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wondering if I should expand on each of the points in this, dedicating more space to each.

Radicalism 100: Get Started from 0 or, How the Hell Do I Get into Organizing as a Newbie?

I spend a lot of time talking about social change stuff. I feel like a lot of it might not be accessible unless you’re already one who sees yourself as a changemaker. Let’s change that. Let’s talk about how to prefigure the world you want to see, even if you don’t have any experience.

Before I do that though, I want to do some quick framing. I am coming from the place of someone who has some relatively specific foundational values that I prioritize and act from. I believe in horizontalism, mutual aid, solidarity, autonomy, joy, love, and transformative justice. I don’t brandish human nature as a weapon against better futures. If you have a view of people and or society that is purely of negation, then we probably won’t see eye-to-eye. If you think that domination and bootlicking is also necessary, then we definitely won’t see eye-to-eye. Hopefully, you’re curious or open to working towards egalitarian goals through egalitarian means. If you are, this might be useful to you.

How Social Change Happens

There is a lot of talk about social change and a lot of different opinions on how that change occurs. A useful framework to work from is one that imma remix from Joanna Macy.

Harm Reduction and Stalling → This is where giving, charity, and advocacy work live. Think of the survival programs that the Black Panthers did. These are good things, and they provide immediate benefits to folks. However, it’s not radical, as far as the meaning of the word goes. So, it’s great (and necessary!) to organize a mutual aid group that does food distro. What that doesn’t do is address why your group has to do that in the first place. This is something that ideally allows you to survive as you prepare to make bigger changes.

Systems change and Social Revolution → This is where the good shit happens. It is understanding the terrain you fight upon, what you’re fighting against, and finding the weak points to create and widen spaces of autonomy and liberation. This is where we decide how we act within the systems, how we change those systems through collective action, and how we build counter-systems to delegitimize the oppressive ones.

Rebuilding Mental Models → To create a new world, we have to become different people. I don’t mean that in an inactive way—through the practice of harm reduction and fighting the system, we realize our own power and become more capable of creating the world that we want. As we reconnect with reality, and illegitimate the current hegemony, we become more able to see the path ahead. The great and terrible thing is that we have to walk that path.

These are the three buckets that encompass our work ahead. Maybe a better way to think of them would not be as distinct buckets, but as spaces or zones of activity with permeable edges, where specific actions are occupying multiple buckets at a time, and where we travel from zone to zone, bringing information from previous legs of the journey. Stated differently, doing harm reduction might lead you to changing your mental models which might lead you to working towards systems change which might change your mental models which might improve your harm reduction efforts and so on and so on.

With that (admittedly open-ended) theory of change established, let’s get into some practical things you can do to get started. Again, this is built for if you’re not sure of where to begin. This will, hopefully, allow you to get started from 0 (which in my mind is you saying something to the effect of “damn, I know the world is cooked. What the hell do I do?”). Maybe you’ve heard people answer that inquiry with “Organize!”, which isn’t very useful. So let’s talk about that: how to start organizing and be successful when you don’t have the background or confidence yet.

Step 0: Read!

I am a big proponent of praxis (practice informed by theory) over theory or practice alone. Just reading doesn’t change the world, and just doing stuff may lead to some happy accidents. If you have to pick one, do stuff, I guess? But, we don’t have to do that. We can read, do stuff, review the successes and failures, and repeat. In order to not trap you in one mode or another, I’ve recommended a couple of things that should give you a good foundation for more readings and more actions.

Why We Should Democratize Everything

Radical Municipalism | The Anarchist Library

Modules - Economics for Emancipation (economics4emancipation.net)

Once you read these, you’ll be able to know that the world can look different than it does right now, and that there are tangible things that you can do to make that happen.

Step 1: Figure out Your Interest(s)

The next move is to understand what you’re interested in. It can be easy to feel like you have to participate in a certain kind of fight… but the reality is that if you pick an area that you already have an affinity for, you’ll be able to engage with it more sustainably. And hopefully, if you get some wins, you’ll be able to engage and support other important sites of struggle. For me, broadly speaking, my goal is to create solarpunk autonomous zones IRL, in the heart of the empire (the so-called United States). For my interests, the main areas of affinity + need within the solarpunk umbrella are:

Building Intentional Communities (like communes and ecovillages and shit)

Radical Urbanism (Tactical Urbanist projects, Tenants organizing, occupations)

Creative Care and Joy (Mutual aid, herbalism, medicine, etc)

Community Resiliency Training (CERT, Self-defense, Wildtending, Urban Foraging)

If that seems broad, blame it on the ADHD. I put time into each of these areas to try and build towards my solarpunk goals at the local level. You don’t have to be as eclectic as I am, but think about the things that get you excited, and go after those things.

Step 2: Get a Lay of the Land (find folks and people who are doing the cool stuff)

Once you’ve searched your soul and excavated some insight, you can begin your fun. Try and find people in your area who are into the stuff you’re into. If you like the idea of mutual aid, find a local food not bombs chapter (and encourage them to work towards system change!). If you like environmental stuff, look for groups that you feel like embodying the values you're developing. Some good ways to do this are:

Finding social medias. I like to find the most popular version for the thing I’m trying to do and excavate other groups from that. For example, I do some organizing work with an Indigenous education group here, and since it’s a tight-knit organizing community, I can use their IG to find other orgs. This also works well for in-person stuff.

Pull up to events. Try to show up to marches, protests (if you’re ready), and popular education events and look for folks representing the ideas you’re interested in. Folks tend to have flags, pins, and outfits at those sorts of things that let you know where they stand. I’d specifically look for Libertarian Socialist groups, Anarchist groups, and communalist groups. I’d also look into solidarity networks.

Step 3: Start working with folks!

Once you find some folks, start working with them if you like the vibe! You’d be surprised at how much you can learn. I moved about a year ago, and I learned so much by diving into the organizing community. Imma be moving again, and now I can carry those learnings forward into my new communities. Ideally, you’re getting involved in actions, doing study groups, and growing your confidence.

Step 4: Do an analysis of your place!

As you get more comfortable and you start to understand where you’re at, you can start working more intentionally toward system change. This is something that folks don’t do nearly enough, but if you can pull it off well, it’ll be well worth the time. The goal is to understand the challenges and opportunities present in your place. This is very much a whole area to explore, but you can start by looking into Asset-based community development and Community-based participatory research to create a guide of sorts for your community to follow. This is an area that I’m currently working on, and it helps contextualize your actions.

Step 5: Dive deep!

At this point, you might be ready for bigger actions or more capacity building. You might even be ready to steward a campaign. Just know, this is work that doesn’t really have an end; we can always strive for more. If you take nothing else away, know these two things:

Everyone has the capability to steward in a new future.

Surround yourself with genuine community to keep you going.

If you can approach this work with confidence and community, you’ll be able to weather any storm.

[dipperdesperado]

The Music, 1895 by Gustav Klimt (Austrian, 1862–1918)

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Knowledge is empowering

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“In Harrison, Virginia, we set up an anarchist community center, allowed homeless people to sleep there through the winter, and provided free food and clothes out of that space. Within six months the cops shut us down with a creative array of zoning and building codes. In the 1960s, the police took an active interest in sabotaging the Black Panther program that provided free breakfast to children. How exactly are we supposed to build alternative institutions if we are powerless to protect them from repression? How will we find land on which to build alternative structures when everything in this society has an owner? And how can we forget that capitalism is not timeless, that once everything was an “alternative”, and that the current paradigm developed and expanded precisely out of its ability to conquer and consume those alternatives? Ehrlich is right that we need to start building alternative institutions now, but wrong to de-emphasize the important work of destroying existing institutions and defending ourselves and our autonomous spaces in the process. Even when mixed with more aggressive nonviolent methods, a strategy based on building alternatives that constrains itself to pacifism will never be strong enough to resist the zealous violence that capitalist societies employ when they conquer and absorb autonomous societies.”

