The key element here was the direction of accountability. The Democratic Party’s dominance in progressive politics and the broad weakness of independent grassroots organizing in many communities means that movements are more often than not dependent on, and subordinate to, elected officials.

In this instance, however, Casar is accountable to movements. He took orders from democratically chosen leaders within One Resistance, taking up little space in the effort. He was a major spokesperson for the group in the end, but this was because the group democratically chose him to be so.

This was not a reflection of any sort of individual moral or political superiority, but the work of sustained organizing over many years that has built powerful, independent, progressive political organizations that can expect their allied elected officials to fall in line with them and serve their interests, not the other way around.

It’s here that we can see a primary task for those asking “what should we do?” The answer is to build institutions capable of securing real power outside of ruling class structures such as the Democrats. Winning elections should not be their primary task, but rather building a base that can support resistance against these structures and their corporate constituency.

Winning elections may be an important tactic later on, but only so that the institutions can leverage official power and political prominence for the sake of the popular movements to which they are accountable.

Among the institutions most responsible for One Resistance’s success were unions and the labor movement. One Resistance meetings were held at the state AFL-CIO headquarters. The social and visual media developed for the campaign were designed by an AFL-CIO employee. Thousands of fliers were produced by unions and union printers. Young labor activists made up a disproportionate share of the group’s volunteer leadership.

Labor-supported nonprofits and political fronts such as Fight for 15, the Workers Defense Project and United Students Against Sweatshops along with political groups with working class priorities such as the Austin Socialist Collective and Democratic Socialists of America were also indispensable to other Inauguration Day protests.

These included student walkouts at the University of Texas and several area high schools, and a strike by fast food workers organized by Fight for 15.

When it comes to institution building, rebuilding the labor movement and empowering workers has to be a top priority. Results don’t lie — working class organizations have a base independent of the major parties and they can move numbers and build leaders capable of truly threatening power.

Now, the problems of the labor movement are well-known. It’s nearly dead in this country. Fewer than 10 percent of U.S. workers are in unions, and in the private sector that number gets closer to five percent. So-called “right-to-work” laws have killed the movement in its former industrial Midwestern heartland.

There are widespread fears in the movement that the Trump Administration and GOP Congress will enact a national right-to-work law, which would strike an insurmountable blow against unions as we know them.

But all of these factors are adding up to a shift in organizing philosophies being carried by a younger generation of labor leaders with very different politics and perspectives than their elders espoused. The younger labor leaders came up in these lean years for the movement, and so they are both unwed to the business-friendly values of their elders and open to organizing models besides collective bargaining.

Raised after the Cold War, they have not been subject to culture-wide anti-communist hysteria and so they know that their movement began not with fights for contracts, but mass direct action that forced employers to bend to workers’ will. They also know that in the era when the labor movement made some of its most significant strides, the state was no friendlier than Trump will be.

I would hate to characterize all the labor folks leading One Resistance as some sort of left-wing labor militancy renaissance — the truth is that these organizers are probably still a minority of their movement, even among young people. But they are significant, and empowering these elements and a resurgent workers movement is key for being able to resist Trump.

It’s also important to recognize the diversity of One Resistance’s leadership, and the key role played by immigrant rights and civil rights groups directly working with the communities most threatened by Trump.

Trump resistance efforts will not and cannot be led by outside saviors — i.e., white liberals — but by the people on the front-lines of his abuses. The rest of us will need to fall in line.

Which brings us to the most controversial word in U.S. politics today. Resistance. One Resistance took it up in its very name, and early on organizers sought to warn organizations that joining would mean truly fighting to protect communities in a confrontational way.

In the end, however, on a day when more than 200 demonstrators were arrested in Washington, D.C., and others smashed windows and took the fight to the streets in cities around the country, One Resistance not only experienced no arrests or other incidents, it actually collaborated with local police in the name of “safety.”

This was a profoundly controversial decision by organizers, because for the most vulnerable families in our community the police are not safe. The police incarcerate, deport, evict and kill their friends and loved ones.

The initial visioning for the event, however, stressed a desire for multi-generational participation, a “family friendly” character. The immigrant rights leaders in the organization in particular were also adamant that the march minimize risk of arrest. Police collaboration was decided upon as the best strategy for preventing arrest and assuring the family friendliness of the event.

There is a logic here despite a long history of police violence against families and unjustified arrest, and in the end those of us on the other side of the argument didn’t feel qualified to push back against these community leaders. But among those of us fortunate enough to do full-time organizing there is a persistent and — frankly — unavoidable risk of gatekeeping for our constituencies.

Our positions become one of deciding first what information and resources reach the communities we serve, and then of deciding which voices within our communities get represented in the spaces where we are advocating.

No community is entirely uniform, and there is always a diversity of opinions — there are undocumented folks who probably wanted to riot and parents with children joined up with the Black Bloc-style Antifa formation in the march — but there often ends up being a uniformity of leadership positions in the end that necessarily leaves out some of those perspectives.

I think that every progressive or radical professional organizer recognizes this risk. In the end, real resistance will not be safe, family friendly or “peaceful.”

This doesn’t necessarily mean resisters have to be violent, but they do have to be disruptive. How can “resistance” mean anything other than forcing the powers-that-be to stop doing what you don’t want them to do? You either force them into a calculation where the consequences of pissing you off are worse for them than the consequences giving up their goals — or you physically prevent them from being able to carry them out.

The ultimate goal of the ruling class is to make money, so most immediately resistance will mean disrupting commerce and normal business. Beyond that it will require a community-by-community assessment of power in those places, how it is organized, how it moves, how it connects to the Trump regime and where the strategic points of intervention may be found to disrupt it.

If One Resistance does continue — and that was the plan all along — this assessment will need to be a primary task.

Even if it doesn’t persist, though, One Resistance’s most immediate impact was to show off — to literally demonstrate — a community-wide mass base for organizing that can support resistance, even if all those who support it may not be able to join the most high-stakes struggles.

It also extended the skills of mass mobilization to new people and organizations. This is vitally important because institution building takes too long to accomplish the most important goal before us right now — the immediate removal of Trump and his entire regime from power.

These institutions are necessary for a full social revolution that can both remove the Trump regime and the conditions that made Trump possible. A merely political revolution, however, is possible with many fewer moving parts than, say, the Arab Spring or the Ukrainian uprising demonstrated. Mass protests forced states from power. That could happen here, too.

The demonstrations during inauguration week created networks and knowledge bases that could make those sorts of rebellions more likely in the future. While we are building long-term institutions, we can also cultivate community ties and communication systems that we can activate for mass mobilization when the opportunity and demand arises.

If we do this successfully, we might not have to wait until 2020 to get rid of Trump, even if the same ruling class that he serves might still be dominant — for now.

Building independent institutions with grassroots political power, rooting these institutions in a newly organized working class, pushing these institutions past the gatekeeper nonprofit model, making them directly accountable to the communities they come from and building capacity for mass-mobilization to force the ruling regime to abandon its plans to harm us and our loved ones — this is what resistance means.

One Resistance took important steps in this direction and illuminated some of the possibilities and perils involved.

It was a good start. The turnout we saw on inauguration night — not to mention the even bigger numbers the day after and in cities across the country — prove that the capacity exists to get it done. If it doesn’t happen, it will be because we fail to do the work to make it happen, or because we get crushed along the way.

The good news is that for One Resistance at least, it was a lot of fun — and deeply rewarding. The real fun and the real reward will be when we win it all. Let’s not wait until 2020 for that pleasure.

Stay defiant.

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