Picking Fights

Seventeen Years of Organizing in the Seattle Solidarity Network

2025-07-10

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In the following reflections, participants in the Seattle Solidarity Network share what they have learned in the course of seventeen years of experimenting with tactics via which workers and tenants can act together against bosses and landlords.

For an action-obsessed group like the Seattle Solidarity Network (SeaSol), pausing for reflection is a rare thing. Upon receiving the invitation to prepare this text, we embarked on a collective process that included written interviews with more than a dozen participants with different levels of involvement over the years—exactly the sort of inefficient endeavor that we work so hard to keep out of our regular organizing activities. It was a little embarrassing how high emotions were for people at times, but that also shows just how much SeaSol means to all of us, whether we were in it for a long or even a short period of time. What follows is our best effort to share with you who we are and what we’ve learned over the past seventeen years.

Prologue

There’s a twinge of nervous energy down your neck and a pinch of hunger in your stomach as you walk towards your first Seattle Solidarity Network action. It’s right before dinner time. Weather-wise, it’s the sort of gray, overcast late afternoon that is so typical of this region. You’ve brought yourself to some northern suburb. You’re venturing across a stretch of sprawl that looks like countless others. Even though you can’t recall ever being on this specific block before, the setting feels so familiar. The street signs and pavement remind you of the block where you live.

You know from the mobilization email that there’s a restaurant nearby. It’s at an intersection, next to a gas station, across the street from a strip mall. You also know the restaurant’s owners are petty, entitled, and completely obnoxious. They fired somebody from the kitchen for bogus reasons and now they’re refusing to hand over that person’s final paycheck. It’s not much for the bosses—a few hundred dollars—but it’s devastating for the person fired, who has rent and other bills to pay. They’re still looking for their next job. And you can relate. You’ve worked at places like this, for people like this, and they took advantage of you like this. Again, there’s the feeling of familiarity.

Then the recognizable hassle of bad jobs in dull neighborhoods gives way to a feeling of excitement in your chest and legs. This is a first for you. Having parked your car a block away, you walk along the sidewalk of an arterial road and approach the meetup spot. You see a small group huddled together with a dozen homemade picket signs. You join them. At the top of the hour, you go around in a circle introducing yourselves. You and one other person are new to this fight. Some others have been doing this sort of thing since the 2010s. The person who got fired is here, too. You get a little briefing on the action to take place: Today, you’re picketing. You grab a sign and march along to the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.

You’re in a solidarity network now. You and this odd lot of sign holders, baristas, email writers, phone tree operators, dishwashers, canvassers, apartment dwellers, and leaflet writers. You’ve read about “solidarity” and today you are getting a clearer idea of what it might mean.

What follows is a collection of reflections from current and former members of Seattle Solidarity Network (SeaSol) intended to inform current and future organizing efforts. We cover the “who,” “what,” and “why” of the organization, including the principles under which we operate and the lessons we’ve learned. While some of the text is a synthesis collectively written by an ad hoc committee, we’ve tried to center the voices of individual members to show the breadth of experience with the organization and to let productive critique of the organization come through.

SeaSol was started with only the most essential anarchist ideological positions. The point wasn’t to create an elaborate organization and set forth a detailed analysis; the point was to attack landlords and bosses, to be combative and effective. To explore the “how,” read SeaSol’s 2011 guide) to building a solidarity network.

What Is SeaSol?

SeaSol is a mutual support organization. We use collective direct action to fight for workers’ and tenants’ specific demands. These demands typically address stolen wages, stolen deposits, unsafe working conditions, landlords refusing to make repairs, and discrimination. Unlike service organizations, the expectation is that those who take on a fight will join the organization and show up at other people’s fights as they are able.

Our History

Some members of the Seattle branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) founded SeaSol in late 2007. They wanted to find a way to build a revolutionary proletarian social movement by winning tangible victories despite having only a small number of supporters.

At the time, the IWW in Seattle only had one organized workplace. Most of the IWW members were students or other young people with marginal employment—only staying in a given job for a few months at a time. Organizing unions in an era of precarious employment seemed like a stretch. While the IWW (and most radical unions) would focus on one workplace and try to win over a critical mass of workers in that workplace, SeaSol tried to develop more of a class-based organizing approach. Their class politics prompted them to view tenants’ and workers’ issues as inextricably linked and they hoped that by engaging with both tenants and workers they would be able to ensure a broader level of activity for their new organization.

Nonetheless, they did take some lessons from the IWW and others. For example, they learned about demand deliveries and workplace mapping from the IWW. Workplace mapping means analyzing who is ready to join a fight, who is loyal to the boss or landlord, and who is on the fence. Early SeaSol was inspired by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), which did a lot of direct action. They also followed the example set by a courageous friend. Their friend had applied to a restaurant in Chicago. She worked there for one day, which the manager called an unpaid “training day.” Then was told not to come back because she wasn’t hired. She came back the next day with ten friends and demanded to be paid for the day’s work.

A diagram plotting “How much can we hurt them?” against “How hard is it for them to give in?” in order to identify which fights are winnable.

Here, some of the early SeaSolers reflect on the network’s origins.

Mickey: SeaSol started out of a series of conversations among comrades at a time when the anti-globalization and anti-war movements were on their last legs. Many of us had been politicized in the anti-war movement or immediately before that during the anti-glob summit protests. We shared a common critique of the ineffectiveness of the activist culture that these two movements were organized around. We felt that this activist culture was alienating to proletarians by design, ineffective at bringing anarchism to the masses, and ineffective at winning struggles against capitalists. To address these problems, we wanted to build a worker-focused project that made anarchism practical and pragmatic to proletarians. We were motivated by historical expressions of anarchism in the old workers movement as well as more recent iterations of anti-state proletarian activity.

We had seen how difficult it was for other groups to start anarchist tenant unions or workplace unions from scratch with few or no resources. We had also been languishing in the Seattle IWW for about a year prior to SeaSol’s start, trying to build the branch through organizing campaigns and not having much success. For these reasons, we settled on a direct action casework model pioneered by the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP for short). We also took some inspiration from Vancouver’s Anti-poverty Committee. We initially conceived of SeaSol as a temporary platform to get to a place where we could take on larger tenant and workplace organizing campaigns, i.e., to form an autonomous tenants’ union or industrial union.

