March 12, 2025
Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.
Photo by Mark Dixon via wikimedia commons
At times like these—who am I kidding, when were there times like these?—one wants to stay in bed, bury one’s head, dream another dream. Or perhaps to privately twist and shout. Or what?
I am not going to report what Trump and his lackeys are doing, nor even the ramifications of what they are doing yet again. Such reports are abundant. More, the broader implications have begun to register. Events are no longer just academic factoids. Implications have become felt awareness. Our condition is serious. Our situation is spiraling. Trump and Co. are not fooling around. We are not dead yet, but we are getting there. So—now what? The time has come. We must make choices. We must turn the tide. Do we bow and scrape, do we ignore and act like nothing is happening, or do we stand and fight?
If we cling to the world we knew, that choice—and it is a choice—will not lead to a better world but to a much worse one. Bernie Sanders has been speaking to major audiences in Trump territory to report trends and implications that are not yet widely known there, and to emphasize that resignation is not an option. You can see him speak thusly on YouTube anytime. He says he gets the fear. He gets the depression. But he also says surrender in any form is not an option. Too much is at stake. And if Sanders can fight, you can, I can, we all can. We don’t have to bow and scrape. We must not ignore. To stand and fight is our choice to make. But what constitutes to bow and scrape? What constitutes to stand and fight?
Different strokes for different folks. There are countless answers. Here are just a few. On campus, suppose your university president chooses to bow and scrape. He strikes a pose—he blusters and flexes, but it is a profile in cowardice. Yes boss, he says, we will eliminate DEI. Yes boss, he says, we will prosecute any student you deem anti-semitic. Yes boss, he says, we will welcome your agents to take our students away. Yes boss, he says, we will disparage, ostracize, expel, and turn over for imprisonment any student who you deem terrorist, even any student who you simply deem annoying to you. Yes boss, I am a University President. I am master of my company. And yes boss, I am down on my knees. Don’t hurt me please. Is that your local president? If you need to hate something, hate that. There is no sugar coating outright collaboration with fascism. So suppose you are a student at this collaborator’s institution of higher learning. Perhaps you are at Columbia, for example. Or you are at a university that’s next door, say NYU, or at one that’s around the next bend perhaps in Illinois or Wisconsin, perhaps Northwestern—or maybe you are at one on the western border, Berkeley, once the epicenter of real free speech, and your university may clampdown next. What do you do? Or even if your school isn’t bowing and scraping, then in solidarity with fellow students at one that is, what do you do?
On the one hand, you feel a hyperbolically growing gut hostility toward collaborationist local bosses, local presidents. For Academia to bow and scrape nauseates you. You twist and shout in your dorm room and even outside when walking in the shade of ivy walls. And to feel angry is certainly a start. But you know, don’t you, that for fighting back it is only a smidgin better than to deem outrage unseemly. So you don’t choose to sleep late. You don’t put your head down and go off to class like last week, like last year, as if now is like then. But if you aren’t in denial and if you refuse to resign, how might you stand and fight?
You want to reach your fellow students and combine your sentiments into a collective action. At first, if others aren’t yet ready, you may have to act alone or maybe with a roommate or partner. So maybe you go to a class and stand and request, and even demand classroom attention to the crisis at hand. Maybe you put up a poster, hand out a notice. Initially you may take a solitary step. Not just in your mind, twisting and shouting, but in fact, standing and fighting, though by yourself or maybe with just a few others. You hope your choice will light a fire in some fellow students’ engines. You hope your example will grow. Perhaps you then go door to door, dorm to dorm, talking, talking. You get steadily more confident, and next you stand up in a dining hall. You call for quiet. You talk about an occupation, a march, a strike, an encampment, or whatever seems best suited to building momentum. You hope others relate right away but if they don’t you repeat your move, and then you do it again, and again, and soon you and others are organizing in classes and corridors. Meetings follow. Spring knocks at your door. Flowers bloom. This is when campus movements rise this time, one hopes, to persist. You know you want it to happen. So why not make it so. You are not alone in your anger. You are not unique in your desires. But some few have to go first, why not you?
Or suppose at your job your owners show their true colors. Some may moan about MAGA, others may welcome it, but virtually all say, okay Donald, we will extract more labor from whoever we don’t jettison. We will ignore the ramifications for those we fire and for those our business or our Department is supposed to serve. We will serve you, Donald, first and foremost. For some co-workers who bow and scrape obedience will arise from fear. They don’t want fascism but hey, they say, it is not their place to buck the trend. And at any rate, they really don’t want to risk repression. Understandable. Not really unreasonable. But not you. You don’t bow. You don’t scrape.
