The Allies landed in Sicily on July 10. Within two weeks, the Grand Council of Fascism removed Mussolini; the king had him arrested; and a new government under Marshal Pietro Badoglio took over, while it pretended to continue the war alongside Germany. On September 8, Badoglio announced an armistice with the Allies and then fled south with the king, abandoning the army without orders. German divisions poured across the Alps and down the peninsula, disarmed Italian soldiers by the hundreds of thousands, shipped them to camps in the Reich, and installed a rescued Mussolini at the head of a puppet state on Lake Garda called the Italian Social Republic. From that September, the country was cut in two. The south was occupied by the Allies and governed by the king. The center and north were occupied by the Wehrmacht and the SS, policed by Mussolini’s revived Blackshirts and by a new fascist militia, the Guardia Nazionale Repubblicana, hunting Jews, communists, deserters, and anyone refusing the draft into the puppet army.

This is the world the partisans walked into. They were workers from the Fiat and Pirelli plants who had already struck once and would strike again. They were soldiers who threw away their uniforms after September 8 and took to the hills rather than report to a German train. They were young women who carried messages, weapons, and explosives in shopping bags through checkpoints because fascist police did not search them as carefully. They were peasants in the Apennines and the Alpine valleys who fed strangers because feeding them was the only honest thing left to do. They were Jews who had survived the racial laws of 1938 and now faced deportation to Auschwitz. They were anti-fascist veterans of the Spanish Civil War who already knew what it meant to fight Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler at once. They were priests in mountain parishes who hid families in their rectories. They were communists who had spent a decade in Mussolini’s prisons on the island of Ventotene and walked out in the summer of 1943 ready to organize.

By the autumn of 1943, armed bands were forming in the woods above Turin, in the Langhe, in the valleys of the Valsesia, in the Veneto foothills, in the Emilian Apennines, in Liguria, in the Marche, in Friuli. They had no central command. They had different politics. Communist formations took the name Garibaldi Brigades, after Giuseppe Garibaldi, the nineteenth-century revolutionary whose volunteers had unified Italy from below. The Partito d’Azione, a republican and socialist party with roots in the clandestine anti-fascist network Giustizia e Libertà, fielded the Giustizia e Libertà Brigades. Socialists organized the Matteotti Brigades, named for Giacomo Matteotti, the socialist deputy Mussolini’s squads murdered in 1924. Catholic partisans formed their own units. There were autonomous bands led by former army officers who wanted nothing to do with party politics. There were anarchist groups in Carrara and the Lunigiana who answered to no one.

These formations did not readily trust each other. The communists were the largest and best organized. The monarchist officers feared a revolution if the communists won the war. The Action Party wanted a republic and a social transformation, but had no mass base. The Catholics wanted the church protected and the king gone. The anarchists wanted the state gone entirely. What held them together was the certainty that the Germans had to be driven out and the fascists destroyed, and that they could not do either alone.

In September 1943, the anti-fascist parties in Rome formed the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, the National Liberation Committee, joining communists, socialists, the Action Party, Christian Democrats, liberals, and the Democratic Labour Party. A parallel body, the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale Alta Italia, was established in Milan to coordinate the resistance in the German-occupied north, where the actual fighting took place. Through the winter of 1943 and the spring of 1944, the partisan war grew. Rastrellamenti, the German and fascist sweeps through partisan country, burned villages and shot hostages. Marzabotto, Sant’Anna di Stazzema, and the Ardeatine Caves outside Rome, where the SS murdered 335 civilians in March 1944 in reprisal for a partisan bombing on Via Rasella, all belong to this winter and spring. Yet the bands kept growing because every reprisal recruited for them.

On June 9, 1944, in Rome, four days after the Allies entered the city, the leaders of the resistance signed the founding protocol of the Corpo Volontari della Libertà, the Corps of Volunteers of Freedom. It was the unified military command of the partisan war in the north. Communists, Action Party members, socialists, Christian Democrats, liberals, and autonomous formations all placed their brigades under a single general command based in Milan. Luigi Longo, a communist who had fought in Spain with the International Brigades, became deputy commander. Ferruccio Parri of the Action Party served alongside him. Raffaele Cadorna, a career army general parachuted in by the Allies, was given the formal command. The arrangement was uneasy and stayed uneasy. The communists distrusted Cadorna. Cadorna distrusted the communists. Parri tried to keep the structure functional. It functioned.

By the end of 1944, the Corpo Volontari della Libertà commanded roughly 100,000 partisans. By April 1945, the figure was somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000. They liberated Bologna, Genoa, Milan, and Turin in the last week of April 1945, in most cases before the Allied armies arrived. On April 25, the date Italy still marks as the Festa della Liberazione, the general command in Milan ordered the insurrection. Mussolini was captured by partisans of the 52nd Garibaldi Brigade near Lake Como on April 27 as he tried to flee to Switzerland in a German convoy. He was shot the next day, along with his mistress, Claretta Petacci, and a group of fascist officials, and their bodies were taken to Piazzale Loreto in Milan, the same square where the SS had displayed the corpses of fifteen executed partisans the previous August.

The unity was always provisional. Within months of liberation, the wartime coalition began to break. The Cold War split the parties. The Christian Democrats, backed by the United States and the Vatican, governed Italy continuously from 1946 to 1992. Communist and socialist partisans were pushed out of police forces and ministries. Former fascists were quietly retained in the judiciary, the prefectures, and the secret services under the 1946 Togliatti amnesty, named for the communist leader who signed it in the name of national reconciliation and lived to see his own comrades prosecuted while their former torturers went free. The neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano was founded in 1946 by veterans of Mussolini’s puppet republic and sat in parliament without interruption. Its political descendants now govern the country.

The partisan tradition did not disappear. The Associazione Nazionale Partigiani d’Italia, the National Association of Italian Partisans, was founded in 1944 and still exists, organizing the April 25 marches every year, fighting the rehabilitation of fascism in textbooks and street names, defending the constitution that the resistance wrote. Local sections function in nearly every Italian city. They have been joined over the decades by anti-fascist social centers, by squatted spaces in Rome, Milan, Bologna, and Turin, by institutions like the Museo Storico della Liberazione in Rome, housed in the building where the Nazi SS tortured partisans and now a working site of resistance memory, and by neighborhood committees who understand that the work the partisans began in 1943 was never finished. When Giorgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia, a party with a direct genealogical line to the Movimento Sociale Italiano, took power in 2022, the anti-fascist networks in the piazzas were the same networks that had defended migrants from CasaPound attacks the year before and the year before that.

