One of the nuts things about organizing in the Twin Cities right now is that even the most long term organizers who've been here for decades can't keep track of all the resistance that is going on. There are so many self-organized crews just doing work that in any conversation with someone from another neighborhood you might stumble over a whole collective of people resisting in ways you didn't think of. There's a crew of carpenters just going around fixing kicked-in doors. There are tow truck drivers taking cars of detained people away for free. People delivering food to families in hiding. So many local rapid response groups that the number is uncertain but somewhere between 80 and the low hundreds- especially when one considers that several immigrant communities have their own non-English rapid response networks usually uncounted in the main English-language directories. People standing watch outside daycares and schools.
This whole resistance has so many poles of initiative and leadership, so many layers of self-organization, that it's extraordinarily difficult for the state to repress or for opportunists (be they Democrats or movement-riding parties) to co-opt and control. Of course, that's built up through many years and decades of organization, and not only through explicitly political campaigns or formations built during times of crisis and rupture like 2020. It is also built through day-to-day mutual aid, culture building, workplace and tenant organizing, and simple, basic relationship building among neighbors and coworkers here.
This is an everyday, practical sort of anarchism, born not of ideology (though Minneapolis has no shortage of anarchists, and many of us have organized for years on these principles), but of the solutions found by people in the course of struggle. Waiting to be led does not make sense. Funneling power and money through a central apparatus the state can target does not make sense. Symbolic actions appealing to a state without a conscience and an opposition party without a spine make no sense. Self organization, federation, and autonomy make sense. Direct action makes sense. Mutual aid makes sense.
That thickly organized, multipolar resistance from below is what no one can substitute their grand architectural plan for, and what no state can successfully repress. The Twin Cities will not be conquered. We will not surrender. We have no indispensable leaders to hold hostage or buy off, no funding streams to choke off, no "outside agitators" to isolate and repress. We are self organized, and could well make ourselves ungovernable.
