An ecology of liberatory movements

TLDR: Understanding social movements primarily as an ecology of organizations allows us to (1) model organizations using a system that is living, complex, and adaptive, and (2) analyze the relationships between them for the sake of creating anarchic social change. With this knowledge in tow, we can become strategic, orienting to our surroundings to formulate strategies and tactics for the future. This modeling allows us to relate to ourselves and others non-hierarchically, filling our “ecological niche”, rather than trying to climb to the top of the “food chain”. If there ever was a time for domination and coercion as a modus operandi, that time has long passed. Cooperative models will allow targeted, small amounts of collective power to create outsized impacts, enabling spaces and zones of autonomy for the most dispossessed and marginalized.

Introduction

If social change happens through social ties, then organizing is the way that multiple ties knot together into a movement. The most common way to make these knots are are through organizations. I’ll define organizations in the most broad sense; a grouping of folks, created to meet (subjectively) specific need(s), want(s), and/or desire(s). I am a critical organizationalist-I hold that organizations are ultimately necessary vehicles to enable and cultivate spaces where revolutionary action, including spontaneity, is at its most powerful (applying maximal force) and effective (able to realize intent). I also hold a lot of the anti-organizational critiques of organization in mind, through integrating them or excavating and incorporating their underlying concerns. I strive to uphold individual autonomy within organizations, where one’s will is never subordinated, and radical informed consent is upheld. We use organizations to engage in struggle effectively. They, like any other tools, should shape us in ways that we are happy with. They should not exist for their own sake.

Organizations can take many forms, but I am primarily interested in exploring organizations in a systemic way. I want to look at how social change & movement organizations relate to one another and how those relations can help actualize (r)evolution. For this, I want to bring together the disparate ideas of ecology, design (as a method), and game design. Ecology as a model will inform the point (how we look at organizations within a social movement along with the context in which they reside), and design practices will inform the view (how we interact with(in) it). This creates our point-of-view, the perspective from which we will explore our topic. We strive to apprehend both the “ parts” and “ wholes “ of a system that we’re interested in exploring. That is how our mental models start to look like reality.

The Broad Context & Our Orientation

Before we go any further, I want to contextualize the discussion some more. I want to explore the time that we find ourselves in so that we can relate our revolutionary activity to that context. This will, ideally, allow us to create bespoke responses to the issues at hand. We want to apply theories to our context and create new theories from that context. This will be a short, incomplete look at some of the main issues that we’re dealing with at present, in the US.

One of the biggest things to note is how unstable this decade has been so far. We’ve had a really wild past couple of years. It’s been HOT. Like, literally. Alongside that, we’ve had a pandemic that is surging up again(2nd worst one since it started!) with no response in sight. We are seeing mass abandonment from our civil institutions and from each other in a broad sense. American individualism (as opposed to individuality) and an adequate response to the public health crisis are like oil and water. This has also intersected with a rising right wing, resulting in COVID safety protocol becoming “political” (masking up, etc is seen as “leftist”(?)).

The 2020 Black Rebellions rocked the country, radicalizing tons of people. After the killing of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and others, there was a massive racial reckoning in the States. Riots abound — the movement could be best symbolized by the Minneapolis 3rd Precinct burning, and the mainstream conversation getting funneled into the slogan “defund the police” (after originally being the correct stance of “abolish the police”). Lots of anger and potential could be found in this moment-showing us a glimpse of what may be to come: radical action, reformist goals, and strategy, the likes of which are wholly unable and unwilling to adequately respond effectively.

