Transcript
Speaker: Hello. You're listening to The Beautiful Idea, a podcast from a collective of several anarchist and autonomous media producers scattered around the world. We're bringing you interviews and stories from the front lines of autonomous social movements and struggles, as well as original commentary and analysis.
Speaker: Follow us on Mastodon and at thebeautifulidea.show. Thanks for listening.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to the beautiful idea. We're here talking with Jean from Let's Go out in the Pacific Northwest. Let's Go is an organizing network that offers strategy, training and community.
Speaker: According to its website, we move fast, share tools and trainings and help local struggles take on national significance. We understand that the front lines run through our own communities. This is a quote from the Let's Go website that recently launched. So I'm excited to talk with you, Gene, about this project.
Speaker: Yeah, happy to be here. Yeah, thanks for joining us. Just to get started, what what is Let's Go, you know, and and what is it not? Yeah, so Let's Go is a movement infrastructure and support network. And we started this at the end of 2024, basically right after the Trump election.
Speaker: And at that time, a number of us from across the country came together and saw that the kind of the national political disaster was pushing a lot of people into immobility.
Speaker: And it felt like kind of simultaneously felt like nonprofits and the institutional left were buckling and surrendering before Trump was even sworn in And at the same time, like many elements of the autonomous left, anarchist milieus were really paralyzed or they were retreating into inward facing discussion or isolation.
Speaker: so it felt like there was this opportunity because it was really clear that there were lots of upset and angry people around the country who wanted to get organized and take action, but they didn't have any place to plug in and they didn't have any support structures. So we kind of came around, came together around that problematic and then decided to focus on the theme of supporting local struggles because we felt like that was an area where lots of new people were getting engaged, fighting in new ways, specifically fighting against, you know, tech oligarch projects like data centers, flock surveillance, ice infrastructure. So we do, we run trainings, we do coaching support for groups around the country, and we try to network different groups together so that they can learn from each other's lessons.
Speaker: What we're not, we're not a mass organization. We don't have membership or dues structure. We're mostly composed of working groups focused on different areas. And then, you know, those working groups meet and we try to align our efforts and maintain a big picture of what we're doing so that we're working in complementary directions.
Speaker: Okay. And when you say we, who are you referring to? Like, who are the the folks that kind of brought this together? I'm kind of curious about the political tendency that the people that started this are coming out of, if any.
Speaker: Yeah, totally. And also, I'm also curious about why there was a decision to formalize these efforts into like ah a publicly legible group, right? Like you have a website that you just launched. A little bit curious about that, because I'm assuming there's some sort of pre-existing network of relationships that is now turning to this structure.
Speaker: I'm kind of curious about that process and and who those folks are and and why now. Totally. Yeah. As far as kind of who we are and political tendency, i think that's kind of that's kind of a fun question and it gets to a little bit of the heart of what we're trying to do.
Speaker: So the interesting thing about Let's Go is that it's pretty broad and ecumenical in political tendencies. So... you know For myself, I've been really involved in anarchist and left communist and autonomous struggles in spaces for the past two decades, especially around the police and ecological defense.
Speaker: And certainly was my networks from those struggles that led me to helping to start Let's Go. But at the same time, we have a lot of people who are coming more from, i would say, parts of the institutional left,
Speaker: Climate change, anti-fossil fuels, direct action movement, some people with really deep ties to labor, people with a lot of experience from the global justice movement from the 90s and 2000s.
Speaker: So really people from, i would say, a ah broader swath of the the wider left than i maybe have traditionally worked with. And from really from all over the country of folks in the Midwest, in the South and some folks in on the East Coast. I'm out here in the Northwest.
Speaker: But I think that kind of one of the things that ties all of us together is that we are all convinced that the subcultures or the milieus or the political tendencies or habits that we've all been embedded in don't have all the answers.
Speaker: And so we're really interested in asking questions together and experimenting together and thinking about What would it look like if more people from different perspectives were strategizing together and working together rather than trying to define ourselves along kind of our narrow ideological lines?
