I’ll Meet You in The Streets
What a collective movement actually looks like
If we are to have an effective movement, we cannot sit and wait for Luigi to dictate what to do. He can’t be our charismatic leader. We need to do it ourselves. Anyway, as pointed out in Part 2, hierarchical structures breed abuse such as secrecy, elitism, passivity, and competition. We are not a cult. We are a collective of people inspired to actively make the change we want to see. Therefore the groups we create must be structured horizontally. That means trusting each other and enacting a culture of transparency and accountability. Through collective activism we can create solidarity within the movement and make decisions by consensus and sharing of knowledge. In turn, active participation can help us use our most valuable resources and create a movement that can have some real impact—including possibly swaying the public’s view, thus potential juror’s view, of Luigi.
What is a collective?
A collective is a non-hierarchical organization, usually with fewer than 20 members. Collectives generally make decisions using consensus or highly deliberative democracy, and many collectives emphasize skill-sharing and mutual support.
Collectives can take many different forms; key distinctions include:
Membership: Open/closed
Focus: identity-based/project-based/campaign-based
Duration: ongoing/for a particular moment/for a defined period
Other features of effective collectives
A sense of warmth, solidarity, and mutual support.
Explicitly articulated shared aims/goals as well as politics/values.
Agreed-upon practices for membership, decision-making, behavior, dealing with conflict or disagreement
A clear process for internal communication.
A shared sense of responsibility and mutual accountability, alongside enough support and redundancy so that when people need to pass on a responsibility they can do that without harming the work.
A shared understanding of the skills and capacities of the people involved and active work on building people’s skills and capacities further.
An understanding of functioning in relation with other organizations and broader movements.1
“We need movements that greatly expand our tactical toolbox, allowing all of us to help build disruptive and constructive power and capture popular imagination.”
Creative Militancy, Mutual Inspiration
You Say You Want a Revolution?
George Lakey, civil rights activist, tells the story of Otpor (“Resistance” in Serbian), a political organization in Yugoslavia (now Serbia) during the late 1990s that organized protest against president Slobodan Milošević.2 Otpor was a decentralized, grassroots movement made up mainly of younger Yugoslovians who stood for anti-authoritarian, pro-democratic principles. Because they opposed the authoritarian establishment, the media (controlled by the same establishment that they were protesting against) attempted to characterize Otpor as terrorists. In order to combat these injustices comitted against them (including police beatings), Lakey says protesters developed creative and unique strategies to invalidate the media and shed the terrorist label. This also united older people with the cause.
Lakey explains that Otpor viewed society as pillars supporting a dictator. In order to uproot president Milošević, they needed to topple those pillars. “Since the top power-holders depend on the compliance of those beneath them to stay on top, Otpur's strategy was to weaken the compliance and finally to break it.”3
Several comparisons can be made with Otpor and Free Luigi. Supporters of Luigi are typically characterized by the media (controlled by the 1%) in a misogynist narrative of vapid, lovesick groupies or fangirls, even though several polls taken in December demonstrated a fairly even split between male and female supporters. Additionally, we are up against a government that is rapidly becoming more and more authoritarian by the day. In fact, they recently rang a modern death knell for Luigi. It’s also known that support leans more toward a younger demographic, with 31% of people4 between the ages of 18 and 45 (Gen Z and Millennials) having a very positive to somewhat positive view of Luigi. Then there are our widespread anti-capitalist values.
While compared to the larger population, we may seem like a small number—don’t let this despair you. Change has been enacted by minority groups for literally centuries.
Otpor took a strategic route in fighting their oppressors. First, they identified the most crucial “pillars” supporting the authoritarian government, then they identified tactics to weaken that support. Two overarching strategies were used to get their message across:5
Creative public protests that mocked and systematically undermined the government, authorities, and Milošević himself.
A decentralized movement built from the bottom up.
Lakey gives this example of how Otpor engaged with police:
The young activists knew that fighting the police would strengthen their loyalty to Milošević (and also support the mass media claim that the young people were hoodlums and terrorists). So they trained themselves to make nonviolent responses to police violence during protests. One of the slogans they learned during their trainings was: “It only hurts if you're scared.” They took photos of their wounded. They enlarged the photos, put them on signs, and carried the signs in front of the houses of the police who hurt them. They talked to the cop's neighbors about it, took the signs to the schools of the police officers' children and talked with the children about it. After a year of this, police were plainly reluctant to beat Otpur activists even when ordered to do so, because they didn't want the negative reactions of their family, friends, neighbors.6
Note that I don’t advocate harassing cops’ families, friends, or neighbors. This is solely an example of the tactics used by Otpor.
