You Need to Build Political Relationships
Creating a culture of resistance means investing in political relationships and and affinity groups
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. I can’t do this without support from readers, so thank you!
Hello everyone,
How can we prepare ourselves for resistance, in practical terms?
One of the most straightforward and yet often overlooked ways 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.
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.
Before the initial attack on the Moncada Barracks in July 1953, Fidel Castro held literally thousands of one-on-one conversations with Cuban dissidents, students, laborers, political organizers, and every day people, working to convince them to both support the revolution abstractly and to make a personal commitment to contribute. While the attack on Moncada failed, these efforts set the stage for the Cuban Revolution’s popular war against the U.S.-backed oligarch and dictator Fulgencio Batista that succeeded six years later.
A challenge to you
Do you personally have connections with 5, 10, 25, or 50 individuals who you can call in an emergency or if you’re planning an action and ask them to participate and show up?
If not, you need to start building those relationships now. Because when the time for action comes, it’s too late. You can’t build significant relationships in days or weeks. You must do it ahead of time.
These small, tight-knit groups are often called “affinity groups” or “cells,” and they’ve been essential throughout all historical resistance movements and liberation struggles. And, with a modicum of security culture, they’re highly resistant to infiltration and repression because of the person-to-person trust they’re built on.
Organizing 101
Organizing is about bringing people together, establishing relationships, building personal connections, growing bonds of trust, and setting up and normalizing a culture of resistance, including secure communications (with the best being in-person, face-to-face conversation) so that you’re not forced to use unencrypted comms when the stakes are suddenly high.
We live in revolutionary times, and political relationships make it possible to act. Whether we’re talking about an opportunity for nonviolent direct action or a confrontational community self-defense action, raids from ICE or the FBI, organized white supremacist or other right-wing militia activity, state repression campaigns targeting people for their opposition to governmental policies, natural or unnatural disasters, threats of violence, breakdown of governmental order and basic supply chains, or opportunities for rebellious or revolutionary actions, it is often impossible to act without first having established relationships that make it possible to coordinate collective action.
Building a culture of resistance
In a crisis, you can’t rely on large organizations. By nature, most are slow, bureaucratic, and reluctant to take risks. If you need a comrade to stand by your side, a babysitter to watch your kids, a co-conspirator for night work, or a supporter to coordinate logistics for food or funding, you don’t need a big organization — you need political relationships — a network of real, face-to-face connections with people with whom you’ve had a chance to gauge their level of political savvy, their knowledge of security culture, their commitment to social change, the degree of risk they might be willing to take, and with whom you’ve perhaps even studied security culture and trained for action.
Are your contacts willing to risk arrest to be associated with a protest or support in a non-arrestable situation during a non-violent direct action? Are they willing to drop out of work or school to support? Can they spend money to get to where they need to be in in order to participate? And are they willing to use more radical and revolutionary tactics?
In a crisis, one person willing to act despite risk of physical violence, state repression, corporate lawsuit, financial penalty, jail or worse is worth ten thousand who can only provide moral support.
This is one part of how we prepare ourselves for action. We build the logistical framework that is required for actually carrying these acts out: we prepare, we train, and we study, so that when opportunities arise, we can take advantage of them.
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Biocentric is a liberated zone with zero AI-generated content.
Good way to get people thinking, especially locally, Max. ..... six degrees of integration.
The focus on relationships as infrastructure rather than afterthought feels central here. Collective action depends less on ideology in the abstract and more on trust built well before pressure arrives.