Luis-Enrique Marquez

Teamwork is something that is so beautiful when it happens. Just imagine a team winning a game in the last second, or the way certain actions happen when we all work together. Any group of people successfully doing anything depends on teamwork.

The American Left has forgotten what teamwork is.

An American high school football team generally has 40-70 players on a team, a collegiate one can have up to 100 players on a team. That is 100 different personalities, different backgrounds, and life experiences and different beliefs. They have the game to bind them—and a goal of winning.
Being on a team taught me so much: discipline, giving my all for a cause, the joy of winning, and the empty feeling of defeat that inspired an anger to become better as an individual and as a team. In a conflict, teamwork and discipline will always win against a mass of people with no team work and no discipline.

We, the American Left, are too quick to kick people off our team for what is often a silly matter. We are also often too willing to die on hills of silly matters. Just because you are no longer friends with someone or have broken up with a romantic partner, it doesn’t mean that they are no longer worthy of being on the team. If we remain so willing to kick people to the curb, soon there will be no one left to stand up.
That is not to say that there aren’t people who have acted as informants to the police or who have committed sex crimes and abuses that can be proven. Those people can no longer be on our team.
The American Left has so many truly smart people who fight among ourselves. This makes us weaker, but what if they worked together to create a leftist justice system that we can all one day agree on. Think about what an accomplishment that would be.

A lot of us are independent and don’t belong to a group. So how do we practice being a good teammate?

It’s actually pretty easy. Don’t engage in gossip or rumor spreading, such as “cop-jacketing.” We don’t know if someone is a cop unless you actually have the paperwork. Having the paperwork would, most likely … guess what? Make you a cop. If you don’t like someone, keep your distance. At actions when the police push—and they will—don’t panic, don’t run: walk. If you run, others will run, and that will cause a panic, allowing the police to push the crowd wherever they want. Think of it in a way that hunters hunted large plains animals and got them to run over cliffs.

The American Left should have one goal and that is to win. This next year is going to be crazy. Instead of fighting each other, let’s be disciplined and not rise to the bait that only makes our enemies stronger. We can fight among ourselves after we win.

We should be students of history and learn from it to make sure we don’t repeat it. When Hitler was running for chancellor, if the German Left would have unified in the common cause of beating the fascist right, they could have won and we would live in a world that could possibly have been one that was Nazi-free. Instead the German Left decided to fight amongst themselves over who was more right and who was to blame for the rise of the Nazis in the first place. They decided to fight among themselves and allowed the Nazis to win, causing the death of millions.T he German left is as responsible for the murder of millions as much as the Nazis are. We, I hope, will learn and keep our eyes on the goal in the coming year.

Luis-Enrique Marquez recently released his new book Antifascist: A Memoir of the Portland Uprising 2016-2020.