2021 blockade of the Port of Seattle to block unloading of an Israeli-operated cargo ship for nearly two weeks. This will help shape a more effective disruption of economies of genocide via more effective disruption of supply chains these economies depend on.

    In consideration of alternate strategies, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that sabotage may have been the most effective means of blocking the boat. While we’ll leave the specifics of what sabotage could mean to the imagination, this does highlight again the necessity of considering the balance of willingness to escalate and risk aversion. This is a long-term and widespread strategic barrier which we should all endeavor to find ways to address according to the resources and limitations of our regionally-bound cultural and material conditions, in preparation for moments like these.

    Any of these approaches to improved preparedness and setting the terms of engagement would have required significantly improved structural coordination between organizing groups and their leadership. Similar to concerns we had about the structurelessness of the A15 movement, a lack of structure here posed serious limitations. These include limitations on effective reconnaissance, strategic planning and implementation, and effective management of the forces that were mobilized, not to mention collaboration between participating groups and organizations. These are all necessary components of setting the terms of engagement and positioning ourselves with as much strategic strength as possible, and are best established through long-term, well-structured organizing.

Reflection and Feedback

    In the face of serious criticisms related to declaration of false victory, poor communication, and lack of transparency, a member of ILPS offered to host a call via Signal to provide space for people to voice concerns and brainstorm improving future collaborations.

    It’s unclear whether any on-the-ground organizers were involved in this session or not. It appears that, aside from ILPS, the organizations that made the initial call weren’t responsible for calling or hosting this meeting. Whether or not they had representatives present is unknown.

     Nonetheless, the invitation to discuss criticisms and facilitate learning for future implementation remains a good model to use for all direct actions, not just those that go south. Creating spaces such as this for open discussion of critiques, facilitated with humility, are vital to maintain ongoing learning and growth. This is in turn vital to maintain an effective, adaptable, and ever-evolving movement in the struggle for liberation. We can’t improve without feedback, so we must always strive to ensure space and humility to receive it.

     In that spirit, debriefs should always be incorporated into every action plan. They should be announced in such a way to ensure all participants are aware and have the ability to join if desired. In other situations we’ve seen debrief dates and times announced during pre-briefs or otherwise in private communications where all participants are present. Depending on the size of the action, multiple de-briefs at different dates and times to accommodate a variety of scheduling issues is effective for ensuring maximum participation and by extension, maximum feedback to learn from. In this case an announcement could have easily been made at the same time that loss was announced or via the announcements chat set up prior to the action. Planning in advance for debriefs would have supported the facilitation of multiple debriefs accounting for varying scheduling needs.

    Unfortunately, barring notes from a comrade who was able to attend the meeting, it seems the results of this debrief weren’t made public. (If any readers are aware of published critiques from this session we invite you to share a link.) Given the highly public scrutiny of this action, criticisms and lessons from this reflection should have been shared publicly to support collective learning and growth. This would have also demonstrated improving communication and transparency. It may not have fully repaired the ruptures that occurred but it would have been a good start. Of course any such sharing would need to be done with optimal opsec in mind, with more sensitive information being shared through private communication networks between associated organizations. The lack of any public self-reflection or self-critique perpetuates the mistrust incited with the false declaration of victory and the ineffective communication surrounding it.

Final Thoughts

    Tacoma’s Block the Boat action started as a potent, rich moment of empowerment for people across ideological lines and levels of political development. It failed to deliver on this promise, leading instead to substantial disillusionment, frustration, and broken trust. 

    Clear and direct communication is not optional. Poor communication between organizers and participants laid the way for demoralization and mistrust. Ineffective communication of goals led to significant misunderstandings and confusion. Failure to disseminate information discussed in the pre-brief left many out of the loop and resulted in a poorly-supported deployment of the Water Warrior’s blockade. Effective communication is best supported by clearly defined and understood structure, roles, and task delegation, all of which will ultimately improve action efficacy and movement sustainability.

    Any success in revolutionary struggle requires exemplary coordination, collaboration, and communication, as well as heightened strategic and tactical consideration. It also requires that organizers have a good idea of what is required to escalate an action, in this case from a picket to an entrenched blockade, or potentially even sabotage. The capacity of the people to escalate, to meet the violence of the enemy, ebbs and flows. It changes with changing material conditions, which are rapidly evolving in the so-called United States, creating a moment ripe for revolution which we must not fail to meet. The revolutionary is a role emerging from the necessity of escalation. This role is fulfilled not only through the explosive and sometimes violent nature of revolutionary action, but also by educating, agitating, and organizing wherever we can during the lulls between escalations. As Communists in the belly of the beast, we must be both looking for opportunities to increase risk tolerance and political development in the people, while navigating the need to build a robust, revolutionary movement making use of current material and social-cultural conditions.

    Finally, our actions and movements should, wherever possible, follow Indigenous leadership and take cues from Indigenous liberation movements and freedom fighters. Especially as settlers occupying Indigenous land, it is our prerogative as communists to elevate radical and revolutionary Indigenous leadership and consistently assess how best to struggle alongside and bolster our Indigenous comrades. We cannot effectively collaborate with our natural allies if we allow unconscious colonial bias lead us into the trap of co-opting or sidelining radical and revolutionary Indigenous leadership, actions, and movements. This is as much about the efficacy of action and sustainability of movements as it is about deconstructing colonial systems through our own actions on the ground.

    We call on all radical organizations to earnestly assess their relationships to the Indigenous nations whose lands they occupy, and determine practical courses of action to build on or improve these where necessary. It’s additionally vital to assess our practices of communication, community care, utilization of revolutionary strategy and tactics, and political education. These assessments must be done regularly to ensure we are maintaining the most adaptive and revolutionary praxis. Only then can we begin to achieve real, material wins rather than the shallow, performative demonstrations our movement has historically tended towards.

*Endnote: Some resources for consideration in planning such actions include Instructions for an Armed Uprising (1868), Joint Doctrine for Barriers, Obstacles, and Mine Warfare (last updated in 1999), and Field Manual 3-90: Tactics—also see Guerilla Warfare and Marxist Revolution Index on Marxist Internet Archive. Information in these resources may need to be adjusted to account for changes in material conditions since the time of publication, but may provide some tactical inspiration.

On April 15, 2024, a series of coordinated but autonomous actions were conducted across the globe with the goal of disrupting the genocidal war machine propping up the zionist entity’s genocide in Gaza. The tactic of choice was economic blockade. Initially concentrated within the so-called United States, organizers hoped to have enough of an economic impact to force the imperial superpower to rescind its unconditional support of its colonial outpost. As word spread between organizers and activists internationally, the scope expanded to include a number of actions in other imperialist and settler countries. While the hope of forcing imperial powers to stop their support for genocide ultimately failed to materialize, there are a number of lessons to be drawn from this moment of decisive and principled escalation. We hope to highlight these lessons so that future actions may build upon them.

At the core of A15 was a dialectical navigation between national and local organizing levels. Organizers understood the necessity of collective action to effect meaningful change, and with this understanding started an ambitious project in the pursuit of a free Palestine. Recognizing the necessity for actions to be tailored to the material conditions of the regions in which they were occurring, organizers established a strategy of regionally-bound autonomous actions to facilitate collective national (then international) action. This resulted in an implicit national-local organizing structure lacking strong centralization, but which ensured action did happen.

It worked like this: national-level organizers spread the word of their intention to facilitate a nation-wide economic blockade. Organizers and activists from all over the so-called U.S. were invited to an initial online “All Cities” meeting where the idea was more thoroughly fleshed out: autonomous actions would be regionally organized against the largest, most influential, local economic target. The target didn’t have to be explicitly tied to the zionist entity and its genocidal pursuits, since the U.S. Empire’s war machine is ultimately powered by the entirety of the imperialist economy. The idea was to “stop pulling the levers of the machine,” even if only for a day, in the hopes of frightening the parasitic class facilitating genocidal violence. Actions were coordinated to occur symbolically on April 15th, tax day, in acknowledgment of the role U.S. tax dollars play in carrying out the genocide.