Lilly: SeaSol was started in fall of 2007 by several people who were also in the IWW. When we were presenting SeaSol’s history, we said that those people were frustrated by the state of leftist movements. Big, show-stopping protests and marches against things like the war in Iraq but very little tangible successes. The war did not stop, waver, or blink in the face of tens of thousands of people convening. The IWW sets the scene for personal resistance in daily labor—why not start there? In the daily interactions that represent capitalist, oppressive macro systems: bosses and landlords.

David C.: SeaSol believed in the IWW motto, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” and utilized the AEIOU approach¹ to organizing.

Matt: SeaSol was created in reaction to many of the perceived deficiencies of the anarchist movement and activist left… Basically, we wanted to do something that required struggle at the level of people’s everyday lives, not struggles against some powerful, abstract, distant force that we were doomed to lose, such as the movement against the Iraq War (from 2003 onward). We also felt disgust with the symbolic protest aspects of anti-war and anti-globalization stuff. The anti-globalization movement was great fun. It was empowering to me and mobilized and radicalized a lot of people, but its ephemerality was evident. When I moved to Seattle from the UK, I was disturbed by the weakness of the anti-war movement. It was clear that many projects and direct action groups that existed for a few years around the time of the 1999 WTO protests had already disappeared, while others, such as Indymedia, were fading away rapidly. SeaSol was founded because we thought we should try to win actual victories, even if small ones, instead playing into the martyrdom of the great but impossible cause and the self-righteousness of “at least we’re doing something” symbolic protests. We also felt frustration that the majority of anarchist projects were not conflict-based. They were infoshops, bookshops, food distribution projects, newspapers, websites—all good stuff, but all auxiliary to the engine of the movement and the school of socialism, class struggle. We believed in collective class struggle through direct action and building a social base.

Also, we had had no luck in various unionization attempts with the IWW and were fed up with how specific organizations such as NAF [Northwest Anarchist Federation] were putting the ideological cart before the horse of having a common strategy and plan of action…

As an attempt to avoid these problems, we discussed more promising movements: the “direct action casework” of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty and Canadian inter-union solidarity “flying squads” seemed to be appealing forms to imitate. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a great amount of detail on how those groups operated, so we looked at our own experiences. A friend in Chicago had worked at a restaurant for one day, only to be told it was a “training day” and she wouldn’t be paid. She resolved this problem by walking into the restaurant with a large group of friends and refusing to leave until the issue was settled. We were looking to create something that was the opposite of the flaws we perceived in the movements we had emerged from: a focus on the immediate issues caused by capitalism in daily life as experienced by the general population of Seattle and ourselves, not as activists—specialists in social change—but workers in precarious employment or living conditions; a focus on effective strategy rather than moral force; realistic opposition to targets we could actually overcome; and an approach that placed us in direct conflict with the powerful interests in society rather than one that sought to create an alternative but coexisting culture. SeaSol is itself partially a product of the crisis—without the low pay, unstable jobs, landlords trying to cut corners, and high unemployment, perhaps the group would not have generated the interest and momentum to keep going.

Why We Do What We Do

For a more comprehensive description of SeaSol’s organizational model and tactics, see the SeaSol manual. In short, SeaSol’s tactics involve a series of escalating actions that make it easier or cheaper for the boss or landlord to give in than to refuse. The approach varies depending on the person or company on the other side. The first priority is to win the fight against them.

David C.: The idea was to have a voluntary mutual aid network of people organizing around individual fights against landlords, bosses, and the powerful committing injustice against workers and tenants. SeaSol was run by its members through “one person, one vote” decision-making processes, and used direct action and escalating pressure tactics to take on winnable fights, which meant not taking on every fight, even if it was a just cause. There were very pragmatic discussions about whether we could produce the pressure necessary to make a boss or company or landlord give in to a demand. If—after conducting research and sometimes having several discussions at meetings—SeaSol determined that its points of leverage or pressure were few or not that strong, or that the demand was unrealistic, we wouldn’t take up a fight. Winning fights was always very important to the SeaSol model from the beginning, and perhaps this is one primary differentiator from other organizing or direct action groups.

Matt: I was surprised by our early victories and my morale was boosted. Getting those wins in to demonstrate that direct action works was vital.

Llama: There’s so much leftist organizing and electoralism, it’s really refreshing to be involved in direct action that wins fights, even if they are small. And having success when our city (like all cities) is in the midst of constant sweeps and cuts to services.

Pete: All the time I spent with SeaSol organizers creatively discussing effective tactics, looking for leverage in fights, and focusing our energies on winning has deeply ingrained a knowledge and attitude toward organizing that I take everywhere. I should add that what attracted me to SeaSol in the first place, which I credit with truly radicalizing me, was that the meetings were focused and concise, fully dedicated to getting shit done. These are the same principles I use in labor organizing, which has had the effect of motivating the people I work with.

The second priority of SeaSol is to build capacity. From the outset, the organization had both defensive and productive aspects. On the one hand, it defended a community from exploitation at work, scuzzy landlords, and other predatory behavior. At the same time, through this defensive process—through the demand deliveries, pickets, parties, and even through the tedious meetings—the participants could experience moments of social transformation, of solidarity, winning small fights in order to gain strength, experience, and reputation so that they could take on bigger fights.

Matt: By taking on a project of manageable size and starting with a few small victories, we hoped to boost our morale and confidence, increase our experience and strength in numbers, and act as a sort of “propaganda of the deed,” demonstrating the usefulness of direct action, showing that workers and tenants in today’s society are not totally powerless. This also serves to illuminate the true nature of a society divided between workers and exploiters, tenants and landlords.

DC: SeaSol did two things. One: it directly addressed the practical problems of wage theft and tenant issues. Two: it served an educational and agitational function. Its momentum came from normal people democratically organizing themselves. It played a role in building capacity and consciousness that intermediaries like nonprofits and law firms—and most unions—couldn’t. In the context of precarious employment, alienation, and cultural amnesia, SeaSol was a transformation of the anti-capitalist energy that had, in an earlier era, been directed into the formal workers’ movement and left-wing political parties. It was a way to take action where we were, a hopeful starting point for something bigger.

Capacity building includes spreading our model and training organizers who can go on to organize and take action in other places.