— How Nonviolence Protects the State by Peter Gelderloos

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lovely mural by the coffee shop this morning

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FAT DUDES

= HOT

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[dipperdesperado]

notes on class analysis beyond class reductionism

In which your favorite anarchist cherry-picks their favorite pieces of identity politics and syncretizes them with his favorite parts of sociological class analysis (with a focus on Marxian conceptions) and center-periphery theories of the same topic… for the sake of abolishing oppression.

Class and economic reduction are some of the worst theoretical and methodological mistakes that we can make in our analysis. Class reductionism is an understanding that the principal unit of analysis for analyzing social conditions is economic class. Other facets of social being, adorned with the dubious “superstructural”[1] labels are seen as unimportant to deal with. Economic reduction is about (1) seeing the “real”[2] determinants of social life as economic and therefore (2) understanding the “base”[3] of society as mechanically determining the elements that exist “superstructurally”. It’s an orientation that talks about inevitable moments of historical development, based on an analysis of the economic situation. When folks rail against Marxist analyses, this tends to be a recurrent target of critique. 

This approach has two big issues. While economics are important, and in some cases are good to see as “primary” in a vague sense[4], they don’t paint the full picture. Reality isn't just economic distribution, production, and consumption, even if we decide that the only “reality” we care about is human sociality. This thinking relatedly doesn't allow us to understand the full scope of what revolutionary potentialities exist by way of class analysis. Said otherwise, focusing solely on class analysis makes that mode have to do more lifting than it is capable of doing, rendering it ineffectual, like trying to make a fish win a footrace, just because it is really fast in the water. We can’t just focus on one variable or fact of interest in our analysis, if we want our analysis to capture a sense of complexity. We need the right tools for the right jobs. Alongside this, we have to always keep in mind that we exist in a dialectical relationship[5] with those tools. A separate can of worms can be opened up if we look at the ways that complex adaptive systems function—seeing the Cerberus of capitalism, modernity, and coloniality as such would illuminate that no one element of its functions is “primary”[6]. That kind of linear thinking only serves to encourage fruitless intellectual pursuits and failed revolutionary regimes. 

If the working class defined by a specific relationship with the means of production, and we have a class reductionist perspective, it can lead to us assuming ideals and extremes represent the whole[7]. We are trying to apprehend totalities with too limited of a dataset[8]. While class and economics are necessary, they are insufficient in an analysis of social conditions, and of the potential that exists for change along realistic[9] lines. 

One way for us to supersede these failure points is by way of a commitment to relationality. When I say this, I am referring to an understanding based in looking at the relationships between our loci of interest[10], in a way that prioritizes evidence (credible information sourced from the world) over hypotheses (or inductive, deductive, or abductive conclusions), with a hyper-critical and skeptical stance towards grand narratives. If there is such a thing, we, as far as we know, can only make approximations. While these can improve, even to the extent that our working models provide all that we need to engage in reality, they will always be models. This commitment isn’t modernist (building grand narratives) or postmodernist (critiquing all structures that exist and living within that critique, by way of being unable to surpass the object of critique). It is metamodernist: an orientation that is dialectical and syncretic, taking the critiques found from metamodernism seriously while believing in the existence of a reality, accessing it through a sober assessment of our capacities and limitations. 

If we want our theory, method, and practice to be based in what is by way of what we want to be, this is paramount. I see class and economic reduction as prioritizing hypotheses to rationalize with flattering evidence, rather than creating hypotheses that are based on evidence. 

A requisite part of this relationality is through having an analysis of positionality. This can be by way of intersectionality[11], interpenetration[12], and/or imbrication[13]. Positionality is an understanding of where you are located, socially, politically, and economically, by way of your identities, properties[14], and experiences. This is looking at the social hierarchies at play and seeing where you are at, in a given moment/period of focus. The "i-words" come in when we use that analysis to inform our practice, bound to a commitment to centering the marginalized. 

The center-periphery model as discussed by FARJ is a useful way to stretch class analysis, but mixing models, without explaining points of divergence before we converge can cause confusion. When we use the center-periphery model to discuss society, and an analysis that is based in intersectionality or similar frameworks talk about bringing the margins to the center, we are not asking for “representation” or “maintenance” of the structures social hierarchy as currently formatted. There is a tacit understanding embedded in this analysis that, if we are to, for example, desire a structure that empowers Black women to have multifaceted, sustaining experiences of freedom and self-determination, whatever we build would be radically different than what currently exists. This commitment is a practical way that we can “destroy” the centers of power. This is what actually allows us to (con)federalize[15] power. This is why understanding positionality is important. If each individual’s uniqueness is their own totality, having an understanding of the different elements, identities, and properties that make up who they are (in regards to it being relevant to the analysis) will allow us to see how we relate to power structures. This gives us an understanding of where to plant strategic and tactically effective action. In any given moment or situation, we might be able to take stock of if we are reinforcing or undermining concentrations of power rather than (con)federalizing of power. If, based on our social composition[16], the most marginalized folks don’t feel safe or heard, we’re doing something wrong in our practice that needs to be revised. 

To make sure we're clear, this is not to say we focus on identity “alone”. This is why we advocate for using economic and political properties along with identities in our understanding of positionality. We can't ignore any of these elements if we want a complete analysis, and centering the marginalized allows our practice to hold the most liberatory potential. Class analysis, which is what I'll call the focus of traditional/conventional leftism, broadly fixates on two things in my estimation: (1) how class interests align and contradict, leading to class conflict, class warfare, and the potentialities for abolishing class. In this vein, the other part of these potentialities is (2) how to build unity. I think that these are useful starting points, but present some issues. Since class analysis is relatively fixed and general rather than relational, it can easily lead to vulgar conclusions from the analysis, where we hyperfixate on specific, mythologized groups of folks that don't hold up to our expectations in reality. It also has the effect of the things we ask for being limited by a desire to build unity.

Unity, in this case, tends to be based on that overarching conception. “we should do this because of our objective class interests” type shit. Again, while it may be true that as economically dispossessed folks, it would be advantageous for us to have control over the means of production or whatever, that alone isn't connecting with the full breadth of how we experience our lives and has an almost Christianity-faith-based, “searching for salvation” vibe to it. “Follow me and I’ll set you free” type shit. It isn't specific enough, as classes aren't monolithic. We have to struggle through our differences, building solidarity based on a bottom-up understanding of shared needs and desires (and how those interact with and shape personal needs and desires). The unity method by way of the most general elements that unite folks is more top-down, simplifying reality in a way that isn't as useful when we're at the ground level. This makes authoritarianism the only real method of holding it together (as top down means easily lead to top down ends), creating weak movements that are vulnerable to outside actors agitating the differences that exist and are being ignored, widening fissures within the movement. Not to mention the way that people who intuitively or lucidly understand that they don't fit into that mythologized model and thus will not participate. I know that when I look at the labor movement, and see all White dudes (but I see many more kinds of embodiment when actually looking at workplaces), I feel like that’s not a place meant for me. 

If we want to have folks join our movements, we need to be more specific in our analysis, so that our practice is more accurate and aligns with the world as it is while enabling us to make it as we like. We should specify the conflicts and contradictions that exist in society so that we can see, across sectors and spaces, where the spaces for intervention can arise, or how to take advantage of the ones that exist. By having positionality and any of the “i’s” in mind, and by looking at facilitating expansive conceptions of desire[17], we can actually create movement spaces that are more holistic in their approach.

A way that this type of analysis becomes useful in multiple situations is by understanding how it can fractalize. For the sake of this conversation, we can work with the scales of Macro (class/umbrella identity), Meso (section), Micro (bloc), and Nano (individual). 

Macro is at the highest level. When looking at analyzing where someone is in society for the sake of liberatory change, the macro level is the most broad/shallow and common features of groups of people. When people talk about the rich, the proletariat, or any other classes, they are on the macro level. This is useful for us to understand “the meta”[18], and get into all of the stuff that class analysis illuminates: class antagonism, the ways that all of the -isms affect people in a broad sense, and how these things change over a broad timescale.

