REST IN POWER

Gerry Gable

UK ANTI FASCIST FIGHTER/PUBLISHER

 

HubMP201

JANUARY 22, 2026

By Andy Bell

The death of Searchlight founder, publisher and sometimes editor Gerry Gable at 88 closes a chapter without which the story of British anti-fascism would look very different. For more than six decades he was a central, often controversial, but indispensable figure in the fight against fascism and the extreme right: an organiser, investigator and strategist who believed that understanding the enemy was the key to defeating it.

That belief found its clearest expression in Searchlight, the magazine to which he devoted much of his adult life. Under his stewardship, it became the most authoritative source of intelligence on Britain’s far right scene, remaining in print for half a century before moving fully online in 2025.

From the start, Gerry was driven by the belief that anti-fascism had to be intelligence-led.

That outlook was shaped early. In the early 1960s, as a young activist, Gerry confronted a far right that was openly neo-Nazi.

Street clashes with groups such as Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement were formative, but even more so was his involvement with the semi-clandestine 62 Group, a network of largely Jewish anti-fascist war veterans who brought military discipline and an acute understanding of intelligence work to the struggle against fascism.

These methods bore fruit repeatedly over the years. Intelligence gathered by Gerry and his collaborators helped disrupt violent plots, bring arsonists to justice and expose attempts to stockpile weapons. Informants and infiltrators – some motivated by conscience, others by more mercenary considerations – became a defining feature of Searchlight’s work.

Searchlight was launched by the leadership of the 62 group in 1964, as a short-lived tabloid newspaper. It appeared only four times.

Then, in the early 1970s, the electoral rise of the National Front led to a decision to re-establish it, this time as a magazine. It proved a hugely important decision.

As local anti-fascist groups sprang up, the magazine provided a trusted source of information and analysis about the far right. Its research fed directly into the Anti-Nazi League’s highly effective campaign to isolate and discredit the NF, helping to stem the advance of organised fascism at a critical moment.

Over the decades, that remained Gerry’s mission: to provide to the anti-fascist movement the intelligence and analysis it needed to make the fight against fascism effective.

It was a Searchlight ‘mole’, Ray Hill, who with Gerry managed to destroy two fascist organisations and thwart a plot to bomb the Notting Hill Carnival.

It was Searchlight ‘moles’ (three, no less!) who helped expose the activities and leadership of the proto-terrorist group Combat 18.

And it was a Searchlight mole, ‘Arthur’, who helped identify David Copeland as the London nail bomber.

Throughout, Gerry retained a deep faith in collective action, shaped by his background in the Communist Party, trade unionism and workplace organising. He believed unions were essential bulwarks against the far right, a conviction that remains embedded in Searchlight’s ethos.

His work came at a heavy personal cost. He faced threats, legal harassment and violent attacks, yet remained undeterred. The hostility shown by extremists after his death only underlines the impact he had. The far right in the UK has had markedly less success than its counterparts in Europe is establishing a foothold since the second world war and Gerry’s contribution to that was immeasurable.

Andy Bell was an investigative journalist with World in Action and former deputy editor of Panorama and a former editor of Searchlight. He is co-author with Ray Hill of The Other Face of Terror. He is on Twitter at @andybell2000.

Image: Anti National Front demonstration. Shoreditch Park 1979. https://www.flickr.com/photos/alandenney/2449021440 Author: Alan Denney. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Deed

Imagining the End of Capitalism

The choice is socialism or barbarism, and the latter has a head start.

By Walden Bello

January 24, 2026

Source: Foreign Policy In Focus

Ever since the 1990s, when to the longstanding cooptation of the Western working class by social democracy was added the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites, the saying has been popular among the chattering classes that “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” As McKenzie Wark has noted, there was this weird consensus among both its partisans and its critics that “Capital is eternal. It goes on forever, and everything is an expression of its essence.”

Lately, however, there have been attempts to meet the challenge of imagining the end of capitalism.

How Will Capitalism End?