Pete: After moving to San Diego from Seattle, I first helped start a now-inactive Solidarity Network. Then, from 2018-2020, I led the creation of a teachers’ union at Education First San Diego. I am now a site representative for classified workers at my new school. I have had a lot of success throughout my time as a labor organizer because of the skills I developed during my time with SeaSol. One recent example is that I organized a demand letter delivery in response to a week’s worth of work being taken from a group of workers across sixteen schools to begin the school year. This resulted in over fifty workers being compensated for a week of stolen wages, and teachers at my school just used the demand letter delivery tactic for an issue they are addressing.

Jane: I think the most important attitude I take with me is always wanting a clear-eyed power analysis of conflicts. And I can also facilitate meetings better than any of my coworkers. There’s no substitute for the skills you develop helping a group practice direct democracy.

Llama: As direct action mutual aid, I think it works pretty well. Sure, we are not disrupting the system as a whole, but we are absolutely creating a community and network… I think what SeaSol builds for people includes:
- Experience in direct action: this can be really scary, but really powerful to participate in. Seasol organizes to help ensure numbers so that actions are safe (as much as feasible, obviously).
- Facilitating meetings is a skill.
- Internet research on people, organizations, laws.
- The (in)effectiveness of The System.
- Engaging with passersby at pickets.
- How to talk to cops and bosses (Don’t! But if you do…).
- Hearing about how people did all the “right things” and can still get screwed over with no real recourse.

Let’s look at the tactic of the demand delivery. As the authors of the SeaSol manual point out, it might be quicker and easier to send a demand delivery by mail or email. But the purpose of the demand delivery is not only to communicate a written message to the boss or landlord. The purpose is to empower the participants in the action. When the demand is met, they will know it is because they were there taking a risk and defending someone in their community.

Here, we reflect on how our tactics relate to our strategic vision for the organization.

Dolly: SeaSol is not a social service… the workers and tenants at the centers of our fights are not provided with a service, but take on equal roles in organizing their own campaigns. Those who are not members of SeaSol when they come to us are required to become members and are expected to show up for others’ fights in the future as far as they can. In a perfect world, it would work out this way every time SeaSol took on a fight. It hasn’t always, though. […]

Doing work with SeaSol provides a way better working-class political education than any book. Lots of people come into the organization as some kind of liberal or democratic socialist and leave, or stay, as anarchists. People learn how landlordism works from doing secretary duty (answering phone calls and emails from people who contact us with their problems) and fighting landlords. People learn that the nonprofit-industrial complex is parasitic and unhelpful to the working poor when it comes to affordable housing, because they see examples of how these organizations fail real people week after week. SeaSolers have front-row seats, in real time and in real life, to how governments and legal systems work to keep landlords and bosses in power, and to the fucked up things that they do with that power. These are things that SeaSolers understand on a visceral level from hard experience, not just intellectually. The knowledge you get from reading about some stranger’s experience on Reddit, or a philosopher’s opinion in a book, is very different. SeaSol learning is not just an idea you entertain, but something you confidently know and are ready to convince others of.

Jane: I think the basic question at the start of SeaSol was how to grow working-class power in a non-authoritarian and democratic way. Most jobs aren’t union (the most obvious form of collective power), and most unions aren’t very democratic anyway. I came to SeaSol while also volunteering with my union. I worked really hard as a shop steward, volunteering maybe fifteen hours a week running around signing people up as members and handling grievances. And still, despite being kind of in an “inner circle” of activists, I felt there was an inner inner circle of paid staff who ended up using my energy as free labor but not giving me a real say in the direction of our organizing. My input felt like a sham. It was all very well-intentioned, but as paid, full-time staff, they just spent so much more time on the work that the dynamic was maybe inevitable. So on a personal level, to start something new with SeaSol offered a degree of input in trying to build power on the left that I didn’t have anywhere else.

DC: SeaSol was not about providing services. It was about building solidarity, about theorizing our response to the disunity of capitalist life, and about acting collectively. Actions are open to everyone. Solidarity brings the group together, not the arbitrary circumstances of one’s social situation. One advantage of this approach is that it doesn’t limit activity within one sphere of one’s life—the job, the apartment, the circle of friends. So participants in the solidarity network relate to each other in many different ways. Mostly, we’re just “comrades.” The common cause of people who join campaign after campaign is more than just challenging the individual power of this or that boss or landlord; it is opposition to all the brutality of the everyday indignities of capitalism. […]

I first attended a SeaSol action around 2010. I was visiting Seattle from out of town and an old IWW contact told me to come out and see what SeaSol was doing. I had experienced some wage theft and other employment issues from working in food service, but I hadn’t seen an organized group of people addressing those sorts of issues. For most people—even most people in the IWW!—workers’ militant direct action is merely theoretical or historical, provided they think about it at all. Opportunities for that sort of unionization are just vanishingly slim. Even when unionization opportunities are present, we often lack the skill, consciousness, and group cohesion to take advantage of them.

SeaSol’s model overcame some of the limitations of the IWW approach. Whereas the IWW focused on union organizing campaigns at discrete workplaces, SeaSol built campaigns for the whole class of workers and renters. At the same time, SeaSol’s actions had a narrower focus and were appropriate to our circumstances; instead of the years-long efforts to organize unions (typically at workplaces where turnover outpaced the campaign), SeaSol made demands that could be articulated simply and met promptly. […]

SeaSol prioritized the effectiveness of actions above anything else. I don’t think Jane McAlevey² was a conscious influence on the group, but “organizing to win” is the ethos of SeaSol. In the earlier years, social retreats and parties helped promote group cohesion. These were the high points, though it’s hard to say whether, and to what extent, the solid sense of group cohesion was the cause or effect of successful actions.

Ike: In terms of passing on the theoretical and strategic framework—we don’t talk much about theory, and what we do talk about is pretty surface level. Most of the discussion is about strategy and tactics. Frankly, I think that’s really valuable—there are plenty of places talking about leftist theory online, but when it comes to anti-authoritarian practice, there are fewer places to learn it. If folks do take an interest in theory, there are lots of people in SeaSol who would be open to the discussion.