That stuff was just in 2020. After that, we saw the repression and clamp down. As the US empire enters its death spiral, and the organized left remains teeny, there is no incentive for anything besides austerity and power concentration from the State. They are raising cop budgets as a counterinsurrectionary, reactionary ploy. Based on media reports, you might think that police were getting defunded, but the truth is that some depts quickly overturned defunding, if they ever did it at all. Most departments have waited for the storm to pass, using the fog of misinformation to their advantage, leading to more militarization and policing, such as all of the Cop Cities being built. Legislatively, there has been an extreme uptick of hateful energy and vitriol towards trans folks, with a massive proliferation of anti-trans bills getting proposed within the past couple of years (the pace of which is constantly increasing). This, paired with the movement towards banning “ CRT “ content has laid bare the emptiness of liberal conceptions of “equality” and “liberty”. These issues are used as a wedge to cleave out the “neutral” political center and polarize folks rightward. Transphobia is highly effective for this. The far-right takes and takes, and the liberals complain but don’t stop them or fight them meaningfully.

Economically, stuff isn’t looking too hot (as if the social issues weren’t enough). Inflation & instability have been the defining features of the decade so far, with the main pain points being fragile supply lines, hurting from climate change, the pandemic, and war, contributing to price-setters raising prices. Capitalism continues to claim victims the world over from its practices and policies, widening the gap between rulers and the ruled.

All of these issues are animated by social hierarchies that uphold domination and coercion, facilitating oppression. We have to look at how these relationships of hierarchy manifest in some specific ways so that we can create specific responses. Some of these social hierarchies/systems of oppression are:

Those systems of oppression are just scratching the surface. And they all interconnect, intersect, and overlap with one another. We have to understand that hierarchy is the general concept that animates them, while specifically exploring how those specific hierarchies show up in social relations so that we can adequately address them. Staying zoomed out (where the level of “zoom” indicates specificity), just being “against hierarchy” does not make an actionable political program (nor does it ground us anything resembling useful ethics).

• (Cishetero)patriarchy: A system of oppression of maGes, perpetuated principally by cis men, though it has seeped into many aspects of life due to its longevity, and thus is something all have to constantly fight against (though cis men have the most work to do in this regard).
• Racism: A system of oppression of non-white people, perpetuated principally by white people, manifesting most saliently as antiblackness and white supremacy, though it can be perpetuated by everyone, and thus is something we all have to fight against (though white people have the most work to do in this regard).
• Ableism: A system of oppression of “dis”abled & neurodivergent people, perpetuated principally by “able”-bodied & neurotypical people, though it can be perpetuated by anyone, and thus should be collectively fought against (though people who are “able”-bodied and neurotypical have the most to resolve in this regard).
• Colonialism: A system of oppression of one group/population by a dominating group/population. Colonial relationships can be perpetuated by colonizers and the colonized, and as such should be constantly fought against (though the brunt of the responsibility lies with those descended from colonizers, occupiers, and settlers).
• Imperialism: A system of oppression that employs economic and political power over an imperialized nation or people. Imperial relationships can be reinforced by those living and imperial countries and those living in plundered countries (though the brunt of the responsibilities lies in those who materially benefit from imperialism.
• Class antagonism: A system of domination that relies on the exploitation of workers for the sake of owners. Mainly perpetuated by bosses, but can be regurgitated by workers.

To address these issues, we can create/employ a broad framework of analysis and action that allows us to zoom in and out, so that we can understand sites of oppression and struggle at multiple scales, for the sake of succeeding in overthrowing those oppressive orientations. I’ll describe a framework, in which our conversation about social movement ecologies would fit in, that might allow us to think about how to analyze and act against oppressive structures.

I imagine the general process for this being an oscillation between analysis and action, where the interplay between the two makes each more impactful. For this, we have what I’ll call gates; orientations to struggle that we can use to understand what is going on and figure out how to move forward. We are taking raw information and filtering it into something useful. These gates are: anti-authoritarianism/autonomism, transfeminism, anticolonization, and disability justice. We would put the issues we face on the path where they meet each of these gates, taking that gate’s perspective, so that at the end, once the issue has passed through all gates, we can have a response that takes those orientations into account. Here is how I’d describe each gate:

All of these gates have to be passed through for our actions to even have a chance of pointing in the direction that we want (genuine, egalitarian liberation, where the most marginalized can self-determine). Once we act, we return and meet the gates again. We check our understanding against each gate, armed with the information gained from action. And we repeat the process.

