Organizing Block by Block in the Face of Fascism

By Michelle Mascarenhas

In the Kurdish region of Rojava over the past decades, under the collapsing Syrian state, various forces contended for the space to govern culture and economy. One of them was ISIS. Another was the Democratic Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (DAANES), which contended that people’s liberation must center the autonomy of women and ethnic minorities and a restoration of ecological balance. While navigating enormous contradictions in a world where power comes from violence and force, the DAANES was able to organize governance of the historically Kurdish region of what is now Syria. With the fall of the Assad regime and the cuts by Trump to US Agency for International Development (USAID) earlier this year, change is again creating crises as well as possibilities for a range of futures. 

Disorganization creates an opening to reorganize. While the MAGA right sows fear, anxiety, chaos, and overwhelm in order to try to reorganize us around an elevated level of fascism, what does the living world teach us about how to respond? Species that have adapted to change, such as salmon populations that have begun to migrate earlier to align with temperatures warming up earlier in the year—show that stressors can be a catalyst for change.

When we are comfortable, it’s hard to take big actions to change things up. And yet, in being complacent, we have become frogs in a pot of slowly boiling water. What we need is a  just transition from a “banks and tanks” economy to economies of sacredness and caring. So while those in the White House are disorganizing us to try to reorganize us around heightened fear, isolation, and competition, we must instead use the openings to reorganize around reconnection, rest, joy, and sharing.

Alone, it is easy to feel immobilized. Rather than isolating, we really do need to come together and move together. Looking up at the sky mesmerized by constantly transforming shapes of starlings murmurating reminds me that we need to find our way from our hearts and our instincts as much as from our heads.

The ability to feel, read, and respond together is what will keep us safe. The ability to align our actions with our values and intentions together makes us safer. Organizing as collective units in which more and more of us have our antennae up, can contribute our analysis, and can offer ideas on how to respond is much safer than any one or two of us isolated and dissociated in our comfortable bubbles.

As Movement Generation always returns to—because it is fundamental—the root of the word economy is the Greek word “oikos,” or eco meaning “home.” Economy is just the care of or management of home. Rather than letting MAGA forces reorganize us around authoritarianism and oligarchy, how can we reclaim our agency to govern and manage home? If we understand that every being has a purpose, we see that governing our lives is not simply a right, but a responsibility in order to live that out as fully as we can.

Here are 5 ways we need to organize block by block toward permanently organized communities in these times:

Organize Locally to Directly Meet Our Communities’ Needs

We absolutely need protest and dissent in order to reject fascism. But we also need to  organize around what we want and need. Like pandemics, things like job losses, loss of health care, ICE raids, mental health crisis, and housing insecurity will be felt in our homes, on our block, in our neighborhood schools, in the bodies that are all around us feeling fear or hunger or need for connection. In doing this organizing, we can normalize the values of honoring all life, cooperation, and meeting people’s needs. 

Our program can include going door to door on our block to find out where the needs and offers are. Who needs their utilities shut off and on in case of a wildfire or tornado? Who can do it? Where are the households with elderly or disabled people or small children, and how can we organize to make sure everyone is cared for? How can we prepare to protect people threatened with deportation or violence? This will look different depending on where we are and who we and our neighbors are. Who can risk going door to door, and who can play other roles? What are conversation openers that build common ground and reach out from a place of care? How do we listen to the needs and take small steps over time?

Build Collective Governance

This is a time to restore our own agency. While the strongmen want us to think they are all powerful, we can learn from movements like the Black Panther Party for Self Defense with its 65 survival programs which transformed material conditions as well as the culture. The Panthers saw that children were going to school hungry and therefore unable to learn. They started a free breakfast program and established a simple set of guidelines that members could use to set up such programs in their communities: How many volunteers are needed for each role—securing donations, preparing the meals, serving the children, welcoming and seating them; what the space should have—tables and chairs, a waiting area with seating. Through block-by-block organizing, we can transform the material conditions as well as the culture—from “get mine” to “share ours.” From isolation and fear to care and cooperation. From slash and burn to mutual aid. 

Get Permanently Organized

As we practice working together to meet basic needs, we can build our level of organization, which is political power, without bosses. We move through different needs, ideas, opinions. We build skills to name what we need, listen to others, and find common ground. We learn about how to regulate our nervous systems. We ask for support.

While we are organizing to meet needs amidst crisis, we must use this organization to codify the material and cultural shifts we make in these moments. Through political education, we can unpack the extractive economic and political systems we live under and how they create trauma and poverty. In this process, we shift hearts and minds so that we can increasingly move together. We begin to cultivate the future rather than just react to oppressive systems.

Honor Care Work

This is a time to shift more of our labor to mutuality and care. This pushes back on a devaluing of life that has escalated to a frenzied pitch. During the pandemic, my father moved in with my family and became part of the fabric of our community, while also teaching my kids how to see and appreciate their loved ones. What are the roles for elderly people to play that call them into their leadership and help them make meaningful contributions in these times? And, as this system continues to collapse all around us, how can this care work be increasingly converted from “jobs” to life roles that feel meaningful and fulfilling for people? Rather than applying our labor to the very systems that are harming us, how can we move more of our time, attention, and passion to taking care of each other and the places we depend on?

Look for the Openings

I regularly ask those around me: Where do you think we are in Octavia Butler’s Parables? This helps us all reorient to see ourselves as world builders. Our actions today are building the vehicles, the pathways, and the worlds we will inhabit in the future. 

While we build forms of organization to meet our community needs, we must also look for the openings. These are the spaces created when a veil is lifted—for example, in 2020 when the murder of George Floyd catalyzed major shifts in the reckoning with racial injustice. Or as the last 18 months of genocide in Gaza have lifted the veil on zionism, especially for young people. We are seeing the backlash to the effectiveness of both of these movements. But these were openings that were seized to win shifts required to move us toward the future we need. Local groups everywhere began digging into how to defund the police and instead fund care and transformative justice for a future that will be safer.

We must harness the shocks and direct the slides to the shifts we need. Don’t burn out reacting. Look for the openings. It’s impossible to do this as individuals, but as we build up our squads, pods, teams, we have more of a basis from which to make assessments and move. Together. Across blocks and neighborhoods. Across cities and bioregions. 

And be ready to codify the shifts—culturally, in custom, and in policy. With economic downturn, more people will be unable to pay rent not just for a couple of weeks but for months or longer. Can we organize rent/mortgage strikes across class lines? Across a number of places? Can we get some base of people to put land in the commons instead of more speculation? Organize to win the shifts.