Speaker: So that's that's kind of a little bit about our our politics. You know, we have ah a value statement, we have some basic shared values, but people come to that from really different places and really different sets of experience, which I think ultimately means we have more to offer. And I just find myself learning a lot constantly from talking with people with a lot of experience in like anti-Zionist Jewish organizing or a lot of experience in organizing clergy. And people have these experiences and these ideas that I just haven't been exposed to before.
Speaker: and i I would like to think or hope vice versa, right, that I'm bringing something to the table as well from my experience and kind of the autonomous left. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious what some of those shared values are.
Speaker: Yeah, so I think our the biggest the biggest thing that we're organizing around, the biggest shared value is this idea of composition, which is ah commitment to working with groups that have different practices of action, different political imaginaries, different tactics, different approaches.
Speaker: and trying to weave those together into something that's synergistic instead of competitive or just fragmented or isolated. But beyond that, we're really focused on invitationality. Like we want struggles to be invitational. We want new people who are getting mobilized by how terrible the world is. to find it easy to join struggles. And I think that oftentimes that's not the case. You know, there's really dense political milieus, there's subcultures, membership groups, and oftentimes it's hard for new people to get connected. And so we want to help people easily get connected to struggles and find a home in those struggles.
Speaker: And we also focus a lot on this idea of relationality, and that's also tied to composition as well. Like we're not separate from each other, and we actually are more effective if we can have real relationships with people in different parts of the ecosystem and have real honest conversations with each other.
Speaker: And also that we're, you know, we're not pure. We're not trying to define a really narrow ideological line. We're trying to be relatively open and relatively flexible.
Speaker: So yeah, those are some of it some of the ways we think about it. Yeah. I think you sort of already answered this, but I was going to ask why why formalize those intentions into a publicly legible group? And I assume it's because it makes it easier for people to find you if you're really focused on connecting with new people.
Speaker: But is there any other reason behind behind that formalization? Yeah, i think I think that's, for me, that's the biggest reason, you know? There's lots of groups out there that are easy to find and and joinable. Some of them do good work and some of them...
Speaker: You know, everyone has their limits and their challenges. But there's just there are so many people getting activated. There are so many people across the country who are upset about data centers being pushed through against their will, so stealing their water, stealing their electricity. There's so many people who are getting mobilized because they're so upset about ICE kidnapping their community members, their neighbors.
Speaker: And we feel like we have some resources and experience to offer those folks. And so I want to be able to connect with them and say, here's this website. If you want a training, you can reach out. If you want to connect with us for advice, we have coaches who can connect and help you think through your local situation.
Speaker: and so we wanted to be legible in that sense instead of being kind of like only possible. like we don't want people to only connect to us if they're in the know, right? Like I want to find and connect to new people.
Speaker: okay Yeah. And this is related, but you know thinking about that type of structure that's publicly legible and more formalized around specific values, I guess you've sort of already answered this question, at least half of it, but what are some of the goals and limitations of this structure?
Speaker: What are you not able to do because of this structure? and why is that less of a priority? versus what are you able to do because of this structure and why is that a priority?
Speaker: Yeah, so lots of goals, lots of limitations. I think some of our our main goals are that, you know, I and we think that we need many more self-organized local groups that are building capacity to fight projects that are impacting people's lives locally.
Speaker: And that this is actually a precondition for any truly effective large scale struggle in this country. And so rather than starting from the top down, we're trying to start from the bottom up and say, can we build a lot of resilient and effective local struggles against projects that impact people's lives?
Speaker: And can we help new people, people who are new to organizing, get started so they don't have to reinvent the wheel? So part of our goals are just helping to prop up those local struggles. communicating some of the basic lessons that a lot of us have have learned through you know decades of bitter experience like how do we organize what is what is strategy how do we think about winning how do we make sure that people come to meetings and have a good time and feel welcome in a in a movement those are things that we think we can help people achieve That's part of our goal. Another part is that, you know, we don't think that local struggles are enough. We think they're necessary, but not sufficient because our adversaries, whether they're
Speaker: you know, data centers and the entire tech oligarch network or ICE detention facilities or the deportation machine as a whole. These are national and international structures. So in one sense, we're pursuing the strategy of a death by a thousand pinpricks. Like, can we just prop up so many local struggles that...