• Anti-authoritarianism/autonomism: at its foundation, our approach must be non-hierarchical and horizontal. Everything that we propose should maximize the ability for folks to self-determine in ways that don’t perpetuate the harmful and oppressive systems and ways of relating that we’re fighting against.
• Transfeminism: We should have an intersectional feminism that understands gender, sexuality, and embodiment expansively-this will allow us to see the implications of patriarchal, sexist, and queerphobic ideas in our spaces and how much they prevent us from achieving liberatory ends. This also allows us to understand that we need to center the most marginalized, namely Black maGes and QTGNC folks, uplifting them into leadership/catalyzation/coordination positions, a necessity if we’re actually serious about liberation.
• Anticolonization: We must understand our fight in the context of a colonial world-system, where the colonized take the brunt of the negative outcomes. With this in mind, we have to do the actual work to achieve our liberatory ends, and that means not tolerating bigotry and colonial logics. We have to understand the systems of oppression that we’re working against and center those at the bottom of the hierarchy in enacting the solutions. It can be easy to get stuck in theorizing and aesthetics, but the whole point of those things is to enable action. That should always be in sight.
• Disability justice: All of this work that we do has to be accessible, inclusive, and create a sense of belonging. I know this can sound toothless in a liberal context, but for us, it means taking seriously the idea of centering the most marginalized, by making sure that we can cede as much power as possible. There should be a constant effort to design processes, structures, and things of that sort to ensure that disabled folks are leading our revolutionary work.

This context is greatly important if we want our social movement ecology to be cultivated towards liberatory ends. Our analysis means nothing if it can’t support the ends that we are trying to reach.

Social Movement Categories

With some context, we can start to explore how different parts of a social movement can relate to each other, to achieve our ends. Looking at the whole of a social movement ecology (or, said otherwise, applying “ecology” as a model to social movements), there are three broad categories or levels of engagement that exist: the social base, the social-political intermediate base, and the political base.

The social base is where people tend to live, work, and interact daily. This is also where broad self-interests are responded to. For example, a big trade union exists at the social base because of the unifying factor being a social experience and/or condition (in this case sharing a trade).

The social-political intermediate base is where folks are meeting their self-interest in a more politicized way. An example might be that while a charity would exist at the social level, mutual aid, with the maxim “solidarity, not charity”, exists at the social-political level. This is an area with leverage, as it can shift the social base’s “common sense” due to its positioning relative to that base. Going from charity to mutual aid is a more tangible jump for many than jumping from charity to abolishing the commodity form.

The political base can also be seen (in our case) as the revolutionary base. This is a space where folks are grouped based on a unity of political objectives and orientation, historically with an ambivalent relationship to member self-interest. Ideally, we rectify that as we move forward. This base’s importance lies in cultivating & encouraging liberatory radicalism within the other bases through mutuality, to foster liberatory tendencies.

These bases are the foundations on which organizations exist, dictating their character and orientation. Generally, organizations as a whole operate at a single, specific base, with the possibility of having initiatives in other bases. An example might be a neighborhood assembly existing at the social base, with an anticolonial council existing more in the social-political intermediate base.

Social organizations build the foundation, through people meeting their direct needs, wants, interests, and desires. They have a low barrier to entry and tend to orient around unity, like a neighborhood assembly. Then, there are social-political intermediate organizations, where self-interests are being met in a way that has a more political and/or militant orientation to it, like the anticolonial council within that assembly. The final type of organization is the political, where groups of unified actors are moving in concert. This might be something like Unity & Struggle. These levels aren’t meant to indicate a hierarchy of importance. They are meant to distinguish and define relationships and positioning to struggle. Each level plays a part in keeping the ecology alive, functioning, and healthy. The organizations within shape what those parts are.