One of the early efforts was the 2014 essay titled “How Will Capitalism End?” by Wolfgang Streeck, the eminent former director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Taking the bull by the horns, Streeck asserted, “I suggest we think about capitalism coming to an end without assuming responsibility for answering the question of what one proposes to put in its place. It is a Marxist—or better: modernist—prejudice that capitalism as a historical epoch will end only when a new, better society is in sight, and a revolutionary subject ready to implement it for the advancement of mankind.”

Streeck’s angle of approach to the question was quite original, one derived from his familiarity with the work of the great Hungarian sociologist Karl Polanyi. This was that capitalism had been so successful in commodifying everything—or converting not only land and labor but also formerly fenced off areas like knowledge, public infrastructure, and the environment into commodities for market exchange—that it was eliminating the very social, cultural, and political conditions needed for its reproduction. A central assertion was that the demands of profit-making had become so intense that capital was destroying the very basis of sustainable capital accumulation—labor—by pushing down living standards in the center economies while allowing only extremely low wages in the economies of the Global South to which it had fled.

Streeck was one of the first to advance the idea of a “polycrisis,” that is, that owing to capitalism’s ability to erode the traditional brakes put on its ability to transform everything into commodities, crises were breaking out along different dimensions of societal existence, and these crises had a negative synergy, enhancing the impact of one another and thus magnifying their collective impact. These interacting crises were producing what Streeck called the “five disorders”—economic stagnation, oligarchic distribution, the annexation of the public domain to private property, corruption, and global anarchy.

Delinking Accumulation from Social Reproduction

Richard Westra advances a similar argument in his book The Political Economy of Post-Capitalism. Capital accumulation can only take place if the profits extracted in the production process are devoted not only to capitalist consumption and investment but part of it is channeled into wages that enable those that produce surplus value to physically reproduce themselves. He agrees with Streeck that the social conditions for the reproduction of the labor force are disappearing at a global level, as capital flees to the poorer countries to avoid the high wages of workers in the advanced economies while paying the bare minimum to workers in the Global South.

But equally important, Westra asserts, is the fact that the industrial/manufacturing sector where the extraction of surplus value traditionally takes place has become, for all intents and purposes, a secondary part of the economy, one that is increasingly subordinate to the part of the economy that produces not commodities but “intangibles” like patents, databases, and design, where the cost of production is conventionally estimated at or near zero. More and more, profits are derived from the “intangible economy” compared to the tangible economy, and these are channeled not into the productive sector but into speculation, so that those who monopolize information technology that reproduce the intangible assets via patents and copyrights, such as Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, become exponentially richer, contributing to the creation of that steep inequality of income and wealth characteristic of our times.

The much-reduced role in capital accumulation of the traditional industrial/manufacturing sector and the dominant role of the monopolized intangibles sector that makes its profits mainly by controlling knowledge create what Westra has called “capitalists without capitalism,” though he himself expresses some doubt regarding the continuing utility of the term.

Burying Capitalism

For both Westra and Streeck, capitalism is undergoing a terminal crisis, but it is still alive. There are, however, theorists who argue that capitalism is dead, and it’s time for theory to catch up with reality.  For McKenzie Wark, in Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse?, capitalism has been replaced by a new mode of production marked by control of the “vector.” Information technology is that “vector,” one that cuts through all dimensions of economic and social life, and it is those who control this vector that have supplanted the capitalist class and constituted themselves as the new ruling class. The capital versus labor conflict that was the engine of change in capitalism has been replaced by the struggle between the “hackers” that produce knowledge and the “vectoralist class” that is able to exploit that knowledge through control of patents and command of the logistics of information acquisition and delivery.   According to Wark,

If the capitalist class owns the means of production, the vectoralist class owns the vectors of information. They own the extensive vectors of computation, which traverse space.  They own the extensive vectors of communication, which accelerate time. They own the copyrights, the patents, and the trademarks that capture attention or assign ownership to novel techniques. They own the logistic systems that manage and monitor the disposition and movement of any resource. They own the financial instruments that stand in for the value of every resource and that can be put on the market to crowdsource the possible value of every possible combination of those resources. They own the algorithms that rank and sort and assign particular information in particular circumstances.