Speaker: Everywhere ICE is trying to operate, someone is bleeding them just a little bit, right? Every data center that gets proposed, people are pushing back somewhere. There's friction everywhere throughout the whole system.
Speaker: But at the same time, we we also know that we as you know humans, as people who have our own interests for a a free and just and dignified life, we need to be able to concentrate our efforts and concentrate our force at particular places and times rather than being caught in this reactive cycle.
Speaker: And so part of our hope is that if we can connect these different groups across the country that are already engaged in struggles that make sense on their own, that we can also create a container that can help people decide to concentrate force and effort against a particular target at the same time.
Speaker: So rather than leaving all of these fights isolated, like helping people to build enough relationships so they can see their own needs, their own fights, their own struggles reflected in the struggles of somewhere else, and then decide, you know, here's this detention center.
Speaker: It's between all of these different towns. What if we all decided to work on this project together in this region? so that's one of our kind of our hopes and our goals is that by building up these networks and these relations, that it becomes possible to start operating at scale through a deliberative and open process, right? So helping people communicate and decide together. We're not coming in and saying everyone needs to target this place or that place. We're saying we should all be talking with each other.
Speaker: and deciding how we win overall instead of how we win only in our local struggle or local place. Gotcha. So, you know, we we support that through our training and coaching networks. We can do connective work by connecting these different groups together. um But certainly there's limitations to our structure. i think, you know, one of the limitations that I've discovered has actually just been primarily technical, which is that when we're trying to operate at scale and trying to have trainers and coaches in different places and trying to bring together spokes councils and meetings of different groups there's actually just a lot of
Speaker: you know, bureaucratic work, administrative tracking that's required to do that. And I say i think that has that has prevented our scaling. It's been a little bit of a surprise. I think maybe in hindsight, a predictable surprise, but that's been one limit that's just kind of slowed the scaling of that effort.
Speaker: And then I think the other the other big limitation, and this is maybe more directly to your point, is that because we have this commitment to political diversity, we have this commitment to composition, we have this commitment to working with people with different approaches, different sets of tactics, different backgrounds, that means that we don't have a unified political ideology with a lot of internal consistency by definition, right?
Speaker: And that means that sometimes we move slower And we can't make really fast moves in particular directions in ways that I might make when I'm working with groups that I kind of share really basic political assumptions with and like have a lot of shared history with.
Speaker: We have to do more translating, ah really understand where different people are coming from and what they're trying to achieve. So there's there's a certain slowness to that.
Speaker: The flip side there is that I think that that slowness and that relationship building means that we're actually building much more connectivity across the entire movement ecosystem instead of kind of staying in a little particular echo chamber.
Speaker: But yeah, it's it's slow sometimes. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. I guess my my next question was actually going to be around how you address the differences that might pop up in a situation like that, where you're working with people from really different backgrounds and tendencies. And I don't know how much detail you want to go into, but I'm kind of curious if you could give an example of like a difference that
Speaker: might show up and how you all would navigate that in this context. Yeah, i'll I'll speak to the former. And while I'm speaking to that, I'll try to think to about an example as well.
Speaker: But, you know, the the question of how we work across political difference is really at the heart of this idea of composition. And so just some of the ways that we we approach that is trying to really focus on practical and pragmatic next steps and getting moving in a direction rather than defining the correct political line or defining and the right or the moral way to move.
Speaker: And so one of the things that we we say in our trainings is that whoever wants to win a struggle locally, like whoever wants to actually defeat ICE in their locale, is responsible for doing the relational the relational work that's necessary to hold all of the different forces together. So like the militants, the leftists, the 5051 groups, the clergy, if all of those groups actually want to defeat ICE, then all of them have a responsibility to maintain relationships with everyone else, which is a lot of work, right? There's a lot of behind the scenes work there that goes into having these conversations, building a shared understanding,
Speaker: I think focusing on pragmatic steps makes a big difference. And then I think another another thing that I've really been working on, but that we kind of speak to and our whole approach is when we're working with people with different backgrounds, different assumptions, different politics, it doesn't work to really convince people, right?
