No One Lets Go of Anyone's Hand

Solidarity and Support: Post Number Six of The Movement We Need

In this moment of incipient fascism and rising right wing power, it's easy to feel scared.. And yet it is more than ever important that we act with courage, to organize openly, to speak our truths loudly, and to stand together in solidarity. No movement, and no strategy can guarantee our safety, we are safer when we build a culture of solidarity and support.

(This series of writings is an experiment—I’m writing a book and releasing it a chapter at a time on Substack, accompanied with podcasts available on Substack, Apple, Spotify, etc. Here is post number 6, which concludes my section on Safety, the first of our core needs. Later sections will look at Belonging, Value, Agency and Meaning.)

Structures of Support

When we stand together to confront oppressive systems, one of the key ways we create a sense of safety within our groups is by offering support and solidarity.  That type of safety is emotional and psychological, not physical.  It often comes into play precisely when we are facing physical or legal danger. When we know that other people in our movement will support our actions and help us weather the consequences, we build trust.

As the system around us becomes more oppressive cortana it's more important than ever that we strengthen our solidarity within and within our movements and within our broader coalitions. One of the key ways that fascism can be defeated is when the left and the center unite in solidarity to stand against repressive regimes. So I think it can be helpful to take a look back at some of the ways we've organized support and ‘solidarity in past actions and movements.

One way we've created structures of support is by the forms in which we organize. Mass movements can be anonymous and alienating. But when we organize mobilizations where people may be risking arrest or attempting different forms of direct action, we often organize into affinity groups. An affinity group is a small group of people who come together to take action together. Affinity groups may be formed around some common interest or bond. Members may come from the same area, be groups of friends who know each other, or they may form because they wish to take similar sorts of actions or face similar levels of risk. Affinity groups can also include people whose role will not be to risk arrest or face physical danger but to take care of the many other needs of those who do, whether that’s cooking food or talking to the media.

In larger mobilizations where we organized with consensus decision making, affinity groups provided an important structure of governance. Consensus is hard to reach in a large, undifferentiated mass of people. It works best in smaller groups. So affinity groups would come to their own consensus on what actions they wanted to take or other aspects of the mobilization, and then send a representative to a spokes council to make overall decisions.  This mode of organizing reduces the numbers of people involved in a discussion and allows for more time for each person to speak. The role of representative is meant to rotate, so that no one person gains all the status and power of being the permanent, designated leader.  At times, affinity groups might attend a spokescouncil and sit behind their representative, so that key decisions could be immediately discussed and the group’s opinion determined.

Affinity groups often develop strong bonds. Nothing cements a friendship more than facing risks together. Some groups might form for a particular action and then dissolve, but others continue on for years organizing together. Organizing in affinity groups or other small, bonded groups is one way that movements can provide support.

The power of group support in creating a sense of safety and helping groups act effectively is not just limited to activist groups. Military historian John Keegan, in The Mask of Command, credits some of the success of the British Army in repelling Napoleon at Waterloo to the composition of the army in regiments drawn from the same area, composed of men who had fought together, knew each other, and so developed both bonds of trust and the desire not to let their fellow soldiers down or look bad in their eyes.  In his earlier work The Face of Battle, he cited studies that showed that soldiers in time of war who remained with the units they knew suffered less post-traumatic stress than those who were reassigned to strange groups.

Support may be practical.  When we organized nonviolent direct actions in the anti-nuclear movement and other social justice movements, often deliberately risking arrest, we always organized legal support for activists, and jail support for those who did get arrested and incarcerated. Supporters might show up in court for arraignment or trials, wait outside the jail for people to be released and provide food, warmth, or medical care, help a newly released activist make a plane or an appointment, feed the cats back home, or perform other acts of comfort and service. Support people might pressure the authorities to release arrestees, show up in court, make calls, write letters, organize support demonstrations, raise money for bail or to cover lawyers’ fees. When we were arrested at Diablo Canyon in 1981, protesting a nuclear power plant built on an earthquake fault line, one of our support people called my mother to wish her a happy birthday.  My ex-husband Eddie's finest hour was when he arrived to pick up a group of us who had been jailed for a week from a protest at the Livermore Weapons Lab, with the Clash blaring on the stereo of his van, a huge stack of pastries from our local bakery in the back, and a bouquet of roses.

Jail can be an especially isolating experience, and everything about it is designed to make you feel ban and wrong and shamed. Recently, while watching an interview with Brittany Griner, the basketball star who was arrested on a spurious charge and held in a Soviet prison for ten months by the Putin regime, I was saddened to hear her say that she felt shame for bringing dishonor on her family.  The interviewer assured her that the situation had not been her fault, and I wished I could have reached into the screen to give her a hug and say, “That's how jail is designed to make you feel!”  Even when you're there for a well-considered political action, there's inevitably a voice in your head saying, “Was I stupid?  What am I doing here?”

