Things are getting even worse on just about every front. People are afraid but we are also getting angrier and angrier. The collapse of the center/left raises the stakes. It was inevitable. Who knows what will provoke the next upsurge? I can promise you it won't be Jimmy Kimmel.

Leadership, in the sense of setting a militant example, will have to come from mass struggle, & it cannot be conjured out of nowhere. We are still following the path set by LA in June. Let a thousand community defense centers & neighborhood assemblies bloom.

This leaves their constituencies, middle class, white collar, civil workers, in a panic. For better or worse this progression is ripe for Zohran & DSA electoralism more broadly. Meanwhile, the grassroots left has been in many places building anti-ICE defense in the shadows.

The center/left cannot & will not now substantially organize as left movements do because they blame the left for what's happening to them, while having severed solidarity between themselves & the people by attacking those movements and failing to have anything credible to offer.

I first thought about this in these terms reading Delany's Dhalgren a decade or so ago. Then reading New Narrative works. I've been having the same thought again reading Dostyevsky's Demons aloud gradually with my partner, and now listening to Kushner's The Mars Room.

Remember that before Bruce Lee said "Be Water," a tactical lesson current era movements have tried to follow since Hong Kong, it was Sun Tzu in The Art of War.

The reality is that the fascists are deepening an armed struggle against the most vulnerable among us. Even if it may not be advised to respond with armed force, community self-defense in the face of a militarized oppressor can perhaps benefit from notions of military strategy.

The quote is from the pamphlet "Categories of Revolutionary Military Policy," which I actually discovered I have had a zine of from who knows when. tderbent.org/articles/Cat...