There are different “species” of organization within this ecology. These species fulfill certain “niches” or roles. An (aspirationally) expansive list of these species, adapted from and inspired by this list are: base-building orgs, popular organizations, activist collectives and affinity groups, dual power structures, political parties, knowledge mutualism spaces, media and culture/art institutions, syncretic organizations, and coalitions/alliances. Let’s define what those can look like:

• Base-building Orgs: People with a common, broad interest that unites them, and a place to collectively fight, receive, and/or advocate for those interests. In our current context, these are generally service-based NGOs and nonprofit organizations that are pretty hierarchically institutionalized
• Popular Organizations: Similar to the above, but may have a wider, more general cross-section of people, the affairs of which are managed by the people in that organization
• Activist Collectives and Affinity Groups: Groups for activists to act towards the issues that they care about
• Dual Power Structures: Institutions that meet needs, wants, and desires, defying the logic of liberalism, authoritarianism, and capitalism
• Political Parties: Statist Governance bodies
• Knowledge Mutualism spaces: Formations focused on building up the awareness, knowledge, and confidence of people and organizations in a horizontal and mutualistic way. Spaces of popularizing knowledge
• Media and Culture/Art Institutions: Formations that create media and culture pieces from liberatory perspectives
• Syncretic Organizations: Formations with members (mostly occupying the underclasses) united around liberatory vision and assessment; work to carry out a shared strategy for liberation. They syncretize learnings from across a movement and recycle them to offer a radical perspective on that movement — to move things forward
• Coalitions and Alliances: Ways for organizations to come together and work as a unit. Tends to be tenuous, and whether or not that is good is based on the context

These organizations comprise a range of formations, that could further be sorted into what base they arise from. This awareness of the species within the ecology allows us to start and imagine the different relationships between the species and how they inform the ecology.

The Role of Keystone Species

Another useful concept is the idea of keystone species. In ecosystems, a keystone species helps disproportionately shape an ecology; it’s a little thing having a big impact. In this case, these keystone species would be the organization(s) that have a great impact across the bases, towards the ends of liberation.

We can pair this idea with keystone mutualism, where that keystone effect depends on how multiple keystone species symbiotically relate to one another. This creates force multiplication and antifragility, where there is no reliance on one keystone species to uphold a movement. It can also help with shaping that “common sense” we discussed earlier.

In our model, the keystone species are syncretic organizations and activist collectives/affinity groups. The positioning and potential of both of these species can help prop up, cultivate, and strengthen revolutionary potential across the ecology.

Syncretic organizations have an especially important role. These are the where folks that are most interested in revolutionary change from an active, intentional, organized perspective should be. To be abundantly clear, I believe that this can only happen though an anti-authoritarian, transfeminist, and anticolonial movement and liberatory culture, oriented around horizontalism and solidarity. Syncretic orgs should be facilitating that. To this end, here are some tasks for them:

• Articulate liberatory theory and strategy that cultivates space for solidarity in pluralism
• Facilitate and/or catalyze alternative visions for the world through practice
• Empower the most marginalized from society & the most impacted by oppression
• Link together formations and folks in the movement ecology to help create ties of solidarity
• Continually analyze the current moment, stay up date with current context and news, share analysis widely for the sake of taking action (past-and-present, local-regional-national-global) as it is relevant
• Record, catalog, disseminate, and archive movement history for the sake of analysis and remembrance
• Help support the creation of new syncretic organizations, invigorating the movement and equitizing the labor required
• Social insertion, where syncretic org members work at the social and intermediate levels, from the perspective of their revolutionary orientation, increasing capacity at all levels. This should happen at sites of struggle that affect those doing the insertion, or, if necessary, in an accomplice capacity. This is not a missionary’s role. Rather than trying to “grow membership” of the revolutionary org, the revolutionary org’s members should engage in a principled manner in non-revolutionary spaces
• Operate as a partner within social movements, focusing on distributed power over leadership
• Guard the lane against reactionaries, opportunists, grifters, and abusers, including but not limited to: transphobes, racists, authoritarians, sexists, ableists, dominators, coercers, settlers, and other bigots
• Strengthen social base through orienting around liberatory approaches to justice and an anticolonial commitment to liberation

So, this begs a central question: how do we create keystone species? I have two basic proposals. We (1) create those syncretic organizations, and (2) a specific kind of formation to facilitate effectiveness with affinity groups/activist collectives and other formations: insurrectionary councils.