Several cities dropped out during the short period allotted for planning, but when April 15th arrived, dozens of cities around the world (including Melbourne, Dublin, London, and Toronto to name a few) saw blockades temporarily stop the flow of capital, or rallies, marches, and walkouts in solidarity with blockades. Participating groups took a variety of strategic approaches with different types of targets, but physical blockades emerged as a common strategy. Many arrests were made, and at time of writing, some legal battles are still being fought as a result of the A15 actions. For the purposes of this analysis, we will be focusing on national level organizing and the blockade of the SeaTac airport which was organized and executed in the Puget Sound. We invite those familiar with other actions to consider contributing their own regional analysis.

The ambitious scale and scope of A15 was admirable, and in some ways a wild success. Dozens of autonomous blockades were coordinated around the world, the significance of which cannot be overstated given the difficulties and barriers of mobilizing even one large group in one city. The size and spread of the mobilization garnered widespread mass media attention and, despite the undefined parameters, successfully centered economic impact as the primary strategy. At the same time as we celebrate the successes of A15, we feel it necessary to analyze its failures.

Critique is a necessary part of continuously improving our strategic orientation and tactical approach in order to learn and adapt in the pursuit of liberation. Through an analysis of available evidence, we’ll articulate both the successes and shortcomings of A15. Ultimately A15 proved the will of organizers and activists to escalate in their effort to shut it down for Palestine. Successes were shaped and limited by a number of strategic oversights and shortcomings, such as an extremely limited timeline for planning and execution. A number of social, cultural, and interpersonal barriers also emerged, including communication pitfalls, aversion to conflict and critique, and most prominently, the myriad troubles that emerge from a lack of coherent and mutually agreed upon structure. While A15 demonstrated the willpower and capacity of people to come together for wide-spread and coordinated collective action to stop a genocide, it also demonstrated prominent barriers the imperial core’s “Left” must directly address and overcome in order to effectively strike the beast from within its own belly.

Communication is Key

The A15 actions can claim a number of successes. At the national and international levels, organizers tapped existing connections to establish a broader communication network and coordinate collective action. Given the scale and number of actions, A15 quickly gained widespread media attention, presenting organizers an opportunity to make their actions double as propaganda. The communication network allowed organizers to coordinate support, resources, and messaging to the public. Here in the Puget Sound, local successes were due to existing affinity groups and informal activist communities. Their existing connections with one another and experience in mobilizing for previous movements supported quick mobilization. Ultimately, the execution of a collective action on such a scale proved its efficacy in terms of uniting a movement and proves the capacity for future actions.

An International Solidarity Network

One of the key factors in A15’s success at the national and international level was the establishment of an international communication network to coordinate collective action. National organizers had stated an intention to maintain the A15 network for the purposes of facilitating similar direct actions in the future. While this intention hasn’t manifested in the wake of the action, the network’s use leading up to and during the action contributed to the overall success of A15. Additionally, because of how widespread the A15 Actions were, organizers were able to garner substantial mass media attention, if only for a short time. The principal success of the A15 Actions at this level, however, was in demonstrating the strength of collective action and international solidarity, highlighting the strategic necessity of building these kinds of connections and strengthening our ability to do so.

Organizers were able to effectively collaborate and coordinate on a global scale because of the existing connections that organizers and activists built during previous mass movements, such as the George Floyd Uprisings. Information about the initial “All Cities” meeting was disseminated to different organizations and individuals in cities across the country, and eventually around the world. At this initial meeting individuals from the same city were able to connect with one another to build regional organizing teams which would then take the lead on planning an economic blockade tailored to their region’s material conditions. Communication networks that balance centralized coordination with regional autonomy enable organizers to collaborate and act collectively across regional boundaries, but the finer details must be determined at a local level to ensure the efficacy and relevancy of the action and its impact on the locale.

Routine national meetings ensured organizers across the world clearly understood the goals of A15 and dispersed ideas for what actions might look like, as well as a generalized understanding of the legal needs of direct actions, such as legal observers, bail funds, and other legal support. These meetings served to fortify the collective element of the action. During meetings some groups were connected to necessary legal resources (or given information on how to do so), and those with less organizing experience were able to connect with more experienced peers to facilitate knowledge and resource sharing. The A15 network was always intended to be a hub of support and solidarity and this was most evident in the early days of organizing.

At the time of this writing, the surviving A15 network exists in the form of an “All Cities” group chat. Members share updates about ongoing campaigns related to Palestine (such as one group’s project to bring potable water into Gaza) along with ways to support those campaigns and requests to connect with organizers in different cities or nations. For quite a while the chat appeared dead, but it came back to life on the night the Freedom Flotilla seeking to bring aid into Gaza was targeted by a zionist drone strike (the first of multiple such attacks) with detailed emergency calls to action being shared. Similar calls have since been shared. At one point, there seemed to be an effort to coordinate another mass economic blockade which failed to take off with the same gusto as the original A15 plan, with only a few responding to the initial proposal and discussion dying off rather quickly. To our knowledge, no action manifested from this, though the particulars of why this might have been remain unclear.

Just as important as internal organizing communications are external communications. Direct actions such as these pose a powerful opportunity to communicate to the world at large about our causes. Organizers should be adequately prepared to utilize captured media attention to this end, with materials designed to educate and agitate, not simply to spread awareness. It is therefore important to think about highly visible actions in terms of propaganda. As communists, our goal is to lead the masses in a revolution; such leadership requires trust that our actions are for their betterment. This is not to say that we should obsess over the optics of our actions, especially characterized by bourgeois media. Rather, consideration should be given to reaching the masses through an antagonistic media apparatus. Messaging should make our intentions clear in order to support raising bystander consciousness, cultivating understanding, and instilling revolutionary optimism. Creating a plan to interface with the public through media is critical to maintaining a level of trust with an organization and swaying other workers.

As a result of this national and international collaboration and solidarity, groups acting autonomously across the world executed dozens of direct actions despite short notice. This international coordination for Palestinian liberation was a potent indicator of what is possible through intentional, focused collaboration and unwavering solidarity. This was by and large only possible as a result of a communication network linking organizers together. Solidarity is our strength; we can’t build a new and just world alone.

The Strength of People Power

In the Puget Sound, major successes revolved around tapping established communities to quickly and effectively mobilize a significant number of participants. On very short notice, organizers were able to pull together an airport blockade that shut down traffic into the airport for around five hours with no injuries and no confirmed security leaks.

For this action, organizers cultivated maps of the target area to survey and select an ideal choke point. Later, reconnaissance was conducted to establish a more thorough understanding of the area, identify staging locations, and plan for action execution. Organizers tapped pre-existing affinity groups and reached out to some additional Palestine-focused organizations to rally forty-six people to participate.

Accounts of the action indicate that a car may have been used to create an initial stoppage in traffic, with organizers feigning that the car had stalled to create cover for deployment of the blockade. Protesters “locked in” at the site using the sleeping dragon tactic: they chained themselves together with their arms threaded through PVC pipes to ensure responding police couldn’t simply cut the chains. This lengthened the duration of the blockade and increased the resources required to remove the protesters from the site.

Operational security practices were implemented at a heightened level, with a keen awareness of the risk of leaks and potential impacts thereof. Encrypted Signal chats with disappearing messages were used for some communication early on, and a pivot was made to all in-person communication due to concerns about the spy-ware nature of much of modern communications technology.