Suppose you work in some Department that Musk wishes to ravage or in some industry that ravages the planet. Now what? Fellow workers around you are increasingly angry but also scared. Fellow workers around you are still tip toeing. They don’t want to get fired. They don’t want to poke the Trumpian Toddlers up top. All of that is understandable. But you heed Bernie’s warning. You know to keep your head down will ensure total defeat. MAGA in the saddle. You ridden. Musk fires half of your department, perhaps the Education Department, to assault not just dismissed workers, but working America’s next generation. What now? To just say stop that Elon is better than to be silence. To ask courts to intervene is another good step. But those steps alone are not enough.
Trump and Co. are long marching through society’s institutions, first here, then there. Environmental protection. Screw it. Free health care. Forget about it. DEI, science, education. Slash, burn, and reconstitute to suit Orange-man rule. They encounter a judicial obstacle. No bigee. They just tell more lies. Or, if need be, they temporarily shift to another target preparing to come back again later for the earlier target, having meanwhile become a little stronger. Every time they win anything at all, or they can even just claim they won something, they gloat. They strut. They rush to continue. They are insatiable. Do we get that, now, finally? They mean to dominate and for us to bow and scrape will just feed their engine. They will keep coming. They can’t be stopped by saying okay boss, we have had enough. Not even by our twisting and shouting. They can only be stopped by unyielding disobedient non compliant resistance. And such resistance can’t just be to just get back to what we endured before MAGA. That intent will be too ambivalent, too lacking in real hope to inspire sufficient commitment to turn back the Trumpian tide. What we endured before was already incredibly uninspiring. It led to MAGA. So, our resistance has to plant seeds of something truly better. It has to evoke sustained support. It has to elicit effervescent energy for positive gains. It has to be so clearly positive that many Trump supporters begin to see that, hello, those gains are gains for us too. Trump is not my savior. Trump is a lying fascist nightmare.
In the campus example, when students get together to stand up to fight back, their effort will need to not only oppose MAGA and their local President’s cowardice, and the fears of all too many suddenly silent faculty, and of some students too, it will need to have a forward looking, positive component sufficient to inspire real desire, sufficient to nurture real community. So students who organize in dorms, dining halls, and corridors to march, occupy, and encamp will need to also say here is what we want. We don’t just reject fascism on campus. We don’t just protect reason, evidence, and science, immigrants, trans people, and Palestinians. No, we students hereafter also intend to become active and even paramount participants in determining campus curriculum, culture, pedagogy, work, and living conditions. This is our university, not Trump’s, and not his local stooge’s either.
Okay, what about workers in Musk-targeted departments, indeed workers in companies of any kind, from auto plants to warehouses, trucks to restaurants, and hospitals to hospices. Talk about what is happening. Talk about what needs to happen. Organize against bosses and for workers. And when Musk says you are fired, you say hell no I won’t go—and you don’t leave. You come back to work the next day. First maybe one or two disobey. But then there are a lot of you. The doors are locked so you can’t get in. Fine, you sit and block those doors. You seek support from other workers in your department, in other departments, and finally in other industries. You call your kids’ teachers, you call your hospital’s nurses, You call the UAW, you call the Teamsters too. You ask for pickets. You ask for solidarity. And later you will join them when they need it. The department you all shut down is DOGE. And finally you all start to ask, what do we actually want? Not just to not be fired. Not just to not have our efforts to help constituencies we serve blocked. But what positive changes do we want, in our circumstances, in our salaries, in our lives. Time for some dignity.
To stand and fight means to not comply. It means to disobey. It means to assert positive new desires. Maybe nurses make a first big step. Maybe packers and assemblers. Maybe public school teachers. Maybe dishwashers and drivers. Maybe students. In college, in high school, younger still. This is all hands on deck time. A few go first, then a few more, soon many.
Look around. Heads are already spinning, heads will soon turn. It has already begun. If resistance disobeys with open ears to hear from those not yet y board and open arms to welcome those not yet committed resistance can even recruit angry Trumpers. They too don’t want to be fired. They too want some real dignity. Their anger just needs a new focus. To stand and fight can recruit some Trumpers and end Trump. It can recruit some angry techies and end Musk. And it can go much further. And it has to. Because we have got to really register, to really feel, to really understand, that this isn’t just another fight. This isn’t just another policy campaign. Trump has put the structure of society’s institutions on the table. We have to remove Trumpism but the fact that society’s institutions are now in question is not itself to be undone. Rather, we need to give our own vastly better answers regarding what to do about our horribly flawed institutions. It is time to start and then to continue to clean house, yes, but from the bottom up, not from Trump down. Time for our long march through society’s institutions to begin. Resistance to things getting worse that has that long March in mind, resistance that is persistent but patient when need be, that is welcoming but seriously and steadfastly militant when need be, that is ready for the long haul, and that is truly all for one and one for all, will win. But less than that—less may surrender. And for us there must be no surrender.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.Donate
Michael Albert
Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.