Speaker: But what does work is to say, what can we both do that would advance the struggle as a whole in a fruitful and positive direction? And that requires me to like decenter myself a little bit and to decenter my own assumptions if I want other people to move their positions as well. So like if I want to convince someone that it's a good idea for people to take a certain form of action and that that would be additive, then I have to also listen like really honestly and with a lot of curiosity to why other people think that something else should happen.
Speaker: And it's only when we're actually listening to each other and like being willing to challenge our own assumptions that we can form new hypotheses together. And I think just, you know, some maybe of just think of some examples here. I'll give, I'll give one example.
Speaker: from kind of our early days when a lot of us were still getting to know each other, which is that it it kind of became clear in early 2025 that it was going to be very important to help support and build up the anti-ice struggle on a local and a national level. This was a kind of a defining struggle of this era. They're deporting and trying to deport so many people. They're building this massive deportation machine that's like truly horrendous. They're building concentration camps.
Speaker: So we have a stake in that fight. We need to like, do something to help that fight move forward. And and I think some of us felt like we had a lot to say in that area and that we could offer a training to help local groups get organized.
Speaker: And other people, I think, were more skeptical and said, well, we're not sure if we actually are experienced in the realm of migrant solidarity or in the realm of specifically fighting ICE. And we want to make sure that we're deferring to organizations and groups with expertise.
Speaker: And, you know, that could have been a moment where we just gave up on that end of that initiative or we just split and we said, no, we can't work together. and actually what we did was we just had a whole lot of conversations and I had a lot of one on one conversations and really tried to listen to like, what are your concerns? Where are you coming from?
Speaker: What are the experiences you've had? What groups are you connected to where you're worried about this idea of outsiders kind of coming in and telling people what to do or telling people how to fight.
Speaker: And through having those conversations and really questioning our own assumptions, we were able to come to a new understanding of actually maybe we're not all experienced in this one realm, but we are really experienced in thinking strategically. We are really experienced in how to help groups work with other kinds of groups. Because at this time, there was a lot of splintering between, you know, maybe the legalistic rapid response networks and people who are trying to take direct action to interfere with ICE.
Speaker: We said one of the contributions we can make is building out a training that will help these groups connect with each other and see their tactics as complementary instead of competitive. So that's just kind of like, yeah, maybe one example of starting from this place of difference, different sets of experiences, concerns, and then really listening to them and trying to think like, what can we do that actually plays to our strengths that learns from everyone in this conversation?
Speaker: That's really awesome. So I'm curious, like you you mentioned, like anti-ice organizing, what are the issues that Let's Go has been focused on since its founding?
Speaker: And what are some of the ways that it's been able to intervene? You know, I think you've already named some, but curious to talk, to just hear a little bit more about what you all have been focused on lately and what the support that you're providing has looked like most recently.
Speaker: Totally. So we really, since early 2025, I think a lot of the contours of political struggle post Trump's second election started to become clear. And it became really clear that ICE and this deportation machine was going to be central to his administration and also central to everyone's concern, right? Deporting hundreds of thousands.
Speaker: Allegedly, they're trying to deport millions of our friends or neighbors or community members. And at the same time, it became really clear that data centers are rapidly becoming this huge issue. They're extremely unpopular. They're locking us into this commitment to fossil fuel use.
Speaker: Water use, it's kind of, it's very good. It's the most insane thing to be pouring so many resources into building out the technical infrastructure for a surveillance state, right? Which like we can't actually separate the infrastructure that these data centers are providing and the AI models that they're building are also being directly used by ICE, by Border Patrol, by the deportation machines.
Speaker: So to us, these issues became really central and we decided to focus a lot of our energy on both of those. So how have we been doing that? With ice, we've been following a couple of different strategies. One of them is we've built out this training. We call it an icebreaker training.
Speaker: and it's a training for local groups and communities to think about how to take their struggle against ice to the next level. So maybe they're not organized at all and they want to get organized.
Speaker: Or maybe they're locked in this kind of reactive rapid response network mode where they're just waiting for a raid and then going to react. And we think that neither of those are sufficient. And so we're trying to help people think about what would it actually take to win against ICE locally? What would it take to make it impossible for ICE to function in a community? What would it take to defeat ICE detention centers?