Four-Fingered Fisherman: It felt like a meaningful disengagement from appealing to electoral politics for me. The previous mass movements I had been a part of could not escape the recuperative energies of that kind of appeal. Like those movements, the solidarity network model focused on the individual acting in concert with others as the engine of change, but it changed the target. It exposed the various nexuses of power that are, most importantly, within striking distance and enabled communities to take immediate and impactful action against them in a way that the mass movements I had been a part of were largely missing. […]

There was also always an acute focus on the model, following the chain of escalation, etc. I think it would be fair to characterize the model and the effectiveness of actions as one of the topmost priorities for SeaSol. This can be a double-edged sword, because any form of dogmatic adherence to something can create the kind of structural rigidity that ultimately ossifies and kills a project. SeaSol mitigated that particular risk by placing an emphasis on debriefing after every action and acting on issues identified in those spaces. […]

As I came to learn the solidarity network model and begin working to help implement it, I felt for the first time that I was participating in something that had a high potential for creating transformative spaces for people. After participating in two moments of great social rupture that inevitably simmered back down to the status quo, it felt like the next logical step to take the energy that I had for those and put it towards developing something specifically to the benefit of the people around me rather than acting in the abstract. […]

Despite the fact that I am no longer currently organizing with SeaSol, my time working on the project represents some of the most foundational and important political activity that I have ever been a part of. It created space for me to grow personally, to expand my organizing capabilities while doing the same for all of the people we took on fights alongside. It secured meaningful, material victories for people, showing them that those could be achieved by direct action. It did all of this while intentionally avoiding getting sucked into electoralism even while Seattle had a self-identified socialist sitting on the city council. Perhaps most importantly, it did this in a way that kept many people engaged with the project for years, parents included, in a setting that tends to lack the cultivation and maintenance of intergenerational relationships.

Llama: I joined in late 2018, but the attraction of direct action that gets the goods has been the main draw for me. The revolutionary fight against late-stage capitalism seems never ending, so it’s really nice to engage in activism that: 1) has a start 2) gets someone out of a bad situation 3) has an end.

Javabean: There is often a tendency for leftist organizations to see themselves as institutions of political theory that view struggle as secondary to politics, dedicating an excessive amount of time to discussing theory in groups in an attempt to create a singular, cohesive political identity.

SeaSol does not prescribe its members’ politics, it doesn’t try to guide its organizers’ understanding of theory. If a meeting starts to veer too far into broad discussion of theory and political identity in general, we will put effort into refocusing on the relevant topics, which are never theoretical. Someone needs their paycheck, someone needs their apartment keys, etc.

The politics of SeaSol are the collective politics of its members, and what keeps that state of political being from spinning off is very much a social model of organizational structure: people with toxic politics will find SeaSol an unpleasant place to be, and eventually be shown the door. It’s not a perfect system, but I’ve never seen a perfect system, and at least we spend our time fighting fights.

Lilly: I’m not sure anyone actually presented it this way to me, but when I joined (in 2009), I remember thinking SeaSol was designed to make every person at the center of a fight into a traditional organizer with SeaSol. This would turn out to be a narrow view of organic organizing; it played out seldomly in SeaSol. What happened more often was a ripple effect or branching: an activated person in a community or social group could motivate four or five fights while being at the center of just one of them. Most people who had fights continued to come out to actions for years, and in some cases, forever.

Some Highlights

SeaSol has been around through many waves of struggle and organization—the antiwar movement, the 2008 financial crisis, Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the pandemic, and the Palestine solidarity movement. Over the past seventeen years, SeaSol has taken on around sixty fights. So far, we have registered a full or partial victory in roughly nine out of every ten of the fights we have completed. We estimate that around 2000 people have engaged with SeaSol in one way or another. Around 400 have become members of the network.

Lilly: Once, we were fighting a developer who sat on the board of an environmental NGO. We hoped to get a flyer detailing his racist employment behavior into the hands of as many people attending this NGO board event as possible. They held their event at a restaurant that had limited public sidewalk and a private parking lot, which made it tricky to distribute the flyers. Another organizer and I dressed in our fanciest clothing, hoping the attendees would infer that we had a relationship to the event venue. They did, and every single car stopped to roll down their window and take our flyer.

On a picket line outside of an apartment building, a property manager came out to the line to explain how she was “just doing her job,” claiming that she was “trying to help and really cared for” the person at the center of the fight, whose deposit was being stolen. The property management company had actually produced pictures that were verifiably not from the SeaSol member’s apartment. We were coming out of a solidarity network conference and had other solidarity network organizers in town. Perhaps because they were backing us up, or because it was a rowdy action, or because I have been a renter the entirety of my childhood and much of my adult life and have visceral memories of scrubbing apartment walls in hopes of getting a deposit back, something in me just gave way.

I verbally tore into the property manager. She knew this was not right, she knew she was stealing $350 dollars from a family that needed it to put down at another apartment—and for what? For a company that routinely steals deposits, knowing people won’t normally advocate for their return. If she cared about the person at the center of the fight, she would advocate to her bosses for the return of the deposit. If she couldn’t do that, she’d better not come out to the line trying to tell us shit. It must have registered, because I remember looking at her face as it broke and she just started crying before running inside. I’m not usually the schadenfreude type, but that knowing she heard and at least momentarily understood the pain she was causing others in this world meant a lot to me.

Dolly: The Admiral Pub fight was one of my all-time favorites as far as what it showed SeaSol can achieve. Lucio, who was a cook at the Admiral Pub in West Seattle, was arrested by ICE and detained. The owner of the business, Eric Galanti, stole his paycheck. Lucio had family members still in Seattle who joined SeaSol and fought and organized on Lucio’s behalf while he was incarcerated and subsequently deported to Mexico.

Lucio’s nephew, Luis, was active in the fight. We did a lot of pickets for several months at the Admiral Pub, and then at Bourbon Jack’s, another bar Galanti owned in the neighboring town of Kent, Washington. During that picket, the Kent police approached us to ask Luis to talk to Galanti with them.

We all sat down, and Luis faced his uncle’s boss. The boss was flanked by cops. Luis was flanked by SeaSolers. Vuvuzelas could be heard blasting down the street. The normal power dynamic in this group had shifted, and I could see and feel it. The power was with Luis and the rabble of protest kids! The rich business owner was powerless, and the cops were decorative but useless. Galanti cut Luis a check for the full amount of wages he had stolen from Lucio . We walked away victorious. We walked away with a powerful experience that showed how direct collective action can shift the power dynamics in unjust situations to win demands for the working class.