 Having the support of comrades inside or out can make all the difference to an activist’s mental or emotional health. Griner had support from her wife, her fans, from thousands of concerned people around the world; nonetheless, she still internalized a sense of shame. Activists often have only one another. Showing up for one another is one of the ways we build a strong, resilient culture of trust and emotional safety.

Jail Solidarity

When we held jail solidarity in our anti-nuclear actions in the ‘80s, we would agree beforehand not to accept citations that would allow us to get out of jail immediately, and instead insist on remaining in jail until all the arrests were processed and we knew that no one was going to be singled out for more extreme charges. At times, we would resist going to arraignment until an agreement was made with the authorities to assure fair treatment for all.  Holding us in jail cost the authorities both money and bad publicity, and put pressure on them to agree to our demands.

As the authorities became familiar with our tactics, they would sometimes simply refuse to hold people. In order to avoid being forcibly ejected, we developed a new tactic: withholding names.  Some people gave symbolic names, not meant to delude the authorities but to make a statement: Emma Goldman, anarchist leader from the last century, was always popular. At times this tactic could backfire:  one white activist in an anti-intervention demonstration gave his name as Oscar Romero, the Salvadorian Bishop who had been assassinated by right-wing death squads. He ended up being held for multiple days and nearly deported as undocumented, although he was, in reality, a U.S. citizen.  At other times, withholding names created intense confusion for the police, provided some protection for activists who might be undocumented or from another country, and sometimes kept peoples’ names off the official records. However, in classic non-violent theory, we want to stand behind the actions that we take. We don’t try to evade the consequences, but instead proudly claim what we do. 

A jail solidarity strategy could be enormously empowering. Facing the overt power of the system in its most crude form, refusing to be intimidated, standing up to it and finding where, within that system, we could collectively wield power created a heady sense of liberation, and reinforced bonds of trust.  But empowerment also came with a cost.

 All these solidarity tactics worked perhaps more effectively before the 9-11 attacks and the militarization of law enforcement.  But even then, solidarity could also be alienating. Not everyone who wished to take part in actions could afford to spend multiple days in jail. People had jobs they couldn't be absent from, children who needed care, or other circumstances that limited the extent of their participation.  Some were non-citizens or undocumented immigrants. Being in a position to assume the risk of an arrest represented unrecognized privilege. Parents, caregivers, people with marginal incomes or health issues might not be able to take those risks. At times, these disparities created great conflict and tension. People felt pressured and disrespected when they couldn't hold complete solidarity.  Instead of creating a greater sense of empowerment and safety, the solidarity strategy could become exclusive and divisive.

In the early ‘80s, Bay Area activists were organizing both around the Livermore Weapons Lab, where nuclear weapons were designed, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, where nuclear weapons were tested. My colleague Eric Bear and I, in planning how we were going to facilitate a string of large spokescouncil meetings, came to the realization that we did not need to have one hundred per cent consensus on our solidarity strategies. We simply needed to know that enough people were willing to hold jail solidarity to make it effective.  There was no need to pressure those who couldn't stay in jail to do so, or to make sacrifices they were unable or unwilling to make.

Shifting this focus created a greater sense of safety and trust in the group. No longer did we need to pressure our fellow activists into taking stands that did not fit their life circumstances.  Instead, we could develop a range of strategies, where some people stayed in jail, others cited out and could be free to speak to the media about the goals of the action and organize outside jail. Still others pled not guilty and insisted on speedy trials, which put another sort of pressure on the system.

 in one of the direct actions at Livermore we ended up holding jail solidarity for nearly two weeks. During that time, many people reached the limit of how long they could spend in jail, and were forced to go to their arrangement, make a plea and arrange for release pending a court date. Instead of pressuring them to stay in jail longer, we created a simple exit ritual, forming a double line like a London Bridge and singing them out on their way to arraignment, to thank them and acknowledge that even though we were choosing different strategies, we were still in solidarity together. The result was a much greater sense of trust and safety within the group. People actually stayed longer and accepted a greater level of sacrifice than they would have if we had attempted to make them feel guilty and wrong, which would only have created resentment.

