The Whistles of Minneapolis

The tools of state authoritarianism are changing fast. Swarms of drones levelling Gaza and mapping European airports; “flock” street cameras and cyber surveillance webs cataloguing everyone that moves through the major cities or uses a cell phone; state-directed bot armies using deep fake video and memes to alter people’s interior psyches.

A large part of the USA’s economic growth over the last few years has been the ever-larger digital surveillance and weapons industries, with Palantir and Amazon Web Services allowing governments to create vast databases of citizens’ lives, with ominous results. Digital and AI technologies have well-begun acting as accelerants of the domination and exhaustion of workers and the Earth’s ecologies. Commentators and scholars increasingly warn of geopolitical parallels with the twentieth century’s most wicked son, fascism.

Only this time the fash are equipped with expansive digital technologies of war, policing, surveillance, and propaganda.

But anti-fascist movements have begun to adapt, inventing organic technologies as new forms of counter-power. For example, when Trump sent Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE), newly formed as a MAGA federal militia, to Minnesota to abduct, detain, and deport people of colour, organisers responded by mass 3-D printing a simple but effective technology: whistles. In Minneapolis, a longstanding hub of leftist organising, protesters wear these whistles as they take to the streets to disrupt ICE operations.

For more than a year, these same organisers and protestors have watched ICE agents on their city raids. Using encrypted cell phones to communicate to each other in Signal loops, they try to warn neighbours before the agents arrive. Thousands monitor the Signal loops for word of a raid, waiting for the moment to run out of their homes, blowing their anti-ICE whistles, so that all within earshot can try to flee the raids if they feel at risk. They are joined as community self-defence councils and more underground crews, with memberships in the tens of thousands. With some undocumented families hesitant to even leave their homes for fear of being disappeared by a federal sweep at the bus stops and outside of schools, mutual aid networks organise transportation networks to help their neighbours arrive at their workplaces and schools undetected.

The community councils have innovated on the road blockade to create what they call “filter blockades” across their neighbourhood streets, designed to allow neighbours to pass freely but prevent the passage of federal agents. Community defence crews counter-surveil federal authorities, setting up outside ICE’s headquarters at the Fort Snelling, a federal compound at the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers that flow down through the North Woods and Western prairies. One hundred and fifty years ago, the United States Army forcibly marched thousands of Dakota Peoples into a concentration camp at the fort. Hundreds of Dakota prisoners died their first winter there, murdered, frozen to death, and starved. Now, federal forces carry out new forms of domination from the fort, part of what the federal government claims as their “unorganised territory” – lands never incorporated into any state or Native American government and thus under the direct control of the presidency through the Department of the Interior.

In Minneapolis’ Whittier neighbourhood, dissenters briefly raised an autonomous zone blockade at the site of the ICE murder of Alex Pretti, a nurse turned community defender. This is the same patch of concrete that, during the George Floyd uprisings, nurtured an epicenter of intense Black Lives Matter anti-police organising. From May 2020 until more than a year later, liberationists controlled a block of the neighbourhood as a police-free zone. Along the edge of Fort Snelling, an infrastructure that was and remains, as Nick Estes has called it, an infrastructure of U.S. power to genocide Indigenous people and Dakota people, organisers with First Nations United have started a Land Back protest and prayer camp on the land that was taken from their families more than a century ago. For these liberationists, only re-territorialising the land as Indigenous Land can end the cycles of history of white nationalist federal state detention and murder that have been perpetrated on the site.

These abolitionist tactics of not letting federal agents do their work uphold and make possible liberation struggles of many kinds. As it is practiced in the streets, self-defence against ICE becomes a logic against white nationalism because ICE targets people of colour, whom they construct to be the “illegals” of the global diaspora (no one is illegal). The uprisings also express logics of opposition to capitalism, because multinational capital seeks to restrict people’s freedoms of movement and mobilisation, not least across nation-state borders, to exploit the unevenness of global labour markets created by colonialism, imperialism, and unequal exchange. As the Trump administration labels those participating “antifa”, and formally declares them members of a domestic terrorist organisation, these people become revolutionaries in the eyes of the increasingly fascist state, willing or not.

Blowing a whistle to stop ICE raids opens up a challenge to the techno-fascists. So do the very low-tech efforts to help transport and harbour people targeted by the USA federal government for deportation. Still more organic technologies like these are needed to mount a serious rejection of the fash and the truly enormous amounts of energy the digital technologies of militarism and the consumer economy now demand. AI data centres will within the decade consume as much electricity as the nation of India. They will also consume vast amounts of freshwater. All this comes in an already destabilised climate with shrinking freshwater supplies worldwide. Day Zero, the moment when a major city runs out of fresh water, is already nearly here in Mexico City, Chennai, and Tehran. Los Angeles planners are working hard to continue expanding their ever-declining water sources, building new infrastructure to draw down water from ever more distant watersheds.

Fash power is partly techno-power, raising the need for struggles to create new organic technologies to uphold life free from domination and with a collective equality between human communities and broader communities of living beings. But any ecological politics that aims to respect human life, decarbonise and detoxify economies, and stop biological extinctions, must do so by countering far-right and capitalist structures. To “melt” ICE and stop the polar ice-caps from melting are but two components of the same struggle: to degrow the planetary economy so that it will not dominate planetary life.

This article was first published in Catalan

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