Meso is us zooming in a bit--instead of looking at just “classes”, used here to mean “types”, we start to understand “sections” of those classes using intersectionality and positionality with more specificity. Rather than just referring to Black people or working people, we may refer to Black young women or German working people. It is understanding that, while we are still at a high level, there is more specificity at play that is useful to have awareness of. Just like there are shared experiences of alienation from the Means of Production for all working class people, we can see how zooming in specifically allows us to see what that actually means for certain sections of whatever unifying element of a given “class”. This is able to let us know that not all workers/genders/racial communities are created monolithically, and within a given community there are sections that have their own interests due to their positionality. 

Micro is about looking at actual groups of actual people, seeing the blocs that exist within our subgroups. For example, if we're looking at Black folks, we can see how sections are composed, and we can look at the actual circumstances in an area of interest to see how different sections relate to one another, to see what contradictions are invisibilized by way of not zooming in enough. Rather than sticking at a higher level and saying that there should be unity solely due to one or two shared variables of intersection, there can be an understanding of how people are seen in society as is, with the capacity to try and shift those resonances and dissonances into more beneficial assemblages for the goals of liberation. If there are contradictions between people connected by variables found in the higher level/more general classes, we can start at a bloc level, building our way up towards people seeing and acting in their “class interests”.

Nano is zooming all the way in. It is understanding specific folks, and seeing their specific experiences intimated and imbricated by the above scales. It is easy, especially when trying to understand how to change society, to not look at individuals. But, ignoring individuals, the building blocks of society, will leave good materials on the cutting room floor. I think we should oscillate between more and less individual understandings, so that we can mutualize the relationships between individuals, collectives, and collectives of collectives.

It's worth noting that all of these are connected, and we move from one to another based on what we're trying to understand. If we're looking at the structure of society, then class analysis, in both meanings of the word, is useful. If we're trying to relate to each other as individuals, we need to think about things at that level, not eschewing an awareness of systemic dynamics. We run into a lot of issues if we don't make sure our method is well-suited to our problems that we're trying to understand.

If we can stretch the idea of class to not just be an economic thing, but to focus on positions in social hierarchies, that allows us to understand oppression on different scales from the interpersonal to the societal, and gives us room to think about what it means to be in one position or another. By framing this in ontologies and epistemologies of  Black feminisms, we come away with a flexible framework for analyzing those positions, and we can, in every situation, center the marginalized, so that we have a more specific, intentional way to expand our understanding of prefiguration and material solidarity. This points us towards uniting in ways that undermine different social hierarchies that reinforce one another. By having these tools at our disposal, we can create unified action through maximal prefiguration in our practice. If we are making something that works for the least privileged of us, we have much less work to do for the more privileged of us. This also ensures that those folks aren't left behind, the way that they can be when we don't do the work to zoom in enough. If they are at the “center”, there is no “center”. If there is a “center”, then there are marginalized people who are being ignored. 

Let’s try to concretize this with an example. Start anywhere in the process (or at any level of zoom). For clarity, we will start at the macro level. We have two classes, the exploiters and the exploited. We can then cut that up, by way of intersectionality and positionality, to see that each of these groups have subgroups that have different relations to their exploitation or exploiting. This allows us to know that broadly speaking, there are contradictions and tensions within these classes that allow us to either foster more mutuality or sow more division, depending on how we approach things. Once we are aware of this, we can zoom in more to see how, within these classes, there are blocs that add more detail to those contradictions. We can see that blocs of communities are not intrinsically unified by way of their identity[19], and this keys us into the intentionality that has to go into organizing unified action, which I recommend to be based on solidarity (bottom-up) rather than unity (top-down). We can then get to the individual level, where we try to unearth desire, in the expanded sense where someone cultivates their individuality, what I call ego, or what Lorde calls the erotic. From here, we can build back up, having a meaningful and actionable awareness of social composition that tells us how the social world exists. By way of our ideology[20] and theories[21] for how the world can change, we can develop practice that materializes into that change. 

[Notes]

[1] In Marxian theories, the superstructure is everything that sits atop the economic mode of production of society. It is everything not economic, from art, to culture, to politics, etc.

[2] As in reality, notating an importance in the physical. This is true in a broad sense, but people tend to leave out things like life belief systems and human action as important unless it relates with a very clear causality to this.

[3] The “economic foundation” of society.

[4] I’m pretty skeptical of focusing on economics unless you’re literally choosing to focus on economics, mainly because of all the ideological, theoretical, methodological, and practical baggage that comes from this. 

[5] We exist in a symbiotic (meant in the neutral sense, not the colloquial, “positive”/“beneficial” sense) process with the tools we create and deploy. As we shape the tools from our ideas, the tools shape us right back, pointing us to particular potentialities. 

[6] How can primacy exist when all of the elements operate together to create emergent outcomes? The closest we get is when, by way of our commitment to relationality, we see that certain axes of oppression rear their head in a pronounced way that is still propped up by the other axes. 

[7] This, when combined with things like Eurocentricity, leads to vulgar dynamics in political struggle, where, for example, “working class” ends up meaning “White working class”, even though POC are much more emblematic of the class.

[8] If we're going to make sweeping statements about society, we should either commit to philosophical inquiry (which doesn’t have the same need for “accuracy” in the scientific sense), or we should do rigorous analysis to understand our context, using phenomenology, sociality, history, science, and culture as our “raw” data.

[9] Changes that can actually happen in the most open sense, where we are not relying on supernatural or physics-defying feats of reality-warping for our goals. It’s a combination of inspiration and analysis, where we are simultaneously thinking about the exciting futures that we want and what we can do now to get there. This is distinct from how some employ “pragmatism”, asking people to “vote harder” or whatever. This is doing things that many people may see as idealistic or impossible, but are possible in actuality, which becomes easier to see as we move away from hegemonic understandings of potentiality.

[10] This is just a funny way of saying the stuff that we’re looking at. This could be anything: “object”, “subject”, “process”, “event”, “phenomena”, and/or “thing”.

[11] The way multiple identities intersect, creating phenomenological “coordinates” that are simultaneously similar to specific variables within that coordinate, but where that specific also creates a unique phenomenological experience that can only be dictated on its own terms.

[12] Seeing how different facets of identity are constantly shifting and bleeding into one another, based on different circumstances.

[13] Identities and social relations overlap and bump up against each other on the edges, and thus are able to be recognized as distinct but interconnected. This shows up in specific practical engagements, where a specific person’s identity, when compared to “normative” modes of being (cishet, white, male), impacts their experiences.

[14] I mean this in both senses of the word: economic property, and features. 

[15] (Con)federalism is a mode of social organization that stands in opposition to centralism. While centralism concentrates power within small groups of people and organizational bodies, (con)federalism distributes power to the grassroots level, and connects laterally and “vertically” with other organizational bodies to administer coordination. 

[16] The way a class is “composed”, through whatever collective experiences or positionalities unite everyone within. It is, based on a dialectical understanding of how the Cerberus is functioning, looking to see how we can (1) see what ways we are bound to the systems at play in a practical sense, and (2) find ways to holistically sever our selves from that binding, to create new relationships with each other, based on more communistic values. 

[17] Desire here is the (spiritual, emotional, physical, rational) needs, wants, and interests of an individual or a collective, in a given moment.

[18] I’m appropriating this term from gaming communities, meant there to talk about the toolset/features that are obviously advantageous to employ, so behavior tends to shift towards using those until the game is rebalanced towards fairness. In our case, we’ll focus on how the meta indicates relationships of power-over, leading to us needing to do the “rebalancing”. 

[19] Positionality tells us the ways that solidarity can develop by keying us into where people share or diverge in experiences based on the society in which they exist...it does not show were people's desires lie

[20] The word ideology has a negative connotation…but I think it is honest and useful. I mean it in the basic sense of our foundational assumptions and commitments, that are ideally evidence tested constantly, and revised if evidence demands it, but also allow us to continue working. 

[21] Our theories are the ideas that allow us to see if our ideology is accurate; it is the way that we build upon our foundation to see if it stands up to reality.

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the importance of social technology in social change

TLDR: By retooling, devouring, and innovating our social technologies, we can create participatory organizations that enable egalitarian social change. These organizations should be animated by an understanding of hierarchy, its relation to oppression writ-large, and how to create and employ social technologies that distribute power, rather than concentrating it.