Jail solidarity strategies can work well when the authorities have limited resources and pressure can be effective. They also work best in actions where everybody does relatively the same thing. If we all agree to a non-violence code that states we will not damage property, and we respect that agreement, then it's a clear and simple matter to hold solidarity with everyone. But in an action where some groups are damaging property, while other groups strongly oppose such actions, solidarity becomes much more complicated.  In the global justice movement of the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, many mobilizations adopted a diversity of tactics, that might range from sitting peacefully in a circle on the street to smashing every window in the local McDonald's.  Solidarity is problematic when we are asked to make sacrifices in support of those whose actions we might not personally condone.  Yet many times activists are charged with crimes they did not actually commit. If we were to decide, for example, that we did not want to be in solidarity with window breakers, how do we know whether any given activist has actually done what they’re accused of?   

By the early 2000s, after the attacks of September 11th, many local law enforcement agencies saw their budgets swell and police responses militarized. At the same time, life became more expensive and stressful in general, especially for the young and the under-employed. While in the early ‘80s, activists could easily live in San Francisco with cheap rent, work part time, and devote much of their lives to organizing, by the early part of the 21st century, rents were sky high, the cost of living had radically increased, and even young activists without families had to work much longer hours simply in order to survive. In addition, as law enforcement systems became computerized and more integrated nationally, the consequences of an arrest became more serious, as the record of even a minor charge could follow an activist into a new area or affect their ability to cross a border. So, the strategies that worked in an earlier time were not as available or effective in the new era. To create safety in our groups, we must recognize and understand the real limitations and circumstances of people's lives, Carefully weigh the costs and benefits of our actions, and Carefully choose how to expend our resources including our human resources.

Solidarity in Actions

Solidarity also means not taking actions that gratuitously endanger others.  I remember a moment in Quebec City in 200, when masses of people were protesting the Free Trade Area of the Americas, which would have extended NAFTA throughout the Western Hemisphere.  The city had been turned into an armed camp, with barricades surrounding the interior core of the urban area where the meetings took place. Several hundred of us had marched up to one of the gateways into the fenced off area, bringing with us a Declaration of the Rights of Water written by the people of Cochabamba in their struggle to stop the privatization of their water resources, one of the issues at risk in the negotiations. Unable to break through a police line, we sat down, blocking the street, and began to read the Declaration with tear gas wafting around us. Suddenly, from far behind us, someone threw a brick over our heads into the line of cops and ran away, endangering all of us, especially those of us who were sitting within billy-club reach of the riot cops. We turned, and with one voice yelled ‘No!’ to the retreating figure. Fortunately, the cops did not attack us.  But had they done so, those of us who were older, slower or who might have disabilities that prevented them from running away were in enormous danger that they had not chosen. That masked fleeing figure may have thought that he was doing something bold and brave, or he might have been an agent provocateur. But he was not acting in solidarity. Solidarity means caring for all those in your group, especially those who may not be as strong and as fleet of foot as yourself.

Safety and Security Culture

A time of heightened repression a natural instinct is to hide. And then we have government officials threatening to use their power to shut down dissent and persecute their detractors, our natural inclination is to be quiet and if we organized opposition to do it secretly.

But we should not give in to this tendency.  But the only way to safeguard our rights to free speech, to dissent, and to organize is to use them. Open dissent and organizing is itself an act of resistance. It stakes out a political space that we can defend, and in so doing, we draw on two centuries worth of American traditions and rights which we should not relinquish without a struggle. If the opposition wants to take away those rights, we should not let them do so without paying a heavy cost in legitimacy, and in the need to expend their resources of money and person-power in enforcement. While their power can seem overwhelming, it is never absolute. Every dollar, every hour of police time they spend trying to suppress open dissent is a dollar or an hour they will not have to round up and imprison immigrants or perform other heinous acts.  And the more people who openly and fearlessly challenge their decrees and policies the harder it becomes for them to police everybody.

This is just one of the many reasons why I'm in favor of organizing nonviolent resistance.  I'll have a lot more to say about this in future chapters, but for now let me just say that I’ve sat through too many discussions in my time about what specifically constitutes nonviolence, whether or not breaking windows or punching fascists is violent and/or worth doing anyway. I don't want to debate that here.  Whether a bit of smashy-hy is  considered violent or not, one of the challenges with actions that condone property damage is that by nature they must be secretive and anonymous. It becomes impossible to hold people accountable for their actions, or to have discussions about what constitutes effective or ineffective forms of struggle.

Security culture, by its very nature, is exclusive. It becomes a barrier to open, broad-based organizing.  We cannot do the work of educating, persuading and mobilizing people if we can’t tell them what we’re doing.