Speaker: So we've been running those trainings around the country. And then we've also been And of through the connections we're building in running those trainings, then helping to network those groups together so that they can share the resources they're building, share the tactics that they've been learning, share the observations they're making about kind of like ICE's operational patterns.
Speaker: So part of our hope is just that right by connecting different people, we're able to generate a larger organic intelligence that's shared by more people instead of staying in these little fragmented ecosystems.
Speaker: So that's that's kind of the ice front. And then, you know, the the data center front is really interesting because it's rapidly become, you know, they're so unpopular across the political spectrum.
Speaker: There's a recent survey that came out that said that most Americans not only are opposed to data centers being built near them, but most Americans would prefer to live near a nuclear power plant than a data center.
Speaker: And which is wild, right? And the the really funny thing there is that because actually the the nuclear industry build out is tied to data centers and they're trying to roll out these small modular reactor nuclear generators to power data centers that actually people won't have a choice. They're going to be living next to both, right? A nuclear nuclear power plant and a data center.
Speaker: Wow, they can give their wishes granted. yeah exactly. But they're they're wildly unpopular across the political spectrum, and there there's this groundswell of opposition. And so we've been connecting with local groups, fighting data centers. I've been involved with coaching a group in Texas for the past year and that's fighting a number of data centers in their town, and they actually have defeated two of those data centers now.
Speaker: And it's kind of amazing because they started... When they started fighting, the political consensus in their town was that the data centers were inevitable. When they had no support, everyone thought they were crazy.
Speaker: Everyone thought it was impossible to win. And now they've defeated two out of the four data centers in their area. And the city council in that area just implemented a ban on data centers. So they actually you know built this groundswell of support, were able to mobilize the community, and then were able to shift the entire political conversation from inevitability towards everyone is opposed to this thing.
Speaker: So that's you know that's really inspiring and exciting. do you want to say where that was or do you, yeah, first yeah that was in, in San Marcos, Texas. Okay, great. I thought so.
Speaker: Yeah. Yeah. so you know, we, we, We have this coaching a relationship. We have weekly or monthly phone calls, try to help people think through strategy. How do they organize their group? How do they keep people coming to meetings? Some of the the really basic meat and potato questions of organizing, but then also try to connect people fighting data centers across the country so they can share resources, they can share information.
Speaker: and I think the data center fight is exciting and interesting and important. Because it's a different political alignment than we're used to. And actually people are like kind of united on more class lines and less political ideological lines against data centers.
Speaker: They don't want them in their backyards. And that's true for ranchers and farmers and MAGA people and libertarians and environmentalists and leftists. Which just opens up the possibility that we can, you know, help to support some new form of politics that is actually against oligarchs rather than against a political party, right? People polarizing to Democrat or Republican.
Speaker: the The other reason that this is important is that we know that the organized right is trying to step into the anti-data center fight because so many of these fights are in rural middle America and places that have been shot on for decades and places that have been you know repeatedly betrayed by the Democratic Party.
Speaker: And so there have been in the Midwest, we know that Klan groups and white supremacists have been trying to kind of take the lead on anti-data center fights. Quite recently, it came out that one of the organizers of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol is now calling for a National Day of Action against data centers.
Speaker: And so there's ah there's some competition here where we want to create broad invitational movements against data centers that everyone can participate in. And we need to make sure that the populist anger against data centers isn't captured by the right, right? Because that will actually give them a huge amount of momentum and put us in a much worse position overall.
Speaker: That's great. Yeah, that's a really, really interesting point. And so I can see how trying to get out ahead of that is critical. And there's a lot of interesting opportunity there as well to connect with groups that have historically been alienated from one another.
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Speaker: So i'm I'm curious, shifting gears a little bit now, kind of looking at all of the federal indictments that have come out in the last couple weeks here. We're recording this the middle of June.
Speaker: You know, I'm thinking about in Michigan and in Minnesota, a lot of communities organizing against ICE or Palestine against data centers are increasingly concerned about the way that they're being targeted by by the feds. Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council, Sebastian Gorka,
Speaker: explicitly names, quote, violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists, as the new primary threats to national security in in his latest. And then there was NSPM 7, right, the National Security Presidential Memo that came out last fall.
Speaker: Yeah. me Groups with anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-Christian views as major threats worthy of federal surveillance and and intervention.
