Workers’ Defense Alliance is a network of working class people and autonomous councils organized on the job and in the streets to practice militant rank and file labor struggle and community self defense. We are an anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian organization committed to building and maintaining autonomous worker and tenant councils, defense bodies, and mutual aid projects. We are an anti-racist and anti-sexist network that recognizes that an injury to one is an injury to all, and that the liberation of each is bound up in the liberation of all. We set out to unmake this nightmare world we’re inheriting, and make a new one in the ashes of the old.
Resources
The Defender: Winter 2020/21
‘zine of the Workers Defense Alliance, Twin Cities, Winter 2020/21.
In this issue: We Build Solidarity, Not Pipelines • Politics Without Proud Boys • Reflections on Action Tactics • Copwatch in the Twin Cities • Recuperation, Collaborators, and Informants • Five Fascist Fuckers • Sanctuary: How I Came To Find a Home • A Powderhorn Neighbor on Solidarity • Housing and Racial Justice • A Summer of Militant Action for Housing Justice • Behind the Barricades at 18th Avenue • Frontline Fight Against Allina Workplace Retaliation • When The Man Tries to Tell You About Racism
Radio Reference for Radicals
A beginner and intermediate guide to handheld radio, tactical information networks, and communication.
Five Twin Cities Fascists
A list of five individuals Twin Cities community defenders have determined to be extremely dangerous organizers of far-right activity.
Community Defense and Security in Mutual Aid and Solidarity discussion
What We Want Now! Community Defense and Security in Mutual Aid and Solidarity (90 minute panel discussion).
Blog
Statement against violent arrests and absurd charges against participants in New Year's Eve noise demonstration
On New Year's Eve, our community gathered for a noise demonstration in downtown Minneapolis in support of prison abolition and in solidarity with incarcerated folks. Officers swarmed the scene, abruptly making violent arrests without dispersal orders. It is an abuse of power to disperse a protest without issuing such an order. Instead of ticketing or releasing folks - which is the norm - our friends and relatives were held over the holiday weekend under probable cause charges, which historically has been used by police to give extra time to justify otherwise unlawful arrests that violate everyone’s first amendment rights to protest.
Brief examples from Minneapolis' Whittier neighborhood of the upswell of organized people
Conversations during and after the Uprising led to people forming up a Whittier copwatch. In that copwatch, connections were made which helped workers get in touch with union organizers and tenants to revive tenant organizing committees and more.
What counterinsurgency tactics have you noticed from people in power?
What are some counterinsurgency tactics you've noticed this summer? What things you have seen people—especially people with clear connections to the existing power structure—do that have led to the demobilization, suppression, discrediting, intimidation, or marginalization of the movement for black lives and against police brutality? Learning and recognizing these tactics is crucial. Here are some that people named in one big thread.
Counterinsurgency and Continuing Insurgency in Minneapolis
As the summer born in flames nears its end in Minneapolis, the counterinsurgency playbook plays out much as expected. As symbolic concessions are granted all over, the material reality of racist police violence driven by propertied interests continues.