In Miami, in 2004, we were again organizing protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. We had set up a convergence center in a giant warehouse with a huge parking lot. My affinity group had brought both ritual and permaculture to the action, and we had created a graywater system to handle the kitchen’s wastewater and distribute it to a small garden we planted at the edge of the parking lot.  We also planted a mini-garden in a giant wooden container we had found in a garbage pile.  It was always our intention to demonstrate integrative, regenerative systems whenever we could in a mobilization, both to educate the activists who came through and any members of the general public who came by, and as a positive statement, a way of showing a glimpse of what we were fighting for.  In contrast to the megaprojects supported by institutions like the World Bank, and given the green light by global trade agreements that took power out of people's hands, we wanted to demonstrate how ordinary people could create simple systems to solve immediate problems, with found materials at very low cost.

The entrance to the convergence space was next to the container.  The little mini-garden created a small spot of beauty in what were otherwise grim surroundings, and represented a welcome to the general public.  But at the check-in table sat a greeter, a young activist, his face shrouded in a black mask. (Before COVID made masking common, being masked represented not a health concern but an attempt to retain anonymity, ominously redolent of outlaws and bandits.) As each person entered, we were Interrogated: “Are you a journalist or a cop?” I was so tempted to respond “Do I have to pick one or the other?” The young watchman never seemed to be in a joking mood, however.  Needless to say, this did not create a welcoming environment. Any attempts to broaden the movement, to show some of our permaculture installations we’d created, or to invite the larger community into our meetings and assemblies were hampered by this rather ham-fisted security culture, that in any case didn’t really make us more secure, as any reputable journalist would let us know who they were, and any disreputable newshound or undercover cop would simply lie.

Secrecy and security may at times be necessary. I wrote much of this section before Trump's recent reelection. Now, with an avowed would-be dictator heading the government, and the rise of autocracy and outright fascism here in the U.S. and globally, there may come a time when secrecy becomes a necessity. But we should delay that time as much as possible by organizing openly. The more openly we organize, the more we hold our political ground and demonstrate that dissent can be bold and public, that we will not relinquish the tradition of free speech without a struggle, and that open criticism of politicians and oligarchs is still a right, a core tradition and a norm. When we retreat from public organizing, we give up political space that is harder to reclaim than it is to hold. Instead, we should make the opposition contest every inch of that space, and expend their resources, social capital and public image to limit it. 

And if our goal is to create a broad- based movement, then most of our organizing needs to be done openly and publicly. We simply can't recruit people unless they know something is happening, and we can't educate, inform or persuade people if we're not transparent about our goals and actions.

 Security culture also creates a false sense of security.  No matter how many encrypted apps we use or secret meanings we organize, generally the authorities have far better access to the technology, the resources, and the leverage they need to infiltrate us.  So just when we think all the precautions and passwords are keeping us safe, they may in reality be encouraging us to share things that the authorities actually have access to.

I have been in actions and movements that were infiltrated, and I have known friends who were betrayed by comrades they trusted, who later turned out to be agents. No amount of interrogation by gatekeepers nor secret assignations on the Signal app would have prevented the infiltration, because the agents were often key members of the organization. In England, for example, Mark Kennedy spent seven years infiltrating environmental movements and establishing long-term, sexual relationships with women.  He was central to the planning for an action at the Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station where six activists were arrested.  Charges were later dropped when Kennedy’s instigation was revealed.

 One example I know personally is that of an undercover agent named Brandon Darby, who was central to some of the organizing in New Orleans by Common Ground Relief after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005. Darby was lean, tall and charismatic, full of daring tales about boating into the flooded city in the aftermath of the hurricane to rescue a stranded former Black Panther. He fit the archetype of the young, courageous, male hero—except with the women who actually had to work with him.  He had a penchant for letting the women do the actual organizing, while taking much of the credit. When they challenged him on his sexism, they were often not supported by the rest of the organization.

“Sexism, like racism, affects all of us,” writes organizer Lisa Fithian in her account. “Brandon was allowed to assume leadership and authority at Common Ground because he was a strong, good-looking, charismatic, straight white male who was willing to take risks, even if reckless. Yet, the work of activists who were women or queer or busy doing relief remained relatively invisible. Those activists were only given power where it didn’t challenge Brandon’s, and he made sure of it.”

Darby's bravado extended to disdain for nonviolence and a penchant for guns and weapons. When the Republican National Convention met in Minneapolis in the summer of 2006, he recruited some young activists from Austin, Texas, and persuaded them to travel with weapons to the convention, always pushing them to do more.  They made molotov cocktails but never used them.   Brandon then Informed the police. They were arrested. Both spent time in jail as a result of Brandon’s actions.

