Community is Resistance

We expect big, fast answers. But the way to our goal is small and slow. And that is done through community.

This piece was informed by multiple discussions with Farrah Fazal, Sumaya Abubaker, Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, and many more.

There is an assumption in many people’s minds about what constitutes resistance against fascism and oppression. For many, the answer is larger, louder, more public: marches, social media, big names, big causes.

For many reasons, this is flawed thinking. But in the context of fascism, it is also dangerous thinking.

The fascists will act quickly to destroy dissent. They will target movements and leaders. They will use violence without hesitation. They will jail people. And going big makes it easier for them to do all this.

There is also another assumption: that change can and must happen quickly. We must have massive marches the day of the election to stave it off immediately, for example.

This too is flawed. The fascists have beaten us because they’ve spent time building their base, building infrastructure, and building connections between their various factions. And now they have power over every branch of government, along with the richest people of the world. Fast is not the answer. Fast will be loud, and it will tire us out. And it will not build the infrastructure we need for the times we are about to face.

Big and fast may work in some contexts, but ultimately a truly fascist government will always be bigger and always be faster. And it will aim to scare us, turn us against each other, and force us to choose our own safety and wellbeing over our democratic cause.

The way to address that is by flipping the idea on its head: instead of big and fast, we need to go small and slow. Instead of centralization of our own power, splitting up our power into many places will allow us to adapt and not lose an entire movement if one part of it is targeted.

And the best way to do that is through community.

Challenging big power through decentralized resistance is not an easy task, even if it is more effective. And since so many Americans are not adept at community, it will take practice. But it is the way we get to where we want to go.

But it is important to understand why community matters so much. Because community in this context doesn’t just mean to get together. And it doesn’t just mean resisting together. Here is what it is and why it matters.

1. Resistance requires others

This may seem obvious, but it isn’t. In an individualist, patriarchal society, we still hold onto mythic ideas of a single heroic individual changing the world all on their own. This, ironically, is an authoritarian worldview.

One of the main tools fascists use is to isolate us from each other. As Hannah Arendt says,

Terror can rule absolutely only over men who are isolated against each other… Therefore, one of the primary concerns of all tyrannical government is to bring this isolation about. Isolation may be the beginning of terror; it certainly is its most fertile ground; it always is its result. This isolation is, as it were, pretotalitarian; its hallmark is impotence insofar as power always comes from men acting together… isolated men are powerless by definition.

Loneliness means we don’t have the very strength we need to stand up to tyranny. That is exactly why fascists want us to be disconnected from each other, and why they will work very hard to do exactly this.

We simply can’t do this alone. And we can’t depend on another heroic figure to do it for us. Both forms are learned powerlessness.

It can only happen with a web of interconnected individuals working as collectives to achieve our true goal: a pluralistic democracy in which all life is treated as sacred.

2. Resistance requires trust

In the context of fascism, the state will work hard to turn people and groups against each other. It has already succeeded in doing this; groups are increasingly fractious. That is a big reason we are here.

The way to trust is to stop thinking purely in operational and transactional terms. We must get together with people and build true connection that goes beyond an identity of fighting or nonprofit work. Doing so allows us to appreciate each other for more than a cause. As people of inherent worth, who we can’t be divided from.

It will also allow us to work on highly sensitive, sometimes secretive work together. If an action can put you in danger, you need to work with people who you’d trust with your life. That only happens when you connect for more reasons than a cause.

3. Resistance requires diversity and cohesion

We can’t achieve democracy by fighting for only one group or cause. This is a shared struggle, and we all need to be in this together.

When our main relationship to others is through the public sphere, we don’t build connection to other groups, because the relationships are shallow even if they are larger. To survive fascism, we have to build strong, deep, true relationships with other groups so that we coordinate our fights while also remembering not to leave any cause or people behind.

The method to do that is through sustained, genuine connection. In other words, community.

4. Resistance requires sacrifice

While we all care about larger causes and about others, there will come moments where standing up to fascism requires bravery and commitment. That rarely happens alone.

Alone, it’s easier to justify only caring for yourself and your loved ones. Or only fighting for your tribal group, which inevitably leads to conflict, division, and a failure at resistance.

When we start to see others as part of our tribe, or even our family, we build the inner reserves to fight for them. To see our own safety as a secondary concern to the group’s safety.

5. Resistance requires joy

You cannot fight without knowing what you are fighting for. You cannot fight for democracy specifically without understanding that you are fighting to end the need for fighting. Joy does that for us.

But more importantly, we just inherently need to feel joy in order to see that there is more to life than all this. And fascism will try to squash it out of us. Joy is what reminds us life is worth living in the first place. And without that, what is even the point of all this?

Being lonely makes joy very difficult. Being lonely during fascism makes it impossible. Private, meaningful community gives you the ability to feel joy sustainably and heightened by others.

6. Resistance requires endurance

The power we are facing is enormous. It has the entire military industrial complex at its disposal. It has popular support. It has every branch of government.

That doesn’t end quickly, and anyone trying to sell you on a quick solution is doing you a disservice. No one march will end this. It will take time.

On top of that, fascists use exhaustion and cynicism to win. That’s how they won the election, and it will be how they work to maintain power. I’m sure if you’ve been paying attention since 2016, it’s likely you are deeply exhausted. We are all feeling it.

Community gives us a web of support to overcome that. One that we need in any case, but one we will need more than ever in our work. Support will allow us to be patient. It will give us a place to rest when we need to. It will give others the ability to take over for you when needed. It’s essential.

7. Resistance requires belief

What we are about to do will feel impossible. Simply talking about it can feel like we’re saying something ridiculous. Us? Transforming a broken world that has embraced fascism, oligarchy, and militarism?

It seems foolhardy. Or at least naïve. And, in honesty, many activists actually do feel like this, which is why they often fall into performative forms of protest instead of effective ones.

But you can see how that creates its own self-fulfilling reality. They think they will be ineffective so they act in ways that aren’t effective.

To achieve pluralistic democracy we actually need to believe it is possible to achieve. And to do that, we need others. It can feel crazy making to think these big ideas by ourselves. But to experience them with others makes it more tangible while also giving you an always available group of others who share your belief in the possible, thus who will make you more effective.

8. Resistance requires depth, not just breadth

The words fight and resistance don’t actually do justice to what we are all trying to do. Because a force that is for democracy as opposed to simply against the existing order requires far more transformational change than just a fight. It requires a change in perception, thought, imagination. And, ultimately, changing so epically big requires even bigger change.

This kind of change can’t just happen through a viral social media campaign. And it can’t happen alone.

We can only achieve deeper change when we have deeper relationships and deeper thought partners. And deep relationships doesn’t happen only one on one. It happens in community.

9. Resistance requires the means in the ends

No shortage of discussions about revolution and resistance reference how easily they themselves can devolve into authoritarianism. This is true only because how we do our work will end up defining what it will create in the world. The means are the ends.

To build a multi-racial, multi-ethnic pluralistic democracy that uplifts all classes, we need to create that in the small in order to spread it to the big. This is particularly true because the power of democracy is to distribute power. Expecting large, hierarchical nonprofits to achieve distributed power is like expecting a hammer to make a flower.

Investing in community is both modeling democracy as well as seeding democracy. Each community becomes its own lived version of it, leading us directly to the world we are making. And when democracy comes, they will literally be the base of its actual operations.

If you are interested in communal resistance, contact me with any relevant info and I or someone else will be in touch with you at some point in the future.