So because of my profile pic, I decided to read some of the RAFs works for the first time in years and the discussion on legality and illegality in Concept Urban Guerilla stood out to me. This section specifically:

It depends on whether communists are so stupid as to tolerate everything that is done to them, or whether they will use legality, as well as other methods, to organize illegality, instead of fetishizing one over the other.

The fate of both the Black Panther Party and Gauche Prolétarienne resulted from an incorrect understanding of the contradiction between the constitution and legal reality and the increased intensity of this contradiction when organized resistance occurs. And this incorrect understanding prevents people from seeing that the conditions of legality are changed by active resistance, and that it is therefore necessary to use legality simultaneously for political struggle and for the organization of illegality, and that it is an error to wait to be banned, as if it were a stroke of fate coming from the system, because then the banning will constitute a death blow, and the issue will be resolved.

Now let me preface this - I absolutely am not going to compare a shitposting subreddit and some journalists on twitter getting banned to the illegality of underground guerillas. This passage still made me think about the current situation and what’s going to come in the future as contradictions continue to heighten. I also want to be clear this is not meant as a call for illegal actions or a move into illegality.

But let’s be real about this, as material conditions worsen and as revolutionary movements gain steam, the state will employ harsher and harsher legal means to surpress them. Parties, news outlets and people will be illegalized. What we’re seeing right now is a precursor to this. Currently it’s mostly private capital doing it in the imperial core to keep up the veneer of legality and obfuscate the contradiction of legal reality and constitution, but even that is changing eg with the banning of the Z in Germany and prison sentences for “Russian propaganda” (see ASBmilitary stopping).

What we’re also seeing is that people are and were woefully unprepared for these changes. So many people and organizations just kinda relied on capitals and states good will to just allow them to exist in these ‘public spaces’. No contingency plans were made for most people and outlets at all. No backups, no alternatives to move to were established beforehand. I think Abby Martin said she lost some of her content permanently, because the uploads on Youtube were all she had. That just goes to show how naively confident people were that the legal reality would remain unchanged and how sure they were that they couldn’t possibly be the target of repression. That obviously was a massive tactical error. To them these bans were “a stroke of fate”, entirely unforseeable and to many and their communities this was “a death blow”. I obviously don’t want to overstate the importance of social media accounts, but in current day it would also be a mistake to take this loss too lightly.

Funnily enough this small Stalin-fetishizing subreddit was one of the only communities that established a contingency plan beforehand. So guys, good fucking job lol. MLs ahead of everyone as always.

I know this isn’t a particularly new thought or an especially coherent rant, but what I’m trying to get at here is that this situation will not somehow reverse itself. The state and capital will not undo these precedents. On the contrary, this will absolutely get worse and curiously enough, not just for communist forces but anyone opposed to the mainstream imperialist narratives. We have these alternatives like lemmy, matrix, mastodon, telegram, peertube etc and that is a massive asset to ensure a continued online presence. We need to make people, not just GZD or specifically communists, aware of the threat and get them to establish alternatives and contingency plans before the ban happens, because people are still not preparing and are still surprised when it eventually does happen. We need to push this to any content creator and community that could vaguely be in danger, so those people and spaces don’t disappear entirely once they get banned and to weaken capitals control over online discourse generally. And ofc we also need to get organizations in real life to think about urgently this before it happens, but I’m not going to talk about that for obvious reasons.