The Four Fingered Fisherman: Hands-down the most impactful moment in my time with SeaSol was our fight against a regional hotel chain called Silver Cloud, which fired a long-time dishwasher named Prospero for a no call no show the day after he suffered a massive heart attack while working in their dishpit. Prospero waited for months while we wrapped up another fight, showing up to every SeaSol meeting and supporting that other campaign before we could begin with his.

Once we initiated his campaign, he fought for what was owed to him with a joy, determination, and consideration for his friends who still worked there that was almost unbelievable. We fought those bastards alongside him for months and finally won after confronting the multi-millionaire owner of the hotel chain at his lakefront home several times, just blocks from where Jeff Bezos was then living. The day that Prospero received the check from them in the mail, he treated himself to a film at the theater and quietly passed away without having cashed the check.

Fortunately, we were able to assist in ensuring that his family was able to cash the check so that he could return to them one final time. Prospero’s indomitable spirit enabled him to hang on to life just long enough to put the bastards who wronged him in their place, in hopes that it would prevent them from doing the same thing to the rest of his friends there. That memory will stick with me until the day that I join him in the great unknown.

David C.: For me, one highlight was the fight against Borracchinis Bakery in 2012 to ensure that workers had the right to take breaks during their shifts. Seems pretty straightforward, no? This fight was a long one, and became one of SeaSol’s more public fights against a storefront institution in South Seattle. We had informed the media in advance of a big action against the Bakery, and the Seattle right wing mounted a response. They were there to disrupt our protest. We held a large action with a sizable turnout, and to me, on that day, SeaSol operated very effectively: comrades standing strong, arm in arm, as conservative jerks yelled in our faces as the media watched. “Cop talkers” handled their duties proficiently, ensuring that police left us alone and allowed us to continue our action. We chanted fun things like “No Breaks, No Cakes!” I felt deep solidarity in the group and loyalty to SeaSol as a movement on that day. It remains one of my favorite memories.

Jane: One of my proudest moments as a parent was attending a SeaSol picket outside a baseball stadium with my toddler in tow. Even when I was tired and wanted to go home, she wouldn’t let us leave until the picket was totally over.

DC: [My favorite memory of SeaSol is] Making friends. Oh, and this one time I ran into a friend’s boyfriend at a taco truck we were picketing. He was a young guy, but he literally worked at Goldman Sachs. When he asked me why I was there, I explained the wage theft thing to him. He was so excited that we were doing direct action. He joined us for a bit and was yelling at the truck owner about how he’s never coming back there to eat. The next day, I saw his girlfriend. Apparently, he had told her all about the fun he had picketing. She half-jokingly told me to stay away from her boyfriend. She didn’t want me to give him any radical ideas. She wanted him to keep on the straight and narrow path to bourgeois wealth. She was sweating.

Lessons and Critiques

Our theory was that SeaSol might start with ideologically-committed anarchists, but it would grow to include people from outside “the scene.” We hoped that by winning small but meaningful victories, SeaSol’s direct action casework would attract increasing numbers of people to engage in demonstrations and organizing. The organizing work was supposed to serve both educational and practical ends, deepening and extending the working-class movement against exploitation.

We saw some success in this. In Walter Winslow’s 2011 interviews with SeaSol members, every respondent

“who did not initially get involved with SeaSol for any sort of ideological reasons, reported that they wanted to see SeaSol continue to grow to successfully take on larger and more significant problems in society.”

One organizer put it poetically:

“the basic motif of SeaSol that I know is we do what we can today so we can do what we want to tomorrow.”

SeaSol has measured its success by the fights it has won, but also by its capacity to grow. After seventeen years, how have we fared according to those standards?

Of course, the history of working-class movements includes plenty of failures. Capitalism is still here, structuring our lives and our ability to resist its dynamic push and pull. SeaSol is hardly unique as an organization that has failed to overthrow it. We’ve seen solidarity networks based on SeaSol’s model start in several other cities, but to our knowledge, none of those are still around today. This speaks to SeaSol’s success as the organization that has lasted the longest—we have to be doing something right!—but it also suggests some possible problems in the SeaSol model.

Fundamentally, we must question the degree to which our project has helped develop class consciousness, taught us about the limits of our power, increased the scope of our demands, and prefigured the social relations and dynamics we desire. Could there be problems with our theories and our model? Certainly, it hasn’t been particularly easy to adapt them to other conditions. The problems we’ve observed relate to some familiar themes: lacking a critical mass; lacking committed organizers; challenges recruiting and integrating new people; burnout and retention; drama and interpersonal conflicts. The critical commentary on solidarity networks (such as this article) suggests some important questions:

Is SeaSol vanguardist?
Does it engage in substitutionism?³
Can the model be replicated?
Have we successfully navigated race and gender dynamics?
Does the model rely too heavily on key organizers and personalities?
Are we aiming too small?
Is a solidarity network adequate to the problems of capitalism and ecological destruction?
Does this lead anywhere?

The following reflections relate to some of the lessons we’ve learned in trying to address these issues.

Emily S.: I was sixteen when I joined SeaSol in 2010 and nineteen when I began to gradually break away from the group. (I was already aware of some basic tenets of anarchism and came to a meeting after seeing the words “solidarity,” “mutual aid” and “direct action” on a poster.) I don’t think I became an independently effective organizer during that time, but I learned a great deal and participated in parallel political moments, like Occupy/Decolonize Seattle and the 2011 port shutdown, alongside other SeaSolers. The parts of the group that immediately appealed to me were the focus on winning and the framework for choosing and carrying out fights. My criticisms of it eventually arose around issues of racial dynamics between organizers and between organizers and people coming to us with fights. (Patriarchal dynamics that affected white women were mostly eventually addressed.)

One incident I remember, the straw that broke the camel’s back for my involvement, was at a meeting after we had voted to take on a fight with a certain monetary demand. Two longtime organizers had apparently been talking with each other and had decided that for whatever reason, the demand was unrealistic and proposed it should be replaced with a lower amount of money to be more “winnable.” They had not talked about this with the people bringing the fight, who were Latino restaurant workers, and the latter had no input until it was brought up formally at the meeting. While everyone has equal ability to participate in meetings (though as I recall these two workers communicated via a volunteer interpreter, so inevitably more friction was involved), I did not feel that everyone involved was on equal footing and I thought it was disrespectful given that no additional information had been discovered in the interim that would have justified reopening the topic. (I spoke my mind at the meeting, to no avail.)

