Daily steps to building our resistance into a General Strike

2026-01-23

In the face of extreme daily brutality the folks of Minnesota have been giving the rest of the US a demonstration of how we resist rising fascism in the US. Anyone can begin taking action to build their personal and community capacity for resistance today. Depending on your location and context, only some of these will apply. Do what you can, do what makes sense in your current context. None of what follows is a blueprint but rather are suggestions to be adapted to your location.

I've broken these down into various categories. Some can start as personal actions but can then be grown into shared, community action. In fact, almost all personal resistance should likely be shared into your community which magnifies its power. Don't keep good resistance to yourself! Also, it's worth mentioning, that most of these overlap in a variety of ways.

Building/saving resources

Start saving money! Put off unneccessary travel or purchases and start a resistance fund. A part of building resistance is preparing for a long-term work stoppage, a General Strike. People will loose jobs. You may loose your job or have your hours cut. Prepare for the worst.
Start building extra storage of the physical necessities. The obvious ones: Food, medical supplies and household supplies. And remember, this is a community project. Everything we do in this effort is ultimately about increasing our capacity as a community of resistance. So have extra for others.
Start thinking about extra housing/shelter capacity on your property. It's possible, maybe even likely that as we go forward we'll need to be prepared to help house other people from our community. What room do you have to offer others that might need temporary shelter? Extra rooms, basements, garage space, yard space. All of these things can be a space for neighbors or fellow workers in need of short-term or long-term shelter.

Build neighborhood democracy

Start organizing with neighbors and fellow workers. All of us working together are the resistance and the way we do that is by getting together to discuss and plan.
Organize potluck meetings to be hosted in homes and apartments. Share food and begin planning for community needs such as self-defense, food and first-aid.
Consider your meetings as practice for organizing community democracy because that is exactly what they are. As much as we are building resistance we are building democracy.
Set a schedule and create an organizational body or bodies. For example each block might form a committee. Experiment, discuss what makes sense for your location. Doing and creating community democracy is a process. Let it evolve, modify as needed. There is no set recipe or blueprint. But be sure to be inclusive, make sure all voices are heard.
Connect your committee with others. Be in touch, face-to-face but also be sure to use available secure and private technology like Signal which is free to install and use.
A block committee might meet weekly, then come together with others in a larger, monthly neighborhood assembly. Think of it as a decentralized building up from the block, to the neighborhood to the city/town.
Another possibility is to have committees that are task/issue specific that work for the larger neighborhood assembly. Potential committees or working groups: Food Security, Medical First Aid, Defense, Transportation, Housing, Community Fund, Communications, Security, Technology

Building Community Capacity

Neighbors planning for long-term struggle should be discussing a strategy and process for building up extra reserves of daily life essentials: food, health care and first aid. Much of this can be kept decentralized in homes throughout a community. Discuss and plan for a variety of options. A mixed method for storage will likely have benefits, provide easier and quicker distribution. If a community space can also be established as a collection/distribution "store" with volunteer staff that would likely also be beneficial.
Create a process/method for increasing the reserves as well as keeping track of these reserves. Holders of reserves should report at regular meetings or via a clearly defined communication chain (email, Signal, etc). A block committee should have a spreadsheet that details where reserves are held for easy access as they are needed. Create a process for request of reserves and distribution.
Food reserves to consider for lower cost, ease of storage: bulk rolled oats, bulk dry beans, bulk rice, bulk peanuts, pasta, salt and sugar. When building food reserves consider insect/mouse proof storage.
In addition to the above mentioned supplies establish lists of available safe spaces for sheltering people. Locations of spaces and what is being offered should be detailed and inventoried. When the time comes that shelter is needed, community members need easy to access list of what is available and who to talk to to gain access to the space.
We are self-managing our community which means we need to define roles and jobs to be done. We all have different skill sets. Just as supplies and spaces need to be accessible, so too do we need to be accessible in the roles we volunteer for. Organizing is a process that builds organization. A community needs to be self aware of what this organization is. Who is doing what needs to be clear to everyone.