What could have prevented this travesty? No amount of secretive planning: Darby himself was at the center of much of that type of organizing.  But had the movement been willing to listen to the women, hold him accountable for his actions and attitudes, that might have dented his charisma, and hampered his ability to market himself as the expert guide to inexperienced young activists who paid a heavy price for their trust in him.

“Some day I hope to wake up and find things different. I hope to see our communities deepen our understanding and commitment to uprooting all the “isms.” I would like to see a community where we create agreements and structures of accountability that will not allow behaviors like those highlighted above to continue, and if they do continue, that men will listen to women, and stand up to each other when someone is clearly abusing their power and authority.”1

                  With all that said, probably the most effective and safe way to organize in troubled times is to get together small groups of trusted friends to study the situation together, participate in campaigns and generate actions, and offer support to one another.  Such groups can then band together into larger organizations and coalitions.  One hopeful sign in the past week since the election has been the formation of such groups.  Some of the larger left-leaning groups such as Indivisible and Move-On have been encouraging people to form neighborhood groups.  Progressive Rabbi Arthur Waskow of the Shalom Center recently sent out a post urging Jews to form Freedom Cheders or study groups, modeled on the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement.  As I mentioned above, forming affinity groups can be a powerful way to assure support and connections for organizing in troubled times.

 There are times when secrecy can work for us. In the early 2000s, when we were organizing many actions around capitalism and global trade agreements, one affinity group decided to take over the San Francisco Stock Exchange. A few blocks away, in the shady, north-facing courtyard of the Bank of America, was a sculpture, a giant, polished black rock popularly referred to as the Banker's Heart.  My friends organized a big public street theater to “Revive the Banker's Heart!” We gathered a crowd of several hundred people around a giant cardboard defibrillator, and a group of activists dressed as doctors and nurses rushed forward to apply the paddles, while yelling “Clear!” All the efforts of the police were focused on our group, and they eventually pushed us out, cordoning off and securing the Banker’s Heart from our ministrations.

 Meanwhile, a small affinity group of activists dressed as Robin Hood infiltrated the Stock Exchange, climbed to the second floor, and took over the lobby, rappelling down from the balconies, hanging banners and causing a general disruption. We marched over to join them while the police remained stuck, guarding the Banker's Heart. That action was successful because the group that took over the Stock Exchange was a small affinity group who knew and trusted each other.  They also trusted a few of us who led the Banker’s Heart revival, but were in the know and ready for the cue to march. Having a public component in this two-pronged action allowed us to organize openly around the issues of economic inequality, in a fun and humorous way that could bring new people into the movement and get our message across.

Again, one of the great advantages of nonviolent organizing is that it doesn't require security culture. We organize in the open, we accept responsibility for our actions and their consequences. We don't try to evade arrest, and we don't have to worry about someone discovering our secrets because we don't have secrets. Instead, we can invest our time and resources into planning actions and campaigns that can educate and inform the public and broaden the movement.

We might think of security culture like a very expensive seasoning that may at times be just what we need to enliven the dish, but must be used sparingly because of its costs. It severely hampers our ability to get our message out publicly, to build coalitions, to make alliances with other groups, to educate a broader public, to tell our stories and shift public opinion.  And the more we do these things, the more we will build alliances that can counter fascism, restore, preserve and safeguard our rights.

Safety In Our Movements

So how do we create a sense of safety in our organizations?  We can do so by creating an internal culture of support and solidarity. The support can come in the form of agreements, ideally expressed in positive terms, not in a framework of crime and punishment. It can be expressed through deeds, not just words, in the ways we stand up for each other, have each other's backs, provide many levels of practical aid and actual care. We can use skillful communication, give and receive constructive critique, and be aware of destructive personality patterns.  When planning campaigns and action, we can recognize the toll that secrecy and security culture take on our overall sense of connection and trust and our ability to educate and influence a larger sphere. We can cultivate an atmosphere of open discussion, with room for people to learn, change and grow, to disagree respectfully, to make mistakes and make amends. 

The Brazilian movement under authoritarian Bolsonaro, had a slogan: “No one lets go of anyone's hand.” When we hold onto one another and build safety and trust within our groups, we can stand strong together, and even under challenging circumstances, continue the vital work of creating a more just and equitable world.

Notes

1.        John Keegan The Face of Battle

2.        John Keegan The Mask of Command

3. 1.        Lisa Fithian. “FBI Informant Brandon Darby : Sexism, Egos, and Lies.”  The Rag Blog, March 22, 2010

3https://www.theragblog.com/lisa-fithian-fbi-informant-brandon-darby-sexism-egos-and-lies/

4.        Arthur Waskow. “Heartbreak and Beyond”: Letter dated November 14, 2024

http://theshalomcenter.org/