Eleanor Goldfield on Marches

April 07, 2025

Protestor at J20, Trump’s first Inauguration, 2017. Photo By Eleanor Goldfield

See her Substack piece Can We Be Honest About Marches? She says

I don’t want our banners of solidarity to be our collective death shrouds. I don’t want the genocide to end because there’s no one left to kill. I want it to end because it was stopped. I want us to get to the other side of empire, as many of us who can. I want us to care for each other in ways that show that there’s something other than this death-making machine. This too is our power, our power outside of the system. Our power to imagine, and brainstorm, and be weird and wild and creative and fluid - all the things which the system tries to beat out of us so we’re good, obedient proles. We have to build what we want to see amidst the horrors we see, and that takes a lot of imaginative power, the kind that goes beyond configuring parade routes.

This walks in parallel with our systemic power. Direct action: general strikes, targeting the centers of the death-making machine, not walking outside begging for life. This of course requires the slogging work of community building, the kind that is uncomfortable (see previous Substack post) and not Instagram material.

She refers to her previous post The Difference Between Community and Friends. I read it but it doesn't mean anything to me.

I don't see why we can't put all that protest energy into creating the conditions where society can maintain its own infrastructure without depending on that provided by governments who have sold of all their assets to private companies so they can run them into the ground and take the money to invest in AI startups, arms manufacturers and private equity funds building swanky homes for millionaires. See On Web Sites for LETS Schemes and DAOs.

Trip to King's Cross: Alice Boyd - The Sounds of King's Cross.