Photo by Mark Dixon via wikimedia commons
At times like these—who am I kidding, when were there times like these?—one wants to stay in bed, bury one’s head, dream another dream. Or perhaps to privately twist and shout. Or what?
I am not going to report what Trump and his lackeys are doing, nor even the ramifications of what they are doing yet again. Such reports are abundant. More, the broader implications have begun to register. Events are no longer just academic factoids. Implications have become felt awareness. Our condition is serious. Our situation is spiraling. Trump and Co. are not fooling around. We are not dead yet, but we are getting there. So—now what? The time has come. We must make choices. We must turn the tide. Do we bow and scrape, do we ignore and act like nothing is happening, or do we stand and fight?
If we cling to the world we knew, that choice—and it is a choice—will not lead to a better world but to a much worse one. Bernie Sanders has been speaking to major audiences in Trump territory to report trends and implications that are not yet widely known there, and to emphasize that resignation is not an option. You can see him speak thusly on YouTube anytime. He says he gets the fear. He gets the depression. But he also says surrender in any form is not an option. Too much is at stake. And if Sanders can fight, you can, I can, we all can. We don’t have to bow and scrape. We must not ignore. To stand and fight is our choice to make. But what constitutes to bow and scrape? What constitutes to stand and fight?
Different strokes for different folks. There are countless answers. Here are just a few. On campus, suppose your university president chooses to bow and scrape. He strikes a pose—he blusters and flexes, but it is a profile in cowardice. Yes boss, he says, we will eliminate DEI. Yes boss, he says, we will prosecute any student you deem anti-semitic. Yes boss, he says, we will welcome your agents to take our students away. Yes boss, he says, we will disparage, ostracize, expel, and turn over for imprisonment any student who you deem terrorist, even any student who you simply deem annoying to you. Yes boss, I am a University President. I am master of my company. And yes boss, I am down on my knees. Don’t hurt me please. Is that your local president? If you need to hate something, hate that. There is no sugar coating outright collaboration with fascism. So suppose you are a student at this collaborator’s institution of higher learning. Perhaps you are at Columbia, for example. Or you are at a university that’s next door, say NYU, or at one that’s around the next bend perhaps in Illinois or Wisconsin, perhaps Northwestern—or maybe you are at one on the western border, Berkeley, once the epicenter of real free speech, and your university may clampdown next. What do you do? Or even if your school isn’t bowing and scraping, then in solidarity with fellow students at one that is, what do you do?
On the one hand, you feel a hyperbolically growing gut hostility toward collaborationist local bosses, local presidents. For Academia to bow and scrape nauseates you. You twist and shout in your dorm room and even outside when walking in the shade of ivy walls. And to feel angry is certainly a start. But you know, don’t you, that for fighting back it is only a smidgin better than to deem outrage unseemly. So you don’t choose to sleep late. You don’t put your head down and go off to class like last week, like last year, as if now is like then. But if you aren’t in denial and if you refuse to resign, how might you stand and fight?
You want to reach your fellow students and combine your sentiments into a collective action. At first, if others aren’t yet ready, you may have to act alone or maybe with a roommate or partner. So maybe you go to a class and stand and request, and even demand classroom attention to the crisis at hand. Maybe you put up a poster, hand out a notice. Initially you may take a solitary step. Not just in your mind, twisting and shouting, but in fact, standing and fighting, though by yourself or maybe with just a few others. You hope your choice will light a fire in some fellow students’ engines. You hope your example will grow. Perhaps you then go door to door, dorm to dorm, talking, talking. You get steadily more confident, and next you stand up in a dining hall. You call for quiet. You talk about an occupation, a march, a strike, an encampment, or whatever seems best suited to building momentum. You hope others relate right away but if they don’t you repeat your move, and then you do it again, and again, and soon you and others are organizing in classes and corridors. Meetings follow. Spring knocks at your door. Flowers bloom. This is when campus movements rise this time, one hopes, to persist. You know you want it to happen. So why not make it so. You are not alone in your anger. You are not unique in your desires. But some few have to go first, why not you?
Or suppose at your job your owners show their true colors. Some may moan about MAGA, others may welcome it, but virtually all say, okay Donald, we will extract more labor from whoever we don’t jettison. We will ignore the ramifications for those we fire and for those our business or our Department is supposed to serve. We will serve you, Donald, first and foremost. For some co-workers who bow and scrape obedience will arise from fear. They don’t want fascism but hey, they say, it is not their place to buck the trend. And at any rate, they really don’t want to risk repression. Understandable. Not really unreasonable. But not you. You don’t bow. You don’t scrape.