Wark says that capitalists were displaced by the vectoralists in what was akin to a bloodless coup. Information technology from the 1970s to the 1990s became an ally of the capitalists in their battle against the powerful labor movement, but upon winning that fight, they themselves were displaced by the vectoralists. The key reason is that the vectoralists were fighting with assets that were different, and this gave them the advantage:

Owning the means of production, labor materialized into capital in the sense of plant and equipment, is a rigid and long-term investment. Owning and controlling the vector, the hack of new information materialized into patents, copyrights, brands, proprietary logistics. It is more abstract, flexible, adaptive.  It is not more rational, but it is more abstract.

The Coming of Technofeudalism

Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, broadly follows Wark’s line of analysis, and he credits Wark with having greatly influenced him and his new book Technofeudalism.

Like Wark, Varoufakis says we have embarked on a new mode of production. He does not say that capitalists no longer matter. They do, and they still engage in extracting surplus value or profit from workers in the process of production. But they themselves are subordinate to a new elite, the  “cloud capitalists” or “cloudalists,” who have privatized the commons that was cyberspace and now control access to it. The cloudalists, among the most powerful of which are Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and the chipmaker Nvidia, control the globe-spanning information highways that are sustained materially by massive data centers located in different parts of the world. Accessing these intermeshed networks in cyberspace known as the “cloud” is now vital for the traditional or “terrestrial” capitalists to get access to you to sell their products, and these corporate gatekeepers make their money by charging these capitalists rent. Without access to the net, capitalists cannot make profits, and, very much like the feudal lords of yore who controlled land, the cloudalists’ monopolistic control of the cloud allows them to directly or indirectly collect, from the “vassal capitalists” and anyone who uses the net, “rent,” or income that is not subject to the market competition on which profit depends. It is this reliance of most of the cloudalists on income and wealth derived from charging rent to everyone, not from traditional accumulation of value in the production process, that prompts Varoufakis to give the current mode of production the name “technofeudalism.”

As in “terrestrial capitalism,” it is not the cloudalists that produce value. The real sources of value are what Varoufakis calls the “cloud proles” and the “cloud serfs.” The cloud proles are the service workers at Amazon and other Big Tech facilities who are ununionized, paid meager wages, and in constant threat of being displaced by robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI). But these proles’ labor provides only a fraction of the value extracted by the cloudalists. It is the cloud serfs that create most of that value. Following Wark and Shoshana Zuboff, author of the influential The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Varoufakis says the cloud serfs are most of us: we provide raw material for the cloud whenever we do a Google search, post a photo on Facebook, or order a book on Amazon, material that is then processed into information that the cloudalists and terrestrial capitalists can use to develop ever more sophisticated marketing strategies to get us to part with our dollars. The distinguishing characteristic of cloud serfs is they are doing unpaid work for the cloudalists even if they don’t realize it. As he remarks, “The fact that we do so voluntarily, happily even, does not detract from the fact that we are unpaid manufacturers—cloud serfs whose daily self-directed toil enriches a tiny band of multibillionaires.”

What is noticeably missing in Varoufakis’s exploited classes are the central producers of value in Wark’s paradigm, the hackers, a category that includes programmers, content providers, and data and logistics managers that produce the wealth of top dogs like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg. It may be that Varoufakis has not yet decided where to theoretically locate them—whether with the proles and serfs or against them—owing to their ambivalent, volatile politics.