The Italian resistance was not a clean story. Partisans killed collaborators, sometimes after the war was already over. Communists settled scores with non-communists. Non-communists settled scores with communists. Women who fought in the brigades were demobilized in 1945 and told to go home, and most of the official histories ignored them until feminists in the 1970s went back into the archives and the oral testimonies and pulled their names out. Carla Capponi, Marisa Musu, Tina Anselmi, Joyce Lussu, Iris Versari, Irma Bandiera, Ada Gobetti, and thousands of others fought and organized, were written out, and then written back in. The Lager survivors who came home were often told to stop talking about it. The Roma and Sinti partisans were barely counted at all.

What the Corpo Volontari della Libertà established on June 9, 1944, was that the parties of the Italian left and center could fight a war together against fascism without dissolving into each other. That has remained the working assumption of Italian anti-fascism since. The constitution of 1948, drafted by former partisans across the political spectrum, declares Italy a democratic republic founded on labor and prohibits the reorganization of the fascist party. Both clauses are under attack now from a government whose ministers lay wreaths at the graves of Mussolini’s officers.

The bands in the Apennines and the Alps in the winter of 1943 did not know whether they would win. They knew the alternative. Workers in Sesto San Giovanni still walk to the monuments on April 25. Pensioners who were children when the partisans came down out of the hills still tell the story to their grandchildren. Bella Ciao, the song the Garibaldi Brigades sang, is now sung in Kurdish, Arabic, and Ukrainian in the streets of cities where people are again fighting against regimes that call themselves nationalist and act like Mussolini’s.

You can listen to a recording of the partisan version.

The post Corpo Volontari della Libertà founded on this day, June 9 1944 appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless

On January 11, a new state law shortened the workweek for women and children from 56 to 54 hours. The mill owners, led by William Wood of American Woolen, responded by cutting wages proportionally. For a worker already earning around nine dollars a week, the loss of two hours’ pay meant losing several loaves of bread. When Polish women weavers at the Everett Mill opened their pay envelopes on January 11 and saw the shortage, they stopped their looms and walked out. The next day, Italian workers at the Wood Mill did the same, shouting through the spinning rooms in the languages of every floor. Within a week, more than twenty thousand workers were on strike.

This was not supposed to happen. The American Federation of Labor, led by Samuel Gompers, had spent decades arguing that immigrant workers, women, and children could not be organized. The AFL organized skilled craftsmen, mostly white, mostly native-born, and treated the unskilled mill workforce as beneath the project of trade unionism. Gompers called the Lawrence strike a “revolution,” and he did not mean it kindly.

The union that did show up was the Industrial Workers of the World, the IWW, founded in Chicago in 1905 on the principle that all workers belonged in one big union regardless of trade, sex, race, or nationality. The IWW sent organizers Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, both fluent in multiple languages, both committed to letting the strikers run their own strike. Ettor and Giovannitti helped the workers build a strike committee with delegates from every nationality, so that every meeting was translated into more than a dozen languages and every decision was made by the workers themselves. The committee organized soup kitchens, relief funds, and a system to send strikers’ children to sympathetic families in New York and other cities, both to feed the children and to make the strike visible to the rest of the country.

The mill owners called in the state militia. Lawrence filled with armed soldiers, many of them Harvard students who had been given militia commissions. A young Syrian striker named John Ramy was bayoneted to death. A woman named Anna LoPizzo was shot during a picket line confrontation on January 29. The police arrested Ettor and Giovannitti for her murder, even though both men had been miles away addressing a meeting when she was killed. The arrests were meant to break the strike’s leadership. Instead, the IWW sent Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn to take over. Flynn was twenty-one years old, had been organizing since she was sixteen, and became one of the central figures of the strike.

Flynn focused on the women workers, who made up the majority of the strikers and who carried the strike on the picket lines while their husbands and brothers, where they had them, watched the children. She held meetings for women only, where they could speak without deferring to men, and helped organize the children’s exodus that drew national attention. When Lawrence police attacked a group of mothers and children at the train station on February 24, clubbing women and dragging children away, the photographs and accounts that ran in newspapers across the country broke the mill owners’ public support. Congress opened hearings. In March, American Woolen capitulated, and the rest of the Lawrence mills followed. Workers won raises, overtime pay, and amnesty for strikers. Ettor and Giovannitti were eventually acquitted after a second wave of strikes in their defense.

The phrase “bread and roses” entered the strike’s memory through this struggle, though its exact path is tangled. James Oppenheim published a poem titled “Bread and Roses” in The American Magazine in December 1911, a month before the strike began. The poem credited the line “Bread for all, and Roses too” to “a slogan of the women in the West.” Rose Schneiderman, a Polish Jewish garment worker, socialist, and organizer for the Women’s Trade Union League, had been using a version of the phrase in her 1911 speeches, telling audiences that “the worker must have bread, but she must have roses, too.” Schneiderman had organized in the same shops and the same industry that produced the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 1911, in which 146 garment workers, most of them young immigrant women, were killed in New York because the factory doors had been locked from the outside. She spent the rest of her life making the case that survival was not enough.

Bread and Roses

As we come marching, marching, in the beauty of the day,
A million darkened kitchens, a thousand mill-lofts gray
Are touched with all the radiance that a sudden sun discloses,
For the people hear us singing, “Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.”

As we come marching, marching, we battle, too, for men—
For they are women’s children and we mother them again.
Our days shall not be sweated from birth until life closes—
Hearts starve as well as bodies: Give us Bread, but give us Roses.

As we come marching, marching, unnumbered women dead
Go crying through our singing their ancient song of Bread;
Small art and love and beauty their trudging spirits knew—
Yes, it is Bread we fight for—but we fight for Roses, too.

As we come marching, marching, we bring the Greater Days—
The rising of the women means the rising of the race.
No more the drudge and idler—ten that toil where one reposes—
But a sharing of life’s glories: Bread and Roses, Bread and Roses.

After Lawrence, the phrase attached itself to the strike in the public imagination, and within a few years writers were describing strikers carrying banners that read “We Want Bread and Roses Too.” Whether any such banner actually appeared on the Lawrence picket lines is unclear. What is documented is what strikers carried when they paraded through New York City: signs that read “They Asked for Bread — They Received Bayonets” and “We Came from Lawrence to Find a Home.” Workers were demanding wages that would let them eat, and they were demanding the time and dignity to be more than machines. The mill owners understood this. William Wood and his peers had built a system that extracted not only labor but life expectancy, and the strikers were saying out loud that they would not accept the trade.

