Minneapolis Shows Us Anarchism at Work
The trans community should look to Minneapolis as an example of how leaderless, bottom-up organizing can be more powerful than traditional politics in making change.
opinion by Emma Arcadia
What can a community do in the face of a hostile federal government? How does a group of people organize to keep each other safe under that kind of threat? For many trans people these aren’t idle questions as hostile governments take increasing interest in targeting us.
The modern movement to secure the civil rights of transgender people has largely focused on efforts that remained within the formal structure of what we traditionally think of as politics. The most accepted strategies have revolved around using court systems, elections, and lobbying to pressure governments to make good on their promises to hold all people equal under the law.
When we pursue these strategies, trans people place our trust into the hands of people who have been elevated to positions of power such as politicians, judges, and heads of large non-government organizations. These efforts have always fallen somewhat short, but the second Trump administration has shown even more starkly how insufficient working within traditional power structures can be in a regime where the rules are written and rewritten on the fly to ensure targeted groups always lose.
Under extraordinary assault by the federal government, the people of Minneapolis are showing a different way of organizing power.
Conventional wisdom would tell us that organizing must be top-down to be effective, that we need leaders and chains of command to keep everyone on task, and that the only effective way to mobilize resources to achieve complex tasks is by creating strict hierarchies within organizations. In Minnesota that conventional wisdom is proving to be wrong. Resistance to ICE in Minneapolis is leaderless, it doesn’t belong to any singular party or organization, it’s not directed by a chain of command. In Minneapolis, networks of communication have been created within and between neighborhoods. Families in hiding or decimated due to the arrest of a breadwinner can reach out to neighbors for aid. Those calls are then distributed through the broader network, and volunteers deliver what’s needed.
Community members also patrol to watch for immigration agents, passing on as much information about them as possible to the wider network. License plates and vehicles that agents use routinely get identified and distributed. Volunteers acting as dispatchers work to pass off watches from one neighborhood to the next to make it more difficult for agents to escape notice. The federal building that agents use as their primary base of operations is constantly watched by community members.
These massive, highly sophisticated efforts are organized among equals, fully voluntarily, through people’s affinity to one another.
Although ICE has targeted and killed observers, this has only increased the numbers of people taking to the streets. A leaderless movement is hard to decapitate. It’s also hard for infiltrators to damage such a movement because there are limits to the power a single individual can grab, it’s harder to recruit turncoats or pressure participants to betray their compatriots because everyone is a truly voluntary participant. The resulting resistance is flexible and responsive, able to adapt to new tactics and adopt counter-tactics as needed, without having to run such decisions through a chain of command.
This decentralized organizing structure is taking on an immense challenge. Thousands of armed paramilitary agents have been stymied and forced to change tactics over and over by this resistance. ICE has approximately twenty thousand employees at time of writing, which includes support staff. Thirteen thousand of those are sworn agents and officers. At least two thousand of those officers are currently operating in Minneapolis and the rest of Minnesota, part of a force that also includes 1000 Border Patrol agents, according to US government spokespeople. By way of comparison, the city of Minneapolis employs approximately 600 police officers. The extent of the force being sent into Minneapolis can’t be overstated. It represents a significant portion of ICE’s national labor power and dwarfs the numbers of local police, even before Border Patrol agents are factored in.
Despite these overwhelming numbers, the federal government’s assault has not broken the people of the city. JD Vance has complained about the difficulties of operating in Minneapolis while gesturing towards the specter of “far left agitators.” Greg Bovino, formerly Customs and Border Patrol Commander at Large overseeing the operations of federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, has reportedly been demoted after immigration operations in the city repeatedly garnered national attention. Prior to Bovino’s demotion he admitted that the resistance in Minneapolis has been making the federal government’s crackdown more difficult, While state and municipal officials struggle to respond to the crisis being inflicted on the people they govern, those people are making the federal efforts more difficult at every turn.
Some commentators have tried to come up with a name for this kind of decentralized, leaderless organization, calling it “neighborhoodism” or saying it doesn’t have a particular ideological structure. However this kind of radically egalitarian, horizontally organized effort has a label from political philosophy: We are seeing anarchistic organizing in action.
Anarchism is frequently dismissed as a mode of organizing power, even on the left. However, the nimble, flexible, and extraordinarily resilient networks of community helping communities in Minneapolis are a demonstration of just how practical this mode of organizing can be. For trans people, it shows in broad strokes how we might think about organizing better lives for trans people in ways that are more creative and less reliant on convincing powerful people to work on our behalf.
The specifics of how anarchistic organizing can work are different in every situation. Most of us don’t live in neighborhoods full of fellow trans people, so the specific networks in Minneapolis can’t be copied outright. The strength of the anarchist mode of organizing is that decentralized, leaderless, flexible forms of organizing can be suited to all kinds of situations. It’s an approach rather than a template, for changing how you imagine making change.
The awesome power of the state is a terrible threat for any community to exist under, but in the streets of Minneapolis there is a kind of organizing that has a place for us all, that subverts our understanding of how power is supposed to be used by regular people, and which shows that maybe we don’t need saviors, we need accomplices.
Emma Arcadia (she/her) is a labor organizer and practicing anarchist. Across her various identities she likely meets most of the NSPM-7's guidelines to be a suspect person, but you probably do too.