Pages

Saturday, March 29, 2025

Shaking the Cherries Down: As an Antifascist Movement Awakens, Our Job Is to Build Organization


By Carl Davidson

Liberation Road Notes

March 27, 2025 - It’s spring, a season of hope, and the prairie grass is dry, waiting for sparks. And we face a clear challenge from the Trump fascist clique. People are suffering. Some are being “disappeared.” We are called to fight.

Antifascist movements don’t arise out of nowhere. The clique now 

in the White House sets them in motion by inflicting one outrage 

after another against people’s liberties, lives, and livelihoods.


In the past week alone, some 550 grassroots protests emerged in 

every state—with dozens, naturally, in D.C. itself, the seat of 

federal power. That power is now split into three: those defending 

the fascists, those enabling it by conciliation or silence, and those 

taking stands against it in various ways. We have to learn how to 

use contradictions among those on top, while healing contradictions 

among the people at the base.


I am thrilled by the tens of thousands turning out in the heartland 

for Bernie and AOC. A large coalition of the progressive organizers 

behind the upsurge has already formed.


It’s calling on all of us to turn out on Saturday, April 5, 2025

There will be a very large mobilization in D.C. But if you can’t make 

it there, substantial local mobilizations also will take place in nearly 

every city and college town in the country. (Our local Democrats

are calling one on April 5, 1pm, at the Beaver County Courthouse).


We have dozens of reasons to join them and even more demands to 

be raised. The tip of our spear must aim at the ICE/DHS secret raids 

against immigrants, documented or not, who have spoken out against 

the genocide being inflicted on Gaza. The thugs start here because 

they consider it low-hanging fruit, our weak point, believing that 

these voices are a despised minority within another unpopular 

minority of a wider peace and justice movement. We demand a 

foreign policy in tune with the UN Charter and its Principles of 

Peaceful Coexistence.


We must do a deeper exposure of Team Trump and prove them 

and their policy of division wrong. The core value in all our 

diverse narratives of who we are and what we want is solidarity

An injury to one of us is an injury to all of us. We don’t have to 

agree with everything any of those targeted might say. But we 

must stand with them on the right to speak, the right to equality 

before the law, and the right to due process. Most of all, we want 

their voices in our campaigns and organizations.


Our 14th Amendment gives these “due process” rights to all 

persons in our country, whether they are citizens or not. If you 

think otherwise, you are abandoning what it means to be an 

American. You are abandoning the legacy of our “Second Revolution," 

of the 500,000 or more who perished, Black, white, and otherwise, 

those who  “gave the last full measure of devotion.” Moreover, “It 

is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work 

which they who fought,” for a nation  rooted in an abolition democracy

This is the core value that is never granted to us by our “betters,” and 

never can be. Why? Because, self-evidently, these core values and natural 

rights are part of our nature as social beings. Tyrants can deny them 

or try to restrict them, but they can never take them away.


We demand that today’s anti-American neo-confederates stop all 

their fascist projects. We aim for their removal from power. We 

demand that they and any successors respect the rights of immigrants 

and welcome those fleeing injustice. We demand that they stop their 

attacks on veterans, whom Trump has always despised, and restore 

the VA and its hospitals and benefits. We demand they cease their 

attacks on the Department of Labor and the NLRB. All workers have 

the right to form unions in every state and to stand up for better wages, 

working conditions, and the expansion of social justice. We demand 

the restoration of all DEI measures won in all the civil rights battles 

of every decade. There is one race, the human race, and we defend 

the rights of all, regardless of skin color, nationality, language, or 

religious faith. We demand respect and equality for all women, including 

health care and abortion rights. The attacks on doctors and their 

female patients must cease and desist in every state. Likewise for 

all LGBTQ persons. In short, we want consistent democracy for all 

the exploited and oppressed, all along the line.


Our task in the weeks ahead is to join these movements and “fan the 

flames of discontent.” But we also must avoid a trap, one this writer 

observed earlier in the Jesse Jackson campaigns of the 1980s. 

My organization at that time, the League of Revolutionary Struggle, 

or LRS, played an important role in shaping Jesse’s Rainbow Coalition. 

Jackson started with a firm base in Chicago’s Black and Latino 

communities. But LRS did important work in bringing in Chicanos, 

Chinese-Americans, Filipinos, and all Pacific Islanders and others. 

(I worked with a small team taking Jesse to Iowa and Nebraska, 

bringing in progressive farmers, the “green stripe” in the Rainbow).


We saw ourselves as “building a movement.” But Jesse frequently 

warned us: 


“My job is to shake the cherries down from the tree. But I can’t do 

it all. Your job is to gather up the harvest on the ground.” 


We found the wisdom in that warning the hard way, soon after the 

election activities ebbed. All the “build a movement” assertions 

turned into empty air. We won a few new recruits to the LRS here 

and there, but not much else, even though a few of us continued 

with staff positions in Jesse’s Rainbow-Push operation in Chicago.


















We fell into the “build the movement” trap. We do not create movements. 

We can see what actually builds them every day, with the flurry of Oval 

Office assaults and inflections on us everywhere. Wherever there is 

oppression, there is resistance. But it’s also true that movements, like 

everything else in the universe, move in waves; they flow, and they ebb. 

At one point of upsurge in the “long 1960s,” we thought it would be 

ever upward and onward, and when the ebb came, our old set of tactics 

for flow failed miserably. Think of the Weather Underground as an 

extreme case in point.


We can help build movement in many ways, such as by fanning the 

flames. But to avoid the hidden trap, we must also build structured 

campaigns and new mass organizations within movements. 

Organizations of all sorts are our most essential weapons, including 

but not limited to our own socialist organizations. The socialists who 

think straight matter a great deal. As Uncle Ho once noted, “the harder 

the core, the broader the front.” We have a far-sighted strategy and 

tactics. If we deploy them well, everyone in our common front can 

grow.


But the key important lesson arises as the wave begins to ebb. We have 

to know when to cast the net out, during the flow, and when to draw 

the net in, when the crest begins to ebb. We need to keep stronger and 

larger campaigns, like Rev. Barbour’s “Third Reconstruction” and 

organizations within it that can survive and thrive either way, so when 

the next wave comes, we start on higher ground with better and larger 

organizations. We especially need this when we are in Gramsci’s “war 

of position,” where we engage in our “long march” winning “strong 

points” (Lenin) in all of them. Why? Because at some point the crisis 

deepens, and we face the tasks of winning governing power—a war 

of movement that can start to “capture the castles,” tactically, at all 

levels, starting with cities, counties, and states.


At some point, the war of movement will arise everywhere, and a dual 

power will become a new power. This will create new problems. We 

would all love to have these new problems on our plates, but we are not 

there yet. For the moment, we solve the problem of organization-building 

within movement-building.


Here's a closing hint for an efficient way to do all this: when you go to 

a protest event or action, take a clipboard, pens, and calling cards with you. 

Then ask questions of people you don’t know, outside your comfort zone,

listen to them, and ask more. Learn to persuade by sharing common 

passions of weal and woe. Record and report. If you don’t take these 

tools, you are simply an activist. If you do and you use them well, 

you are an organizer and a party-builder. Now is the time for us to build.



Carl Davidson is a veteran organizer with roots in the New Left 

of the 1960s, where he served as a Vice President and National 

Secretary of Students for a Democratic Society. He continues 

to write prolifically.

No comments:

Post a Comment