The successes of the SeaTac airport A15 blockade were largely due to the numbers available to organizers. Not all actions will have as many organizers or participants available, nor do all actions require such numbers. The key take-away here is that actions must be scaled to the real capacity of the moment. This fact also works in tandem with the level of centralized organization required for particular actions. How many people do we need to be successful in a particular time frame? How centralized does the planning need to be to achieve its goals? What level of operational security is required to protect organizers and participants? Setting achievable goals allows for sustainable and consistent work and victories. As Mao teaches us in On Guerrilla Warfare, we must only engage in battles in which we are guaranteed victory.

Informal Structures and Movement Security

There were many lessons learned not only from the successes of A15 actions, but also from some critical failures in the planning phases that luckily did not result in worst-case scenarios. Excruciatingly short timelines bred a number of issues at the national level, from poorly considered media strategy to inability to fulfill promises and achieve unspecific, difficult to measure goals. On the local level in the Puget Sound, a complete lack of structure facilitated interpersonal breakdowns which posed a number tactical and strategic barriers. In consideration of these oversights and critical failures, there were many areas for improvement we can learn from. The most powerful lessons learned center on the necessity of giving ourselves time to develop effective strategies, be intentional in choosing targets and tactics, and more.

Communication is a Practice

At the national and international level, many identified shortcomings stemmed from the short timeline for planning and executing a national, then international, economic blockade. There was a little less than two months’ notice that there would be an “All Cities” meeting outlining the idea and intention behind a forthcoming national economic blockade against the United States — The Empire. Paired with the time needed to plan and host these initial meetings, this left organizers at the international, national, and local level with about a month and a half to identify targets, gather intel, set goals, plan, and execute.

On Urgency

The short time allotted for organizing these actions undermined the potential of a wide-spread and well-coordinated economic blockade in a number of ways. There is an undeniable urgency when people are being murdered en masse, but the way that urgency was treated in this case reflects a common tendency of organizers within the imperial core to treat the fight for liberation as a sprint rather than the marathon it is. Urgency requires not just timely action, but effective action. The minimal time allotted to plan and execute these actions had multiple impacts. Limited time to recruit participants meant many actions were quite small and therefore limited in what they were able to do. The pressure to pull together actions quickly meant that some organizers weren’t able to pull any action together at all, resulting in a number of cities dropping out altogether when they realized the severity of this limitation. Limited time to do recon and establish contingency plans also meant that riskier targets with larger potential impacts were off-limits for many. Finally, there were a number of actions which were sloppy and ineffective, not because the organizers themselves were sloppy or ineffective, but simply because they didn’t have the time to coordinate something better. The key takeaway from this is that we must be honest about and take seriously the time needed to effectively set our goals, plan for them, and accomplish them. Failure to do this undermines our efforts and betrays the people we are fighting for.

On Logistics

National organizers had offered in All Cities meetings to provide local organizers with support in accessing or connecting with resources including bail funds and legal support. Although never explicitly mentioned, offers of mentorship were implied. While some areas were able to receive support and guidance from the national level organizers, others in need of similar support were left with little or none. Many actions were able to coordinate their own support with the help of experienced organizers on their teams, but for others, the inability to access rigorous legal support was a deterrent to planning higher risk actions with more potential for greater impact. While the autonomous method of organizing was successful overall in this instance, more time and resources could have improved centralized organization and increased support and guidance from national level organizers. This would have supported better developed and more effective actions.

Furthermore, the economic impact of the blockades was much smaller than organizers had intended, and as a result, these actions were not successful in applying economic pressure great enough to threaten the Butchers of Gaza or their enablers. The idea of not limiting targets only to businesses directly participating in the slaughter of Gaza was simple, straight forward, and well intentioned. However, without greater numbers (both of actions and of participants) this spread the movement thin and diluted the message being sent. More time to plan and coordinate between cities would have enabled more robust, targeted actions, and as such, would have produced a greater economic impact. Consider the effect of multiple cities coming together to target their state’s largest weapons manufacturer rather than staying focused on unrelated industries in their own cities, for example.

On Propaganda

A banner reading “Our Taxes Are Funding Genocide” was displayed alongside Palestinian flags at the SeaTac airport blockade, highlighting the significance of tax day for the action and reminding onlookers of the way in which the United States government makes its citizens complicit. There was little planning or strategy for communicating to the media or the masses beyond this, however. Unfortunately, the opportunity to also highlight the ways in which the imperial core’s whole economy supports genocidal colonial and imperial violence, the intricacies of which aren’t easily recognizable or intuitively understood by the majority, was missed. In cases where targets aren’t explicitly related to the genocide in the same way a target like Boeing or Microsoft might be, it’s important to consider how to communicate these complex economic relationships in a way that is concise and accessible to your average working person.

Though there was mass media attention to the A15 actions, it was short lived and confused. Reporters identified that these blockades were coordinated and therefore connected, but at the outset not all reporting outlets seemed to understand that these were actions for a free Palestine (though eventually this was reported more confidently). This confusion spread to non-mainstream commentators as well, including supporters of a free Palestine, whose confusion or misunderstanding of the actions at times led to reporting and analysis that was frustrated and failed to recognize successes. Many actions lacked banners, signs, or other means of clearly communicating the causes and intended effects of the actions, leading to confusion rather than clarification. Ultimately these actions largely failed to utilize the opportunity for effective propaganda.

On Organization

This high intensity, unbalanced planning is a consistent habit of the imperial core’s “Left.” This strategy of reacting rather than acting leads to intense burnout among organizers and difficulties sustaining long-term activity. Paired with rumors of conflict and infighting among the national level organizers, it’s unsurprising that the communications network has declined to the degree it has. This all gestures to the problem of structurelessness that followed A15 from the beginning: with no clear roles, guidelines or expectations on conduct, and no system for accountability, the A15 movement inevitably became a one-off moment with minimal continuing impact or legacy.

Though the international network that was meant to be established through the course of this action technically still exists, its current form is a far cry from what organizers originally set out to build: a space for continued national and international collaboration for increasing escalation in the pursuit of a free Palestine. Some of this collapse reflects a general need in leftist spaces in Occupied North America to build conflict resolution skills, increase distress tolerance, and implement effective methods for addressing harm. It also demonstrates the importance of understanding and identifying roles, and formulating a clearly understood and articulated structure to support adherence to expectations around conduct, facilitate conflict resolution, and effectively make and execute plans. Unfortunately, these issues of interpersonal and structural development have been repeatedly observed as serious barriers to building or implementing successful strategy, let alone building a successful revolutionary movement in the so-called United States.

On Structure

The issue of structurelessness appeared at the national level as rumors of conflict and infighting, but was well and truly on display at the local level. Without a clearly defined structure for organizers and action participants to operate within, one member was able to flood the Puget Sound organizing committee with their previously existing Affinity Group (AG). This ultimately led to the abandonment of all democratic processes and the de facto establishment of an in- and an out-group. The seizure of power by this AG led to a litany of safety and security concerns for organizers, participants, and the general public, ultimately resulting in an insignificant economic impact despite being publicly celebrated as a resounding success. Many of the issues discussed here are a result not necessarily of bad strategy, but of structurelessness. In essence, the failings of the Puget Sound A15 action is a case study validating Freeman’s thesis: the absence of a formal democratic structure only invites an informal reactionary one.

Once the original planning committee was flooded by the AG and a de facto leader emerged, an implicit social hierarchy quickly followed. While there was no intentionally defined structure, that does not mean an absence of structure. Rather, what formed in the absence of openly discussed and agreed upon structure was an unspoken but recognizable in- and out-group dynamic with deference to the implicit leader, who was then able to assume control over planning. This resulted in the discarding of the democratic process in order to focus on the preferred target of the unspoken leader, as well as select participants enjoying the privilege of having their ideas, concerns, and suggestions regarded seriously. The original lack of structural development appears to have arisen out of organizer naivety, and many of these original organizers withdrew from the project or were pushed out by the toxic dynamics that emerged in place of well-considered structure.

