Durham: REPORT BACK FROM ANTIFASCISM ASSEMBLY

From Workers Assemble

This past Sunday, dozens of comrades came together to fill the Pinhook in Downtown Durham, ready to begin organizing the necessary resistance to President-Elect Trump and the sweeping wave of fascist/racist organization that won him the election. Neither his election or the present threat of fascism can go unchecked, and despite the cries of liberals across the country, this shift in power towards white nationalism cannot be permitted or cooperated with. The kernel of fascism has to be destroyed where ever it develops.

The assembly was an open space for comrades to come together, discuss the situation in front of us, assess the current needs and available resources in our communities, and to build networks of solidarity and mutual aid. The agenda for the afternoon was broken into four major areas:

• Building community self-defense and medical assistance infrastructures to protect ourselves.
• Building an immediate response network to deal with anticipated ICE raids and deportations.
• Popular community education as part of greater #antifa organizing.
• Antifa organizing in response to the march proposed by the Pelham Loyal White Knights of the KKK, happening on December 3rd.

We opened with an issue that is becoming more and more urgent: community and personal self-defense in the face of a reactionary regime. United Thai Kickboxing & MMA got things started by offering classes to everyone in the room for Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, two extraordinarily effective systems of martial arts for dealing with violence on the streets – Muay Thai is a striking art that focuses on elbow and knee techniques, and Jiu-jitsu is a grappling art used for ground-fighting. The room was then opened up for people to get on Stack, and either ask questions or raise issues: after street-violence from fascists like the stabbing of five comrades in Sacramento, one person specifically asked for weapon-defense workshops to disarm enemies with blades; others asked how to deal with verbal confrontations and harassment in public spaces; I was pleasantly surprised by the positive response to the suggestion of creating armed defense committees in the community and target-practice workshops, particularly to protect people of color who are especially subject to para-military violence from groups like White Lives Matter. It was mentioned that there is a free shooting gallery in Caswell County that has no slave-patrol presence, merely forty-five minutes away.

Moving on we tackled the need to develop independent medical systems, particularly as working-class communities face the threat of losing access to critical healthcare services and medicine. Those engaged in medical programs and who have access to resources put out the call to create stores and stock-piles of desperately needed medicine: clean needles for hormone therapies, as well the transition hormones themselves; epipens, insulin and asthma inhalers; Plan B, birth control, and oral abortion treatments; opioid-overdose medicines like NARCAN and Nalaxon, and workshops on their proper application, etc. One comrade mentioned that the UNC Shac Clinic provides free dental care services on a regular schedule (the next date being 11.30). Another made note of the Rape Crisis Centers in Chapel Hill and Durham,which offer resources to rape survivors like 24-hour emergency hotlines, x6 free therapy sessions, and local referrals to low-cost resources. Community street medics proposed a permanent network of volunteers who can run regular training-sessions; too often comrades take a single street-medic course and then run into the riot with far too much confidence in skills they haven’t perfected. Skills like pressure wrapping and tourniquet applications need constant re-enforcement. A local herbalist detailed plans to build an alternative ecology of medicine and medical knowledge based on our actual needs, rather than profits or irrational stockpiling.

Following a five minute break after moving through the first section of the agenda, we transitioned into a subject of immediate importance: the future of ICE oppression in immigrant communities, and how we are going to deal with it. Certain illusions were first dispelled: a delegate from Alerta Migratoria informed some of the liberals in the room that while Trump’s rhetoric is certainly more violent than that of neoliberalism, Obama has deported ~2.5M immigrants in the last eight years – more than every 20th-century US President combined. Those of us in Durham needed to figure out what new Anti-ICE Defense Committees should look like, and how we can build them. We need to be proactively building funds for these committees, and organizations like the Durham Solidarity Center have already begun the process of doings this with things like the Freedom Fighters Bond Fund.