Activists were also friendly with some police and reminded them that their own rights were being violated. This encouraged relationships with police that created allyship, resulting in police doing nothing when a full-fledged insurgency occurred.
Strategic Nonviolence
Otpor engaged in strategic nonviolence to achieve their goal. Here are some of the ways they achieved this:
MESSAGING
T-shirts
Zines
Widespread distribution of anti-Milošević materials
Use of the Internet to disseminate resistance messages and organize opposition (we did not have social media as we know it at the time)
INTERFERENCE
Blockades of highways or use of large crowds at economic and political activities
Sit-ins/occupations for key public buildings (e.g., government and media)
Public and private communication with security and church officials, media, union leaders, municipal politicians, and others to cultivate potential allies and create defections;
Street theater and humorous skits mocking Milošević performed throughout the country
Workshops and training sessions for activists, including distribution of training manuals
Large public rallies, marches, and demonstrations
Electoral politics – coalition-building and campaigning
Dean Spade points out that typically accepted ways of protest and showing our displeasure are usually nondisruptive and work within the system, such as voting, donating to causes, writing letters to or calling our lawmakers, talking on social media, and participating in protests/marches that have been legally sanctioned and do not interfere with other aspects of the public.7 While these acts are not necessarily bad in of themselves, if done alone without additional participation, these tactics are unlikely to significantly impact distribution of wealth and violence.
Rage Against the Machine participated in, and made a music video in front of the New York Stock Exchange, disrupting traffic and business. The director of the video, Michael Moore, was arrested for shooting without permits.8
Spade lists three kinds of work that resistance movements can engage in to effect positive change in communities9:
work to dismantle existing harmful systems and/or beat back their expansion;
eg, campaigns to stop the expansion of surveillance, policing, imprisonment, and deportation, to close precincts and prisons, to stop privatization of schools and utilities, to terminate gentrification, pipelines, fracking, mining, and more. This work includes such tactics as pipeline sabotage, direct actions at building sites, training people not to call the cops, divestment campaigns, blocking deportation buses, disrupting city council meetings, door knocking, and working to change state and municipal budgets to defund police and jails.
work to directly provide for people targeted by such systems and institutions;
eg, Prison visit and pen pal programs, rapid response systems for ICE raids, ride sharing, reentry resources, eviction defense, medical clinics, childcare collectives, food distribution, disaster response, and court support efforts.
work to build an alternative infrastructure through which people can get their needs met.
eg, work to create an alternative infrastructure based on leftist values of democracy, participation, care, and solidarity includes many of the prior activities, which establish community connections and put in place structures for meeting needs. It might also include things like creating food, energy, and waste systems that are sustainable and locally controlled, building methods of dealing with conflict and harm that do not involve the police or prisons, and building health, education, and childcare infrastructure controlled by the people who use it.
Mutual aid is another way to help others collectively in the community. This can include creating places where people can get their basic needs met as well as help attracting new people and discussing and analyzing issues within the movement. An example of mutual aid that already exists within the Free Luigi movement is his legal fund. This was a grassroots effort created and funded by supporters. Though his legal team seems to have taken over the fund for the most part, it remains a supporter-funded mutual aid effort, raising (at the time of this article’s publication) over $800,000. This is what we can accomplish with activism when it’s done right.10
We Gon Be Alright
Look, I know it’s hard to be positive during times like these. The American government is on a mission to destroy any public services or advancement toward a public healthcare system. Luigi acted as a bellweather for our current political unrest with a simple act of rebellion. Now he’s facing death, demonstrating that the state will go to any length to double, triple, quadruple down to keep us in line. However, we have each other. As long as we engage in horizontal group structures, promote equality and democracy, and practice strategic nonviolence within our movement, solidarity can remain a reality. And that solidarity includes Luigi himself. He is not a trophy. We must embrace Luigi for who he is, flaws and all. This is the only way to avoid idolization and understand he is a flesh and blood human being. It’s okay to not agree with some of the guy’s views or even criticize him for certain views. I certainly don’t 100% align with him. Only by realizing his humanity can we be better allies, avoid becoming a fandom, and fight against a system bent on keeping people in poverty, killing us through corporate-sanctioned means, training us from childhood to work to live, and imprisoning us when we fight back. Solidarity is everything.
Here I have made a resource drive full of information on protest and strategic nonviolence as related to the Free Luigi movement.
Ibid.
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