Building Keystone Mutualists

To start syncretic organizations, there needs to be a coherent political frame and an orientation. The way I generally imagine this is as the end result of a clarification process of activist collectives and affinity groups, where they start to become more expansive, with a focus on analysis and multiple issues. These can maintain an affinity group model, operate in a federated council structure, or a stigmergic cell structure as I describe in my writings on organizational forms. Whatever form it takes, it should be in line with our goals. Basically, these kinds of organizations come into being through a process of gaining more political clarity and specificity, through engaging with social and other intermediate formations, as a revolutionary formation.

Insurrectionary councils are social-political intermediate formations that allow for there to be points of congregation to steer radical action. At the social level, there might be high levels of apathy towards radical change, especially if that change is scary. This is an extreme case of learned helplessness, where people both aren’t willing to make change and actively decry meaningful action that isn’t “ respectable “. This can make social insertion difficult to the point of being ineffectual. It leaves rupture points as the moment that folks from the social level might take more radical action. The 2020 Rebellions are examples of that. This isn’t to decry social insertion; it should still be practiced. That work, however is the slow build-up towards more radical activity. It’s a process of evolution. Insurrection, on the other hand, creates spaces for revolution.

The insurrectionary councils are places where there is an alignment through points of unity and a commitment to direct action. This is a place from which folks can come from any organization or species of organization across the ecology, as long as they agree with the points of unity that animate the council. Through unification around liberatory values & methods, the insurrectionary councils are an experimental space to create change through direct action. If someone calls themselves a liberal, but is willing to align with the council’s points of unity and tactics, there’s no reason to bar them at this level. Just keep an eye on them. The councils would operate on a spokescouncil model, where each organization and formation sends/has a delegate. They don’t have to be anarchist, but they do have to be radical. This is key. We don’t want to send someone who is (only) a massive letter-writing advocate to a space discussing disruptive direct action. These delegates build connections with the council, and plant the seeds of direct & militant resistance in their otherwise moderate/unaligned ‘primary’ formation. This allows for there to be a potential for popularizing direct actions, without obscuring the revolutionary development of the syncretic orgs, or alienating the social base through the “ vanguardist” vibes that can arise through poor social insertion & entryism. Multiple tendencies can come together and engage, which widen the spaces for other formations to be more effective, and propagate principled discussion and deliberation.

Syncretic orgs and insurrectionary councils can use that keystone mutualism to move things in a more radical direction through participation and practice, rather than domination and coercion. This will allow our movements to be strong and flexible, growing through collective intelligence.

Applying Strategy to our Ecology

With our social movement ecology as a foundation, we can get into conversations on strategy, applying some classic strategic ideas, through design lenses. Strategy, for our purposes, will be described from the perspective of our keystone mutualists, as it might not be as heavy of consideration for other formations, especially at this conjuncture. This is not a declaration on who has the “right” to create strategy. It’s just an observation on who might be willing to intentionally strategize, in an effective way.

Let’s define strategy. I tend to think of this as fractal, which is a way to explain the fact that it can apply to multiple scales. Strategy is planning for the sake of liberation at the “highest” scale. It’s planning to reach our vision of change. It’s like a viewfinder that allows us, from where we are currently situated, to (1) apprehend our goal and (2) iteratively chart out a method to get there, through practice and reflection. Specifically, we will have to look at:

• where our engagements, clashes, fights, and struggles will happen from a temporal and spatial perspective
• our current and potential material(izable) strengths and weaknesses, along with how these can change to our advantage
• the current and potential material(izable) strengths and weaknesses of our enemies, along with how these can change to our advantage

This information starts us on the path of being able to assess our conditions through theory and analysis.