We heard from teachers who were moved to organize after witnessing the trauma inflicted on their students through ICE raids and deportations; they specifically mentioned their experiences working with the case of Wilden Acosta, the Riverside High School student who was detained for nearly a year at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia, after fleeing the violence in Honduras created by Secretary Clinton’s military coup. Through an endless barrage of calls to Secretary Johnson at the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and Congressman G.K. Butterfield, they were able to secure Wilden’s release – on bond. He is still caught in the system. Wilden himself, accompanied by delegates from Alerta Migratoria, called for further assistance in securing the release of his friend, Santos Guzman, who was seized at the same time as Wilden. A call-in network is being established to apply the same pressure that freed Wilden. The number for Sec. Johnson at DHS is 202-282-8204, and the number for ICE is 202-732-3000; Santos’ Alien Number is #208268389.

The experiences of Wilden and Santos raised the issue of how we deal with explicit racism in our school systems, particularly the in-situ racism faced by students. Examples of student-led resistance groups like Assata’s Daughters, the UNControllables or Duke Students & Workers in Solidarity are showing us the way through in-school demonstrations, class walk-outs, and campus occupations. While a new wave of #SanctuarySchools has happened in the wake of Trump’s election, it was noted that ICE has no issues violating the safety of university campuses, and if we’re going to convert them into havens for refugees and immigrants, we are going to need to be able to directly confront and resist ICE in these spaces. However, it was likewise noted that ICE has an apparently reverence for the Church, and out-reach to local churches is being organized to build a network of sanctuaries.

This led to further discussion of how we can deal with our families being targeted by the slave-patrols in cooperation with ICE: 287G programs connect local slave-patrol departments with federal ICE departments, creating a “police-to-deportation” pipeline. North Carolina has no sanctuary cities that refuse to implement these kinds of programs, so any stop by the slave-patrols puts immigrants in immediate danger. Part of the response to deal with this has to be (a) creating cop-watch programs to monitor the slave-patrols at all times, as well as building profiles on their respective members for community distribution, and (b) setting up a network of emergency-response volunteers who can arrive at slave-patrol/ICE checkpoints with valid drivers’ licenses.

After another five minute break, we moved on to building popular channels of antifascist education. We were a bit pressed for time at this point (being ~2hrs into the assembly), but we covered the dire need to be spreading agitation-propaganda directly through our own streets, to begin dominating social media platforms that are being leveraged by reactionaries, and to champion radical/alternative media channels to our friends, families and neighbors. We suggest: ItsGoingDown, submedia.tv and the Stimulator, Unicorn Riot, Insurrection News, Scalawag Magazine, and NoMedia Monopoly. We also discussed the need to build organizations like Redneck Revolt, responsible for doing the serious work of elevating class consciousness within the white working-class neighborhoods that have been abandoned as “white trash” to the reactionary right.

To close out the night, we had to discuss plans to prepare an #antifa response to the KKK march on 12.03. As #WorkersAntifa, we had already begun organizing our counter-demo to shut down the march, and the response has been wonderful so far. For those who are just beginning to form chapters of local antifa in their communities, we offer our experience as example:

(1) Create a FB event, exclusively for circulation and sharing, with information about the counter-demonstration being planned and an email contact for further organization; do not organize antifa actions on Facebook, do them through end-to-end encrypted platforms like Bitmessage or through PGP email.
(2) Wheat-paste fliers throughout your community to make your presence known and to raise awareness about the action.
(3) Set up a listserv through collectives like RiseUp (if you do, be sure to donate at the very least $5) to quickly disseminate updates to everyone who signs up for the action.
(4) Determine who has street medic training, set up a Street Medics Committee, and supply yourselves with: sterilized water, Maalox, gauze, pressure wraps, tourniquets, medical tape, triangles, disinfectant, ibuprofen, etc.
(5) Reach out to legal organizations like the National Lawyers Guild, which can provide legal observers to monitor the slave-patrols during the action and provide legal support for anticipated arrests.
(6) Spend time watching footage from other antifa actions to get a legitimate sense of what these things look like.
(7) Set up a proactive donation fund for medical and legal resources; six comrades in the Red Guards Austin were arrested by the Austin Slave Patrol, one of whom had their neck broken. Be prepared.

These assemblies, working groups, and the connections that emerge from them are the cells of #theresistance and the new world emerging out of the collapse of capitalism. Foster their creation, participate in their organization, and fight back! Be sure to join us in Durham to shut down the Klan on 12.03, and for the next #GeneralAssembly of the #Durham27704 Commune on 12.04.