Citing security concerns, the group pivoted to in-person communications only, including daily meetings and sometimes multiple daily meetings with no plan (or apparent intention) to communicate with participants unable to attend. As a result, a culture of exclusion emerged. Working individuals, individuals with disabilities, and individuals with care-taking duties were effectively barred from participation. This strongly favored members of the aforementioned in-group, with some members of the out-group not being alerted to in-person meetings due to text communications being almost entirely abandoned. As such, many individuals who were not members of the in-group were pushed out of planning altogether. In essence, heightened security culture practices became an implicit enforcement of in-group/out-group dynamics and functioned to assure in-group dominance in the organizing process. Poor communication also resulted in numerous people appearing to be on completely different pages about how to handle the issue of independent press on the scene, leading to questions of what else people weren’t on the same page about. When participants voiced concerns about inaccessibility and exclusivity, they were roundly ignored, and no effort was made to find a resolution, increase accommodation, or improve communication. There was no follow-up with the individuals leveraging these critiques after they left the group.

Structurelessness also resulted in inadequate responses to safety concerns. One stark example of this was the handling of concerns about the potential for vehicular violence. When a member of the out-group raised this safety concern, it was brushed off as a matter of privilege. Later, a member of the in-group raised the same concern and was praised for doing so (though it is not clear that this concern was addressed in any practical way). Not only did such incidents reaffirm the in-group/out-group dynamic, it highlighted a lack of regard for participant safety or sustainability in the movement for Palestinian liberation overall. Beyond the tactical value of striving for safety, this example also highlights the fundamental strategic oversight of valuing high-risk adventurism over actions designed with safety and efficacy in mind: quickly burning through the risk tolerance of participants runs the risk of ultimately reducing our own numbers in the name of a spectacle, fundamentally weakening our position in future actions.

Many of these shortcomings would have been avoided with explicit communications about roles, expectations, decision making processes, and issues of accountability. Explicit communication would have supported more intentional collaboration, more effective adaptation in the face of critique, and could have avoided pushing people out, increasing the number of on-the-ground participants.

As previously noted, a greater allotment of planning time would have likely yielded a more robustly designed action capable of achieving greater success — this too was directly impacted by structurelessness. Already working on a tight timeline, a democratically selected target was rejected during an in-person meeting where only a fraction of participants were present. The time and effort spent on the original target had to be scrapped and restarted for the new target, leaving organizers with just weeks to plan.

Rallying forty-six people to join an action like this is a feat on its own, but the action would have been even larger with more time to recruit. More time would have allowed organizers to connect with local orgs and build better working relationships. With more time organizers could have also expanded their network rather than solely relying on existing affinity groups, increasing access to support, resources, and recruitment. There would have been more time to establish contingency plans in case something went wrong, and more time to work on additional materials to support the barricade or create clear and effective messaging.

It’s also worth noting that the Seattle Police Department developed an Apparatus Removal Team specifically to deal with sleeping dragons, making them uniquely capable of dealing with this tactic quickly and efficiently. This highlights the necessity of knowing our enemy. If this particular method must be employed in the Seattle area, utilizing a more effective variation is preferable. Styles of sleeping dragon which utilize barrels filled with cement through which the PVC pipes and chains are threaded, creating additional barriers to removal, have been used elsewhere and could serve as inspiration for out-maneuvering the Apparatus Removal Team. Researching SPD capabilities, getting materials, building these more robust sleeping dragons, and establishing and practicing methods for transporting and deploying them quickly and efficiently would have been viable with more planning time. This could have greatly increased the amount of time required for responding police to remove the protesters, increasing overall economic impact. Imagine if there had been time to plan for deployment of such a tactic with sixty, seventy, or even eighty participants.

The ultimate financial impact of the action was estimated to be in the low hundreds of thousand of dollars. To us working people this is a lot of money, but for the corporate ghouls being targeted it is barely even pocket change. It is significantly less than what was hoped for, yet it was celebrated as a resounding success, echoing concerns such as the false victory claimed at the earlier Block the Boat action. These concerns indicate two main areas for growth: 1) the ways in which goals are established, and 2) the ways in which we evaluate success.

Too often we’ve seen actions designed without clearly articulated goals in mind, or alternatively, with unrealistic goals. Setting clear and concise goals not only supports organizers in designing and executing an effective action, it provides a metric against which success can be measured. In the case of the Puget Sound A15 action, the goal was simply to “have a financial impact.” The fact that as little as a $100k impact could be called a success highlights how vague the goal actually is; despite discussion of the financial impact organizers hoped to achieve, specific numbers were never mentioned. This was a significant strategic weakness in the action design and planning. Without a specific and measurable goal, it wasn’t possible for organizers to calculate how long a blockade would have needed to be held. As a result, organizers did not design the blockade according to any specific length of time intended to meet a realistic goal. Furthermore, organizers must have a truly honest assessment of their successes and failures — victories should not be inflated and failures should not be minimized. To do so would be avoiding criticism and self-criticism, which is an integral part of successful revolutionary organizing. Refusing to engage in this process of (self) criticism, we lose the ability to facilitate learning, growth, and greater future adaptability and success. If we are to be serious about the cause of liberation for Palestine and all peoples, we must be serious about how we engage with critique.

Many of the issues discussed in this section would have been minimized had organizers established even a loose sense of structure, with identified roles and responsibility, decision-making processes, and systems for accountability. This is largely an issue of naivete on the parts of different organizers, but the constraints of an extraordinarily short timeline certainly didn’t help. Organizations require structure in order to effectively achieve their goals, and democratic processes must be core to the pursuit of equitable and just interpersonal dynamics within an organizing group. Organizers must maintain clear and effective communication to ensure that people understand what is expected of them and what they should expect from the organization. Organizers must also ensure that no one gets left behind. Security culture should be practiced in dialectical balance with consideration to accessibility needs of the people who make up the masses, most especially those with jobs, disabilities, caretaking duties, etc. Barring this, an action will never become a movement, and will instead become a quickly forgotten historical blip.

It is vital to note that all of these issues aren’t only a barrier to creating a successful action or movement, they are a barrier to developing effective strategy at all. Without an effective strategic outlook or orientation, getting something as ambitious as A15 off the ground and meaningfully achieving goals is next to impossible — as we have unfortunately seen in the aftermath of the day of action.

Building Movement Resiliency

The metrics for success and failure regarding the day of action were ill defined, but ultimately we understand that the broader goal was to mobilize in support of a free Palestine; in that regard, the A15 actions succeeded. The failures and shortcomings of the A15 movement lie not in the mobilization, but rather in the organization. Throughout much of her work, Jane McAlevey details the distinction between the two (see No Shortcuts), but to put it succinctly, Kwame Ture teaches us that “mobilization [is] temporary. Organization is permanent and eternal.” A15 was able to mobilize, but it was not able to organize. Without a clearly defined and democratic structure — both of which are equally essential to the health, longevity, and power of an organization — we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes ad infinitum.

The reason we see so much turnover and burn out among our organizers is not from an inability to mobilize, but a critical failure in establishing and maintaining organization. This is why we continue to see these outbursts of activism (e.g., Battle of Seattle, Occupy Wallstreet, George Floyd Uprisings, etc.), but not a sustained movement that will lead to revolutionary change. To remedy this, we must learn these important lessons and move forward to build stronger organizations that are capable of winning while withstanding repression.

In light of the lessons learned from this study, both in terms of successes and failures, we propose the development of regionally-bound organizations to facilitate the development of militant cadres capable of rapidly and effectively responding to and leading mass movements. While organizers in this case were able to get the word out to various cities, there have been countless other such attempts which have either fallen far short of their goals or failed entirely. The success of such future endeavors cannot be left to chance. These new organizations — free from the capitulationist, revisionist, and dogmatic tendencies of our movement’s leading organizations — could facilitate such communications, disseminating empire-wide calls to action in a more secure way than posting to social media, and structuring a response in collaboration with local coalitions and other ideologically- or issue-focused organizations. Beyond simply acting as a means to mobilize, putting time and effort into such development will lead our movements toward permanent organizational structures that can be adapted to the needs of the moment, helping to avoid the pitfalls of structurelessness observed in this study. These organizations will need to develop themselves based on their local conditions: organizational needs, barriers, available resources, class composition, geographic context, as well as a continually updated understanding of friends and enemies in the area. Such development will improve our overall strategic position, facilitate ease of collaboration within and across regional boundaries, and bring us closer to the permanent revolutionary organization we need.