Speaker: So I'm curious how Let's Go is seeing these indictments that are being handed down and and how you all are thinking about mitigating security concerns in this new or emerging political landscape.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely. it's ah It's a thing that we talk a lot about and think a lot about. And, you know, we we are in this moment of like major upswing and in federal repression across the country. NSPM 7 feels like it's really kicking into gear in a way that took a few months, but now feels really active.
Speaker: And one of the one of the things that we think about a lot is how do we make sure that we're connecting all of these different stories and connecting these threads So that these different groups from different places, from different tendencies, see the necessity for joining together in the fight against that repression instead of allowing the repression to kind of splinter and fragment the ecosystem overall.
Speaker: So, right, we know that repression is designed to intimidate people and scare people into inaction. They're trying to make examples out of a few people to punish, right? Like they're trying to punish all of Minneapolis by these indictments of 15 people.
Speaker: We also know that repression is designed to separate and fragment and split movements. So, right, the classic government or counterinsurgency operation is to try to push the militant flank of a movement away from the rest of the movement to isolate them and then to attack them. And the hope is that if they isolate the militants,
Speaker: and attack them, then no one will step up to defend them. so So one way that we think about that is that that means a really effective counter-oppression is about building really strong networks and connecting people and movements so that they really understand and feel that it's in their interest to defend everyone who's targeted, whether or not they agree with their politics or their sets of actions.
Speaker: We don't all have to like each other, but we all should agree that it's worse for everyone if the Prairieland defendants get convicted of conspiracy and terrorism. Right. It's worse for everyone if the Spokane Three are convicted of conspiracy charges just for showing up to a demonstration where some people blocked an ice fan.
Speaker: It's worse for everyone if, so last week we also saw the FBI target, you know, 60 people in Ohio and some organizations who are all doing voter registration work in black and brown communities. And this is part of the their voter suppression tactics.
Speaker: And actually, it's really important to me, and it's important, I think, for our movement as a whole that we see that as part of the same pattern and strategy of repression as the attacks on students in Michigan who are right facing charges for participating in Palestine solidarity encampments and the 15 folks in Minneapolis who were just indicted for their participation in opposition to Metro Surge.
Speaker: So, you know, one of the things that we're trying to do is that actually help people connect, help people see their shared stakes in resisting this repression and realize that everyone has something, some different strengths to offer. So, for example, like...
Speaker: Militants, anarchists, communists have faced and lived through and dealt with really severe government repression for decades. Right. where We know this. We've learned from the Green Scare. We've learned from grand juries.
Speaker: We've learned from Occupy movement. We've learned from Standing Rock. There's a lot of experience of people in doing effective counter-oppression work, effective prison solidarity work, building out support committees.
Speaker: And that's information that people can share with other parts of the movement that are new to this. And at the same time, we think that the radical flanks and militants will be much better protected if more parts of civil society and more mainstream groups step out and speak up on their behalf.
Speaker: Right. So one of the real tragedies of the Prairieland case is that no one really talked about it in the mainstream until after the convictions came through. And that was just but really, really tragic that we, as a movement as a whole, were not able to convince large portions of civil society that The stakes were really high in Dallas-Fort Worth in the Prairieland case.
Speaker: Once they were convicted, people started to realize, oh, this has consequences for everyone. If you can just go to a noise demo at a detention center and then end up facing 15 years and charges of terrorism and conspiracy, that affects everyone resisting ICE.
Speaker: So that was really tragic that those connections were so tenuous beforehand. And one of the things that we think is really important is to deepen those connections throughout the entire movement so that everyone is responding to these acts of repression.
Speaker: Okay, so you're sort of seeing connectivity and composition, like this strategy of linking different groups that historically have not been linked as as a security measure itself.
Speaker: Absolutely. Is that right? Yeah. Cool. What do you think is new about this approach? Like, do you feel like, like surely this, this idea has been tried before.
Speaker: um What do you think are like the kind of novel ways that Let's Go is approaching it? And I know that's maybe an antagonistic question. I don't mean for it to be, but I am genuinely curious, like what's, what's new about this attempt that hasn't been tried before?