Whether they see the current mode of production as “terminal capitalism” or post-capitalism, all these authors see it as having brought humanity to a situation worse than that under conventional capitalism. For Westra, what makes the current arrangement distinctive in relation to other modes of production, including capitalism, is that for a mode of exploitation to be sustainable, it is necessary for it to provide the means by which the work force that creates the wealth of the ruling class can physically reproduce itself. That link has been broken in the post-capitalist era, with the ruling class preferring to channel its resources to speculative ventures rather than the provision of a living wage, condemning the workforce into deeper and deeper indebtedness in order to survive. “Even authoritarian regimes need to reproduce the material lives of human beings, as a byproduct of their social goal or project,” he notes. Invoking Rosa Luxemburg’s famous saying, he warns that “barbarism and social decomposition is a more real prospect if new socialist forms are not forthcoming.”

AI: From Promise to Threat

In the flush of the advent of information technology in the 1990s, there were those who saw the potential of that technology to bring about that transition from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom, from prehistory to history, to use the famous words of Marx and Engels. According to Paul Mason, in a piece of writing known as “The Fragment on the Machine” that was part of the voluminous Grundrisse, Marx foresaw a time when, owing to the accelerated development of the forces of production, the main objective of humanity would be the attainment of “freedom from work.” At the dawn of communism, Mason theorized, “liberation would come through leisure time,” or as Marx put it, it would be possible for one “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd, or critic.”

What kept people away from such a society of abundance based on technologies that allegedly reduced the marginal cost of production to zero or near zero was the control of these technologies by the information monopolies, assisted by government and the big banks.

Two decades on, such a rosy view of the potential of information technology to serve as the bridge to communism if only we could end the iron constraints of the “social relations of production” on the “forces of production” has withered. With the coming of AI, such liberation seems further away than ever, since the way information technology develops is determined by the interests of those that control it. Technological development is not class-neutral.

In her powerful expose of Sam Altman and Open AI, Karen Hao provides in Empire of AI a stark warning about the destabilizing impacts of the development of “centralized AI.” There is, of course, the threat of the creation of a “superintelligence” that can go its own way, eluding human control and subverting humanity itself, a fear promoted by sci-fi literature that is shared by key figures in the AI industry. But AI poses more immediate threats. The so-called zero-cost of-production intangible economy is not independent of the tangible economy. It does not float on thin air. Indeed, it entails massive ecological and human costs. Like capitalism and earlier modes of production, it is extractivist in nature, necessitating the accelerated mining of lithium, rare earth, and other minerals, and voracious in its demand for land and water to maintain data centers whose energy consumption contributes to global warming.

There is also the massive human effort needed to check, censor, and annotate data gathered by AI, which is leading the AI giants like Open AI, Google, and Microsoft to hire and exploit hundreds of thousands of workers in developing countries such as Kenya, Venezuela, and the Philippines, workers who are grossly underpaid and are prevented from unionizing owing to the threat of the AI giants to leave and recruit their workers elsewhere in the world.

If one adds to the drive for monopoly profits and the absence of regulation the desire of states to use AI for intensive surveillance of citizens, you end up with a Brave New World, even before the arrival of the superintelligence that will displace us at the top of the food chain and have us for dessert.

Barbarism…or Barbarism?

It is true that Hao speaks, with  guarded optimism, about an alternative path of AI that is based on community control, much like Varoufakis and Wark envision the emergence of cross-class alliances of cloud serfs, cloud proles, hackers, and terrestrial capitalists resisting the information elites and posing the possibility of liberation. Still Westra’s fear of a ruling class that has delinked its interests from that of the survival of the whole society must not be discounted and might, in fact, be more likely. A portrait of such a descent into barbarism instead of leap into communism is provided by a remarkable article by Naomi Klein that appeared in the Guardian:

The startup country contingent is clearly foreseeing a future marked by shocks, scarcity and collapse. Their high-tech private domains are essentially fortressed escape pods, designed for the select few to take advantage of every possible luxury and opportunity for human optimization, giving them and their children an edge in an increasingly barbarous future. To put it bluntly, the most powerful people in the world are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frenetically accelerating.

Indeed, some of our techno elites are preparing to literally leave the earth. As Klein notes, “Who needs a functioning nation state when outer space—now reportedly Musk’s singular obsession—beckons? For Musk, Mars has become a secular ark, which he claims is key to the survival of human civilization, perhaps via uploaded consciousnesses to an artificial general intelligence.”