It is evident, now more than ever, that we need our Party — the Communist Party that will lead our revolution and the liberation of this continent from colonial occupation and the world from imperialism. But as we are now still disjointed, uncoordinated, and disorganized, we must build the structures necessary to allow for its formation. This is possible only through developing our local means and capabilities, thus elevating class consciousness and proving we are deserving of leadership. Furthermore, principled organizations must coalesce into Intermediate organizations — an organization of organizations. This is the embryo of our new, revolutionary party. But what is the Party, what does it do, and what does it look like? 

The Party is the organized, conscious, and revolutionary vanguard of the working class — an essential instrument for the proletariat to seize and maintain power. Unlike our movement’s current leading organizations, who are unfit for revolutionary struggle, our new Party — a Leninist Party — will emerge as a militant, disciplined force prepared for revolutionary conditions. It is the most advanced organization of the working class, composed of its most devoted and politically conscious members. The Party leads, educates, and unites the working masses, serving as their leaders in the class struggle. It embodies revolutionary theory and action, guiding the proletariat beyond trade-unionism and reformism toward the overthrow of imperialism and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The Party is a tightly structured, disciplined organization with clearly defined and understood roles, centralized leadership, and structure that efficiently supports party work, mobilization, and both systemic and interpersonal conflict resolution. An ability to withstand internal struggle toward a unity of will is vital, with discipline toward minority compromise with majority will in the pursuit of much needed revolution. To support this, time and effort must be directed toward building robust, resilient communication networks, networks structured in consideration of striking balance between centralized coordination and regionally-bound material resources, needs, and autonomy. It is not a loose collection of sympathizers but a coordinated system of organizations bound by the principles of democratic centralism, adapting to shifting material conditions, and effectively coordinating collective action across regional boundaries. The Party functions as the highest form of class organization, uniting and leading all other proletarian institutions — trade unions, cooperatives, mutual aid networks, and more — under a single revolutionary direction. The work of the Party entails guiding the proletariat to power, consolidating socialist rule, and maintaining discipline by filtering out opportunist and reformist elements and investing the political education and development of its members and their associated communities. In short, the Party is both the mind and the will of the proletarian revolution: the organized force through which the working class acts as one to destroy the old order and build socialism.

We are not utopians, we are scientific socialists. Every action we take serves to better inform our practice. All self-conscious struggle brings us closer to fulfilling our historic task in overthrowing the imperialists. To end the tyranny of capital, we must first end the tyranny of structurelessness.

“Rich Men North of Richmond” went viral — but not based on mass appeal and the average worker’s connection to the message. It was astroturfed. Astroturfing — the opposite of a grassroots campaign — is a propaganda technique that gives the illusion of coming from the masses. Like the fake grass that gives astroturfing its name, astroturfed phenomena are propagated by the wealthy. They are launched into existence on fountains of money. How was a brand-new Twitter account, with posts in the single digits, able to reach millions of people in such a short time? How did all these conservative media outlets have the video ready to post? Money, and influencers lined up beforehand to promote them.

Twitch live-streamer, iDanSimpson, compiled screenshots in a Twitter post proving that a company, REACH Digital, was behind Anthony’s success. Dan Bongino — whose dubious past includes stints with the NYPD and Secret Service, three failed runs for Senate, and owner of the fascist social media platform, Parler — confirmed that his friend and colleague, Jason Howerton, CEO of REACH Digital, contacted Anthony to finance his project. A post Howerton made on LinkedIn, telling how he came to work with Anthony, corroborates Bongino’s claim. Additionally, Howerton’s LinkedIn “About” section claims his success in helping “media companies and political influencers grow their social media footprint exponentially” (emphasis added). The capitalists behind these projects are in no way hiding their aims. Astroturfing is clearly a lucrative venture; otherwise, why would REACH Digital be able to front the cost for Anthony to professionally record an album? The company expects a return on their investment.

So why are there people claiming to be communists championing this song as an “American Anthem”? Stealing legitimate working-class rhetoric and warping legitimate working-class grievances is a fascist tactic that goes back to Mussolini. Fascists preach a false-solidarity; they focus on “culture wars,” distorting and dismembering the real grievances working people have against the ruling class and transforming them into a kind of reactionary whining, pining for the “old days.” To better understand what we’re up against, let’s take a look at the lyrics:

Anthony goes on to condemn the titular rich men north of Richmond, referencing the current politicians in Washington D.C., claiming that they want “total control” and that your dollar “ain’t worth shit and it’s taxed to no end.” To this claim, I would agree! The surveillance state’s existence is a crime against humanity, inflation has severely hurt working people, and our tax dollars disproportionately fund the local occupying army, the police department, instead of programs and services that actually help the people. But I fear this is not what Anthony is referencing. In the second verse, Anthony tells the listener that the reason we are inordinately taxed is because fat poor people — whom these “rich men” apparently favor over poor miners — are “milking welfare.” Ah! The reason, apparently, that these young men, whose money “ain’t worth shit,” are killing themselves is because of other poor people!

If we were only suspicious before, we can be certain now. In the second verse, Anthony perpetuates the age-old lie that welfare recipients are fat, lazy, and abusing the system. If his people were in charge, instead of the song’s titular men, they could look out for the right people.  The fascist rhetoric has been exposed,  giving all the context we need to understand what the lyrics truly mean. Anthony does not blame rich people for our economic and social woes; he only blames the particular group of rich people in power today. Furthermore, he divides the poor, “us” — those who listen to and agree with the message of his song — and “them” — the undefined and nebulous other. There is nothing “Left” about this song, precisely because of his piss-poor class analysis. Anthony construes miners, “folks on the street,” and “the obese milkin’ welfare” as different, but in reality, all three share the same class enemies and many of the same oppressions. Indeed, only through becoming fully conscious of our shared socioeconomic class and uniting for our collective class interests in overthrowing our capitalist oppressors can we achieve the freedom, justice, and liberty we so deserve and yearn for.

So there’s another reactionary country song, so what? Why bother talking about this one? The problem lies in those claiming to be a part of our movement trying to claim the song for the Left. “Rich Men,” however, is not something we can co-opt and bring into our movement because the song comes with its own politics. American patriotism and vaguely complaining about rich people and then turning around to blame fat people on welfare for our economic woes is categorically antithetical to our movement. In The German Ideology, Marx calls communism “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” This text is concerned with how humanity can drive history forward, and emancipate itself from the old world’s constraints of metaphysics, nationalism, classes, and alienation. Yet it’s exactly this old world that Anthony’s song wants to return to. Considering the old world never left, and remains “the present state of things,” it’s clear that “Rich Men North of Richmond” advocates for historical regression.

What Anthony is attempting to do with “Rich Men North of Richmond” is implant false consciousness within the people, and make us susceptible to fascist ideas. We must guard ourselves against those who would try to instill a false consciousness within us. What do we mean by “false consciousness?” To be “conscious,” in a Marxist sense, means to be cognizant of one’s class and economic interests as a member of that class. The capitalist class, the bourgeoisie, is class conscious. They know the power that they wield; they know what politics serve their interests. Thus, to have “false consciousness” is to have some understanding of one’s economic position, but an incorrect understanding of class that has been led astray through bourgeois propaganda. Many workers in the U.S. are not class conscious, unwittingly serving the exploiting capitalist class, because of the false consciousness that has been imposed on us. Racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, fatphobia, ableism, etc.; all are tools that the capitalists employ to divide the workers amongst ourselves, and they are wielded against the masses through media and culture. “Rich Men North of Richmond” is a classic example of such a tool. It would claim to be against rich men, in which case it could instill class consciousness, but it is a screed against our fellow workers via an overweight strawman, which makes its consciousness false.