I do not recall which fight this was, and for all I know it went on to be successful, but I know from what I was told afterwards that the workers were not happy with how things went down at that meeting. While I had always felt respected and appreciated in Seasol, I did not feel like I had the social skills or clout to intervene in a way that would be satisfying in the long term, and mostly stopped going to meetings. In my view, this was an example of the concept of winnability being taken too far: toning down a demand for no concrete reason and at a cost to those workers.

Another incident was a much more serious mistake. Before the first picket of Boracchini’s, one of the founding members of SeaSol had gone on a local right-wing talk radio show to speak about it, without asking approval from the rest of the group. This led to the presence of many counter-protesters, and one of our members was seriously hurt at this picket. The violence would not have happened if the action hadn’t been publicized to all the wrong people. It was a major blunder, and an inexplicable one given the generally democratic nature of the group.

SeaSol provided me with many formative relationships and experiences as a young adult in a way that’s hard to sum up today. The main takeaways I have are the experience of militancy, the willingness to break all the normal social rules and get in the bosses’ faces; the general principles of planning an escalation campaign; and how to use mobilizing lists for actions (something that I later realized is surprisingly rare). While I’ve never been involved in another group with the dedication with which I was involved in SeaSol, it gave me a solid and practical education in core aspects of organizing that are almost universally applicable.

Javabean: My realistic critique of that as an overall organizational strategy is that it’s not always easy to recognize when it’s necessary to shift focus to building capacity. I think that we tend to put so much focus on maintaining a fight that outreach and organization building can look like additional work for an already exhausted organizer, which can lead to a diminished organization, and member burnout.

There’s no straightforward answer of when to build an organization and when to fight fights. I think the only real answer is to keep the focus on output. If your organization doesn’t create material results, figure out why. It might be that you’re focusing on “recruitment” when you should be focusing on action; it might be the reverse. It might be something else entirely. At the end of the day, SeaSol is more interested in what we can do than in how many people come to meetings. […]

To be honest, I think that this question [about what happens when struggles are at a low point] gets right to SeaSol’s biggest weakness, and it can seem existential. When an organization is built on people’s ability to connect and form collective action over material struggle, and it judges its efficacy on its ability to engage and win on that level, then its primary source of energy is those fights.

When there isn’t a fight, people get bored, lose interest, and capacity falters. SeaSol has been fortunate to have had members that have the energy to keep things going in those times. As much as I wonder how long SeaSol could survive without a fight, my immediate response to that thought is, “If SeaSol doesn’t have fights, what’s the point of it even existing?”

I haven’t been around for a serious existential lull, but I think that historically, the answer is that there’s enough struggle out there to go around, and so we actively look for fights, and that re-energizes the organization. […]

Just to get this out of the way, SeaSol can’t be specifically “substitutionist” in any way that I would understand it, because it’s not a political party. SeaSol has no collective revolutionary agenda beyond (arguably) the likelihood that most of its members would hope that the existence of solidarity networks might generally raise class consciousness, contribute in some way to aspirational goals in a way that could be described in terms of base building, or create pathways that might assist in community organizing that is antithetical to capitalist hierarchies.

The thing about that is: SeaSol doesn’t actually do any of that. We fight fights that we can win. We’ve literally never talked about revolution or political goals in a meeting beyond those directly relevant to what’s in front of us. [In fact, revolution and political goals have been discussed in meetings that this member may not have attended.] If we were to co-opt a fight, it would be for an agenda that doesn’t exist. There isn’t really a definition of “substitutionism” that I could see being realistically applied to SeaSol in any serious way.”

Mickey: SeaSol took off and was far more successful than I think any of us initially imagined it would be. Some of the challenges presented by activist culture that we had critiqued in the anti-glob and anti-war movements followed us into SeaSol, such as voluntarism. But we were able to address other challenges successfully through this new hybrid form of class struggle unionism. For example, we were able to recruit workers from a variety of backgrounds to our network, introducing them to a functional and pragmatic anarchism.

The success of the model also made jumping to other forms of struggle very difficult. Expanding our fights between single tenants or workers into larger collective fights that could form the nucleus of future unions continued to be a persistent issue. Our fights often stayed between isolated tenants or workers. We found out that it was fairly difficult to use the solidarity network model to build a tenant or workers union. […]

Integrating into any anarchist/left-wing project is difficult and turnover/attrition is inevitable. That said, this is one of the things SeaSol did well. There was a formal system for bringing new people in and making sure they were engaged. SeaSol also offered childcare at meetings and sometimes organized meetings or materials in Spanish, since some members were Spanish-speaking. While there was plenty of turnover, we recruited and integrated many long-term members into our organizing committee. The theoretical and strategic framework was largely syndicalist and somewhat reductionist on purpose. This framework was perpetuated via regular and consistent organizer trainings. There were attempts to organize political education in SeaSol, but I’m not sure how successful they were.

Dolly: Revolutionizing the global labor movement and toppling capitalism is a tall order for any single organization or idea. In my twenty-something mind, this was possible for SeaSol. If we fought enough of them, the solidarity network model would spread, and bosses and landlords wouldn’t be able to exploit us anymore. Capitalism would surely fall. For a couple of years there, it seemed like it was happening! Honestly, as I approach my forties and SeaSol similarly enters a slower, more measured and reflective phase, I still believe this model holds key components to the liberation of the working class. We operate using the principles of cooperative self-governance and decision-making. We rely on direct action tactics. We have no paid staff or hierarchy or membership dues. We can definitely improve, but there is a lot about SeaSol that is… perfect. […]

Our toolbox of tactics has evolved. We’re really creative, passionate, smart people. What we will do for a $99 fight we believe in is unhinged. We have fought international corporations like Greystar in coordination with other solidarity networks and won. We’ve organized strikes and beaten enormous corporations like Chase Bank that traditional unions wouldn’t dream of touching. SeaSol has also cultivated a tight-knit, positive anarchist community whose members have built lifelong friendships. SeaSolers have strong cross-generational relationships built on real class struggle. Our community fights bosses and landlords together, yes, but we’re also a community of people who care for one another outside of that context. […]