Introduction

We take technology for granted in general (most people I know don’t think much about how water gets to their sink unless it doesn’t work, for example), but this seems especially true for our social technologies. We take things like democracy, laws, and even the nuclear family form at face value and as fundamental parts of reality.

So, what is technology, and how does it relate to our pending conversation? What is the throughline between obvious technologies like a stone axe and my iPhone, and more nebulous ones, like speech and the nuclear family? Any technology you can imagine takes concepts and knowledge and creates a method of applying them to specific goals, objectives, or functions. This doesn’t preclude emergent uses for tools, as you can probably think of using tools in unintended ways. This definition is useful to keep in mind as we realize that the technologies at present, animating the status quo are inadequate. We need something different to make radical, roots-grasping change.

And, for the sake of change, we need a specific way to achieve it. Part of this is technological; we need to figure out models of relating and working with one another that prefigure the changes that we want to see. To create and modify those technologies, we need to figure out which concepts and knowledge we will use.

Prefiguration can be described as “creating the new world in the shell of the old”. It’s doing things in the present that we think will get us to our imagined future. This implies the need to have a coherent conception of what is currently happening, and change will look like.

Currently, we live in a hierarchical, bureaucratic hell. This might best be epitomized by trying to obtain official identification recognized by our respective state. From all of the forms that you fill out, to the additional paperwork needed, to the horrible experience of getting that information approved, there are a lot of issues that this creates, from an experiential standpoint. One of the more under-realized aspects of issues such as this is how these experiences alienate us from the ability to do things for ourselves. Bureaucracy is a way to manage hierarchy’s inherent simplification of reality. A king couldn’t actually run their kingdom themselves, so they create layers of functionaries, under their control, to (try and) manage that complexity.

Along with my opposition, I’d like to propose something. A theory of change, that allows us to do that prefiguration work, leaving behind some of the negative methods of relating as currently mediated and handled. Since we live in a very hierarchical and bureaucratic world-system, constituting a colonial-imperialist, cisheteropatriarchical, ableist hegemony, if we create non-hierarchical/heterarchical organizational forms that allow us to relate in alignment with our values, then we will achieve a more egalitarian world, because of these organizational forms addressing fundamental contradictions in the way that society, from the personal to the global scale, is administered and ordered at present.

Having non-hierarchical organizational forms will allow us to become self-managed and autonomous, gaining collective control over collective issues, and individual control over individual issues. What is hierarchy, though? For our purposes, hierarchy can be seen as the glue that brings oppression together. It binds structures of domination, coercion, and power (specifically power-over) into oppression writ-large. This is what makes the act of arranging organizational forms a pyramid, where value, authority, and decision-making ability are concentrated toward the top. It is not a problem if some friendly games and competitions employ hierarchy in the broadest sense. The issue comes where, in that game, the folks who won got to eat and the folks who lost went hungry. The power imbalance and value judgments are what make hierarchy dangerous.

Alternatively, non-hierarchical structures that prioritize non-coercive, non-domineering principles, that enable positive versions of power-to (the ability to act) and power-with (the ability to act collectively, towards collective interest) have much more liberatory potential at their foundation. That’s what we’re aiming for, social technologies that allow for horizontal relating.

The pieces of horizontal organizations

The foundation of these horizontal, heterarchical forms should be in values and principles that enable relating in that way. Some of these values might be joy, autonomy, radically informed consent, cultivating ownness-uniqueness, and solidarity. These are defined as:

Joy: This should be a group that is constantly looking critically at how we engage with productivity, work, and formality from the perspective of prefiguring spaces of fun, play, and levity -- infusing it into as much of the work as we can. If it feels like a drag, that should at the very least give us pause. While we will not be able to avoid negativity wholesale, we can be intentional about minimizing the moments where it is unnecessary.

Autonomy: Each unit of interest (teammate, team, section/wing, whole) can operate independently from other elements as it desires, without imposition.

Radically Informed Consent: All decisions that include or impact someone should be made with that person (1) in that discussion/process and (2) having as much context and information as they need to be aware of the implications of the decision being made.

Cultivating Ownness-Uniqueness: The group should allow for a cooperative orientation that is based on finding what is best for all involved as individuals, concerning the collective goals. The group should be a tool that cultivates this orientation, rather than existing for its own sake and becoming something that holds power over the people in the space.

Solidarity: People in the group should work together around common interests and affinities, made clear in the joining process, grounded in (1) centering the most marginalized in society and/or our specific context within our spaces, and (2) sharing in the responsibilities of achieving what the group sets out to do.

Having these values as described gives us a shared language from which to judge how we relate to each other using the organizational forms we will set out to describe, to make sure that it gives opportunities to widen the spaces where our organizational aims can be achieved.

The components of these forms, the building blocks that sit atop the foundation, creating the organization when assembled, are the teammate, roles & tasks, aims & domains, the team, assemblies and summits, and the areas, functions, and committees. These are defined as:

Teammate: This is the individual in the structure. A specific person, who interfaces with the other parts of the structure.

Roles and Tasks: This is how the work is distributed within an organization, in line with the foundational principles and the aims of the specific team and organization as a whole.

aims: Objectives of the unit of interest. The thing that the unit of interest is trying to accomplish.

Domains: The range of focus a specific unit of interest has within an organization. What the unit of interest is responsible for doing.

Team: A collective unit within the structure. Multiple teammates coming together.

Assemblies and Summits: Multiple teams (or delegations of teams) coming together to deliberate on mutual aims, across mutual domains.

Areas, Functions, and Committees: Ways to group teams together (or create new teams) to cover specific aims.

These allow for us to have specific modes of relating with each other around specific things that we want to accomplish, from the individual to the organization-wide scale, with the potential to connect with outside organizations.

These values and components are important to create are heterarchical organization, but it doesn’t tell us what the organization will be doing. We know that it’s meant to be aimed towards social change, but what does that actually look like? I think that there are three interrelated things that the organization should achieve for it to be successful at its overall aims. There should be robust analysis, care work, and effective, radical action. These are described as:

Care Work: Embedding the ideas of restoration, rest, healthy engagement, sustainability, and healing into the core of the organizational structure. This can be done through things like healing circles, accountability circles, meeting "non-organizational" needs that deal with the making and remaking of folks (a la childcare, food, emotional care, etc), and other methods.

Robust analysis: Creating mental models that can approach an accurate understanding of the world, along with how to be experimental and learn from those experiments (while not seeing participants as disposable, or coercing folks into things). This horizontal orientation encourages us to be able to catalyze autonomous & self-directed action, rather than make ourselves indispensable to a movement. We should use these forms to organize ourselves out of a role, in a sense, through things such as making sure other people understand how to do what we do, and not hyper-specializing.

Effective, Radical Action: The organization, through the above two functions, should be able to achieve the goals that it sets. It should be successful at the current conjuncture, and these successes should build up to the general goals of the organization. There should be a conception of strategy, campaigns, logistics/operations, and tactics.

For any of these initiatives to be successful, there needs to be a basic security culture. Pretty much any social change org that is directly effective or building towards effectiveness necessitates modes of protection for the people in the organization. We need to protect from state, corporate, and non-state reactionaries. This is worth an in-depth conversation, but basic things like not talking to those forces, being mindful of where and when certain information is shared, if at all, and screening for new members, the intensity of which is proportional to the openness of the organization, and not fedjacketing (claim that someone is the cops) people. This would be paired with collective discussion to establish those agreements, and training/collective study to inoculate folks against bad security practices.

Arranging the pieces

Now that we’ve built up the different parts of our organizations, we can describe some ways to bring them together. I propose three different organizational shapes: phantom cells, networked guerrillas, and fractal teams and working groups. These are differentiated by the ways that the teams within the org are connected and relate to one another.

Phantom cells are the most ephemeral formation that I’ll describe. These are temporary teams created with wide variations towards some goal. They don’t even have any meaningful awareness of the composition of other cells. Actions are motivated by catalyzing forces that follow a general flow of event → action → report-back → action. Something happens that motivates a cell to form and act, that cell publishes information about their action, along with instructions on how to replicate and the ideological motivation behind it, and others follow suit. This repeats and spreads out, through stigmergy. It’s like how social media trends work. All follow a similar format, evolving as they spread until they saturate a space and wane. The goal here is to combine distributed intelligence through information posting, replicability, and inspiration.