Oppenheim’s poem was set to music multiple times, and the song has been sung on picket lines and at memorials ever since. Here is Utah Phillips’ version. Schneiderman went on to help shape the New Deal, advising Franklin Roosevelt and continuing to organize garment workers through the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn helped found the American Civil Liberties Union, was later expelled from it during the Cold War for her membership in the Communist Party, and died in 1964 having spent more than fifty years in the labor movement. The IWW itself was broken by the federal government during the First World War, when the Wilson administration prosecuted IWW leaders under the Espionage Act for opposing the draft and the war. Big Bill Haywood, facing a twenty-year sentence, fled to the Soviet Union and died there in 1928.

The IWW did not disappear. The Industrial Workers of the World still exists, organizing in workplaces across multiple continents, including through the Bradford Industrial Workers of the World Union, the Bristol Industrial Workers of the World, the Edinburgh Industrial Workers of the World, and the Guildford Industrial Workers of the World Group. These are smaller than the IWW of 1912 in raw numbers, but the principle is the same: all workers, regardless of nationality or status, in one union.

The Bread and Roses tradition runs through every part of the contemporary labor movement that refuses to separate material demands from human ones. It runs through care workers organizing for both higher wages and the time to do their work well, as with the Bristol Care Workers Network. It runs through sex worker organizing that insists on labor recognition and bodily autonomy at the same time, as with Class Whorefare: The Radical Sex Workers Collective. It runs through the new wave of cultural and service worker unions, including Comic Book Workers United and Doughnut Workers United, where workers are organizing not only for pay but for the time, respect, and creative control that turn a job into a life. It runs through IWW-organized workplaces like Buffalo Organizers United and through labor solidarity organizing like the Boston Labor Solidarity Committee, and through international formations like the Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement.

The contradictions in the Bread and Roses tradition are worth naming. The Lawrence strike was won partly because the mill owners feared that the immigrant workforce they had imported precisely because they thought it could not organize was now organizing across every language. The AFL spent the years after Lawrence trying to rebuild a labor movement that excluded the workers who had just won the decade’s most visible labor victory. Schneiderman herself, late in her life, supported wartime restrictions and immigration policies that contradicted her earlier internationalism. The IWW’s refusal to sign contracts, which kept it ideologically pure, also made it hard for the union to consolidate gains, and many Lawrence workers saw their wage increases eroded within a few years. The mill owners eventually moved production south to escape the unionized northeast, and then overseas to escape the unionized south, and global apparel corporations now run the same labor relations in garment factories in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and Honduras, where workers continue to organize and continue to be killed.

The phrase itself has been used by people who would have horrified its originators. American politicians from both major parties have invoked “bread and roses” in speeches that strip out the socialism, the strike, the dead Syrian boy, and the bayonets. This is what happens to the language of movements when those movements win enough to be respectable. The work of remembering Lawrence accurately, of naming Anna LoPizzo and John Ramy and Rose Schneiderman and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, of pointing to the IWW locals still meeting in Bradford and Bristol and Edinburgh, is part of refusing to let the slogan be hollowed out.

The women who walked out of the Everett Mill on January 11, 1912, did not have a plan beyond the next shift. They had pay envelopes that were short, hungry children at home, and the example of every other workforce in Lawrence ready to walk with them. What they built in the next two months, with translators, soup kitchens, and a delegate from every nationality, is the same thing that workers build now in warehouses, hospitals, doughnut shops, comic book studios, and care homes. Bread, and roses, and the union that gets both.

We covered the Bread and Roses Strike in depth on Resistance in Focus. Listen to the episode here.

The post Bread and Roses appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless

Political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s research suggests that 3.5% of the population taking action is enough to force serious political change, which works out to 11 million people in the U.S. GSUS built the Strike Card to track commitments toward that number. Signers can submit online, by mail, or in person at community events, protests, and rallies. The count now stands at nearly 450,000, growing month over month, across geography and without a central institution holding it together.

On the ground, one of the most concrete things their chapters are running right now is Feeding the Fight — mutual aid events built around the principle of solidarity, not charity.  Events are coming up this month in Connecticut, Chattanooga, Kalamazoo, and Grand Rapids. If you want to bring this model to your area, GSUS will send you an organizing toolkit when you register your event.

Alongside the chapter work, GSUS runs ongoing political education nationally — onboarding new members, training chapter facilitators, and building out teams focused on strategy, outreach, media, and community support. That political education work recently produced Liberation, Not Reform, a panel discussion series examining why reform falls short and what movements are building instead.

Support General Strike U.S. through ARG’s Financial Solidarity Project at radical-guide.com/general-strike-u-s/.

The post What General Strike U.S. Is Building Right Now appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless

Sacramento Homeless Union is a local chapter of the National Union of the Homeless, founded in 1985, when federal housing cuts sharply increased homelessness. At its height, the NUH counted roughly 15,000 members across 20 city unions before it dissolved in 1993. In 2019, the original founders went to Washington, D.C., with the Poor People’s Campaign to rebuild it. Crystal Sanchez was in that room. She founded the Sacramento chapter from her own experience on Stockton Boulevard, serves on the NUH executive board, and co-founded Sacramento S.O.U.P., Solidarity Of Unhoused Peoples. This is a union of unhoused and formerly unhoused people organizing alongside their own community for dignity, safety, and systemic change.

They gather and distribute food, clothing, blankets, hygiene supplies, and storm protection to folks living on the streets of Sacramento. Past that, most of their effort goes into helping people move through the systems built to wear them down. Their support request form maps the range: shelter and housing pathways; applying for CalWORKs, food stamps, Medi-Cal, and Social Security; behavioral health and substance use referrals; school enrollment; resume building and job search; homeless verification; case management and life skills; legal help, citation defense, and domestic violence support; accessing rent, utility, and DMV assistance; emergency response; sorting out City and County concerns; and community dispute resolution.

Their mission says it plainly. They commit their lives to ending homelessness and all poverty, and to the human right to Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, for social and economic justice for all. They pledge to end every form of exploitation, racism, sexism, and abuse. As they put it, true solidarity demands that we create not only the new society but also the new human being.

Mutual aid is people meeting each other’s needs directly, sharing what they have, and taking responsibility for one another. It runs on trust and cooperation among equals. Sacramento Homeless Union has consistently practiced that, building real relationships with the people they organize alongside. We are honored to stand with them again.