Tactics are like strategy on a smaller scale. It’s a more concrete look. We ask the same questions but for a specific moment. If strategy is how we win the war, tactics are how we win the battle. To analyze our tactics, in addition to our previous strategic considerations, we can get more specific (using an Action Winnability Matrix):

• Do we have a compelling narrative for the action?
• Are those most directly impacted involved AND ready to act?
• How materially easy is it for the target to capitulate/for us to receive what we want?
• How ideologically easy is it for the target to capitulate/for us to receive what we want?
• Is the action is autonomous? Does it hold the threat of further disruption?
• How SMART(IE) are our demands/goals?
• Do we have the resources (people, power, process) to execute this action successfully, without exhausting those resources?

So if strategy is about moving towards our goals, and tactics are about a specific application of that strategy for a particular moment, there needs to be a way to make those plans materialize. This is where logistics and operations, an underrated part of strategic planning, comes in. With these, we answer questions like:

• How are we keeping our people cared for? What are the ways in which we produce and reproduce/maintain things like food, water, shelter, and personal needs?
• What does onboarding, engagement, and training look like, at each level of the movement?
• What plan(s) do we have to acquire what we need?
• What (tools, resources, materials + people, power, process) do we need to accomplish our (short term, medium term, long term, micro, meso, macro) objectives?
• What is our positioning, at this moment, and in general? What about our enemies’?
• What conditions (social, political, economic, ecological/environmental, technological) are we facing? How does that impact our capabilities?

Having logistics and operations in place makes the theory of fighting material, and lets you know what the chances are of being able to succeed at the goals and objectives being set.

Zooming back out to strategy, there are different strategic orientations that we can take. We can approach things head-on, we can swarm/encircle our objective, or we can divide our objective/split it up. I recommend a general strategic orientation of encircling, with features of the other two as they are useful. In my conception, encircling is a strategy that sees objectives as having multiple sides. Essentially, the movement would try to achieve objectives by working in solidarity, through a diversity of tactics. There would be an effort through the keystone mutualists to mitigate unhelpful redundancies (redundancy can be insurance in many cases). Each type of organization in the ecosystem would approach the problem in a way that is grounded in their theory of change, all the while, radical elements are showing the importance of more radical action. It might look something like this:

• Responsive: support is provided when and where it’s needed.
• Simple: planning and execution of action is oriented around solidarity and efficiency, as a counterweight to the friction and lack of information on the ground.
• Flexible: can improvise and adapt on the ground to changing conditions.
• Resourceful: only use what is needed to achieve objectives.
• Attainable: can achieve objectives and operate with an acceptable level of risk (enough supplies, support, infrastructure).
• Sustainable: can maintain the attainability of objectives for the length required to complete them.
• Survivable/Antifragile: able to prevail, persist, and strengthen from adversity.

Encircling is a way that the disparate parts of a movement can co-create a “common sense” and act in solidarity. Multiple groups, in various overlapping and related formations, sharing objectives, and working towards them, with the radical elements shifting what’s acceptable in a more militant direction, can create higher chances of achieving social change.

In Practice

I want to try and bring everything together in a relatively tangible way. So, the organizations that we’ve discussed in this ecology can exist in different forms, but as we grow, we should encourage forms that support our content. For us, that means anti-authoritarian, transfeminist, anticolonial, and horizontalist orgs. This would allow the social, intermediate, and political bases to have a way to relate to one another that is based on mutuality rather than domination. Instead of leading the movement, the keystone mutualists can influence it and be influenced by it by proving themselves in practice. The radical tactics adopted at the social level should win folks over because they work, not because they were imposed from above. The social level will also innovate in ways that the two other levels can learn from.

