Our Power in Motion
In “What We Have Forgotten”, I discussed our ability to both destabilize and capture societal infrastructure. This was only a mention in the section that is subtitled “Our Power”. Today, I’ll discuss what that might look like in action.
Power Through Civil Disobedience
Capture of Infrastructure
You and your city-wide community can take over your city. From the hospitals to the banks, from the parks to the grocery stores, and from the theaters to the bus depots, you can commandeer it all.
Initially, you will think that this is crazy. You may envision a hellish landscape that resembles the movie “Mad Max”. You’ll think of anarchy. You’ll think of rioting. You’ll picture buildings burning and chaos in the streets. But what I suggest looks nothing like that.
Imagine that you and the other members of your community begin meeting regularly to discuss the ills of current society: rising unemployment, job supply disruption via A.I. and outsourcing, unreasonable rates on borrowing, increasing taxes with decreasing social programs and degrading infrastructure, lack of investment in education, increasing costs for college, extreme wealth inequality, food instability, rising energy prices, oppressive inflation, etc. In these meetings, you and your neighbors discuss the narrowing road that leads to security and prosperity. You all decide that the pathway to these goals should be wide enough for all of you to make, not just some. Collectively, you all realize that you are contributing to the problem by working for the very institutions that create the problems, both public and private institutions, from governments to private sector companies. You all decide that enough is enough. In unison, you all decide that you’re not going to work anymore. You’ll run the city yourselves. You have several key people who agree to work in concert:
- Those of you who own rental property agree to be lenient with renters while you reshape your local economy.
- Those who work in banking agree to be lenient with landlords who are participating in your revolution and have mortgages on their properties.
- Those who work in local government agree to be lenient with the landlords and give extensions on paying property taxes, while the new economy takes shape.
- You all reclaim public lands and the commons for use in growing food, etc.
- Those who work in law enforcement and the courts agree to be lenient with any laws that might put undo restrictions on the use of public lands.
- Those who work in the medical field offer services to the public and negotiate new, affordable rates, based on your new economy, independent of insurance companies.
- You develop a local system of trade based on bartering and/or local currency.
- You source energy needs based on renewable solutions that are specific to your region (solar, wind, etc.).
- You create a self-sustaining community, while starving the larger system of the value that you generate.
This works because all of the systemic functions that would otherwise punish you for this action are short-circuited by the fact that those responses are negated by the other working-class people in your community who are responsible for triggering those effects. Eventually, there will be those from outside your community who will intervene. The goal would be to have a mature, independent community up and running, before that can happen. Ideally, you would have planned accordingly and constructed a set of parallel systems that allow you all to continue living independent of the oppressive structures that you have decoupled from.
Boycotts and Strikes
Outside of societal capture, we can simply boycott and strike against the main offenders in our society. By moving from one company to the next, we would add to the list of boycott targets, until those in power agree to our pre-determined demands. In the midst of this action, we’d have to find alternative sources for the goods and services that would otherwise be offered by the companies being boycotted. This opens another pathway to creating community institutions that provide these options, while also being controlled by we, The People, and not greedy corporations and their owners.
Strikes, especially a general strike, would be a great way to quickly break the back of the current, vampiric system that is bleeding the populace dry. However, this approach also requires the building of parallel systems, similar to what I discussed above, in the “Capture of Infrastructure” subsection. People who aren’t working will not make money, and they’ll soon find themselves unable to sustain their livelihoods. Therefore, community resources that sustain them will have to be afforded. I discuss guidelines for this approach in “Civil Disobedience Framework, Part III”.
Parallel Systems
I have referred to parallel systems several times. These are economic and social structures that perform the same purpose as current analogous frameworks. For example, creating a community currency that allows for trade that is not limited by access to official, state-issued currency. This allows for a social collective to manage their economy independently from the larger economy. Another example would be creating our own energy within our communities. We could use any combination of community solar projects (rooftop or local solar farms), small-scale wind turbines, micro-hydropower in streams, geothermal heat pumps for building heating/cooling, and biomass from organic waste. The particular implementations would be based on what is available in our particular geographical region. However, this creates independence from the current energy grid that is controlled by the wealthy owners, who attempt to maintain social control through manipulation of energy delivery and pricing.
A good question to always ask ourselves: “Is this something that we can provide for ourselves, as opposed to paying a company to provide it for us?”
The overall idea with building parallel systems is to disconnect from the prevailing systems that are currently being used to control us. By managing our own social structures, we gain both increasing control of our own lives and greater ability to strike against the larger, institutional, exploitative systems that are used to oppress us.
Before It’s Too Late
Whichever path of resistance we choose, we must act soon. As I discussed in “There is No Tomorrow”, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans will take any significant action to correct the course of the United States. Nobody is coming to save us. Our fates are in our own hands.
Solidarietas Populi