The post Mutual Aid General Fund Recipient – May 2026: Sacramento Homeless Union appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless

In the late 1950s and through the 1960s, Caribbean immigrants settled in working-class neighborhoods across Britain. Brixton and Notting Hill. Handsworth in Birmingham. St Paul’s in Bristol. The East End of London. They brought ska and rocksteady with them, and they brought the whole world that surrounded that music. The sound systems set up in front rooms, back gardens, and at house parties became the gathering places where you went if you wanted to hear what was actually new. The kids in those neighborhoods grew up around it. Caribbean kids and white working-class kids on the same blocks, walking the same streets, going to the same schools. They danced to the music. They learned the style.

The look came together from the rude boys: the sharp edge, the attention to how you carried yourself, the insistence that being poor did not mean looking poor. From the British working-class side came the haircut, cropped short for the factory floor and the dock, and the work boots originally made for the same kinds of jobs. The shirts were Ben Sherman, Brutus, and Fred Perry. Fitted button-downs designed to look correct on a body that worked for a living. The trousers were Sta-Prest, sharp and creased. They called themselves skinheads, after the haircut.

What came next is harder to tell quickly because it happened slowly, in the cracks. By the late 1970s, the original generation that had built the scene was aging out, and the British economy was getting worse. Unemployment was climbing. The cities that had held that cross-cultural working-class culture were also the cities where racial tensions were being deliberately stoked by politicians and tabloids. A new generation of kids was coming of age in a harsher world, and a new strand of music called Oi! was emerging to give them a voice. Oi! was working-class punk, angrier than the art-school punk that had come out of the King’s Road. Some of the best Oi! bands were committed anti-fascists. Others were ambivalent. A few drifted toward something darker.

The National Front, a far-right, neo-Nazi political party in the United Kingdom, had been trying for years to build a youth wing and had been failing at it in straightforward political ways. What they noticed about Oi! and the harder edge of the skinhead scene was that it already contained what they couldn’t manufacture on their own: angry young white men with a shared aesthetic and a strong in-group identity. The work of building a subculture was already done. The far-right just needed to walk in. So they started showing up at shows. They started recruiting at the edges. Their literature talked about British jobs for British workers. Their rallies blamed immigrants for unemployment, blamed Jews for finance, and blamed Black communities for crime. It was the same racist story fascists have always sold.

It was a seduction. It worked on a minority of the scene, but it worked thoroughly enough to corrupt the public image of the whole thing. By the mid-1980s, the tabloid press had compressed everything into a single picture. Skinhead meant Nazi skinhead. The Jamaican-British roots, the cross-cultural origins, the Black skinheads who had been there since the beginning, all of it disappeared from the public story. If you told someone you liked ska or wore the boots, you had to explain yourself. A scene that had been built on cross-cultural solidarity got reframed in public memory as the opposite of what it had actually been.

The people inside the scene knew what had been done. They organized to take it back. What had happened to the British scene was happening to skinhead scenes everywhere the subculture had spread. Far-right groups in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States had picked up what the National Front discovered in London and were running it themselves. The venues that had once belonged to the scene were becoming contested ground. The shows where Black and white kids had once stood together were turning into places anti-racist skinheads had to fight to attend. The public image of the whole subculture, in country after country, was being reshaped by people who had never built it and did not belong inside it.

From the early 1980s, groups like the Redskins and Red Action in the UK and Red Warriors in France were building explicitly left-wing anti-fascist formations inside the skinhead and punk scenes. Their politics were explicit: socialist, communist, anarchist. They organized against far-right groups in venues and neighborhoods, published zines, and built networks across borders. The work set a template that traveled.

In Minneapolis, a multiracial crew of teenagers called the Baldies was building something similar from the ground up. They shaved their heads, listened to punk and ska, and fought Nazi skinheads who were trying to claim the same streets and venues. By 1989, they had declared Minneapolis a Nazi-free zone and put the word out to anti-racist crews across the Midwest to come organize. That network eventually became Anti-Racist Action (ARA), which spread across North America with a first principle that came straight from the streets: we go where they go.

In New York, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice (SHARP) was formed in 1987. The name said everything the organization needed to say. If you wore the patch, you were saying out loud that the scene was not theirs. The original culture had been built across racial lines, and you were not going to let anyone walk in and rewrite it.

The connections between the American and European scenes ran in both directions. In 1989, Roddy Moreno of the Welsh Oi! band The Oppressed visited New York and connected with SHARP members, tightening the link between anti-fascist skinhead organizing on both sides of the Atlantic. The people doing this work were in contact across borders through touring bands, through zines, through the informal networks that hold subcultures together.

Red and Anarchist Skinheads (RASH) formed in New York City on January 1, 1993. The founding crew explicitly modeled itself on European groups. Red Action, Red Warriors, and others. RASH wanted to do what SHARP had built, with more explicit politics: anarchist, communist, working-class internationalist. When RASH chapters spread internationally. They were connecting with networks that had been doing this work for over a decade, and formalizing that connection into a shared name and set of commitments.

The people involved often moved between ARA, SHARP, and RASH because the work was the same work in different forms. The music scene was one front. The street was another. The everyday neighborhoods where fascists were actually trying to build their base were where most of the fighting happened.

None of it was new, either. People had been doing this work for as long as fascism had existed.

In October 1936, Oswald Mosley tried to march his British Union of Fascists through the East End of London. The route deliberately ran through Jewish neighborhoods. The police were prepared to clear the way for him. What happened instead is what people in the East End still talk about. Tens of thousands of people came out into the streets. Jewish dockworkers, Irish laborers, anti-fascist veterans, Communist Party organizers, anarchists, women, children, and ordinary residents of Stepney and Whitechapel. They built barricades. They tore up paving stones. They fought the police, who were there to escort the fascists, and they held the streets for hours. Mosley never marched.

The Battle of Cable Street didn’t end fascism in Britain. It established a precedent that every subsequent generation of British anti-fascists has returned to. That ordinary people, organized on their own streets, could refuse. The state would not protect them from fascists and might actively work against them. The protection had to come from each other.

The mural in Shadwell commemorating that day is still there. New generations stand before it and learn what happened on those streets in 1936. It’s a way of keeping the memory in living circulation, refusing to let what was won be quietly forgotten.