A diagram representing phantom cells. Pill shapes with the word team in the middle are spread around on a white canvas.

This form is inspired by Tiktok and the SHAC campaign. If we could have groups of folks who: (1) find concrete goals & replicable methods for finding connected goals in specific contexts, (2) create compelling narratives around acting in line with those goals, and (3) encourage easily replicable actions, consistent pressure, and sharing the results so that it spreads. This allows for action to become highly distributed, where unity isn’t based on allegiance to specific organizations, movements, or formations. This type of operation is most useful for trying to achieve protracted, quick, decisive, small actions against a target.

Networked guerrillas are cells (or teams) of folks that have a well-rounded skill set, and who work consistently together. I imagine it being like a team for an RPG (role-playing game) campaign where each character is in a different class. This group should have a relatively high amount of self-sufficiency, to be able to achieve aims within their domain without much outside assistance. Each cell is animated by a general alignment of principles, vision, and values. Cells are also designed to link up with other cells, of this type, to accomplish bigger goals and complete bigger actions. There might also be a bundle of cells “in the middle” to help coordinate resources between cells and provide additional, more specialized, and contextual resources. Ideally, there is a rotation and continual morphing of the core to not become a failure point. This is why it’s important to have the cells be as self-sufficient as possible. Every connection is an enhancement of capability, rather than a necessity. The relationships between the cells can be organized like a mesh network (many-to-many relationships between the cells), star (one-to-many-to-one relationships), and a chain/ring (one-to-one-to-one relationships), or some combination, based on the needs of the organization.

A diagram representing networked guerrillas. showing a form that combines mesh, start, and chain/ring.

Fractal teams and working groups work through a kind of fractal, heterarchical confederalism. Essentially, it flips the hierarchical nature of authoritarian federalism by having power flow from the lowest level upwards, rather than the other way around. It starts at the lowest level, the team, and we confederate upwards from there to encompass more general aims and domains, using assemblies, assemblies of assemblies, and summits. This structure also operates on the principle of autonomous collaboration, where people who are impacted by and/or are doing a specific set of tasks are the ones to decide how that task is implemented. This is meant to minimize the amount of power-over within the structure, while still fostering modes of engagement between different scales of decision making. At each level, there would be assemblies that provide the space to share information and discuss plans, and for potential working groups to meet and freely associate and dissociate as necessary. Decisions shouldn’t be made here at these higher levels of the hierarchy, as that leads to a form of power that isn’t always deliberative. Folks would execute whatever plans they see fit on the ground, based on self-organization, informed by the information that is shared within these more open, popular gatherings. The trust is put on folks to be self-directed around their needs, getting help and providing assistance in a mutualistic way, rather than a top-down way.

a diagram of the fractal teams & working groups. teams send delegates to assemblies, and assemblies send delegates to assemblies of assemblies or summits. delegates gather information and context at the above levels and come back to their team to provide context and give information to the team. They also will share the decisions made by the teams, to the assemblies and summits.

All of these forms would need some kind of intelligence apparatus. Intelligence for us will be information that allows us to achieve objectives better. We gain this information through research, investigative journalism-style methods, and espionage. It is pertinent, practical, and informative. These apparatuses will gather information (what we might usually think of as intelligence), and prevent/impede opposition from doing the same (counterintelligence). This is not something it seems like social change folks are intentional about very often, but is an important part of building, refining, and achieving the aims laid out at every scale, from strategies for wider social change to specific actions.

The basic structure of this intelligence apparatus is a specific unit of interest would (s)elect/delegate an intelligence handler to work within that unit’s domain. This handler is one part of an intelligence cell. The cell would be a compartmentalized team for the sake of mutual protection, containing a handler, analyst(s), and agent(s). Handlers are the cell coordinators, recruiting the other roles as they see fit. They act as the direct link/contact to the agent on the ground/in the field, supporting them on their missions with whatever they need. Handlers also support analysts with collaborating on research work or anything that they need. Handlers are the glue of a cell, supporting everyone towards their objectives. Analysts are the folks who make the information gathered by the agents usable. They sort and organize the information, making things like reports and presentations so that action can come from or be informed by the information. Handlers may support the analysts with those tasks. Agents are the crux of this cell—they gather the intelligence. They should be a generalizing specialist, where they understand the breadth of the context in which they act, even with a specific specialty in the type of intelligence they gather.

For these purposes, there will probably be a combination of focus on open-source intelligence, signals intelligence, and human intelligence. Finally, we have the auditor. They are also elected by the unit of interest (the one that placed the handler). This is a way to make sure there isn’t any tomfoolery happening within the cell—the auditor can look over any of the information within the cell, and compile an independent report for the sake of the unit of interest.

A diagram of the basic intelligence apparatus.

The basic intelligence process would go as follows: Information would be split or categorized into four main areas: strategic, campaign, logistic/operational, and tactical. For each of these levels, there would be a repeating loop process of setting goals in relation to those areas, gathering the information, analyzing it, figuring out how to use it, and a method to evaluate the process. Information can be gathered by agents or anyone else in the organization, anonymously. This helps bolster the capacity of information gathering.

So, we start by asking, what do we need to know to achieve our aims? Then, we ask about where we can find that information. As we’ll probably receive more information than what is usable, we want to ask about what information found is important, timely, and accurate/verifiable? After that, we want to ask how we can package and disseminate the information, along with an understanding of the audience(s). That leads us to review what we’ve done, integrate any changes, and start the process over. This is not to say that teams can’t do intelligence-gathering work themselves, such as scouting or information synthesis. It is just useful to have capacity specifically built for that work.

How these forms relate

Finally, we want to look at the relationship between the organizational forms, and how these forms change, depending on what the specific organization does. We can do this by understanding how things look through the classifications of overt, covert, and clandestine.

Overt organizations act out in the open. They operate in a mode where what you see is what you get. Phantom cells might operate as front-facing aboveground collectives of folks who have a very specific focus, with the intent to popularize and virally spread action around that focus, through building (para)social relationships. Networked guerrillas might make more intentional, long-term connections between cells, leading to a more tightly bound network. This could look like the mesh model. Fractal teams might have highly accessible and legible teams and assemblies with centralized information pipelines, creating an easy way to get involved with the movement. This point is important when we’re thinking about how to make the movement accessible.

Covert organizations act in secret, operating on the mode of plausible deniability. Phantom cells might use mainstream channels to share their ideas but operate in a way that obscures their identities. Networked guerrillas might have the cells be related using a star model, with many connections compartmentalized by those shared nodes. Fractal teams might hide membership and focus on the intake process because this formation is the most vulnerable to infiltration. Maybe this formation isn’t useful outside of the overt context.

Clandestine organizations are fully underground. Phantom cells might only spread action through hyper-encrypted or low-tech methods. Networked guerrillas might have no awareness of who or what the composition is of other teams in the network, and any connections between cells might be mediated in ways that maintain anonymity and prevent infiltration. Fractal teams likely would be a great weakness in this context.

Looking at all of these forms, across different modes of operating, we should not “pick” one form or the other in a dogmatic way. Each form should see the others as providing something of value towards anti-authoritarian ends. In other words, fractals should not decry networks or phantoms for their seemingly chaotic structures or methods. Phantoms shouldn’t shit on the other two for not being effective enough. Aligning people and actions across these horizontal forms will allow an ecosystem of forms that reinforces the ability of each to succeed. Overt groups can act as an auxiliary force for the covert and clandestine groups, and the covert and clandestine groups can create spaces for the overt groups to construct the world they are all working for.

By having principles and ethics that are sound, exploring what organizations need to do, and creating structures that enable those ethics and principles to be realized, we can have social technologies that allow us to more easily accomplish the social change that we’re seeking.

