Portland, OR: Building Trust and Affinity Through Action

With Trump in office, it’s more important than ever that we organize ourselves and remember the lessons we’ve learned from the Spanish anarchists when they faced a fascist ruler. It’s hard to make meaningful connections when we live in such a paranoid society focused on security culture. Rather than seeking to build critical masses, we should be focusing on building trust in small affinity groups of 3-6 people. Organizing smaller disconnected groups makes it much harder to be infiltrated and keeps the police always three steps behind.

It’s a little too late for armchair anarchism and coffee shop theorizing.  Many of us are already taking to the streets for demos, yet we’re still wondering what more we can do in our daily lives. Here in Portland, a small group of likeminded individuals have started taking more clandestine actions to fight back.

What started as weekly wheatpasting sessions has expanded to include multiple fun hellraising hobbies. Several weeks back, we spray painted a dozen cop cars parked in an overflow lot. We’ve glued coin slots on parking meters shut, and altered many signs around town, plus some other things we’ll keep to ourselves. Our actions are small but they further build that trust, leading us to take more risks and think bigger.

We’re not gonna cause the revolution tomorrow because we jammed a couple meters. What we are doing is fostering a deep sense of solidarity. We’re making ourselves feel better in bleak times while sticking it to the man, and we’re having fun. As May Day approaches, this solidarity and trust will allow us to aggressively attack the State in a way we wouldn’t be willing to without comrades by our sides. Anyone can do this, and we encourage you to build your own affinity groups in your neighborhood or town and keep up the pressure and wear down the State and police.

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