What runs from Cable Street to SHARP to RASH to Anti-Racist Action to the groups doing this work today is a single understanding. Fascism doesn’t arrive from outside the culture. It moves through the culture, through the neighborhoods, through the everyday spaces where people form their sense of who they are and who they belong with. Defending those spaces is the work. It looked like a street barricade in 1936. It looked like a record label printing anti-fascist songs in 1985. It has looked like a SHARP patch on a denim jacket. It has looked like a mural that refuses to be painted over. It has looked like a group of kids at a show deciding together that someone with the wrong tattoos does not get to stand among them.

The form changes constantly. The work is the same.

It’s still happening. Kirklees Anti-Fascist Assembly is doing it in Yorkshire. Anti-Fascists of the Seven Hills is doing it in Richmond, Virginia. The Canadian Anti-Racism Education and Research Society is doing it in Vancouver, keeping the documentation alive so that the next generation of organizers does not have to start from scratch.

The spaces where community forms, the shows you go to, the neighborhoods you live in, the subcultures you build identity inside, the music you love, those have always been political terrain. The people who understood that, in every generation, organized to defend them. They were people like you, in their own time, who saw something worth defending and decided to defend it.

The organizing described here was real and it mattered. It also had real internal contradictions. Groups that fought Nazi skinheads at shows were often slower to address the sexism and homophobia inside their own circles. The women in those scenes pushed back, and that reckoning was part of the work too. Defending space from fascists while tolerating other forms of harm inside that space is not a complete politics.

Anti-fascist organizing takes many forms, and none of the groups named here should be treated as a finished model. The work lives in more places than any of them: in how communities are built, in who gets heard and protected, in the daily refusal to let harm go unnamed. Recognizing it when it’s already in front of you is where it starts.

Follow Ideas, Not People

The post The Scene Was Never Just a Scene appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless

this month (May 2026). Sixteen pages. Three threat categories: narcoterrorists and transnational gangs, legacy Islamist terrorists, and “violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” The document calls for “rapid identification and neutralization” of these groups. The logic behind it dates back to before the FBI.

The federal government has been naming anarchists as threats since the Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903, which barred anarchists from entering the United States and authorized their deportation. That was the first time the government put the target category in writing. It would not be the last.

From 1956 to 1971, the FBI ran COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program). Its formal mandate was to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize” organizations the Bureau considered subversive.

COINTELPRO targeted the Communist Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panther Party, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and Martin Luther King Jr. personally. The FBI designated King “the most dangerous Negro in America” in 1964. He received the Nobel Peace Prize that same year.

Neutralization was a technical term. It did not mean arrest. It meant the organized disruption of a group’s capacity to function, by whatever means were available, whether or not individual members were ever charged. Anonymous letters were sent to members’ families, employers, and allies to destroy reputations. Forged correspondence between organizations to manufacture distrust and internal conflict. Paid informants inside organizations, gathering information and, in some cases, inciting illegal activity that could then be prosecuted. Raids coordinated with local police. In the most documented cases, direct coordination with local law enforcement in the murder of movement leaders. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark were killed in a pre-dawn FBI-coordinated raid in Chicago on December 4, 1969. Hampton was 21. Clark was 22.

Most of the people targeted by COINTELPRO were never charged with anything. They lost jobs, housing, relationships, and organizing capacity. The program fragmented the Black Panther Party, tore apart the Civil Rights Movement, and disrupted the possibility of a sustained radical left in the United States for a generation. It did most of that without a single prosecution.

COINTELPRO was exposed in 1971 when activists broke into an FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania, and took classified documents. Congressional investigation followed. The Church Committee documented the full scope. The FBI was ordered to officially end the program.

Despite the end of COINTELPRO, the legal framework for targeting activists expanded. The Patriot Act, passed in 2001, gave the government broad authority to surveil Americans with limited judicial oversight. The FISA courts, formalized through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 and significantly expanded after 2001, allowed intelligence agencies to monitor communications in secret. Informant programs seeded organizing spaces with paid government agents. The material support statutes, strengthened through the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act in 1996 and expanded again after 9/11, made it a federal crime to provide assistance—however loosely defined—to anyone the government designated as a terrorist. These tools were built across administrations of both parties. 

The 2026 strategy updates the list and gives it national security authority. Understanding who gets on that list requires looking at who has always been left off it.

The Ku Klux Klan has conducted organized political terror against Black communities for 160 years. A federal grand jury declared the Klan a terrorist organization in 1870. The FBI has investigated Klan violence since 1918. Over a million people signed petitions in 2020 demanding a federal terrorist designation.

There is no federal domestic terrorism statute. No domestic group can be formally designated under the legal frameworks used for foreign organizations. This gap has persisted through administrations of both parties. The current administration did not propose closing it. It instead used executive authority to designate antifa, the shorthand for anti-fascist organizing, leaving the Klan’s status exactly as it was.

In 2020, Trump promised to designate the KKK as a terrorist organization alongside antifa. He followed through on one of those promises.

The Klan’s violence has served the interests of landowners, political machines, and labor suppression for a century and a half. It has reinforced state power in most of the regions where it operates. Antifascism works differently. So does mutual aid, tenant organizing, and deportation resistance. Organizing that builds collective capacity outside state authority poses a political threat, regardless of the label under which it operates. 

PBS NewsHour reported that the strategy omits right-wing extremism entirely. Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have carried out 152 attacks in the United States and killed 112 people. Left-wing extremists carried out 35 attacks and killed 13. These numbers come from the government’s own research. The 2026 Counterterrorism Strategy ignores them.

The Biden administration designated white supremacy as the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat in 2023. The Counterterrorism Strategy quietly reverses that without saying so.

The administration has spent the last 16 months actively protecting organized right-wing violence. On January 20, 2025, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people convicted or charged in connection with the January 6 attack, including Proud Boys leaders Tarrio, Biggs, Nordean, Pezzola, and Rehl. In April 2026, the DOJ moved to vacate the seditious conspiracy convictions of Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and the remaining Proud Boys leaders convicted for planning and executing the assault on the Capitol. In 2021, Canada designated the Proud Boys a terrorist organization. New Zealand followed. The United States has not.

The document’s operational language, the section that allocates resources and directs investigators, identifies “rapid identification and neutralization of violent secular political groups whose ideology is anti-American, radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.”

The document reaches for a specific justification. It cites “the assassination of Charlie Kirk by a radical who espoused extreme transgender ideologies.” Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University in September 2025. The accused shooter had a transgender partner. Investigators and journalists who covered the case noted the connection was speculative. The administration built it into the strategic framework anyway.

