From Relationships to Organization

Effective resistance depends on a web of relationships that can only be established through in-person, face-to-face organizing

Photo by the author.

Hi everyone,

Face-to-face gathering among physically-close community members to discuss problems and plan solutions are common and essential to self-governance in healthy societies.

As Priya Parker writes in her book The Art of Gathering:

“In democracies, the freedom to assemble is one of the foundational rights granted to every individual. In countries descending into authoritarianism, one of the first things to go is the right to assemble. Why? Because of what can happen when people come together, exchange information, inspire one another, test out new ways of being together.”

In the United States, this type of community deliberation has disappeared along with the collapse in friendship. With technological communication ascendant, face-to-face gatherings are passe. Political discourse increasingly takes place via disembodied digital platforms controlled by the largest corporations on the planet and surveilled by the government.

Text chains, email threads, Reddit posts, and Signal groups have enabled our movements to move faster and reach wider audience than ever before, but at the same time they have often replaced face-to-face talking. When we do meet in person, it’s mostly for someone to talk at us, or sometimes to take advantage of a 3-minute public comment period, not for true a participatory discussion. It seems like we’re all too busy for an embodied, in-person politics of discussion, deliberation, and real personality. It’s just too damn slow.

One result of this is that civic engagement and radical organizing has become more superficial, relying more on “coded” cultural signifiers rather than actual relationships to determine political orientations. In this way, we are coming to mirror the technologies we use.

Applied to the dominance of AI, smartphones, short-form video, pornography, and other technological trojan horses, this trend terrifies me. This, in addition to the ecological and imperialist costs of the internet, is why the technological “innovation” of the internet-era has directly fueled the rise of fascism.

More and more people exist in a state of “internet-induced psychosis,” and even those of us who remain “normal” are profoundly altered by the tools we use (or are used by).

So I was glad, several days ago, to be invited to a private potluck dinner hosted by a nearby community. The topic of the gathering was the ICE raids and the rise of fascism, but there was no formal agenda. The 30 of us who gathered are already deeply involved in various forms of resistance to empire: ICE rapid response networks, mutual aid projects, alternative food systems, herbal medicine, eco-defense, rights of nature, community organizing, digital security, arms training. We didn’t need another politics 101 discussion. We were there for something deeper and more important.

A friend of mine opened the meeting. He began by reminding us of the importance of gathering face-to-face in these dangerous times. It is too easy, he said, to sit alone at home, lost in the doomscroll, consumed by despair, psychically isolated and politically neutralized.

He reminded us that the creation of this psychological state — helplessness — is, in itself, a central goal of tyrants and oppressive systems. Those who are defeated in their minds do not need to be bribed or fought, and so those who may resist are the targets of not just state surveillance and repression, but also of psychological warfare aimed at destroying our sense of the future.

The antidote to this, of course, is community.

Any serious resistance movement organizes and emerges primarily through face-to-face meetings — not group chats, online forums, or social media. These can be useful, but they’re decidedly secondary. Real shit happens when people get together.

And so, for the next three hours, we shared a meal, discussed what is happening in the world and our community, and reflected on our strategies for moving forward.

We didn’t solve anything that night. We didn’t come up with a silver-bullet solution to the crises we face. We did something far more practical: we began to strengthen the relational scaffolding which is the foundation of effective resistance movements.

Back in December, I wrote a post called “you need to build political relationships,” in which I argued that “one of the most straightforward and yet often overlooked ways [that we can prepare for resistance] is by developing political relationships with a wide range of people, so that when opportunities for action or crisis situations arrive, you can call on friends to help.”

I continued:

“It’s simple, but most people don’t do it. Most people believe that, when it comes to political action, someone else is going to take care of the networking side. Most people have a vision that political action is organized by groups and organizations who rally their supporters to participate in events, protests, blockades, campaigns, and even revolutions.

Even in the individualistic United States, strangely enough, most people have subscribed to this view.

It’s dead wrong.

It is your individual responsibility to build networks of relationships and prepare yourself and your community members to take place in serious acts of resistance. No one else is going to do it for you. They can’t. Effective community organizing requires networks of relationships and webs of trust that are far too complex for one person or one organization to keep track of. That’s why social movements are inherently social and communal.”

This is a challenge to Biocentric readers: hold a gathering like this. Bring people together for a private, physical gathering. Curate the space. Invite good people — not just anyone, but only those who you are generally aligned with and who are solid, dependable folks. Do some basic facilitation to steer the conversation. Exercise your patience as the messy, essential process plays out. And be prepared for real-world action, not digital facsimiles of it, to emerge.

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This is Biocentric, a newsletter about sustainability, greenwashing, and resistance. I’m author and organizer Max Wilbert. If you want to follow, you can subscribe for free. Paid subscribers, in return for supporting this publication and the activism you see here, receive access to private posts, which contain behind-the-scenes reports and unreleased drafts.

If you’re local to the Southern Willamette Valley in Oregon, let’s meet — face-to-face. I’ll be speaking on February 18th at the “Toaster Church” (AKA the First United Methodist Church at 1376 Olive Street) in Eugene as part of a Community Rights Lane County speaker series on water protection.

This is leading up to an upcoming May vote on the Lane County Watersheds Bill of Rights, or Measure 20-373, a rights of nature initiative led by local organizers which would fundamentally challenge corporate power in this area. It’s one strategy among many our community is bringing to bear on the problem of eco-collapse. I hope to see you there on February 18th to hear my take on this measure — and if you can’t make it but are local, reach out to me so we can connect.

I’m no longer on social media, so I rely entirely on readers to share this content. If you appreciate what you read here, please share on social media, discussion forums, and in direct messages to friends. Thank you!

Biocentric is a liberated zone with zero AI-generated content.

Photo by the author.