Speaker: Yeah. You know, it's not it's not new and we're drawing on a legacy of a whole lot of different struggles around the world that have started from this assumption that actually having as many different people as possible using as many different tactics and strategies directed towards a shared enemy is one of the most effective ways to win.
Speaker: i think... One of the things that is new maybe in the U.S. is that the U.S. is just, you know, I think as a result of historical defeats, as a result of our position at kind of the core of of the imperial system, for lots of different reasons, the U.S. is so fragmented and the left as a whole is so extremely weak. and there's so many little tiny groups and tendencies that are not talking to each other that primarily define themselves by ideology rather than by practical success or by victory.
Speaker: And so I think that one of one of the things we're trying to do is just build that sensibility here, not as a moral position, but as a strategic and ethical position, right? Like we actually think that we will be more effective if we are coordinating and communicating across different parts of the of the ecosystem.
Speaker: One of the ways that I i think about this is that we need a lot of people experimenting. And I actually, i have no idea what's going to work. To be totally honest, like, it would be arrogant for me to say i know what's going to work to like bring this system down.
Speaker: i have no idea. So I think we need a lot of openness and a lot of experimentation. we need lots of different groups trying different approaches. But we also need these groups to be communicating enough with each other and to see their shared connection with each other so that, you know, the people who try something and it fails and they get punished, they get severe repression, have people there to protect them.
Speaker: And also so that when there's a breakthrough and people have a success, so that there's enough people they're connected to that they can follow that example, right?
Speaker: And because I don't know what's going to work, that breakthrough might come from, kind of traditional militant anarchist tactics, it might come from clergy groups. It might come from, you know, undocumented people in detention centers going on hunger strikes and finding out new innovations and new tactics. And if we're so fragmented and segregated that we can't see each other's experiments, we can't learn from each other.
Speaker: And I can give just like a little example here, if that's interesting, of just kind of like one little breakthrough moment. So we we talked about this group in in Texas and San Marcos. We've been supporting them for a while. They've been you know really incredible, really have changed a lot there.
Speaker: And then I'm up here in the Pacific Northwest. I've been running a lot of these anti-ice trainings up here. And actually through one of those anti-ice trainings, someone participating in the training let us know that this Washington-based data center developer had also signed a contract with ICE to rent out warehouse space just south of Seattle.
Speaker: And I was like, Sebi, Sebi Corporation, that name sounds so familiar. yeah. That's Carson Seby. So Seby was the partner for a local realtor in San Marcos who was trying to build out a data center.
Speaker: And he is this kind of progressive appearing developer, a little greenwashed. The town itself has pretty liberal politics. So he'd been able to, you know, move the data center proposal along pretty effectively because he had all these relationships in these networks.
Speaker: But as soon as people found out that his partner was leasing out ice infrastructure in the Seattle metro area, people in Texas went on a propaganda blitz, tying him specifically to ice.
Speaker: And he dropped the proposal within a week. Because even though he had protected himself along the axis of like environmentalism and the local economy, he was politically vulnerable along the axis of working with an ice collaborator.
Speaker: And that information wouldn't have been possible without building these kinds of links and relationships between different struggles. So one of the, I think, one of the strengths of composition is that if there's different people with different political subjectivities, different cultures, different appearances, different sets of assumptions, all fighting the same project, it's harder for our adversaries to defend themselves.
Speaker: because they're really used to nailing us down into very specific subjectivities. they have the like They have the critique of the environmentalist down, right? Environmentalists oppose the data center and they call everyone a Patagonia-wearing, job-hating, like rich liberal, right? So if we just and if we only inhabit that particular vector, we're already boxed in. We don't have any room to move. But if we're making connections with ranchers,
Speaker: and they're fighting the data center, it's a lot harder to paint them as that. And if we're making these connections with different people, different angles, it allows us to launch these attacks from you know unexpected directions.
Speaker: And that also feels like insulation against repression, right? Like the hope, the the beautiful dream in Texas is that You know, there could be large groups of people acting against data centers. And if anyone is repressed, right, the whole town comes out to defend them and they have a barbecue and there's country music and there's environmentalists and everyone is there saying, no, no, no, we all hate the data center and we all support what this person did.
