Briefly Reflecting
Modernity has failed. This will be realized through the collapse of our modern society and our modern way of life. While this collapse is imminent, we can both mitigate collapse and tactfully delay it through appropriate crises response.
To try and save modernity would not be an appropriate response, but would only mire us in the same predicament we have created for ourselves. The appropriate response is to preserve humanity, every living creature and our collective biosystem through direct action – by sharing and caring for one another and Mother Earth.
The ascendancy of the American autocracy is a major leap past any attempt to manage these crises. Instead, it invites our collective to embrace a sort of full throttle collapse mentality. This is the grand finale of the New World Order – the order embraced by the likes of Vladimer Putin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Xi Jinping, Viktor Orbán, and the other neo fascists stepping onto the stage around the globe.
This is Power’s response when Property is threatened with poverty. Doing what it has perfected since archaic times - consolidating and expanding its power.
A betrayed proletariat has lifted their hero in the form of a ruling class charlatan who will betray them all over again, but at least he’ll make those responsible pay….
Austerity is being given to us even as Property hoards the surplus while claiming scarcity. This is the inevitable lie we must be prepared for.
At this stage, any semblance or pretense for social cohesion is being burnt in the dumpster fire of the very few public institutions extant that can actually serve working people. This is the last forceful wringing of the great bifurcation of the neoliberal economy. Workers continue to be marched into the ghettos of the gig economy. The decades long tight-rope walk of dependency that is the middle class has become an endangered species and even the managerial class is melting like some wicked witch of the west doused in holy water.
The ruling class neither expands nor contracts, but simply stockpiles surplus and a greater proportion of the wealth our exploitative economics generates.
Nothing, in any sense of the word, is sustainable here. Sustainable isn’t the idea.
In truth, it seems, this is actually about self-immolation preceded by mass extermination and impoverishment.
Modernity has failed. This has made middling politics a pariah to be abandoned wholescale. This middle path is a fairly wide swath of formerly “accepted” politics – liberal or even progressive to conservative or even illiberal.
This is the failure of neoliberalism. In America we see the transformation of party right to fascist MAGA. Meanwhile, the party left has become stuck in irrelevancy.
Why? Monied Power has sealed its fate. The left turn is blocked by Wealth even as the right is accepted as the eventuality that ensures Property is secured through the modern iteration of autocracy. These new fascists are a global network without the messiness of ideology other than shared values for unapologetic self-enrichment through theft, fraud and the coercion of information and the truth.
This model hatched under the apartheid state of Israel and put into practice by Vladimer Putin has now metastasized with its made in America branding and the figure of a solipsist megalomaniacal cult-master felon.
The most immediate threat to life on planet Earth is multifold. We have climate catastrophe, pandemics, nuclear Armageddon, and the urgency of artificial intelligence. With this new autocracy taking control and using its network of self-support, we are faced with the existential threat of these dictators themselves and their mismanagement of all these expressions of the modern polycrisis.
This is how it gets even worse. The innovations of this cast are insidious and we are faced with a multi-pronged attack on the health and safety of working people, particularly the working poor or those otherwise deemed as undesirables.
The first term of this new American tyrant showed us how neglect and ineptitude could kill off hundreds of thousands of our weakest citizens by intentionally mishandling a deadly global pandemic.
This mismanagement now represents a mortal threat to humanity – as always, this is especially true with our most vulnerable. With this sort of “leadership”, denial will kill more than even care can save. It seems this die has been cast.
In the first few weeks of this present term, we see a real disregard for the health and safety of those relying on a functioning state – working people. Walk away from WHO. End USAid including putting a halt to treatment of millions with AIDS, undergoing pharma treatment and trials, or receiving life-saving immunizations. Gag the CDC. Tell us repeatedly you will not bring the hatchet onto Social Security or Medicare and then shift to a fraud narration that is more phantom even then the neoliberal racist welfare mother variety peddled in the 80s and early 90s.
When USDA bird flu experts were terminated by the Muskrats, this was quickly rescinded. A shift of strategies won’t be designed to benefit poor animals subjected to factoried animal agricultural practices such as battery farms and dairy feed lots, but will increase profits while addressing the disease’s impact on egg supplies. Let them keep laying eggs and milking cows. Test and force the testing of poor workers who can hardly afford sick days without pay much less any other hard costs they may be required to incur.
This clarifies our government’s priorities. Profits over people (not to mention animals).
If this, along with defunding health and science, makes people sick…well, all the better. This is the solution to the climate crisis for the fittest - just as the Nazi’s Final Solution was designed to purify Europe. How far this is taken – beyond concentration camps, neglect, financial depredation, disappearances, and misinformation – is among the most frightening aspects of this new New World Order.
Imagine how bad it can get. Now imagine it even worse. That is what we face.
Overview of the Resistance
My only previous article for ACM went over this, the heart of the matter. To summarize:
We are the potentiality of approximately 8.2 billion Earth citizens and align in opposition, truly, to something like 21 or so global neo-Nazis. While we wish to preserve life, they wish to exterminate us. When pared down, it’s that simple.