Suppose you work in some Department that Musk wishes to ravage or in some industry that ravages the planet. Now what? Fellow workers around you are increasingly angry but also scared. Fellow workers around you are still tip toeing. They don’t want to get fired. They don’t want to poke the Trumpian Toddlers up top. All of that is understandable. But you heed Bernie’s warning. You know to keep your head down will ensure total defeat. MAGA in the saddle. You ridden. Musk fires half of your department, perhaps the Education Department, to assault not just dismissed workers, but working America’s next generation. What now? To just say stop that Elon is better than to be silence. To ask courts to intervene is another good step. But those steps alone are not enough.
Trump and Co. are long marching through society’s institutions, first here, then there. Environmental protection. Screw it. Free health care. Forget about it. DEI, science, education. Slash, burn, and reconstitute to suit Orange-man rule. They encounter a judicial obstacle. No bigee. They just tell more lies. Or, if need be, they temporarily shift to another target preparing to come back again later for the earlier target, having meanwhile become a little stronger. Every time they win anything at all, or they can even just claim they won something, they gloat. They strut. They rush to continue. They are insatiable. Do we get that, now, finally? They mean to dominate and for us to bow and scrape will just feed their engine. They will keep coming. They can’t be stopped by saying okay boss, we have had enough. Not even by our twisting and shouting. They can only be stopped by unyielding disobedient non compliant resistance. And such resistance can’t just be to just get back to what we endured before MAGA. That intent will be too ambivalent, too lacking in real hope to inspire sufficient commitment to turn back the Trumpian tide. What we endured before was already incredibly uninspiring. It led to MAGA. So, our resistance has to plant seeds of something truly better. It has to evoke sustained support. It has to elicit effervescent energy for positive gains. It has to be so clearly positive that many Trump supporters begin to see that, hello, those gains are gains for us too. Trump is not my savior. Trump is a lying fascist nightmare.
In the campus example, when students get together to stand up to fight back, their effort will need to not only oppose MAGA and their local President’s cowardice, and the fears of all too many suddenly silent faculty, and of some students too, it will need to have a forward looking, positive component sufficient to inspire real desire, sufficient to nurture real community. So students who organize in dorms, dining halls, and corridors to march, occupy, and encamp will need to also say here is what we want. We don’t just reject fascism on campus. We don’t just protect reason, evidence, and science, immigrants, trans people, and Palestinians. No, we students hereafter also intend to become active and even paramount participants in determining campus curriculum, culture, pedagogy, work, and living conditions. This is our university, not Trump’s, and not his local stooge’s either.
Okay, what about workers in Musk-targeted departments, indeed workers in companies of any kind, from auto plants to warehouses, trucks to restaurants, and hospitals to hospices. Talk about what is happening. Talk about what needs to happen. Organize against bosses and for workers. And when Musk says you are fired, you say hell no I won’t go—and you don’t leave. You come back to work the next day. First maybe one or two disobey. But then there are a lot of you. The doors are locked so you can’t get in. Fine, you sit and block those doors. You seek support from other workers in your department, in other departments, and finally in other industries. You call your kids’ teachers, you call your hospital’s nurses, You call the UAW, you call the Teamsters too. You ask for pickets. You ask for solidarity. And later you will join them when they need it. The department you all shut down is DOGE. And finally you all start to ask, what do we actually want? Not just to not be fired. Not just to not have our efforts to help constituencies we serve blocked. But what positive changes do we want, in our circumstances, in our salaries, in our lives. Time for some dignity.
To stand and fight means to not comply. It means to disobey. It means to assert positive new desires. Maybe nurses make a first big step. Maybe packers and assemblers. Maybe public school teachers. Maybe dishwashers and drivers. Maybe students. In college, in high school, younger still. This is all hands on deck time. A few go first, then a few more, soon many.
Look around. Heads are already spinning, heads will soon turn. It has already begun. If resistance disobeys with open ears to hear from those not yet y board and open arms to welcome those not yet committed resistance can even recruit angry Trumpers. They too don’t want to be fired. They too want some real dignity. Their anger just needs a new focus. To stand and fight can recruit some Trumpers and end Trump. It can recruit some angry techies and end Musk. And it can go much further. And it has to. Because we have got to really register, to really feel, to really understand, that this isn’t just another fight. This isn’t just another policy campaign. Trump has put the structure of society’s institutions on the table. We have to remove Trumpism but the fact that society’s institutions are now in question is not itself to be undone. Rather, we need to give our own vastly better answers regarding what to do about our horribly flawed institutions. It is time to start and then to continue to clean house, yes, but from the bottom up, not from Trump down. Time for our long march through society’s institutions to begin. Resistance to things getting worse that has that long March in mind, resistance that is persistent but patient when need be, that is welcoming but seriously and steadfastly militant when need be, that is ready for the long haul, and that is truly all for one and one for all, will win. But less than that—less may surrender. And for us there must be no surrender.
ZNetwork is funded solely through the generosity of its readers.Donate
Michael Albert
Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfare for the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.
No comments:
Post a Comment