Thanks to the writers we have surveyed, it is now easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of the world. But whether we regard the system that imprisons us as terminal capitalist, post-capitalist, or techno-feudal, we are more than ever faced with Rosa Luxemburg’s choice of socialism or barbarism. Unfortunately, barbarism, as Klein, Westra, and others warn us, appears to have had a headstart.Email

Walden Bello

Walden Bello is currently the International Adjunct Professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton and Co-Chairperson of the Bangkok-based research and advocacy institute Focus on the Global South. He is the author or co-author of 25 books, including Counterrevolution: The Global Rise of the Far Right (Nova Scotia: Fernwood, 2019), Paper Dragons: China and the Next Crash (London: Bloomsbury/Zed, 2019), Food Wars (London: Verso, 2009) and Capitalism’s Last Stand? (London: Zed, 2013)

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How to Defeat MAGA Tyranny: An Introduction to Social Strikes

By Jeremy Brecher

January 23, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

As authoritarian politics harden in the United States, familiar channels of resistance are proving dangerously inadequate. Elections are constrained, courts are under siege, and dissent is increasingly met with repression in the streets. In this moment, questions of power — who has it, how it is exercised, and how it can be withdrawn — are no longer abstract. They are immediate and practical.

Labor historian and longtime organizer Jeremy Brecher has spent decades grappling with these questions, and in a recent series of reports, culminating in “Social Strikes: Can General Strikes, Mass Strikes, and People Power Uprisings Provide a Last Defense Against MAGA Tyranny?,” he argues that large-scale noncooperation may be one of the few strategies capable of halting an authoritarian slide.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: How People Power Has Defeated Authoritarian Regimes Around the World
– South Korea: “Our citizens, armed with nothing but conviction . . .”
– Serbia: Otpor
– Philippines: People power
– Puerto Rico: Rickyleaks

Chapter 2: Social Strikes in American History
– Social Strikes, Mass Strikes, and General Strikes
– General “Strikes”
“Imagine the Power of Working People…”

Chapter 3: Social Strikes vs. MAGA Tyranny

Chapter 4: Laying the Groundwork for Social Strikes

Chapter 5: Timelines

Chapter 6: Organization

Chapter 7: Goals

Chapter 8: Tactics

Chapter 9: Endgames

Conclusion: “The power is in our solidarity”

Read or download the full report PDF here.

CREDITS:

Author:
Jeremy Brecher is a co-founder and senior strategic advisor for the Labor Network for Sustainability. He is the author of more than fifteen books on labor and social movements, including Strike! Common Preservation in a Time of Mutual Destruction, and The Green New Deal from Below.

Video production & narration:
Dominick Conidi is a recent graduate from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is a contributor at ZNetwork.org. He has organized previously with the Sunrise Movement and is a current member of North Jersey DSA.

Publishers:
The mission of the Labor Network for Sustainability is to be a relentless force for urgent, science-based climate action by building a powerful labor-climate movement to secure an ecologically sustainable and economically just future where everyone can make a living on a living planet.

ZNetwork.org is an independent media platform dedicated to advancing vision and strategy for a better world. Since 1977, we’ve produced a series of projects that go beyond critique to explore and organize alternatives, including: ZMagazine, Z Media Institute, ZNetwork.org, & the AllofUSDirectory.org.Email

Jeremy Brecher

Jeremy Brecher is a historian, author, and co-founder of the Labor Network for Sustainability. He has been active in peace, labor, environmental, and other social movements for more than half a century. Brecher is the author of more than a dozen books on labor and social movements, including Strike! and Global Village or Global Pillage and the winner of five regional Emmy awards for his documentary movie work.

Occupy Minneapolis

Cinnamon Janzer

 January 23, 2026

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Image by P C.

After growing up in Mandan, North Dakota—a small town named after the Native Americans violently displaced to form it—moving to Minneapolis for college was the most exciting event of my life.