This is the rights of property over the right to self. Bodily autonomy and identity, as our beloved comrade NY brit expat has pointed out, is a matter of both, yet the rights of property will prevail under the new fascists. This is their “sovereignty” that ignores the sovereignty of those who depend on capitalism, much less the planet Earth, for survival.
So, they burn down Rome to build Neropolis. Modeled after Russia. Theirs is a reflection of the darkness and not the light they have buried within themselves. It is incompetent, vacuous and ultimately a force futilely self-destructive.
The heart of Revolution is perpetually building Resistance and Unity. It is continuously educational. A prime weapon of the new autocracy is information. We must use this power as well. We must perpetually educate.
We together:
• Must perpetually build
• Must perpetually educate
• Must use information to our advantage
• Live the mantra that a harm to the least of us is a harm to us all.
• Are the revolutionary momentum
• Are shaping an entirely new social order
• Are the People who must be in charge
• Practice strategic non-violence
• Must only serve one another and no other
• Know what to do, but we know not the future
• Must have Moral Authority or be lost
What is most important is to realize that this is not my plan or any real directive, but is what is already being projected and what is already taking place. Radicalism and the revolutionary spirit have long endured and been refined to this point in the history of planet Earth.
Understanding this, one realizes that now is the time.
One starts to realize that this momentum towards revolutionary change, well…, it can’t be stopped.
It’s going to happen with us or without us. That said, we must unite. We each have a role to play. We must be as one and we must walk and talk with Moral Authority.
Our enemies become our greatest recruiters. Today’s MAGA supporter is tomorrow’s revolutionary.
Start by considering this in how you interact and broadcast your messaging. You are representing an all-inclusive resistance to Power. You are representing the power of the People and this means you are not representing any other power including your own personal agenda.
There are two aspects of resistance – the interior organization and the exterior movement. They work together.
Community
This is our heart. This is us. We are community and this is strategically realized through community hubs or our internal organizational nodes within the cellular network of the Revolution we must build.
These can be houses of worship, charitable centers, worker cooperatives, organized labor halls, ethnic, youth and cultural centers, and other similar spaces where communities assemble and support communities.
Diversity with these relatively independent cells is critically valuable. Each hub represents a vital segment of our diverse collective. We find strength through diversity and view homogony as weakness. Each cell is part of system of change.
Through this network of community hubs:
• We begin staging our future.
An important step is first knowing where we would like to be in the most general of terms – alive in an environment that is nurturing to life. This is not a modern life as we know it, but something entirely different. This life does not include the exploitation of the capitalist economic system, or racism, sexism, bigotry, warfare, or even violence. It is a social order that cherishes all life – humanity, every living creature, and the Earth - our common Mother commons.
• We act as collectives.
The community hubs are sharing and caring collectives meant to support one another in a variety of ways and most often avoid mainstream, capitalist transactional relations. These hubs represent our means of providing Mutual Aid. As these hubs cell-by-cell create a revolutionary network, we become people strong. We rebuild the commons. This can only be done together by forming and strengthening our ability to cooperate with one another.
• We begin to create a shadow economy.
This is integral to any revolutionary structure that addresses economic injustice. This is the economy of the collective. An economics that is designed to conserve and to save – in direct opposition to capitalism being propelled by consumption. This is an economics that embraces cooperation directly in oppositions to capitalism’s reliance on competition. While competition serves to enhance the power of the few, cooperation builds the power of the people. Without cooperation, humanity itself is doomed. The toxic economy must be replaced. We must build our own sharing and caring economics that is the new commons of communal living.
• We prepare for the collapse of modernity and the capitalist economy.
The more independent our economy, the more we can push the capitalist economy towards its own demise while protecting people from the inevitability of economic collapse. Capitalism is a house built on sand. The great contradiction of capitalism has been exposed, or that growth equates to death. This means the serpent will eat itself and will eventually collapse whether we help it along or not. Our shadow economy, something relatively sustainable, must replace the existing unsustainable order (conservation and cooperation v. consumption and competition).
• We provide education to the community.
This is a perpetual function and a social requirement. It is among the most essential aspects of building a revolutionary society. This is not something to immediately replace a public education that is likely under assault, but eventually it must even as our community must replace the capitalist economy. Meanwhile, we must control the narrative within our collectives and teach the young to critically think for themselves.
• We ensure the needs of the community.
This is basic necessities that starts with food. We must ensure community members have access to shelter, clean water and clothing. We must ensure all have basic essentials.
• We build a place from which we can tactically push back against capitalism.
By providing needs and creating a network of shadow economies, we are better able to undermine the capitalist system of exploitation that is doomed already. In so doing, we use People power to supplant traditional hierarchical Power (the ≈ 21 neo-Nazis). Tactical resistance actions arise from our network of hubs.
• We can advance community support.
We can use our creativity and resources to eventually ensure that members of the community have real access to health care, to child care, to a nurturing community that provides care for one another, that leads with environmental stewardship and community strength, and that provides the many intangibles required to build a revolutionary community of compassion, inclusion, and purpose.