To understand how we might start preparing to cohere an ecology into a movement that can exercise force, we should target systems of oppression from the perspective of self-interest.

Self-interest is expansive in my conception, where it recognizes that every individual has self-interest, so building a community that can self-determine is in the self-interest of those community members. Think of it as an ethical egoism, stretched to encompass the facilitation of communal, deep bonds with others. If I have a dream to be a musician, an alternative to seeing my self-interest being embedded in the dog-eat-dog world of the music industry would be to create and plug into networks of care and communal support for tours. We want to change the rules of the game and create a new game entirely, rather than taking the design of the game for granted.

• At the social level, there might be a desire to do low-confrontation actions, where they appeal to authority. These are your letter-writing campaigns, phone banks, rallies, and marches.
• At the social-political intermediate level, there might be a desire to do medium-to-high-confrontations with authority. These are actions like civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts and other noncooperative forms of resistance, and “nonviolent” direct actions.
• At the political level, there might be more of a willingness to have higher confrontation tactics. These would be actions that orient around crippling and destroying the ability for authority to function.
• Each higher level might engage at lower levels, and employ tactics from those levels. Each level will probably escalate over time, as lower confrontation methods yield less useful results long-term.

To find our primary target, we can orient around analyzing the pillars that hold it up and think of ways that our folks can respond. We can then find points of intervention, where we can exercise leverage. For sub-targets, it could be steps on the way to that final primary target, or specific leverage points that make it easier to hit the central node that will take down the primary target.

For the pillars, we can see if any of them constitute meaningful tertiary targets, which could be more manageable and isolate the primary target. It may be easier to cut off the circulation of resources than it is to strike directly. A ship or truck in transit is easier to impede than a shipping depot.

We should approach these targets using encircling, with as much fidelity as we are allowed. An illustrative and contentious example of this orientation in practice is Operation Al-Aqsa Flood. Alongside thinking about a diversity of tactics, happening in parallel, across a spectrum of confrontation, it would be worthwhile to consider tactics that work from the inside, outside, and alongside the target(s). Inside are things like spies and espionage, outside being the range of what we might normally imagine when thinking of attacks, and alongside being working on fortifying the other two, usually through networks of care, support, and alternative institutions.

A specific application for these ideas would be about community control. For more on these ideas, read the excellent community control of the poor community. Meeting personal (and community) self-interest would mean kicking the state out of the community. In its place, we might create things like cooperative housing, food, medical, rewilding programs, community & cultural centers, and more. We’d do this all in the frame of a liberatory approach to space, applying our principles to change the built environment. We would orient around the idea of survival programs (as in survival pending revolution), where everyone has an irreducible minimum (could also be seen as universal basic outcomes) for their life. To get to there from here, we could:

1. Collectivize everything we can, through collaboration, or seizure if we must, depending on the antagonism of the current owners. For example, businesses in our communities should be collectivized. We should, especially if it provides some benefit to its customers, try to bring them into the fold. We would try to encourage worker ownership structures and the like. If they refuse, then we can either leave them be, or decide how else to proceed. People tend to see small businesses as inherently less capitalistic, but systems have fractality. A small business owner, especially one who doesn’t challenge domineering paradigms, is still a business owner. As we transition our community to usage-based ownership models, in the vein of a library socialist economy, we should, (especially to folks who aren’t multiple strata above us in the hierarchy) make the case that socializing resources will bring everyone’s standard of living up, through proven examples, keeping their (expansive) self-interest in mind. In other words, we’re not going to be warlords with this shit, but we should be willing to fight so that spaces of self-determination can be found. We are going to work to get what we deserve and take what we need.
2. Create communal housing and spatial planning structures that maximize community input. Folks in a community should directly decide what goes on in their community. The design and usage should move from being static to being fluid and participatory, accommodating the needs of folks and other parts of nature, with an orientation around centering and uplifting those at the margins. For housing, slumlords will have their housing seized and collectivized, renovated to healthy living standards, or deconstructed to retrieve any valuable building materials. A combination of tactical urbanism, rent strikes, demonstrations, squatting, and other confrontational methods should be employed to achieve this.
3. Demand reparations, landback, and government concessions. We should bolster our solidarity economy, mutual aid, and dual power structures through funds and resources seized or conceded from the government. We should create popular pressure campaigns to this end, and use these concessions to reinforce our resolve toward self-determination (instead of seeing concessions as the ends themselves), through communal inoculation against statist promises of representation. We should employ strikes, targeting critical state functions, tax boycotts, and debt boycotts, all predicated on robust networks of care to support our people through the fight.
4. Organize self-defense formations against the forces of reaction. We need to be able to practice self-defense against any of the forces that would wish to harm us. Communities should have a maximal permeation of fighting, combat, de-escalation, and liberatory justice training. Certain groups, such as cops and fascist para-militaries, shouldn’t even think about attacking. Internal threats, such as abusers, grifters, sellouts, and opportunists, should be handled appropriately, with a process decided that centers the needs of those that are harmed, and only goes towards rehabilitation/transformation if (1) that is something that the harmed folk(s) want, and (2) something that the perpetrator(s) of harm are willing to commit to with high levels of intentionality. Otherwise, it’s time to run their pockets and kick them to the curb.
5. Democratize and Popularize “professional” knowledge guarded by industries and academia. Anyone interested in a subject or profession should have access to the training to learn that topic, in a horizontal, autonomous, cooperative setting. Healthcare work, construction work, ecological restoration, engineering, and other professionalized fields should be accessible to all, with the end goal of having the skills in our communities to create things like free clinics, makerspaces, boutique engineering projects, spatial environment retooling and renovation towards community needs, and projects to increase ecological harmony.
6. Abolish all carceral systems. Jails, prisons, psych wards, non-free schools (by free schools I’m referring to freedom school/modern school), and any other appendages of the Prison Industrial Complex should be devoured and destroyed. Prisoners should be released, including political prisoners. Community programs, a distribution of the means of protection and violence, liberatory, horizontal approaches to schooling, and communal justice practices should be raised in the Prison Industrial Complex’s stead.
7. Establish communal and inter-communal food sovereignty. There should be campaigns employed to create sovereign food systems through collective associations and seizure of agricultural lands, transforming them into ecologically harmonious zones through methods found in agroecology, ethnobotany, and permaculture.
8. Establish networks of liberatory school systems with liberatory pedagogical models throughout the community. We should enable our children to experience a learning model that engenders within them a sense of community-informed individuality, allowing them to self-direct their learning and growth with adults being support systems, like a net ready to catch them. This should also be bound to a movement to gain free college for poor folks, a movement on campuses for student & staff control, and continual experiences for adult education and older learners. Everyone should have methods and spaces to learn in the way that best suits them, to cultivate freer spirits.

Community control can create a base of activity for further revolutionary action — leading to a stronger movement ecosystem where forms like cooperatives and community-owned programs can be used to bolster liberatory outcomes. Creating more direct control structures in a community helps people meet their needs in ways that give them more space to do the other things that they want to do. A thing to keep in mind is that a cooperative, solidarity economy or things of that nature are not inherently liberatory, as in they challenge the logic of capitalism in a meaningful capacity. We create these survival programs so that we can have the logistical and operational bases that we need to be able to execute our revolutionary strategy and tactics. This allows us to expand our influence and activity inside and outside of our community.

By crafting this ecological, designerly view of our social movements, we can read them as living networks and/or systems, discover what levels we need to engage, how we might relate disparate parts of a movement, and create a united front to bring about the world that we desire. This gives us direction, intentionality, and the possibility to bring about the kind of change that we want to see.

Originally published at https://www.tumblr.com.