Divided, we are weak. Without class consciousness, we are ignorant. With a false consciousness, we remain divided and unable to break free from our chains, and the CEOs and billionaires know that if enough of us were able to become class conscious it would spell the end of their tyrannical reign.

As we are, without a unified movement guided by international solidarity, we will continue to be exploited. The wealth that we, the workers, create is stolen and hoarded away by the capitalists, our bosses. Like a vampire, the capitalist leeches off of the blood of the worker. This is what the “Rich Men North of Richmond” actually do. They divide and set us upon each other while they steal from us. This is what Anthony would be railing against if he wasn’t being bribed and socially boosted by those very men to encourage it. 

In our efforts to guard ourselves against astroturfed campaigns and false consciousness, we must be able to identify the fascist propaganda that would keep us divided. The fascist is a snake and will try to disguise itself; in the case of “Rich Men,” the lyrics’’s fatphobia and pining for the non-existent past gives Anthony away. Generally speaking, fascists will try to divide our class through the use of their many tools, but no matter how many tools they may have, our greatest weapon is also our greatest defense: solidarity. Anything that attempts to divide the working class rather than unite it around the complete and total liberation from exploitation must be met with extreme caution.

As we labor to repair and build our movement, we must be cautious of, and well educated on the elements we include. These astroturfing campaigns are designed to disrupt and corrupt. The only way we can effectively resist right-wing reaction is through organization and education. As we collectively develop our politics, we are better able to resist and reject the propaganda that would otherwise divide us.

School is the singular place in American society where all manner of social reproduction is expected and taken for granted. Schools shelter, feed, and sometimes clothe their students. Educators are expected to assume the roles of teacher, mentor, counselor, and even friend and parent. Professionally, there are too many hats for one person to wear, boundaries that are pushed, and generally too many responsibilities for one person to bear. Tragically, it’s at the discretion of each individual educator as to how much they will give of themselves to their job.

Such is the case for nearly all aspects of education. How many school events will you volunteer your already scarce time and energy at? How will you configure your classroom furniture to be open and inviting to all students? How will you implement accommodations to keep vulnerable kids from falling through the cracks? How frequently are you contacting home? How often are you meeting one-on-one with your students? Are you advising a club? How are you conveying to your students that you are a safe person while not alerting the reactionary students and parents? Are you interrupting bigotry and implementing restorative practices?

The list of questions is endless, and all answers are ultimately for each individual teacher to decide. 

As more and more aspects of social life are privatized and made inaccessible to the poor, public schools have become a final bastion of public life that can help many families meet some of their most basic needs. But, of course, public schools are themselves under threat from privatization, with charter schools and traditional private schools in addition to a steady increase in homeschooling — all of which ultimately steal funds away from public schools. We are called to do more with less, and the demands and scarcity of resources are increasing daily.

This is not to mention the societal threats that plague our schools. American fascism in crisis has resulted in the constant barrage of attacks from the far-right against educators, championing a delusional conspiracy theory that educators are “grooming” their children and making them gay or “woke” (anti-racist) — or worse yet, both! These attacks are not only launched online; the threat of violence is all too real: angry mobs instigating fights, such as the incident in Glendale, California, where a teacher was put on leave for speaking out against transphobia at a School Board meeting; or school shooters whose manifestos clearly lay out their bigotry, such as the May 2, 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. Educators have lost their jobs, have been severely injured, or even been killed for their conviction to create a more just and equitable world.

Educators are exhausted. For our sacrifice to public service, we are called upon to give even more while the mass media demonizes us and our profession. The problem isn’t that educators care too much or that educators don’t actually believe in the social justice we try to implement in our classrooms — to the contrary! It is precisely because of our dedication to service, social justice, and the youth that so many of us chose this profession in the first place! But, it’s also the reason our deteriorating society can exploit us so. 

This is not to say we should abandon our shared beliefs and morals or our students’ and families’ needs. We would never abandon them. Educators deeply understand the enormous magnitude of the task that stands before us, and we know the necessity of taking on that challenge. So many of our students face struggles that could be easily solved with proper funding, and so, the “solutions” often presented are unsustainable and, regrettably, sometimes the only option available. At our lowest points, when we are overwhelmed by a system designed to work against us, this necessary task seems insurmountable. 

But we will not give in; we will not falter; and we will not cave to fascist reaction. We will win! The future we desire is within our grasp — we need only reach out and seize it. How will we achieve this victory? Only through a stalwart and unified labor movement — through our unions. The cure to the plague of fascist reaction is solidarity. We must unite and work together to achieve our goals!

Traditionally, most will think of the union simply as a negotiating body to get a better contract — an increase in pay. This is true, but a union can also accomplish so much more. We understand just how much work needs to be done inside our schools, but in order to begin that work in earnest, we need to relieve some of the pressure and return most of the social services our schools provide to the broader public sphere. Educators must fight for more than just a better contract for ourselves — solidarity is the key! 

We are not alone in this struggle. In the fight for educator needs and the welfare of the families we serve, we are also fighting for worker rights more broadly, as well as the rights of children. In linking our struggle with our fellow workers, we can win and create a more sustainable and democratic society in the process. For this, we can look at the history of the Chicago Teachers Union. Since the 19th century, educators in Chicago have organized and fought for the needs of the people. In his article, “A People’s History of the Chicago Teachers Union,” Rethinking Schools editor, Jesse Hagopian, illustrates the necessity of courageous and unswerving union organization. It is in this history of those who came before us, and those who carry on their legacy today, we can find not only the lessons of how to tackle the tasks at hand, but the strength to continue the struggle.

Learning from these examples, our immediate goals become more evident. Who stands with us? And who of those that are in opposition could become an ally? What can we do to support our community? To this question, there are infinite answers, but some examples: rallying against an anti-work bill, raising funds for an organization that helps the unhoused, collecting and distributing meals to families during the summer, rallying to support our worker-siblings who are on strike, etc. Our unions must unite the workers it represents and the families and communities we serve. 

Our struggles are all so deeply intertwined, and it is the process of atomization and alienation that created these horrible conditions we yearn to rid ourselves of. Only through solidarity and unity of action can we successfully fight back and win!

Every summer, Portland becomes a hotbed for fascists. Those looking to earn their stripes by jumping unsuspecting queer people or harassing the unhoused enjoy an “open season” in the city. The people who claim to “protect and serve” the city are, of course, also inviting, perpetuating, and participating in the violence. Portland police Chief Chuck Lovell said in an interview that he is “optimistic that the bureau can fully restaff” and that “he’s happy with the kind of people applying.” Are these the same kind of people who collaborate with fascist organizations like Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, and the Ku Klux Klan?  Portland police have always had strong connections with the most vile and reactionary terrorist groups, dating back to the city’s founding. How can the people trust that these new cops will be any different? Nothing has fundamentally changed! The police only continue to maintain their reign of terror.

After over a hundred consecutive days of protesting during the George Floyd uprisings and an attempt to establish an Autonomous Zone in the city, the politically advanced elements in Portland have made it clear: the police are not wanted. Occupations were destroyed; houseless encampments were, and continue to be, ravaged; and chemical warfare was waged on the people, including the unsuspecting liberals trying to peacefully protest police brutality as well as those who had the misfortune of living near the “cool zone” (locations where police escalated violence). The many aid groups and community survival programs throughout the city are working tirelessly to serve and support our neighbors who are most in need. It’s the people who actually live here, unlike the majority of the PPB stormtroopers, that care what happens in Portland.