Opposing the administration’s policies on gender is now part of the definition of what makes a group a national security priority. The document does not say “antifascist.” It says “radically pro-transgender, and anarchist.” Anyone organizing against deportations, against detention, or against the criminalization of trans people is included in that language. The document does not need to name you specifically. It was written so it doesn’t have to.

Building the Precedent: Prairieland

A strategy document that names new targets needs legal infrastructure to back it up. In the months before the administration released the 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy, the DOJ was building that infrastructure through a single case.

When the administration designated antifa as a domestic terrorist organization in September 2025, the designation had no direct legal force. There is no federal domestic terrorism statute, so it carries no formal enforcement mechanism on its own. What it did was signal to federal prosecutors which cases to prioritize and how to frame them. The Prairieland prosecution was the test of whether that framing would hold up in court.

On July 4, 2025, a group of protesters gathered outside the Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, an ICE detention facility. They planned a noise demonstration. Defense attorney Xavier de Janon described it: “What people do outside is just literally noise. The purpose is to get people inside to remember that they’re not forgotten.” They brought fireworks, spray paint, and a megaphone.

Benjamin Song, a former Marine Corps reservist in the group, also brought an AR-15-style rifle. When police arrived, Song opened fire and shot an officer in the neck. Song was convicted of attempted murder and faces a minimum of 20 years.

The prosecution’s primary interest was the eight other people present. None of them fired a weapon. None of them had planned the shooting. Several had no idea it was coming. The government’s theory was that they were all liable anyway.

The material support statute was the vehicle. Under that statute, prosecutors need not prove terrorist intent. They only need to show that a defendant assisted someone who committed a federal crime. Song’s shooting was a federal crime. Everyone present at the protest was potentially liable for having been there.

All eight were convicted in March 2026 of providing material support to terrorists. What the prosecution used to establish that material support: wearing black clothing at the protest, using the Signal messaging app, and carrying anarchist literature. The prosecution’s antifa expert, Kyle Shideler, is director of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington think tank the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated an anti-Muslim hate group. He helped write the definition of antifa used in the indictment. Under cross-examination, he acknowledged that nowhere in the Signal chats did anyone mention antifa, discuss harming people, or plan property damage, and that everything the defendants did was consistent with a noise demonstration up until the rifle fire. Sentencing is scheduled for June 18, 2026. Seven of the eight face between 10 and 60 years each. One faces up to 40 years.

Former DOJ counsel Tom Brzozowski described what was actually being built: “They’re trying to kind of concentrate all that and distill it into this working definition of antifa and get that next to a terrorism-related charge” to signal enforcement intent. The antifa label barely appeared in the actual trial. It came up once across dozens of pages of jury instructions. Judge Mark Pittman questioned the prosecution directly: “Whether it’s antifa or the Methodist Women’s Auxiliary of Weatherford, why does it matter?” The government said it was prosecuting conduct. Washington sent top DOJ officials to headline the press releases anyway.

The convictions came in March 2026. The 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy was released two months later. The strategy now directs every relevant federal agency toward the target category this verdict established. Showing up to a protest where someone else commits violence, communicating over Signal, wearing black, carrying political literature: these are prosecutable as terrorism support, confirmed by a federal jury, available as precedent.

The Proud Boys stormed the Capitol. Pardoned. The Oath Keepers planned and executed seditious conspiracy. Convictions being vacated. 

And the people outside a detention center with a megaphone? Convicted terrorists awaiting sentencing.

What Neutralization Means Now

What follows the Prairieland verdict is the surveillance of activists and silencing of dissent under the thin guise of national security. As Brzozowski explained, Trump’s 2025 executive order directed agencies to investigate “all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies.” That investigation runs outside the public view. “That’s probably ongoing as we speak,” he said. “None of that is going to show up as a high-profile federal criminal case.”

Agencies that previously needed justification to surveil an activist group now have a national strategic document naming their targets as priority threats. This is a resource allocation document. It tells federal investigators where to focus and what legal framework supports the attention.

Signal encryption protects message content. Metadata showing who is communicating with whom is accessible through legal process. Political literature in your bag is on record as terrorism evidence. At a demonstration where one participant crosses a legal line, everyone else who was present, who communicated with participants beforehand, or who provided food, medical supplies, or legal support is within reach of the material support charge.

The investigation itself is the disruption. Knowing a federal informant may be present changes how people communicate and who they trust. That was the intended effect in 1969. It is the intended effect now.

The 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy says operations will be “apolitical” and will not target Americans who “simply disagree.” There is no enforcement mechanism attached to that promise. There is no legal definition of what separates “simply disagreeing” from being a violent secular extremist who is radically pro-transgender and anarchist. That line gets drawn by investigators and prosecutors working under a document that tells them antifascists, trans organizers, and anarchists are a priority national security threat.

The state does not target organizing because it is violent. It targets organizing because of the threat it poses to entrenched authority. The 2026 strategy is that logic made into official policy, but the logic predates the document by over a century.

The state deploys security language against political threats because security language ends debate. You cannot negotiate with terrorism. Calling antifascists and trans organizers terrorists removes them from the political conversation entirely. The 2026 strategy does not need to prove these groups are more dangerous than armed white supremacist networks. It needs the designation in place. The danger being managed is political, not physical.

The 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy did not arrive in isolation. Read alongside Project 2025 and its 2026 rebranding as the Golden Age agenda, the Big Beautiful Bill, and the Supreme Court’s April 2026 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, a coordinated direction becomes visible. These are not separate policy decisions. They form a coordinated effort to concentrate power, eliminate opposition, and remove the legal mechanisms that would allow communities to fight back. This is what the rise of fascism looks like in the United States.

Tracking the Rise of Fascism in the U.S.

ARG has been tracking this build since before it had a name. The pattern became visible in stages, and each stage confirmed what the previous one suggested.

In November 2024, our Silencing Dissent podcast episode covered the shared authoritarian playbook: surveillance, infiltration, and reputational destruction. We traced it from COINTELPRO through the post-9/11 legal architecture, including the Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project precedent that made association with a designated group prosecutable even absent violence. We said those techniques were active. What we were watching, without yet having the document to prove it, was the construction of a legal and institutional framework designed to contain organized opposition.

The June 2025 analysis of how political labels get weaponized showed the next layer. Collapsing every form of opposition into a single imagined threat is how that framework justifies itself publicly. The right, the center, and liberal institutions all participate in this collapse, each for its own reasons. The 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy is a national security document with federal enforcement authority behind it.