[dipperdesperado]

Build an affinity group. An affinity group is a small group of 5 to 20 people who work together autonomously on direct actions or other projects. Affinity groups generally consist of like minded people who come together to get something done. If you already have an affinity group, link and cluster those groups!

Skill up. Delinking from capitalism and colonial apparatuses requires us to learn how to do things for ourselves and each other beyond buying, selling, working, or asking the state to help us. From self and collective defense, to gardening, building bikes, unschooling, and caring for each other- we can learn a skill and share a skill. We can change how we value skills and dismantle hierarchies of class and ableism.

Establish and practice good security culture. Security culture is necessary to survive state repression. We can stop a lot of infiltration and disinformation in its tracks by improving our ways of communicating and navigating conflict. We can still be horizontal and transparent without sacrificing security and safety.

Practice transformative and restorative justice. Strong communities make police and prisons obsolete. We can change our culture to prevent violence and abuse. We can build up our capacities to confront and resolve conflicts. We can strengthen our ties and detoxify our relationships so harm has no space to grow in our communities.

Mutual Aid. Start a mutual aid group and provide necessary support to those who are in need. Mutual aid organizing can ensure our communities are not dependent on corporations and the state. Shift your use of resources to things you can grow and make or procure from others in resistance. Build networks of aid and resources beyond capitalism.

Mutual defense. From arms training to street tactics to bystander interventions and safety teams, we need to have the skills and resources to defend our communities from fascist attacks on our people, non-human beings, and lands.

Build and sustain conflict infrastructure. Conflict Infrastructure is any structure we organize helps us be more effective in our fights. This is infrastructure that goes beyond solely providing awareness and services and instead builds our capacity to wage actual resistance. From community gardens and collectively coordinated farms to infoshops and independent media/communications.

Open squats for unsheltered folx. Rent is theft. Private property is colonial violence upon the land. Abolish rent and private property. Rematriate lands to original caretakers. Create spaces to live beyond landlords.

Defend and reclaim ancestral lands. Because #landback means ending colonial occupation and restoring Indigenous stewardship of our ancestral lands. Regenerate our sacred relations, and all that entails spiritually and materially, with our original homelands. Liberate the sacred.

Reparations. Seize what has been stolen from Black and Indigenous Peoples and liberate it back.  Radical redistribution is necessary.

Shut shit down. Intervene in critical infrastructure at the points where capitalism and colonialism are at their most vulnerable. Seize the streets, factories, ports, fracking pads, pipelines, power stations, smash the borders, be smart and be creative! It’s also an effective way to target those industries perpetuating climate change.

Be fiercely intersectional. ‘Cause we’re not taking those old shitty behaviors with us. Fuck anti-blackness, fuck orientalism, fuck islamaphobia, fuck anti-semitism, fuck transphobia, fuck heteropatriarchy, fuck white supremacy, fuck imperialism, fuck ableism, fuck hierarchy, fuck racism, fuck citizenship, fuck privilege, fuck everything fucked up!

Practice Radical Self & Collective Care. To remain dangerous to power we must care for ourselves and each other. Learn common triggers and how to communicate without being fucked up. Learn to communicate your needs, boundaries, and wants effectively and nontoxicly – remember that folks in the struggle and resistance have the hardest time accessing resources for mental and spiritual care. Movement work can be unsustainable to those with many experiences of settler policing and violence triggers – find ways to communicate and negotiate group norms and boundaries that accommodate peoples’ needs if reasonable. Identify toxic communication patterns and learn / create ways to dismantle them and communicate in more healthy and less harmful ways.Be honest about your limitations and care for yourself and each other. The christianized, capitalized colonial state has taught us to never rest or heal. Reject any attempts at coercing people to go beyond their limits. Radical self-care keeps us safe and invulnerable when consistently engaging in agitating governability by the state.

Make everything accessible for everyone. Reject ableism and objectification of our bodies and lives, establish community care networks with people equipped to provide first aid and care support to a full spectrum of needs. Challenge ableism in our language, how we organize, and how we value each other. We are all enough.

Abolish Rape Culture. Study rape and rape culture and how it relates to the desecration of sacred lands. Transform our culture and practices around dating, humor, relationships, sexuality, consent, parties, sex labor, and play to abolish rape culture. Hold mactivists, rapists, abusers, opportunists, and creeps accountable. Center consent and healthy relationships in everything we do everywhere.

Spread radical and militant joy. We can fuck shit up while we dance, sing, party, laugh, play, wonder, have deep conversations, tell stories, make art, make love, make magic, make brilliance, make awesomeness, and have fun.

[dipperdesperado]

Transfem self defense zine above

Good articles on transmisogyny and transmisogynoir for a more comprehensive and intersectional look at things.

PDF download link for an essay on transmisogynoir.

[dipperdesperado]

Hello! I'm from the Philippines and currently pushing for liberation from the colonized mindset that permeates through our everyday life, as well as mutual aid initiatives to mitigate economic disparity. Your videos have been eyeopening for me and I was wondering... What do you think are the most sustainable and efficient courses of action? I have leadership experience in grassroots movements but I find it quite difficult to organize as I struggle to find like-minded people.

I think that the most sustainable and efficient courses of action are entirely context-dependent and it's tough for me to give the people who ask me this question specific recommendations without a fully detailed description of their unique situation.

As much as I hate to borrow from "corporate speak," it might be helpful to do a SWOT analysis of your area to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats present in your unique context. Maybe someday I'll make a video going into that idea in more detail.

It may also help to do a resilience assessment. I found Think Resilience's self-directed course to be quite helpful in explaining this way of thinking in a concise manner. It's also completely free.

I fully relate to the struggle to find like-minded people, and it has certainly continued to be a challenge in my own local efforts. If/when I find an easy solution to this, you'll be the first to know. What I can suggest for now is that you seek out not necessarily like-minded people, but perhaps like-invested people. Meaning seek out groups that are already doing some sort of social, political, environmental, or educational activism but may not necessarily share your radicalism and try to work/build relationships with them that will naturally create opportunities for you to radicalise their efforts and tactics and spread anarchic and decolonial ideas.

Of course, doing this solo comes with the risk of your own radicalism being watered down--especially in more institutional spaces--which is why especifists recommend you engage in social insertion within movements as a group rather than as an individual.

My video on social revolution is meant to be a comprehensive overview of the variety of actions necessary to transform our world, so you can also look to those tactics and projects to draw inspiration once you've identified what needs doing and been able to connect with some folks who are as motivated as you to see change.

Hope this can help in some way. All power to all the people in the Philippines!

[dipperdesperado]

something I've been thinking about that would be a good team to have alongside the intelligence would be what i've called "movement historians". these would be folks who are writing about and logging what is happening in a movement and can "package" that history for both a movement and folks outside of it.

how do we make activist groups work? Or, the importance of social technology in social change

TLDR: By retooling, devouring, and innovating our social technologies, we can create participatory organizations that enable egalitarian social change. These organizations should be animated by an understanding of hierarchy, its relation to oppression writ-large, and how to create and employ social technologies that distribute power, rather than concentrating it.

Introduction

We take technology for granted in general (most people I know don’t think much about how water gets to their sink unless it doesn’t work, for example), but this seems especially true for our social technologies. We take things like democracy, laws, and even the nuclear family form at face value and as fundamental parts of reality.

So, what is technology, and how does it relate to our pending conversation? What is the throughline between obvious technologies like a stone axe and my iPhone, and more nebulous ones, like speech and the nuclear family? Any technology you can imagine takes concepts and knowledge and creates a method of applying them to specific goals, objectives, or functions. This doesn’t preclude emergent uses for tools, as you can probably think of using tools in unintended ways. This definition is useful to keep in mind as we realize that the technologies at present, animating the status quo are inadequate. We need something different to make radical, roots-grasping change.

And, for the sake of change, we need a specific way to achieve it. Part of this is technological; we need to figure out models of relating and working with one another that prefigure the changes that we want to see. To create and modify those technologies, we need to figure out which concepts and knowledge we will use.

Prefiguration can be described as “creating the new world in the shell of the old”. It’s doing things in the present that we think will get us to our imagined future. This implies the need to have a coherent conception of what is currently happening, and change will look like.