I fell hard for this place—for its thriving local art and music scenes; for all of its lakes encircled by parklands that keep the mansions that would otherwise privatize them at bay; for its Prince-ly history and the solidarity that stems from slogging through yet another frigid winter together; for its Midwestern common sense sensibility, the Thai food I tried for the first time, and the sense of community that perseveres despite a larger capitalist socio-economic system designed to obliterate it.

Young and naïve, surely, I assumed, this was just the beginning. If I found all this awesomeness in the first in which city I’d ever lived, bigger and better cities would certainly have even more to behold. So, upon graduating with debt and a degree, I moved to New York City in early 2011.

That fall, news began trickling out of an occupation of a small park in the Financial District. Frequently ruminating on how I’d ever pay off my student loans amid an unpaid internship and a nannying gig, Occupy Wall Street’s discourse on income and wealth inequality intrigued me to say the least.

Always a chronicler, I took the subway to Zuccotti Park to see what I could see—and what I saw was people thinking critically and creatively about the neoliberal problems facing us while taking sustained and disruptive action to claw their power back amid the astute observation that no one is coming to save us but ourselves.

Sustained and disruptive action—exactly what’s missing from the nation-wide response to the state-sponsored horror Minneapolis has yet again sustained mere blocks from where George Floyd was slain, the state-sponsored horror that has become this county’s status quo.

To be clear in this post-truth, social media driven world defined by black and white thinking, nothing is all or nothing. It’s not that there aren’t any benefits to scheduled rallies like the ones that have been taking place in Minneapolis and beyond since Good’s murder in broad daylight. When your community is brutalized, coming together is the only way through.

But coming together for a few hours on a weekend afternoon before going back to the regularly scheduled programming of our lives—the ceaseless cycle of working and consuming in which capitalism has incarcerated us by way of having commodified the natural sustenances that are the birthright of life, human and otherwise—does nothing to disrupt the problem that is the status quo.

Stopping, however, does.

Stopping throws an intractable wrench in the gears of a system that turns on churn.

Remember what happened in those early weeks of the pandemic? Those sad and scary and confusing times that kept us inside and away from our daily lives and the reproduction of our oppression that modern living inherently accomplishes? The system and all that is too big to fail was brought to its knees in a matter of weeks. The natural world flourished in our absence and the government suddenly had the ability to immediately offer its people multiple forms of aid.

All because we simply stopped.

I’m not saying that setting up an encampment at 34^th and Portland will immediately solve the problem because it won’t. What I am saying, though, is that disruption is necessary, that there’s poetry in place, and that the general strike planned for Friday the 23^rd holds so much potential to be the beginning of something truly transformative.

“It will be an asterisk in the history books, if it gets a mention at all,” wrote the New York Times’ then-financial columnist, Andrew Ross Sorkin, of the Occupy movement. What Sorkin doesn’t understand is what Rebecca Solnit has so eloquently described, which is that radical change is slow and meandering rather than immediate and obvious.

In 2022, amid the Biden administration’s exploration of debt cancellation—long after I had, inspired in large part by what I saw at Occupy, attended a graduate program where my research focused on systems-level social change—I was commissioned by YES! Magazine to write a piece that explored the debt cancellation movement and the solutions powering it. What I found through interviews and research was that the debt cancellation movement was birthed by Occupy.

“The endgame here is to put potential power, the potential collective leverage of debt, into the hands of debtors to actually change the systems that indebted us in the first place,” Hannah Appel—an economic anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who participated in Occupy and went on to start a nationwide debt resistance movement called Strike Debt—told me for the story.

I argue that it is this kind of systems-level thinking—about power, collective leverage, and the systems that put and keep us in this predicament in the first place—taking place in the place where Good lost her life would be one way, one important way, to make the most of the tragedy of Good’s death. Because Good—like Floyd and Taylor and Garner and Peltier and too many to name here—was sacrificed at the altar of unchecked power.