Along with attracting top-notch organizers, our organization tends to attract people who see an opportunity to take advantage of a place that doesn’t have any membership dues or barriers to membership and seem to delight in being the center of drama and interpersonal strife. The group has a big problem with being helpless in the face of abusive behavior by such people—it’s a pattern that has repeated itself a handful of times since I joined and I wish I knew how to solve it. Many people have “gotten tired of dealing with [person x]” and left before the group got up the courage to vote [person x] out. We don’t have a great process for doing this, and one solid organizer left over the process itself. […]

Group cohesion is generally easy when we have fights and we only intentionally work on this when problems arise. Occasionally, groups of female-identifying SeaSolers (affectionately calling ourselves “SheSol”) have gotten together to address problematic or threatening behavior specifically directed at us. We then brought issues to the group with proposals about how to resolve them, which were approved each time. There have been personality problems over the years, with people doing various things—seemingly intentionally—to disrupt the harmony of the group and manipulate and abuse others emotionally. This has been awful, but we’ve found ways to deal with it each time, by eventually voting the member(s) in question out after a certain amount of damage has been inflicted. There has been talk of establishing a process for dealing with this, but no clear proposals have been made. It’s messy.

Ike: I’d say a majority of people who find out about SeaSol don’t end up taking on any role—even something as small as note-taking.

My impression is that SeaSol’s default mode of transmitting knowledge is person-to-person, and we could probably make better use of written material and organize it better. For example, anyone can volunteer to be a secretary / facilitator, and new people who have been around for a few weeks are encouraged to do so, but the actual knowledge of how to do it properly is conveyed either through shadowing someone or through SeaSol school, which runs sessions on this topic maybe one or two times per year. I’ve been trying to document the things I was confused about when I joined and I think it’s been helpful.

Also, our niche seems to be people who already know they’re leftists and are familiar with the way “orgs” tend to talk. I haven’t seen much success in converting “normal” people to organizing or much repeat engagement with SeaSol from people we helped with their own fights in the last two years. I do know that some organizers had prior SeaSol fights, so that may be a short time span.

Jane: On the side of “lessons learned,” we have learned that doing this work does not magically transform people into anarchists or other flavors of lefties. It seems to me that it took a preexisting lefty ideological commitment to motivate people to stick around long term as organizers. But as for a list of people who might show up if we asked them about a compelling fight, that list grew and is pretty large now…

In terms of my personal desire to have more influence over my organizing work, I definitely achieved that goal as one of the people putting my heart and tons of hours into the work. But I feel like we were in crisis mode for many years, perennially overstretched, and so not really taking the time to develop or mentor people who maybe wanted to be more involved but hadn’t already developed those skills in other parts of their lives. So it’s possible that people felt that same inner circle / outer circle dynamic that I had felt in my union work, again totally unintentionally. There’s only so many hours in the day and we were trying to win those fights. And organizing work is often tedious and more people want to have opinions about it than want to actually do the work.

Regarding unexpected outcomes, it’s the friends you make along the way, right? Actually, I’m still super tight with a bunch of SeaSol folks and it’s been fun seeing how they’re using the skills that we all developed together in other organizing projects, in their jobs, and so on. I think fighting gross misconduct in employers and landlords will never go out of style.

As (mostly) anarchists, we were pretty helpless in the face of basic social dysfunction. We’re so inclusive and want to be nice. But people who would have just gotten fired from actual jobs were allowed to stick around for far too long and to be a psychic and emotional drain on the group. When we actually managed to eject one or two, it nearly broke us. If anyone has managed to crack the code on that problem, I’d love to hear it.

Llama: From my experience, the focus has been mostly on effectiveness of actions. We have discussed recruitment on and off but have not been very successful—from what I’ve seen, not a lot of fights turn people into organizers and a lot of people come and go. Group cohesion has definitely diminished over COVID-19, as we don’t have as many socializing activities.

DC: Of course, SeaSol’s model has its own limits. The tangible returns of even successful campaigns—a $500 paycheck here, a $1000 deposit there—aren’t great compared to the energy and time put into the campaign. (Although I’d argue that the intangible results are more important!) Obviously, SeaSol hasn’t generalized any of its individual campaigns into some bigger revolution. Many people are burnt out from the time, dedication, and courage required. We keep bumping our heads up against the limits of coordination, communication, and alienation. […]

SeaSol also isn’t always prepared for a legal counter-attack. We’re vulnerable when an employer uses the courts (lawfare) to harass and intimidate us.

Lilly: Regarding failure, almost ten years after I left the organizing team I would still prefer to say “I didn’t give it my best effort,” rather than the truth, which is that I totally did and I still feel I failed. I think I learn more everyday about why it didn’t work “better”—and how flawed and grandiose it is to think “I failed” at social revolution. At one point during organizing, it became almost physically painful when people uninvolved in the daily struggle would ask why it wasn’t “scaling” or picking up speed. And honestly? It wasn’t scaling because of the sheer weight of that metaphorical boulder representing an entire economic system, and the innumerable divisions between us in society.

Criticism flowed constantly: why didn’t SeaSol create more community? Why didn’t it scale? Why was it focused on single-worker or tenant fights? Well, it did do all those things and aspired for more, but the reality of constant, concerted oppression was more extreme than I previously understood. Existing under capitalism—let alone resisting under it—is exhausting, demoralizing, and traumatic. Solidarity Networks are a great method to get elbow-deep into resistance, for pushing that boulder around for a few moments, letting someone else under it breathe before it rolls back on top of all of us. I think that is the type of community and resistance building we need, repeatedly, even if it’s barely manageable. If we keep gaining momentum on this boulder, if we keep organizing and shifting it around, we will eventually keep up the momentum to push it off of us for longer and longer periods; I have no doubt that if more people participated in SolNets, we’d see increased community capacity over time. […]

During my time, one organizer quit by basically telling everybody how much he hated each of them and especially the relationships that organizers formed. It can’t be reduced to this because there was so much going on at the time, but one point he made was that SeaSol organizing was not really sustainable with a working-class lifestyle. He was kind of right. Doing something that hard and doing it extremely well took a handful of people making SeaSol their entire lives. Now, many of those people were working class, but still. It took a lot. I hope that anyone engaging in solidarity networks realizes that balance is really difficult, but not impossible. The frustration around ease of participation is valid; solidarity networks should try to be as inclusive as possible. And it is not fellow organizers or members who dictate the difficulty of participation so much as the conditions from which all fights originate: capitalism.