Currently, we live in a hierarchical, bureaucratic hell. This might best be epitomized by trying to obtain official identification recognized by our respective state. From all of the forms that you fill out, to the additional paperwork needed, to the horrible experience of getting that information approved, there are a lot of issues that this creates, from an experiential standpoint. One of the more under-realized aspects of issues such as this is how these experiences alienate us from the ability to do things for ourselves. Bureaucracy is a way to manage hierarchy’s inherent simplification of reality. A king couldn’t actually run their kingdom themselves, so they create layers of functionaries, under their control, to (try and) manage that complexity.

Along with my opposition, I’d like to propose something. A theory of change, that allows us to do that prefiguration work, leaving behind some of the negative methods of relating as currently mediated and handled. Since we live in a very hierarchical and bureaucratic world-system, constituting a colonial-imperialist, cisheteropatriarchical, ableist hegemony, if we create non-hierarchical/heterarchical organizational forms that allow us to relate in alignment with our values, then we will achieve a more egalitarian world, because of these organizational forms addressing fundamental contradictions in the way that society, from the personal to the global scale, is administered and ordered at present.

Having non-hierarchical organizational forms will allow us to become self-managed and autonomous, gaining collective control over collective issues, and individual control over individual issues. What is hierarchy, though? For our purposes, hierarchy can be seen as the glue that brings oppression together. It binds structures of domination, coercion, and power (specifically power-over) into oppression writ-large. This is what makes the act of arranging organizational forms a pyramid, where value, authority, and decision-making ability are concentrated toward the top. It is not a problem if some friendly games and competitions employ hierarchy in the broadest sense. The issue comes where, in that game, the folks who won got to eat and the folks who lost went hungry. The power imbalance and value judgments are what make hierarchy dangerous.

Alternatively, non-hierarchical structures that prioritize non-coercive, non-domineering principles, that enable positive versions of power-to (the ability to act) and power-with (the ability to act collectively, towards collective interest) have much more liberatory potential at their foundation. That’s what we’re aiming for, social technologies that allow for horizontal relating.

The pieces of horizontal organizations

The foundation of these horizontal, heterarchical forms should be in values and principles that enable relating in that way. Some of these values might be joy, autonomy, radically informed consent, cultivating ownness-uniqueness, and solidarity. These are defined as:

Joy: This should be a group that is constantly looking critically at how we engage with productivity, work, and formality from the perspective of prefiguring spaces of fun, play, and levity -- infusing it into as much of the work as we can. If it feels like a drag, that should at the very least give us pause. While we will not be able to avoid negativity wholesale, we can be intentional about minimizing the moments where it is unnecessary.

Autonomy: Each unit of interest (teammate, team, section/wing, whole) can operate independently from other elements as it desires, without imposition.

Radically Informed Consent: All decisions that include or impact someone should be made with that person (1) in that discussion/process and (2) having as much context and information as they need to be aware of the implications of the decision being made.

Cultivating Ownness-Uniqueness: The group should allow for a cooperative orientation that is based on finding what is best for all involved as individuals, concerning the collective goals. The group should be a tool that cultivates this orientation, rather than existing for its own sake and becoming something that holds power over the people in the space.

Solidarity: People in the group should work together around common interests and affinities, made clear in the joining process, grounded in (1) centering the most marginalized in society and/or our specific context within our spaces, and (2) sharing in the responsibilities of achieving what the group sets out to do.

Having these values as described gives us a shared language from which to judge how we relate to each other using the organizational forms we will set out to describe, to make sure that it gives opportunities to widen the spaces where our organizational aims can be achieved.

The components of these forms, the building blocks that sit atop the foundation, creating the organization when assembled, are the teammate, roles & tasks, aims & domains, the team, assemblies and summits, and the areas, functions, and committees. These are defined as:

Teammate: This is the individual in the structure. A specific person, who interfaces with the other parts of the structure.

Roles and Tasks: This is how the work is distributed within an organization, in line with the foundational principles and the aims of the specific team and organization as a whole.

aims: Objectives of the unit of interest. The thing that the unit of interest is trying to accomplish.

Domains: The range of focus a specific unit of interest has within an organization. What the unit of interest is responsible for doing.

Team: A collective unit within the structure. Multiple teammates coming together.

Assemblies and Summits: Multiple teams (or delegations of teams) coming together to deliberate on mutual aims, across mutual domains.

Areas, Functions, and Committees: Ways to group teams together (or create new teams) to cover specific aims.

These allow for us to have specific modes of relating with each other around specific things that we want to accomplish, from the individual to the organization-wide scale, with the potential to connect with outside organizations.

These values and components are important to create are heterarchical organization, but it doesn’t tell us what the organization will be doing. We know that it’s meant to be aimed towards social change, but what does that actually look like? I think that there are three interrelated things that the organization should achieve for it to be successful at its overall aims. There should be robust analysis, care work, and effective, radical action. These are described as:

Care Work: Embedding the ideas of restoration, rest, healthy engagement, sustainability, and healing into the core of the organizational structure. This can be done through things like healing circles, accountability circles, meeting "non-organizational" needs that deal with the making and remaking of folks (a la childcare, food, emotional care, etc), and other methods.

Robust analysis: Creating mental models that can approach an accurate understanding of the world, along with how to be experimental and learn from those experiments (while not seeing participants as disposable, or coercing folks into things). This horizontal orientation encourages us to be able to catalyze autonomous & self-directed action, rather than make ourselves indispensable to a movement. We should use these forms to organize ourselves out of a role, in a sense, through things such as making sure other people understand how to do what we do, and not hyper-specializing.

Effective, Radical Action: The organization, through the above two functions, should be able to achieve the goals that it sets. It should be successful at the current conjuncture, and these successes should build up to the general goals of the organization. There should be a conception of strategy, campaigns, logistics/operations, and tactics.

For any of these initiatives to be successful, there needs to be a basic security culture. Pretty much any social change org that is directly effective or building towards effectiveness necessitates modes of protection for the people in the organization. We need to protect from state, corporate, and non-state reactionaries. This is worth an in-depth conversation, but basic things like not talking to those forces, being mindful of where and when certain information is shared, if at all, and screening for new members, the intensity of which is proportional to the openness of the organization, and not fedjacketing (claim that someone is the cops) people. This would be paired with collective discussion to establish those agreements, and training/collective study to inoculate folks against bad security practices.

Arranging the pieces

Now that we’ve built up the different parts of our organizations, we can describe some ways to bring them together. I propose three different organizational shapes: phantom cells, networked guerrillas, and fractal teams and working groups. These are differentiated by the ways that the teams within the org are connected and relate to one another.

Phantom cells are the most ephemeral formation that I’ll describe. These are temporary teams created with wide variations towards some goal. They don’t even have any meaningful awareness of the composition of other cells. Actions are motivated by catalyzing forces that follow a general flow of event → action → report-back → action. Something happens that motivates a cell to form and act, that cell publishes information about their action, along with instructions on how to replicate and the ideological motivation behind it, and others follow suit. This repeats and spreads out, through stigmergy. It’s like how social media trends work. All follow a similar format, evolving as they spread until they saturate a space and wane. The goal here is to combine distributed intelligence through information posting, replicability, and inspiration.

A diagram representing phantom cells. Pill shapes with the word team in the middle are spread around on a white canvas.

This form is inspired by Tiktok and the SHAC campaign. If we could have groups of folks who: (1) find concrete goals & replicable methods for finding connected goals in specific contexts, (2) create compelling narratives around acting in line with those goals, and (3) encourage easily replicable actions, consistent pressure, and sharing the results so that it spreads. This allows for action to become highly distributed, where unity isn’t based on allegiance to specific organizations, movements, or formations. This type of operation is most useful for trying to achieve protracted, quick, decisive, small actions against a target.