Speaker: And that is a much, much harder group to control than like, a group of Patagonia-wearing environmentalists or a group of black-clad anarchists or any other specific group, right? So if we have these different connections, it's easier to act from different positions.
Speaker: And, you know, more people the more connectivity we have, the more people see their needs reflected in other people's actions. Say, that person has taken action to defend my interest.
Speaker: The more people will show up to protect each other. Awesome. Well, I want to start wrapping up, but is there any, i guess i'm I'm just curious about like practical first steps that you would recommend for people that are interested in this strategy of composition, regardless of whether or not they're wanting to join, you know, let let's go formally, but you know, that too.
Speaker: What kinds of actions do you recommend people take to start sort of break out of their individual groups or communities that they're used to organizing with. And, and yeah, if there's anything else that you want to touch on that we haven't talked about yet, go feel free to to add it.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, I think, i think practical first steps are like really starting to understand your social and political terrain locally and think about all the different groups and all the different actors that are involved. And I, you know, I know this from being politically active for decades, but it's really easy to get annoyed at groups.
Speaker: It's really easy to write people off. And oftentimes people are annoyed and then they have bad ideas, but actually it's still valuable that they're there. And so if we kind of understand who are all of the groups and then try to really develop relationships with people in those different groups on a one-to-one basis,
Speaker: So it's possible to speak really frankly. And we can still have strong differences. But if we're having conversations and we have a relationship based on respect, we can still take those strong positions without fragmenting and fracturing.
Speaker: So that's kind of, I think the the biggest thing for me is like, and that's been the biggest lesson in this past year of doing this, is really intentionally cultivating relationships with people in different groups.
Speaker: And really, when differences arise, asking people to articulate why they're pursuing the strategy they're pursuing, and then asking them to listen to me when I articulate why I'm puring pursuing the strategy I'm pursuing.
Speaker: And if we can get to a place where even if we disagree, we recognize that like all of us are reasonable and serious people who are thinking carefully about what we're doing. And we're not just crazed militants or we're not just, you know, wishy-washy liberals, but we have principled positions that we've come to through thought.
Speaker: Then we can still disagree, but reasonable people disagree. Right. And we can still work together. So that's kind of, i think that's that's the biggest thing for me, is just really building those relationships and being curious about why other people are doing what they're doing. The other thing that I'll say is that this is it's hard work and it's emotional work. It's care work in a lot of ways, like developing these relationships and tending them and making that emotional work and that care work really visible.
Speaker: And making it part of an expectation for participation in political struggle can also go a long way. if I'm saying like, I'm going to extend myself, I'm going to build a relationship with you, and I'm going to make sure we don't fracture even when there's difference.
Speaker: I need you to do the same thing. And if we can set that expectation, then I think it sets us up better for when, you know, the really, really terrible things happen. And there's a moment of repression and people are really prone to splintering and blaming each other.
Speaker: And then we get to step in and we say we have these relationships. We have a commitment to each other. we actually need to figure out how to make the outcome of this situation as good as possible, despite our differences.
Speaker: o Awesome. Well, is there anything else that you want to add or is there any website or online info that you want to direct people to? if They're curious to learn a little bit more about Let's Go.
Speaker: Yeah, if if folks want to get involved, can visit letsgonetwork.org. Got some basic information on the website. There's ways to request trainings there and ways to request coaching. So if people are getting involved in a new struggle and they want support, you can reach out. You know, we're always trying to build out our...
Speaker: Network of trainers as well. So if you're out there in the world and you're a person who feels like you have a lot of experience in the movement and you have a lot of experience helping other people think through their their local conditions and and think through how to get organized, one of the things we're trying to do is just Also help facilitate some some intergenerational transfer of knowledge so that people with experience and wisdom that they've that's come quite hard earned can share it with new people.
Speaker: So you can you can check us out at letsgonetwork.org. Yeah, that's what I got. Thanks for having us on. Awesome. Yeah, thanks so much for joining us, Jean. Really appreciate your time and thoughts.
Speaker: Thank
Speaker: Thanks for listening to today's episode of The Beautiful Idea, news and analysis from the front lines of anarchist and autonomous struggles everywhere. Catch you next time.