Digital Communications, Privacy and Security

By definition privacy starts with your personal practices. These days much of this is going to be about the digital space and data. Do an audit of the services and apps you currently use. What devices, services and apps are leaking data to state agencies like ICE. How are your daily activities being reported to those agencies? As we go forward we need to make adjustments to our assumptions about our safety and security as the larger context of state threats has shifted.
Most US-based computing devices and services are collecting, selling and reporting user data daily. Your audit should result in actionable items and changes to what you use with the intent of reducing the surveillance data and the ease of access to that data by ICE and other agencies.
While these actions can be taken individually, remember that privacy and security are ultimately a community process and practice. Your lack of precautions can harm others as your digital devices may be leaking their private information along with your own.
Consider working with others in your community to form a working group or committee dedicated to improving the privacy and security practices of community members.

Starting points that will provide immediate benefits in terms of increasing privacy by limiting data:

Neighborhood electronic communications, especially texting, should be based on Signal which offers encrypted texting, audio and video calls. This is a free app and service (you are encouraged to donate as it is costly to run). At a minimum community members should set the app up on their phones. Not only can community members text one-to-one but group chats can be created. And any group chat can also serve as a group audio or video calls. Signal is one the easiest ways to quickly enable fully private and secure digital communications between neighbors.
Adopt Proton Email for all of your work-place or neighorhood organizing. Do this as a group as full privacy with Proton Email is easiest when everyone is using Proton. The company offers a free account with options for paid accounts. Start with free account for quick assurance that you and your fellow activists are as private as possible. Like Signal, Proton Email is fully encrypted when sending/recieving email from other Proton users.
Adopt Proton for shared files as well. The free email account includes some limited storage and use of Proton Drive. This can serve for collaborating on shared spreadsheets and documents for your organizing efforts.
Once you've gotten a start with Proton for your local organizing consider switching to that service for all of your email. Many people these days are using Google's Gmail which is likely one of the worst possible choices in terms of privacy. Google's buisness model is based on the sale of user data in exchange for free services. Make it a priority to move all of your data away from Google services as soon as possible.
Related to the above, delete Google Maps and Google's Chrome browser if you have them installed on your devices. On desktop computers or laptops, switch to LibreWolf. On mobile devices switch to Brave browser.
Stop using Google search as all of your searches are logged and directly associated with your IP address. Switch to duckduckgo.com, StartPage.com or maapl.net
Both Microsoft and Apple also cooperate with Federal agencies and will turn over access to your private data when requested. The same solutions above (Signal and Proton) are recommended to replace both Apple and Microsoft's email and cloud services.

Location Tracking

It's increasingly clear that ICE is using location tracking based on mobile phones which, when turned on with an active carrier provided line, will result in a map of your daily locations. ICE and other federal agencies can and do access this location data along with call logs when they are tracking targeted individuals.

It's difficult to impossible to make your phone fully private while maintaining an active internet connection. However, it is possible to make it more difficult for government agencies to gain access.

If your phone supports eSIMs purchase a data-only eSIM from a service like KeepGo. There are many such companies that offer eSIMs. Prices range, but KeepGo offers 1 GB of data for around $3. That data does not expire (check, some does expire, some does not). Once purchased and activated you can turn off your carrier provided line that makes location/call tracking easy. When at home on wifi keep your phone in airplane mode. When away from your home wifi turn wifi off and turn on the third party eSIM data line and use that for Signal calls and texts. While this eSIM still connects you to the internet it's less trackable because it isn't the first place a government agency will look. They'll look at your carrier line/call log which should be turned off and not reporting anything.

If you need to make calls to actual phone numbers rather than Signal users you can download the MySudo app and pay for a VOIP number. Currently this has to be done through a subscription via your device app store but in the future it will be offered via the MySudo website. A MySudo VOIP number is more private and less trackable. Used in conjunction with your third party eSIM it offers a much higher level of privacy. Cost is around $5/month for 3 VOIP numbers and 200 minutes of call time.

There are other considerations when using mobile devices, apps and data. The more apps you use the more data you'll use when using your mobile data. Also, apps leak/share data data brokers which will sell/share with law enforcement and government agencies. For the best privacy, use a website instead of an app. Delete apps that are not essentual. Turn off location services entirely or, at the least, for most apps on your device.

Practicing digital privacy and security does require some effort initially to set-up new services but once that is done there's nothing to it. Given the current sharp increase in surveillance it's worth your time and not only are you protecting yourself but you're protecting anyone you communicate with. Learn more at Privacy Guides.

I don't have comments but I love email or you can find me on Mastodon.

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