But what power remains if we, en masse, refuse to further participate in the system in which it travels? What if the 23^rd was just the beginning?

I thought a lot in my University of Minnesota days characterized by tuition hikes that continue to this day about what would happen if its more than 50,000 Twin Cities students simply stopped paying tuition. How would the university pay its president’s handsome salary and cover the costs of its coveted research institutions without our debt? Individually students don’t have any power, but collectively we had (and U of M students still have) the power to bring the institution to its knees.

Today, a hair under 10 years after I moved back to the city that marveled me once I realized with the wisdom of time that the specialness I thought I’d find everywhere was actually unique to this slice of Dakota land, I wonder what would happen if—and here I’m talking chiefly about those of us who have benefitted enough from this system in order to make sacrifices and take risks—the 23^rd was just the beginning?

What if we didn’t go back to work on Monday? What if we stopped paying our rent and mortgages? If we stopped consuming and shared what we have among each other instead? What if we refused to pay taxes to a government that is terrorizing us? What if an encampment at 34^th and Portland stood as a symbol of, and a hub for, our absolute refusal to continue to participate in the systems that oppress us? What if, in this way, we honored Good’s poetry with poetry in place?

What if that’s how we came together? What if we made this time the time from which we can’t—we won’t—go back to the status quo? What if this time is the time that we finally decide enough is enough—that we won’t allow murderers to gas our kids as they leave school? That we simply will not participate anymore? That Friday can only be a beginning, not an end in and of itself?

I argue that Minneapolis, still home to the thick sense of community that made me fall in love with it in the first place, was made for this moment.

Despite the media industry and the country at large having had the audacity to dub everything that lies between Silicon Valley and the original colonies as “flyover country”—a hapless, barren land where nothing of significance takes place—nothing could be further from the truth. Minneapolis and the Midwest more broadly exist on long-occupied land that’s been home to a resistance of the injustices of the United States for practically as long as the country has existed.

The Lakota and their battle for He Sapa (otherwise known as so-called South Dakota’s Black Hills) started in the 1800s and continues to this day. Some 50 miles from where I grew up, the protests that rang out from the Standing Rock reservation and the encampments erected there were heard around the world. Minneapolis birthed the American Indian Movement that advocated for Indigenous self-determination and against police brutality back in the ‘70s and remains home to George Floyd Square. Land, and the occupation of it, is, and always has been, central to resistance.

For a yet-to-be-published piece, Nick Tilsen—a member of the Oglala Lakota Nation and a Grist 50 Fixer, Ashoka Fellow, multi–time Bush Fellow, Rockefeller Fellow, and founder and CEO of NDN Collective who is currently facing up to 26 years in prison because of trumped up charges via a trial set to start on the day that could be the day we refuse to return to what was before—told me this of the Standing Rock protests in which he participated in 2016: Despite NoDAPL being largely understood as an environmental issue, “the fight at Standing Rock was about Indigenous liberation. It was about human rights. It was about so much more because the Dakota Access Pipeline was just the latest colonizer in the long line of colonizers.”

ICE is just the latest oppressor in a long line of oppressors. Good is just the latest casualty in a long line of casualties we’ve suffered at the hands of the rouge state that is the United States. The injustice of her murder isn’t about ICE or Trump, it’s about the right to a truly free life that is the birthright of all life. It’s about our liberation from the oppression we’re forced to not only endure but propagate by way of merely living our lives in this system day in and day out.

That’s what needs to stop.

That’s why it’s time to occupy Minneapolis.

It’s time for us to address the systemic levels of power and oppression facing us and to understand that no one—no person, no institution, no politician, no government—is coming to save us and, therefore, that it’s up to us to save ourselves. As daunting as that may be, the first step towards our collective liberation is small and simple—it’s just stopping. Because the one thing we have that they don’t have, and can never have, is numbers.

We are the 99 percent.

Cinnamon Janzer is a Minneapolis-based freelance journalist dedicated to covering lesser-told stories across Middle America.