As Mayor and Police Commissioner, Ted Wheeler’s valiant attempts at curtailing police brutality and their more-than-occasional collaboration with other fascist organizations has, effectively, amounted to politely asking his cops to not do that. Clearly having everything under control, Wheeler was even tear gassed and maced by his own stormtroopers during his first and only attempt to align himself with protestors during the 2020 uprising.

The primary function of the police is to protect private property. Given Wheeler’s family history as an heir to a timber logging magnate — one of the biggest capitalists to settle in Oregon, even having a town named after his ancestor — his decisions as Mayor and Police Commissioner begin to make more sense when we understand that he is first and foremost a capitalist; the class the police truly protect. Knowing this, we can be assured that, when it at last becomes a question of defending his own property, his own “prosperity,” he will side with the dogs of the empire and sic his stormtroopers on anyone who dares to hold him accountable. 

Let us say it without equivocation, so we cannot be mistaken, so no one can say we meant something else: the cops, these rabid dogs, have no place in our city.  They have given us nothing but grief and hardship. From destroying the unhoused’s encampments to gassing us in the streets and in our homes, the police have shown their contempt for and their betrayal of the working class. Portland yearns for peace, but without justice, there can be no peace. We will not be free until we abolish the police, and, in its place, build a system that serves the masses and their will rather than the interests of the wealthiest few. 

Only through the abolition of the current state of things can we move forward to build a better world. Only socialism is capable of this task.  As long as private property exists, it will need police to protect it. As long as wage labor exists, it will need the dogs of the empire to break strikes and send us back to work. As long as the empire seeks to colonize stolen land and put the ghosts of those who occupied it before us — in stewardship, not in ownership — into the ground, it will need the police. But we, the workers, do not need them. The police are the first line of defense for the settler empire. To allow their ranks to grow is to give succor and aid to our enemies. For each cop hired, that’s food from a hungry worker’s child. For each baton-twirling trigger-happy goon given a badge, that’s another soldier in the enemy’s uniform.

We say no more.

Conservative men on social media are even posting photos of themselves in drag as a sort of “gotcha” to trans women — and perhaps inadvertently learning something about their own relationships to masculinity in the process. Others are sharing their discontent with childish displays of hyper-masculinity, by, for instance, uploading videos of themselves shooting Bud Light beer cans.

Caitlyn Jenner’s complaint that Bud Light is “going woke” might appear self-contradictory. After all, isn’t Jenner herself a trans woman? What would motivate one rich trans woman (a member of the Kardashian Dynasty) to publicly slam another, less rich trans woman for taking on a superficially pro-LGBT, and altogether inoffensive, corporate sponsorship? Exactly the fact that she’s rich!  Jenner, like all capitalists, is, before all else, a profiteer and an aspiring monopolist. She is a capitalist first, second, and third; any “solidarity” she might feel for other trans women is nothing compared with her wealth, which in turn is dependent on maintaining her public image as a conservative Republican. A bourgeois trans woman like Jenner would have no problem throwing another trans woman under her Cadillac Escalade if she stood to gain from it.

This is not to say that Anheuser-Busch is at all brave or a progressive champion of social justice and trans rights, merely for partnering with Mulvaney on an advertisement. Quite the opposite, in fact! The capitalists are featuring queer people and people of color in their media, advertisements, and marketing campaigns because they see a potential for profits. Although reactionary and chauvinist ideas, such as transphobia, are still widespread in the U.S., it appears that public opinion is becoming steadily more tolerant — toward LGBT people and other oppressed sections of the population — over time. Corporations have long-since taken the hint: in most cases, tolerance sells, and bigotry doesn’t. If the opposite were true, the capitalists would shift gears, and LGBT people would again be purged from representation in big corporate media. It’s really that simple. The “inclusivity” of the capitalists — their so-called “wokeness” — is nothing more or less than opportunistic profit seeking! 

But should we care? We should certainly be concerned about the proliferation of transphobia.  The latest barrage of fascist Republican attacks on the transgender community represents a last-ditch effort to reverse the tide of progress, to revive anti-LGBT bigotry in the U.S. public, to halt and roll back recent expansions of transgender civil rights. We must not wait for our rulers to “graciously” hand down pitiful reforms. Now is the time to stand up and fight back — to fight for our rights and the rights of our transgender family, friends, and neighbors. Our enemies seek to distract us — keeping us fixated on the latest social media frenzy, the latest colorful advertisement, the latest manufactured outrage — all the while Democrats and Republicans work hand in hand to make our mere existence even harder. 

 We must be steadfast in our position: that any and all instances of transphobia are intolerable. Transphobic vitriol and violence will continue under capitalism, even as the capitalists monetize “tolerance” of our identities. The “representation” politics the oppressed people are given is shallow and empty, because it does nothing to challenge, let alone abolish, the structures that oppress us: the rule of Capital, the white supremacist, settler-colonial order this empire was built on, and patriarchy. Socialism is the only path to the abolition of our oppressions, to the overthrow of our oppressors — the reactionaries who want to kill us and the capitalists who exploit and attempt to dupe us — and to the liberty and equality of all. We will remain principled and consistent in our efforts as we build a new world, one where “the last shall be first.” 

Housing prices are skyrocketing, forcing impoverished people to move further out to the city’s edges and into a food-desert apartheid created by disappearing grocery stores and rising food prices. These struggles are exacerbated by deteriorating public transportation as a result of divestment and  increased policing, resulting in fewer social services and increased police terrorism. This is a horrific, but all-too-common, example of U.S. capital’s  assault on the working classes, which continues to intensify as another periodic crisis in capitalism looms. 

White people are indeed suffering the consequences of a settler-colonial empire in decline — an empire their colonizing ancestors built, and an empire they carried forward with a regime of racial apartheid — but these hardships are much more severe for working-class Black and Indigenous communities across Oregon. The same is true of other racially marginalized and nationally oppressed peoples across the state. Capitalism in the Pacific Northwest is grounded in settler colonialism, chattel slavery, and racist and xenophobic immigration and property ownership laws. Oregon became Oregon through the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous and Black people, mob and legislative violence against Asian immigrants, and the state-sanctioned support of white settlement, wealth, health, and property at the expense of all others. Oregon is a white supremacist state. Progressive? Hardly! Today’s problems have been centuries in the making. Consistent racist and patriarchal policy throughout the entire U.S. Empire’s history has brought us to this moment.

From 1804 until 1806, the U.S. Army Corps of Discovery carried out a military operation to chart the geography and learn how to economically exploit the land acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. This would become known, and is today taught to schoolchildren as, the “Lewis and Clark Expedition.” While an express goal of the operation was to study the terrain and wildlife, Lewis and Clarks’ notes also conflated the many Indigenous peoples with the flora and fauna. This practice went on to influence the historical work on the frontier until about the 1980s. Left out of the fictionalized, classroom retelling of the expedition are the indispensable contributions of Sacagawea, an enslaved 14-year-old Agaidika girl and child-bride of a French-Canadian fur trapper, and York, an enslaved 34-year old African man, whose request for his freedom was denied upon the expedition’s return. The violent coercion of Black and Indigenous labor quite literally paved the way for the settlement of Oregon. Once the operation had concluded, the U.S. military sent soldiers to establish forts along their expanding empire’s so-called frontier, with the express purpose of defending the encroaching white settlers and permitting them to conduct terror-raids and attacks of extermination against the Indigenous populations of the territory. These settlers were guided by Protestant ideas of private property, enclosure, and “rights of conquest,” as well as the wink-and-nod lie that the land was “uninhabited.” Fort by fort, settlement by settlement, the U.S. moved further West until its Destiny was made Manifest.

Just before the American Civil War, the provisional government of the Oregon Territory passed a law banning slavery. Far from a triumph of abolitionist progressivism, the same law required all Black persons to leave Oregon Territory at once. The white legislature then passed another law — one that forbidding free Black persons from entering the territory. The punishment for the violation of any of these new laws was public flogging, repeated every six months until the offending Black person left the territory — not dissimilar from the punishments enslaved would experience. 

