20 or 30 homeless people camped in the parking lot of an unoccupied office building. They had had been there for a little over a month. As I was leaving for work this morning 6 cop cars turned the corner. When I got back, there was yellow tape everywhere and all the tents were in a pile waiting to be loaded into a garbage truck.
How can we destroy these monsters? What hope is there? What good am I that I did nothing to stop any of it?
I’m homeless and tbh, I think it would help if leftists started treating electoralism at least at the local level as a tool for building power, or at least taking it a bit more seriously.
In my city, homeless people have suffered under the second term of our shitbag mayor, who in 2020 ran for re-election against a staunch progressive liberal who ran on cool things like affordable housing and decriminalizing sex work. But then one of the candidates who lost the primary (we have a runoff system here) started a write-in campaign, which all the white radlibs rallied behind, thus splitting the vote and re-electing our shitbag mayor.
More broadly I feel like leftist abstentionism has allowed the right to control the narrative, leading to the dominant notion that all the city’s woes are because of homeless fentanyl zombies, and not the fucking pandemic.
Has any leftist org ever seriously built power through electoralism? We can all imagine how voting in a good guy would make changes, but the reality seems to be that any time the possibility of change arises, more bourgeois fucks flow out the woodwork, governmental or corporate, to completely nobble the chances of any change.
I've never seen voting achieve anything except very temporary harm reduction. Which is still a good thing, but far from actually helping the situation. The staunch progressive liberal sounds like a step in a better direction, but how much of their promised change do you think they would actually be both willing and allowed to do when in office?
The only time leftists had any part in the narrative, was when large orgs had the power to demand it, other than that, news sources have always been right-wing.
I mean historically yes, even in the great satan, Milwaukee, Wisconsin had a socialist mayor for 12 years during the height of the second red scare because the SPA pursued an electoral strategy, so there's no reason it can't work under some circumstances. I'll let history judge whether they were successful in the long run, or even more successful than any other leftist organizations.
Was that Sewer Socialism where they held up the sewer system as proof of the power of leftist economics?"
At the very least you would have—instead of a mouthpiece for the small businesses association and the cops—a voice against criminalization and displacement, with the legitimacy of the mayor’s office.
What is the alternative? My city’s last progressive lib was defeated by a centrist fuck running on a campaign of “Fuck Homeless People.” In his capacity as Fire Commissioner or something he stopped the city’s not-police first response unit thing (they take 911 calls and stuff that are about homeless people and other stupid shit, instead of the police) from distributing tents and tarps. And now he’s running for mayor. Someone blew up a car in front of his house, which while funny is just free publicity for him.
And it’s not like other routes of “building power” have accomplished much, here anyways. There was a slight uptick in mutual aid organizing a couple years ago but it seems like people got bored with that. There’s been some good labor organizing. Lot of protests against the genocide in Gaza, some harm reduction orgs, but idk.
If you tried to go in alone they'd have arrested or killed you. It's not something we can do alone. There have been successful defenses of camps, either to give people time to get their stuff together and get out, or to really hold off the cops for a long time, months. It's possible. You need to add your strength to the strength of others, find an org or affiliance group or something doing camp defense. Hell, talk to folks in the camp, give them your number and tell them to call you when the pigs show up and you'll help them pack up and get out. We can fight these monsters. It's going to be long and miserable and painful, but we've won before and we'll win again. Even if they kill us all, the next generation will fight them because our ideas and ideals arise naturally from human compassion in the face of oppression. There's no end to history. There is no final victory, for them or for us. The struggle goes on. Countless millions stand behind us, holding us up, giving us examples of how to fight, and we will provide that inspiration for countless millions to come
Take heart; our goal is beautiful, and no matter how much blood they spill the pigs can't sully that. It will shine on through time and history.
It wrecks me to know that they just trash this stuff. Like, it's literally everything those people have. Fucking monsters
In some states, they are required to catalog and store items of value. One example, city gets caught throwing everything in a dump rather than sorting through valuables (trackers ftw). The city settled. Shout out to the few good lawyers
What good am I that I did nothing to stop any of it?
Those cop cars could have been about anything given the information you had at the time. When you found out, it was already over. That's not your fault!
Is there anyone you can tell besides us that this happened, preferably someone local or who works with homeless people?
When I got back, there was yellow tape everywhere and all the tents were in a pile waiting to be loaded into a garbage truck.
So they weren't even allowed to gather their belongings before they were kicked out, and then said belongings were destroyed? I'm not a lawyer, but considering the obsession with protecting property in capitalist "justice" systems, that's where I might start with getting some compensation for the displaced people if I was one. Fucking scumbag cops.
I feel like we need to start keepin lists of their home addresses. Wreck a tent city, we'll moltov your home while you're at work and kids are at school. A home for a home seems fair.
