Local War Resistance Pictured: Part 3
Engaging with Workers
In our last post, “Local War Resistance Pictured: Part 2”, we showed pictures and articles about encampments and war tax resistance as tactics to resist the US war machine. This post focuses on The Honeywell Project, and how the organizers and educators and artists attempted to lift the veil of propaganda from the workers whose labor contributed to it being Minnesota’s largest weapon manufacturer at the time.
Engaging with Workers
One of the Honeywell Project’s most prioritized direct action strategies was their campaign to engage with Honeywell workers, with the goal being to convince them to either quit their jobs or advocate for their employer to drop its military contracts. The excerpts below provide insight into these organizing methods as well as the responses of employees. A number of Honeywell employees did quit their jobs due to the education they received from the activists, and some even joined the anti-war movement themselves.
Organizers knew that they were asking workers to risk their livelihoods, and they therefore kept economic justice as a core part of their campaign. One of their central demands was, “Peace conversion without loss of jobs.” As part of a coalition of anti-war groups, the Honeywell Project advocated for the Peace Conversion Bill, which would have pressured companies to convert weapons manufacturing related jobs into positions at the same company working on non-weapons related projects, such as renewable energy.
In their interactions with workers and the public, organizers distributed literature and art that pulled on heartstrings while insisting on the collective responsibility everyone bears for dismantling the U.S. war machine.
Here are some examples:
“Dear Honeywell Worker: For over a year, the Honeywell Project has picketed corporate headquarters once a week to protest Honewell weapons production. We plan to continue various forms of protest, and some of our members may go beyond protest to peaceful acts of civil disobedience.”
“We wish that all weapons manufacturers would begin peace conversion, but have chosen to focus on Honeywell for several reasons. With approximately one billion a year in arms contracts, Honeywell is the largest arms maker in Minnesota. It makes the cluster bomb, a hideous weapon on which recently killed and maimed many civilians in Israel’s invasion of Lebanon.”
“My work at Honeywell has been that of a weapons promotor, writing advertisements, video tapes, brochures, proposals; sales documents for the Pentagon and for international arms markets. It’s slick writing, benign company image work, full of code words that shy away from the purpose and use of the torpedoes, submarines, mines that the division works on: ‘the threat’, ‘readiness’, ‘effective’, ‘high performance’, ‘state of the art’.”
“This doublespeak was born out of the protests of the sixties and has grown to an almost comic phobia about the potential of being picketed, tremendously acerbated by The Honeywell Project in Minnesota… By your protests of Honeywell, and Honeywell’s nervous response, you make the company acknowledge that their buisness may be considered morally repugnant, work that should be best done hidden. And, in the hiding, they daily cause their employees to consider the type of work they are doing. I have quit for this reason; others will quit for the same…”
In Conclusion: Creating Anew
As we close this three-part series, let’s take a moment to vision, dream, and speak into existence the end of all settler colonial states. Demonstrated throughout this post, there have been—and still are—countless people, groups and campaigns resisting the devastating effects of the weapons economy that props up and funds the United States government.
When we build movements rooted in our history, healing can and will happen. We hope in this post series we have demonstrated a sliver of the beautiful struggle that inspires and guides our energy and our own resistance.
So, as we demand and imagine the liberatory world that we hope to live in, we leave you with these questions. We do not have the answers to them, but we hope you’ll join us in reflecting on them, as you join us in co-creating a new existence.
How have we been socialized in the settler colonial state? What does this mean for us?
Is it possible to reject militarism, capitalism, and colonialism? How do we do this in our everyday worlds?
Where do we want to focus our creative resistance, our energy for the struggle? How do we pick and choose the actions we want to help make possible?
How do we create movements that rely not on figureheads, but instead on deep relationships and community care?
Settler colonialism can only continue if it has access to weapons, which in turn depend on our money, our time, and our labor. Knowing this, in what ways can we live more of our lives outside of the settler colonial state, so that those systems no longer have access to our selves, our resources, and our fear of perceived scarcity?
This is a necessary part of the fall of empire: asking and dreaming about hard questions as we call upon histories of resistance and struggle, using their actions, models, and lessons to inspire our collective liberation.
Thank you to the Indigenous, Black, and Chicane siblings who have been holding, sharing and gifting ways to subvert empire while in deep collective relationship. Thank you to all those who resisted during the time these pieces of history are from. Thank you to all who are resisting now, fumbling but together: may we end empires and create the next world.
