By Práxedis
12/09/21
A neighbor has informed me of NICOR gas company’s plans to dispossess our Black neighbors in Pembroke Township, IL.
For more information, they offered this link: https://www.blackfoodjustice.org/preserve-pembroke
The Blast would benefit from receiving communiques and updates from on-the-ground voices such as the types whom Black Ink[1] has written should influence our struggles in the region: those in the “Black radical tradition, anarcho-communism, Indigenous resistance, decolonial movements, autonomist forms of communism, Black feminism, radical queer frameworks, insurrectionary anarchism, eco-socialism, etc.”
What can we do as a region were we able to collaborate with our neighbors? Do key NICOR individuals or assets live in your city whom you could mobilize your group of friends, study group, distro or tenant union to confront? If that were the case, The Blast would need to be able to point to such information to help groups mobilize.
But other questions come to mind. Who should revolutionaries collaborate with, and would it be safe to do so? In Chicago we’ve come across nonprofits and workers unions calling the police on us or leaving us to get arrested when there are certain disagreements or divergences in the course of struggle. Could such dynamics emerge elsewhere?
Furthermore, how do we regionally collaborate while ensuring “radical” disaster tourists and accelerationists do not harm our neighbors in Pembroke Township? In Chicago we have more than a few of these who will travel anywhere else in the region in a heartbeat to have fun in complete disregard for the safety of local inhabitants whose welfare should be first and foremost.
What can we learn from the most recent regional collaborations? It would be important to see at least the same kind of care we saw when people across Illinois and Indiana converged upon Dwight, IL when locals there were trying to set up an immigration prison in recent years, which they did not succeed in doing, to my knowledge. Some nonprofits have taken full credit for that. No one has mentioned the many threats Illinois and Indiana neighbors gave to the Dwight government in person about what hell they would unleash upon Dwight’s rulers if they continued to go forward with the process nor have they mentioned the nervous inability of Dwight’s local police forces to handle even the smallest mobilizations coming in from abroad.