The December 2024 deportation resistance work covered the ground-level reality: what community organizing against ICE enforcement looks like, what it costs, and what it builds. Prairieland is the state’s direct answer to that organizing. Communities build infrastructure. The state names it a terrorism support network and prosecutes the people who showed up.

From the beginning of the Resist Project 2025 work, we named LGBTQ+ targeting specifically: gender-affirming care restrictions, anti-discrimination rollbacks, and the systematic removal of trans people from public life. The “radically pro-transgender” terrorism designation in the 2026 strategy is the escalation of what was already in motion, now formalized as a national security priority.

The Big Beautiful Bill funds the enforcement infrastructure. The 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy names who gets targeted with it. These are not separate efforts. They are the same project at different stages. None of this arrived without warning. Treating it as a sudden shift lets too much off the hook.

What to Do

The state has always moved against organizing that threatens its control. This is not a recent development, nor is it unique to the United States. It predates the FBI, predates the United States itself, predates every specific law and designation discussed in this piece. What changes is the legal language. The target has been consistent. COINTELPRO did not end organized resistance. It disrupted it, fragmented it, murdered some of its leaders, and set movements back by a generation. The work continued anyway. The Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 did not end anarchist organizing. The post-9/11 domestic terrorism designations did not end environmental defense or animal rights organizing. The organizing has outlasted every version of this playbook—not because it was unstoppable, but because the need for it never went away.

That need is not going away now.

Security culture is not an overreaction to the current moment. It is the appropriate response to a legal precedent that now makes encrypted messaging, black clothing, and political literature prosecutable as terrorism evidence. How you communicate, how you document your work, and who knows what about planning decisions carry real legal weight. The investigation itself is a disruption tactic. Knowing that shapes how you organize. Groups that have thought carefully about these questions are worth finding and learning from.

The longer answer to “what should we do now?” lives in what the state is actually trying to prevent. Mutual aid is not charity. It is not an emergency response or a stopgap while waiting for a better policy. It is communities meeting their own needs outside systems that profit from their desperation. Food networks that feed people because the community decided everyone eats, not because anyone qualifies. Housing support that keeps families in their homes because neighbors built the means to make that happen. Medical care is organized through relationships of trust rather than through systems that extract profit at every step. Legal support, childcare, money, information—all of it flowing through networks of mutual care that exist because people built them.

When communities build enough of this, something shifts. The systems that extract compliance by controlling access to basic needs lose their grip. Eviction becomes harder to enforce when the entire building organizes. Deportation becomes harder to execute when the whole neighborhood knows to warn each other. The state’s ability to isolate and punish individuals weakens when those individuals are held inside dense webs of community relationships. That is what the 2026 strategy is trying to prevent. Not the violence, but the interdependence.

This is why the designation of mutual aid as terrorism is not evidence that it is dangerous. It is evidence that it is working. They can name it terrorism. They cannot stop neighbors from feeding each other. They can seed organizing spaces with informants. They cannot unwire the relationships communities have already built. They can prosecute individuals. They cannot prosecute the practice of collective care that has kept communities alive for as long as communities have existed. More of that work, built more carefully with deeper roots, is the response to this moment.

The ARG Mutual Aid General Fund moves money directly to community-led projects with no overhead and no strings attached. Every dollar goes to the groups doing the work. Farmworker Rental Assistance keeps families housed when the systems designed to displace them bear down hardest. Financial solidarity with groups like General Strike U.S. builds the organizational infrastructure that makes sustained resistance possible.

The question this moment asks is not whether to keep building. Communities will keep building because they always have. The question is whether we recognize what we are building for, whether we resource it seriously, and whether we build it with enough depth and connection to withstand what is being organized against it.

Fascism depends on communities forgetting what they are capable of together. Every designation, prosecution, and surveillance program discussed in this piece was designed to make that forgetting happen. None of them succeeded completely. The work continued because the need for it never left. That is still true now.

The post The State Has Always Called It Terrorism appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless

Since forming seven years ago, Decarcerate Sac has built a sustained organizing infrastructure in Sacramento County. Their work occurs at multiple levels: direct support for people in county jails, community education and mobilization, and strategic intervention in county budget and policy decisions.

Their jail hotline remains a groundbreaking project. The hotline connects people inside Sacramento County jails with medical advocacy, legal research, free books, and information sharing. Over 3,000 letters have gone out to reach every person incarcerated in the county, including information on voting rights, education materials, and updates on ongoing jail fights.

Decarcerate Sac’s community organizing has stopped multiple jail expansion attempts. They halted the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center expansion in 2019 and again in 2020. They blocked the Main Jail expansion in 2021 and won an official pause in 2023 after working with architects and partner organizations to produce a detailed report exposing errors in the proposed expansion plans.

The numbers tell part of the story. 82% of people in Sacramento County Jail have not been convicted of any crime. 39% of people in the jails are Black, while only 11% of Sacramento County’s population is Black. Over 60% of people in jails have been diagnosed with mental illness. Over 50% of people charged with misdemeanors are experiencing homelessness.

Decarcerate Sac’s organizing responds to these realities. They pressured the county to create its first jail population reduction plan. They forced the Community Corrections Partnership to fill its community advisory board after seven years of vacancy. In partnership with the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network and the Community Care First Sacramento coalition, they released the Sacramento County People Power for Public Health report, which interviewed people who are unhoused, incarcerated, or on probation to develop policy and budget recommendations.

The jail expansion fight continues. Sacramento County is still considering a $2 billion expansion project. Decarcerate Sac keeps showing up at Board of Supervisors meetings, producing analysis, building community opposition, and making the case for investing in community health systems instead of more cages.

Their work includes zine projects with people inside the jails, art shows featuring work by formerly incarcerated people, film screenings, clothing donations, letter writing to incarcerated activists across the country, and ongoing education about city and county budgets.

We’re sending April’s Mutual Aid General Fund support to Decarcerate Sacramento, as they continue to build organized community power in Sacramento County.

The post Mutual Aid General Fund – April 2026 Recipient: Decarcerate Sacramento appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless

SVTU names what much of the housing sector will not. They call themselves a tenants’ union, and the word choice points at their analysis: the current situation is a tenants’ rights crisis. A housing crisis suggests a supply problem that policy tweaks and developer subsidies can eventually resolve. A tenants’ rights crisis names the actual relationship. Landlords hold power over where people live, for how long, and under what conditions. Tenants, by definition, do not. No amount of new construction changes that relationship. Organized tenants do.