The white property owners in Oregon passed these laws not only because the Territory could not be admitted to the Union as a slave state, but also because they needed to exclude Black people from the workforce, in order to prevent them from owning private property. Black private ownership of the land would undermine the white-supremacist order, predicated on the theft of Indigenous land and its repurposing into a “reward” for white settlers. Any white male could receive 650 acres of land upon arrival, plus an additional 650 if married, encouraging as many as 400,000 white settlers to flock to Oregon during the mid-19th Century. The ultimate goal of this policy was to relieve the economic (class) tensions on the East coast. To reduce the conflict between white workers in the East and their industrialist bosses, the government engaged in systematic dispossession of land in the West through broken treaties and military occupation of the “frontier.”

Oregon’s white supremacist policies of exclusion also applied to Indigenous people in the state. In 1919, an Indigenous Tillamook woman, Ophelia Paquet, wished to claim the property of her recently deceased white husband of 30 years, Fred Paquet. The Tillamook county court recognized her as his widow and appointed her as the administer of the estate. “Two days later, though, Fred’s brother John [Paquet] came forward to contest Ophelia for control over the property.” The legal battle took place over the next two years and was eventually seen in the Oregon Supreme Court. Despite John’s horrible reputation (described by a county Judge as “a man of immoral habits… incompetent to transact ordinary business affairs and generally untrustworthy”) his status as a white man under the Oregon miscegenation laws was enough to ensure that he won his case against Ophelia. Not only were her people dispossessed of their ancestral lands by the state, but Ophelia, as an individual, was excluded from legally reclaiming even a small parcel of that land under the new private property regime. 

These horrific events are merely local instances of the systemic dispossession of oppressed nationalities, primarily Black people, across the U.S. Empire. Property relations have always been racialized in this country.

One of the many Supreme Court cases that helped codify the boundaries of racialization in the U.S. Empire comes from Oregon. In 1923, an Armenian immigrant, Tatos Cartozian, gained citizenship; this was challenged by the state in 1924. Cartozian argued that he was a white man and was, by law, guaranteed a pathway to citizenship and the right to continue his business as a rug dealer. In the resulting 1925 Supreme Court case, United States v. Cartozian, the Court ruled that Armenians were white and not Asian based on the provided “scientific” evidence. Race is not a biological fact, but rather a social construct and a legal category. The boundaries of whiteness can be restricted and expanded to suit the needs of the ruling classes.

Oregon eventually “allowed” Black settlement at the beginning of the twentieth century. Black persons were relegated to the Albina neighborhood in North Portland through a myriad of interwoven systems of discrimination carried out by the state and private institutions, but most notably through a process called redlining — a process in which banks refuse to give mortgages to Black people or extract unusually severe terms from them with subprime loans. During World War II, Portland’s Black population grew significantly, from roughly 1,800 to about 15,000 in five years. Three major shipyards were established in the Pacific Northwest, two in Portland, Oregon and one in Vancouver, Washington. These shipyards employed about 97,000 workers in total at their peak, and the prewar population of 340,000 was simply insufficient to meet the amount of ships commissioned by the U.S. Maritime Commission. Only fulfilling 27% of the commissioned vessels by the end of the war, it was clear that white male labor alone couldn’t maximize the market potential that was begging for ships. Thus, Oregon’s white capitalist class opened the doors to more workers and the general entry of women into the industrial workforce. To house the massive influx of people, Portland established a new, racially integrated city called Vanport to serve as temporary housing. The city was built in a dried lakebed between Portland and Vancouver and surrounded by locks to keep the water from the Columbia River out. Intended only to serve for the duration of the war, the buildings lacked foundations. In 1948 the locks gave way. Vanport was flooded, and the racially integrated, effectively autonomous, growing city was razed and swept away by the Columbia River. Portland refused to rebuild Vanport or compensate residents for the loss of property. The Black residents who could not find housing in Albina were then forced out of the area — through redlining. 

During the Second World War, Oregon and Southwest Washington also dispossessed 3,676 Japanese of their property via Executive Order 9066, issued by Franklin Roosevelt. The state imprisoned the Japanese at the Pacific International Livestock Exposition Center, known today as the Portland Expo Center. Upon their release, most families found that their homes, businesses, and personal belongings had been auctioned off by landlords or the state and were now occupied by white families. In commemoration, “Portland artist Valerie Otani created Voices of Remembrance (in the form of [traditional Japanese torii gates] most commonly found at the entrance of a sacred space)” at the Expo Center MAX Station. Each gate is adorned with hanging metal luggage tags to represent the individuals who were interned there. There is no sign or indication of what the art installation represents to passersby.

Throughout the twentieth century, Portland continued to wage economic warfare on the remaining Black population in the Albina neighborhood through various “urban renewal” programs. Programs like the 1961 Albina Neighborhood Improvement Project were established by city officials and were then awarded to private construction firms. From 1956 to the 70s, the city ripped through the neighborhood, splitting up the community with various construction projects and highways—specifically Interstate 5 and Highway 99 (ironically, OR-99 was named Martin Luther King Boulevard). Most notoriously, the Legacy Emanuel Medical Center expansion plan, which covered 76 acres of land,  dispossessed 300 Black families of their homes and businesses. The area was razed, but the hospital expansion was never actually built. Today, a fenced-off empty lot is all that remains. 

City officials had proposed the project at the height of the Black Panther Party’s Portland chapter. The Panthers had built interracial solidarity between the Black community concentrated in Albina and other poor communities, including white workers, in Portland. The City effectively ended the Black Panther Party’s solidarity work through aggressive dispersal of the Black community, robbing the Panthers of a place to organize. Today, minor and insignificant-looking signs dot the sidewalk of Albina’s North Williams Avenue — a pitiful attempt to tell the story of the historic neighborhood. 

Since the 1980s, conditions for Black people in Portland have not improved. Under the so-called Urban Renewal projects, Black residents were either forced out of their homes or continued to live in the increasingly disjointed neighborhood. Redlining has further prevented Black people from creating new communities outside Albina. Banks and policy-makers have worked hand-in-hand to prevent the reappearance of significant Black communities. Systemic disinvestment in Albina gave rise to further problems, ultimately resulting in more families abandoning their homes. Across the United States, the 1990s abounded with gentrification projects, and Portland was no exception. This project continues today with the unrelenting construction of expensive apartment buildings, expensive restaurants, and boutique shops in historically poor and majority-Black neighborhoods. 

Free and fair trade are nothing but capitalist fairy tales, meant to justify the obscene wealth of the rulers and the obscene poverty and deprivation of the masses. When the underlying logic of an economic system is to generate endless profits and amass unlimited wealth, why would the powerful allow “fair” competition? The capitalists and other property-owning classes mitigate competition through exclusion; they nurture and manufacture racism, misogyny, and other prejudices to suit their own ends. Whiteness is an elastic identity that can include or exclude groups of people depending on the needs of a given moment in time. Blackness, however, is a highly policed identity, allowing whiteness its elasticity through exclusion. Non-white nationalities, so long as they are not Black (or in the case of the U.S., Indigenous), may be incorporated into whiteness (i.e., Jews, Irish, Italians, light-skinned Latinés and Asians, etc.). The “right” to the various spoils of exploited labor is mainly bestowed upon those considered white, while privileges and benefits are granted to assimilated non-whites (re: Armenians). At the same time, the U.S. Empire frequently intervenes to thwart the “anomaly” of capital accumulation by Black and Indigenous people — those who cannot be subsumed by whiteness and the colonial project. The history of Portland provides a stark local portrait — unfortunately, only one among many across colonized North America — of how vile, cruel, and relentless the capitalist U.S. Empire is in its construction of race.