Networked guerrillas are cells (or teams) of folks that have a well-rounded skill set, and who work consistently together. I imagine it being like a team for an RPG (role-playing game) campaign where each character is in a different class. This group should have a relatively high amount of self-sufficiency, to be able to achieve aims within their domain without much outside assistance. Each cell is animated by a general alignment of principles, vision, and values. Cells are also designed to link up with other cells, of this type, to accomplish bigger goals and complete bigger actions. There might also be a bundle of cells “in the middle” to help coordinate resources between cells and provide additional, more specialized, and contextual resources. Ideally, there is a rotation and continual morphing of the core to not become a failure point. This is why it’s important to have the cells be as self-sufficient as possible. Every connection is an enhancement of capability, rather than a necessity. The relationships between the cells can be organized like a mesh network (many-to-many relationships between the cells), star (one-to-many-to-one relationships), and a chain/ring (one-to-one-to-one relationships), or some combination, based on the needs of the organization.

A diagram representing networked guerrillas. showing a form that combines mesh, start, and chain/ring.

Fractal teams and working groups work through a kind of fractal, heterarchical confederalism. Essentially, it flips the hierarchical nature of authoritarian federalism by having power flow from the lowest level upwards, rather than the other way around. It starts at the lowest level, the team, and we confederate upwards from there to encompass more general aims and domains, using assemblies, assemblies of assemblies, and summits. This structure also operates on the principle of autonomous collaboration, where people who are impacted by and/or are doing a specific set of tasks are the ones to decide how that task is implemented. This is meant to minimize the amount of power-over within the structure, while still fostering modes of engagement between different scales of decision making. At each level, there would be assemblies that provide the space to share information and discuss plans, and for potential working groups to meet and freely associate and dissociate as necessary. Decisions shouldn’t be made here at these higher levels of the hierarchy, as that leads to a form of power that isn’t always deliberative. Folks would execute whatever plans they see fit on the ground, based on self-organization, informed by the information that is shared within these more open, popular gatherings. The trust is put on folks to be self-directed around their needs, getting help and providing assistance in a mutualistic way, rather than a top-down way.

a diagram of the fractal teams & working groups. teams send delegates to assemblies, and assemblies send delegates to assemblies of assemblies or summits. delegates gather information and context at the above levels and come back to their team to provide context and give information to the team. They also will share the decisions made by the teams, to the assemblies and summits.

All of these forms would need some kind of intelligence apparatus. Intelligence for us will be information that allows us to achieve objectives better. We gain this information through research, investigative journalism-style methods, and espionage. It is pertinent, practical, and informative. These apparatuses will gather information (what we might usually think of as intelligence), and prevent/impede opposition from doing the same (counterintelligence). This is not something it seems like social change folks are intentional about very often, but is an important part of building, refining, and achieving the aims laid out at every scale, from strategies for wider social change to specific actions.

The basic structure of this intelligence apparatus is a specific unit of interest would (s)elect/delegate an intelligence handler to work within that unit’s domain. This handler is one part of an intelligence cell. The cell would be a compartmentalized team for the sake of mutual protection, containing a handler, analyst(s), and agent(s). Handlers are the cell coordinators, recruiting the other roles as they see fit. They act as the direct link/contact to the agent on the ground/in the field, supporting them on their missions with whatever they need. Handlers also support analysts with collaborating on research work or anything that they need. Handlers are the glue of a cell, supporting everyone towards their objectives. Analysts are the folks who make the information gathered by the agents usable. They sort and organize the information, making things like reports and presentations so that action can come from or be informed by the information. Handlers may support the analysts with those tasks. Agents are the crux of this cell—they gather the intelligence. They should be a generalizing specialist, where they understand the breadth of the context in which they act, even with a specific specialty in the type of intelligence they gather.

For these purposes, there will probably be a combination of focus on open-source intelligence, signals intelligence, and human intelligence. Finally, we have the auditor. They are also elected by the unit of interest (the one that placed the handler). This is a way to make sure there isn’t any tomfoolery happening within the cell—the auditor can look over any of the information within the cell, and compile an independent report for the sake of the unit of interest.

A diagram of the basic intelligence apparatus.

The basic intelligence process would go as follows: Information would be split or categorized into four main areas: strategic, campaign, logistic/operational, and tactical. For each of these levels, there would be a repeating loop process of setting goals in relation to those areas, gathering the information, analyzing it, figuring out how to use it, and a method to evaluate the process. Information can be gathered by agents or anyone else in the organization, anonymously. This helps bolster the capacity of information gathering.

So, we start by asking, what do we need to know to achieve our aims? Then, we ask about where we can find that information. As we’ll probably receive more information than what is usable, we want to ask about what information found is important, timely, and accurate/verifiable? After that, we want to ask how we can package and disseminate the information, along with an understanding of the audience(s). That leads us to review what we’ve done, integrate any changes, and start the process over. This is not to say that teams can’t do intelligence-gathering work themselves, such as scouting or information synthesis. It is just useful to have capacity specifically built for that work.

How these forms relate

Finally, we want to look at the relationship between the organizational forms, and how these forms change, depending on what the specific organization does. We can do this by understanding how things look through the classifications of overt, covert, and clandestine.

Overt organizations act out in the open. They operate in a mode where what you see is what you get. Phantom cells might operate as front-facing aboveground collectives of folks who have a very specific focus, with the intent to popularize and virally spread action around that focus, through building (para)social relationships. Networked guerrillas might make more intentional, long-term connections between cells, leading to a more tightly bound network. This could look like the mesh model. Fractal teams might have highly accessible and legible teams and assemblies with centralized information pipelines, creating an easy way to get involved with the movement. This point is important when we’re thinking about how to make the movement accessible.

Covert organizations act in secret, operating on the mode of plausible deniability. Phantom cells might use mainstream channels to share their ideas but operate in a way that obscures their identities. Networked guerrillas might have the cells be related using a star model, with many connections compartmentalized by those shared nodes. Fractal teams might hide membership and focus on the intake process because this formation is the most vulnerable to infiltration. Maybe this formation isn’t useful outside of the overt context.

Clandestine organizations are fully underground. Phantom cells might only spread action through hyper-encrypted or low-tech methods. Networked guerrillas might have no awareness of who or what the composition is of other teams in the network, and any connections between cells might be mediated in ways that maintain anonymity and prevent infiltration. Fractal teams likely would be a great weakness in this context.

Looking at all of these forms, across different modes of operating, we should not “pick” one form or the other in a dogmatic way. Each form should see the others as providing something of value towards anti-authoritarian ends. In other words, fractals should not decry networks or phantoms for their seemingly chaotic structures or methods. Phantoms shouldn’t shit on the other two for not being effective enough. Aligning people and actions across these horizontal forms will allow an ecosystem of forms that reinforces the ability of each to succeed. Overt groups can act as an auxiliary force for the covert and clandestine groups, and the covert and clandestine groups can create spaces for the overt groups to construct the world they are all working for.

By having principles and ethics that are sound, exploring what organizations need to do, and creating structures that enable those ethics and principles to be realized, we can have social technologies that allow us to more easily accomplish the social change that we’re seeking.

[dipperdesperado]

[dipperdesperado]

When people look at abstract art and go "uh I could make that"

Fuck, I wish you would!

I wish you would let this inspire you. I wish that seeing a piece of abstract art would move you to self expression.

I wish you would go to the craft store, buy a cheap canvas and some cheap paint and let yourself play with color and form just to see if you can.

I wish that there were more amateur painters, trying their hand at geometric abstraction and color field painting. That would be so fucking cool.

"I could make that" should be a joyous revelation, not a snarky dismissal.

You could make that? Holy shit. please. Please make that.

Jack Bush

Kenneth Noland

Piet Mondraine

Pat Lipsky

Joan Mitchell

Helen Frankenthaler

Kikuo Saito

Marilyn Kirsch

Mark Rothko

Adolph Gottlieb

[dipperdesperado]

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: 

(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.

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). 

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:

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.

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. 

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 invovled AND ready to act?

How materially easy is it for the target to capitulate/for us to recieve what we want?

How ideologically easy is it for the target to capitulate/for us to recieve 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?

In ways that fulfill these metrics (adapted from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff):

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.

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:

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.

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. 

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:

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.

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.

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

[dipperdesperado]

Trans activists in Mexico City, protesting violence against the LGBTQ community.