The Four Fingered Fisherman: I think it is inarguable that the social context has changed; the Trump years, the George Floyd Rebellion, climate catastrophe, and the genocide in Palestine, among other things, have all pulled us in a million different directions, often in reactive way. Moments such as those are always going to shift some of the energy away from a geographically-focused, long-term project like SeaSol.

However, I would posit that a serious and strategic assessment of the limitations of these moments, which we continually find ourselves running up against, points us back toward the keystone elements of the solidarity network model and what has made it so successful for SeaSol. In this regard, the most important elements of the solidarity network model that I have taken away from it as it can be applied to the current social context are having a geographically-restrictive focus (even when tied to a broader mass social movement), being regenerative in their capacity, and using direct action to target relevant local manifestations of power. […]

While SeaSol was generally pretty intentional about reserving use of its mobilization list and organizing energies for its own demand-specific campaigns, there were moments in my time with the organization when we directly organized to support broader goals. The largest single SeaSol mobilization that I participated in was when we hit our entire mobilization list to bring people out into the streets to face off against the Northwest Hammerskins⁴ on an attempted so-called “Martyr’s Day” march they were planning in 2015. SeaSol mobilized over 70 people from our list and offered a contingent at the action for our supporters in a context that might otherwise have felt prohibitively dangerous . Beyond using the project itself as a space to participate in broader social movements, however, I have always felt that SeaSol is one of the primary points of entry here in Seattle for new, politically-activated people to come in and quickly develop skills and experience that they can then apply in other spaces.

That was certainly my personal experience, and I have seen that play out for many others as well in my time here.

David C.: In retrospect, I think we were asking many of the right questions, but there were things we missed or fumbled. While those conversations did happen, sometimes outside of “formal” meeting processes or spaces, we didn’t initially pay as much attention to how we as a group might define “the working class,” what politics should define our approach, how race and gender and class factor into those politics, or what the composition of SeaSol might look like. Often, the thinking was that all this was secondary to winning fights.

Matt: We were also inspired by the positive reception we got from anarchist and communist groups around the world.

Among other unintended positive effects, it increased the credibility of the anarchist movement around the time of Occupy. We could point to some tangible and practical victories we had achieved. This helped to put us in a position to win the battle of ideas (and organization) against liberal collaborationists.

The big problem was scale. It’s great to win a few thousand dollars back in lost wages for a few dozen members, and to help families avoid eviction and so on, but that is a tiny drop in the ocean, so I believed that the model had to grow exponentially to even keep up with capitalist society. That is why I favored speaking tours to spread the model and encourage growth of new groups. This was quite successful in the short term, but most of those groups folded after only a few months to a year. (Perhaps in our enthusiasm, we made it sound too easy.)

Another impasse was about what to do with the local Seattle group in order to achieve constantly increasing growth—should we form specialized groups focusing on tenant committees and workplaces, or should we split into smaller regional groups for different parts of the area?

Conclusion: What’s Next?

We won’t shy away from it: We want you to start a solidarity network, or at least to borrow heavily from the idea. The solidarity network narratives and critiques that we have shared here attest that manifesting a community of solidarity and resistance through sheer organizing energy is an experience worth the effort it takes to sustain. The responses describe applied, practical solidarity as an antidote to apathy and agony.

Solidarity networks are a way to blow life into the working class. We want you to play a part in this resuscitation, to pound on the chest until you hear the ribs crack if you need to. Give this your best effort. Because it works. Even if it’s completely exhausting. And despite everything—anxiety and ruined relationships and failed fights, extreme edges of human behavior and fraught moments when it feels like it may actually be impossible—solidarity networks may still be one of the best forms of organizing on offer.

Mickey: The biggest thing I learned from my time with SeaSol is that anarchists can organize successful autonomous class struggle initiatives independent of mainstream unions or NGOs. This was huge for me when I was in my early twenties. Much of my experience up to that point had been in off-putting subcultural spaces with anarchists who seemed committed to losing.

Dolly: Fascists are becoming bolder, which has increased the relevance of the solidarity network model and increased the importance of security culture within SeaSol. Bosses and landlords have been gaining power and traditional business unions are weakening, all of which increases our relevance for obvious reasons. The climate crisis and racial injustice are shifting within our social context. Both are caused by capitalism, and people active in SeaSol and similar organizing care deeply about both of these things.

SeaSol, over the years, has also made me increasingly doubtful of the effectiveness of governments and legal systems for making any kind of meaningful gains for the working class. I’ve seen people turn to legal fights rather than SeaSol fights, and seen those just drain them of time and resources until they peter out into nothingness. I can see that the bosses and landlords who write the laws of our land also benefit from them. I see that wage theft is the most common type of theft, and that wage theft laws are not enforced. That is a design feature, not a bug, because the employing class writes these laws and enforces them, not the working class. They have ensured that the working class will never overthrow them within the systems that they have set up.

I had a lot more faith in things like electoral politics when I first joined SeaSol. I’m a lot more critical of those systems now. I consider myself an anarcho-syndicalist. My education didn’t come from reading theory so much as through watching people’s situations play out in the context of organizing.

Epilogue

The picket wraps up and your solidarity network crew does a group go-around, each person recounts a favorite moment from the last two hours. One person—you think they’re the barista, they might have authored the leaflet—says they loved it when the boss stepped out to yell at the picket line. They can’t imagine the vein on the boss’s forehead can handle another picket like this one.

Another member—the other person brand new to the fight—proudly shares the moment they were able to turn a customer away, leaflet in one hand and picket sign in the other. Two solidarity network members who had stepped over to the side to talk to the police when they arrived report to the group that the boss was the one who called the police to the picket yet again. The person at the center of the fight goes last and thanks everyone for coming out.

It’s now dusk. The street lights are flickering on. You are still in the middle of a stretch of suburban nowhere, at an intersection next to a gas station across the street from a strip mall. But you’re feeling different. You and the dishwashers, phone tree operators, leaflet authors, apartment dwellers, and the barista return your picket signs to the back of the truck that transported them there. The concept behind this group is sinking in. Solidarity.

“It really is so simple,” you think to yourself. “When we stand up for one another, the rest of the petty, entitled, obnoxious bosses will probably buckle just like today’s did.” You head back home to think about the next action. Maybe you will finally check out one of the planning meetings, too.