SVTU also extends the category of tenant past the narrow legal definition. A tenant, in their framing, is anyone who does not control their housing. Renters. People living in their cars. The unhoused. People in jail. The category holds together because the underlying condition holds together: housing that belongs to someone else, on terms you did not set.

The union organizes through three neighborhood chapters in Arden Arcade, South Sacramento, and Del Paso Heights. Each local holds tenant meetings every two weeks. The meetings are open to any tenant in Sacramento, with or without a chapter in their neighborhood. Tenants bring what they are dealing with, share resources, and work through problems no one can solve alone. The meetings are bilingual, with radios for simultaneous translation between English and Spanish. There is no intake form to complete before someone can receive help. There is no caseworker deciding who qualifies for what. There are neighbors, showing up for each other, on a regular schedule.

Tenants in Sacramento can attend a neighborhood local meeting or read the SVTU Tenants’ Rights Handbook. Anyone, inside or outside Sacramento, can join as a dues-paying member through SVTU’s membership page. SVTU is part of the Autonomous Tenants Union Network, which connects autonomous tenants unions across the country. The model travels. If you live somewhere without a tenants union, SVTU’s structure and the ATUN network are where to start.

The post Mutual Aid General Fund: Sacramento Valley Tenants Union appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless

Financial Solidarity Project is part of ARG’s programmatic work. Alongside our global directory of radical spaces, mutual aid programs, and educational resources, we provide financial solidarity to grassroots organizations doing liberation work on the ground.

General Strike U.S. is a decentralized grassroots network of regular people who know that our greatest power is our labor and our right to refuse it. Founded in 2022, GSUS is organizing toward a national general strike once 11 million Americans, 3.5% of the population, have committed. That threshold is grounded in research showing that movements engaging 3.5% of a population have never failed to bring about change. GSUS operates through local chapters across the country focused on mutual aid, strike preparedness, and community engagement. No traditional leadership. No one gets paid. A network of people and groups moving together.

This partnership grew out of a relationship that has been building for over two years. In February 2024, we hosted “Mobilizing Change,” a panel bringing GSUS together with Evolving Seeds, Red Heart Coalition, and Blackout Strike to explore how the coalition organizes and motivates collective action. Daii, a GSUS organizer from the Michigan Chapter, was part of that conversation. A few months later in June 2024, we hosted “Solidarity and Action: A Dialogue with Radical Leaders,” a panel with members from the Black Panther Party, The Panther Party, and GSUS, focused on solidarity and building micro-communities. Then in February 2026, we sat down again with Daii and Eliza Blum from the NYC Chapter for “Survival, Solidarity, Strategy,” a deeper conversation about what mutual aid looks like with limited resources, how chapters stay connected and accountable to each other across distance, and how local organizing fits into a long-game strategy for mass collective action.

Through those conversations and the ongoing relationship between our communities, what has come through consistently is that GSUS is doing the kind of slow, unglamorous infrastructure work that movements actually need. Building chapters. Connecting people. Creating the conditions for collective action long before the moment arrives.

As GSUS shares updates on their chapter-level work, we will pass those along to our network.

Supporters can now make tax-deductible donations to General Strike U.S. through A Radical Guide. Donations go directly to GSUS and are distributed to local chapters doing mutual aid, community organizing, and strike preparedness work across the country.

A Radical Guide is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that builds movement infrastructure, including a global directory of radical spaces, mutual aid programs, and educational resources for people doing liberation work around the world.

The post Two Years of Building Together. Now We’re Going Further appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless

If Davis Night Market sounds familiar, it should. They were our April 2025 recipient, and we are thrilled to welcome them back to the fund. The Night Market was also among the mutual aid groups we supported during our extended solidarity effort earlier that year, when the fund delivered tents and supplies directly to groups across the Sacramento region. Returning to support them now reflects something we believe in deeply: mutual aid is not a one-time gesture. It is a sustained commitment to the communities doing this work every single day.

Every weekday evening from 9 to 11 pm, volunteers with the Davis Night Market set up in Central Park in downtown Davis and distribute food that would otherwise go to waste. They build relationships with local restaurants, bakeries, and grocery stores to recover surplus food, then redistribute it to anyone who shows up, no questions asked, no eligibility requirements, no paperwork.

The Night Market has been doing this since 2019, and they have not stopped. Not during the pandemic. Not during the winter. Not during the political upheavals of the last several years. In fact, on Inauguration Day 2025, they turned their nightly distribution into a community space of reflection and mutual support, offering food, warm drinks, clothing, and literature to a park full of people who needed to be together that night.

Led by their commitment to environmental sustainability, Night Market volunteers ride bikes to pickup locations to gather the food and deliver it to the distribution each evening. Their operations run on what has been described as a “shoestring of a shoestring” budget, powered entirely by volunteers.

While the nightly food distribution is the core of their work, the Night Market is far more than a food recovery operation. They host regular community meetings open to anyone, clothing swaps, community care nights, care kit building events, hydration stations during hot weather, migra watch trainings, and art, music, and dance events. They maintain several freedges (community refrigerators) around Davis. Their youngest volunteer, Sierra, started at age nine and brings a different stuffed animal to distribution each week.

The organization also makes its model freely available to other communities. Their website offers a how-to-do-night-market toolkit and a guide to rebuilding a used bike trailer, because they believe this kind of community-based food recovery should be replicated everywhere.

The Night Market operates with a non-hierarchical, anti-racist structure guided by core values of environmental sustainability, inclusivity, equity and justice, community and collaboration, learning and humility, and working with joy. Their goals are clear: decrease food waste, increase stigma-free food access, promote environmental sustainability, build and strengthen community, and create a replicable model for community-based food waste recovery.

As community coordinator Max Morgan has noted, stigma keeps many people who need food from accessing it. The Night Market’s relaxed, welcoming approach is intentional. It creates an atmosphere where anyone feels comfortable showing up and being part of the community, whether they are coming for food, to volunteer, or simply to connect.

Food insecurity in Davis and Yolo County remains a serious concern. The food insecurity rate in Yolo County has been documented at over 10%, and UC Davis students experience food insecurity at rates as high as 44%. The Night Market addresses this with a directness and consistency that larger institutions often cannot match.

The post Mutual Aid General Fund — February 2026: Davis Night Market appeared first on A Radical Guide. by Jason Bayless