• We can perpetually build revolution through community and community through revolution.
The hubs become closely linked through both proximity and through global communications to form an adamantine revolutionary network of mutual support for all life and in direct opposition to the fascists and their genocidal agenda. This can form the post-revolutionary structure of a new community network made of small communities connected by common interest (life, one another and the planet).
• We strategically strengthen our revolutionary movement.
Community hubs become a strong strategic node for acts of resistance that can capture revolutionary momentum and propel the power of people to final strategic victory.
• We take over the means of production.
The strategic revolutionary vision leads our communities to forming their own means of production that can support one another through our cellular regional and global networks. This step represents a complete shift in power from the ruling class to the proletariat who have coopted the means of production.
• We move to the future – whatever that is.
The future is advanced through non-hierarchical collective cells that are socialist and even anarchistic.
The Movement
This is the external expression of resistance and the revolutionary momentum that demands action. This is our active expression - our thrust against the hegemony of Propertied Power. With strategic non-violence, the primary weapons are boycott, demonstrations, and labor strikes.
Because of the commodification of labor in late-term capitalism, the tactical use of strikes is primarily to gain concessions and secure worker’s rights and to expand these benefits until we can really grow as a movement.
On the other hand, we are the market. This exposes one of the prime contradictory mechanisms of capitalism or its dependence on dependency.
This is why boycott becomes one of the most effective tools of resistance and a critical tool to help shape revolutionary change. The producers depend on the consumption of the market.
And we are the flippin’ market.
Through the recent history of regime change we can see non-violence is virtually twice as effective as violent regime change, and that we only require the cooperation of 3.5% of the populace (see this vid). With the momentum of this revolution, though, we will exercise a greater proportion of the citizenry and propel boycott into a unifying and powerful weapon for the liberation of our globe and its denizens.
Each weapon or tool has both a tactical and a strategic function. Community hubs can deploy tactical measures that fulfill their specific mission while often also advancing the movement’s strategic vision. Local or regional tactics can become part of the global strategy. The networking of these cells helps to bring these initiatives into the overall strategy or allow local hubs to draw from the overarching strategic vision.
Tactically:
• Boycotts can leverage Power to alter its behavior through the force of the market. For example, Amazon can be impacted enough that they divest themselves of the Washington Post – a formerly essential international presence that was one of two remaining US sources of investigative journalism. Boycott might even persuade the directors of Amazon to sell it to a people’s cooperative or similarly structured entity. Another example might be to boycott Telsa to move for Musk’s divestment of X (Twitter). Local community hubs can use tactical boycott to alter the behavior of local or regional suppliers and producers, tactical boycotts coordinated internationally will be most effective on larger national or global enterprises. Locally driven boycotts can become regional or even global and large, tactical boycotts must be supported by local community hubs and their members. Companies, specific products and services or entire industries can be targeted through these efforts. With enough unity, we can drive behavior through choreographed non-action.
• Demonstrations can disrupt infrastructure, supply chains, production, and other capitalist institutions and structures to similarly impact the opposition of the ruling fascist elite. Civil disobedience, performative disruptions, and messaging can all be used as a form of demonstration that can support the use of Boycotts, Strikes or other tactical measures.
• Strikes, as mentioned, have limited tactical purpose, but work to keep us strong while we build alternative economies. Empowering labor becomes more imperative than strikes and we do this as we re-build the labor movement in America from the ground up. The American labor movement has a problematic history in large part due to the centrality of race and the face of European immigrant labor looking a lot like the bourgeoise and the privileged rulers. Global neoliberalism has largely excluded organized labor to further weaken worker strength and cohesion.
Strategically:
• Boycott can be used to terminate corporate enterprises entirely or make for large shifts in corporate behavior. This tool can make arms-length allies of our closest enemies. Strategic boycott could encompass the entire capitalist economy if the right pieces are in place and it actually came to that. This is the revolutionary commons removing itself from the market entirely forcing a shutdown of the entire capitalist nightmare.
• Demonstration can shut down entire sectors of the economy and, in finality, paralyze the entire system. Specific individuals can be nullified, their ideas and directions diverted and their institutions finally dismantled.
• Strike can be used to put the final nail in the coffin that is capitalism. We will no longer be making or buying their products or using their services. We will be entirely independent affording us the opportunity to walk away from the system we have become so dependent on. Without us, there is no system.
We must have flexibility. We must plan and be prepared to improvise and take the initiative and the advantage with little notice.
We must maintain efficiency. Cooperation is efficiency, while competition is inefficient. We must support one another at all times and through each and every crisis. Together we may win, apart we will certainly be lost. In scarcity, through unity, we will make enough manifest so that all needs have been met. This happens as we collect the commons.
Information
The community organizational hub and the revolutionary momentum represent a hybrid strategy of resistance. A third element might be the growing importance of information in our day and age, and the need for a global organ of communication.
We find ourselves in a society where Power controls much of the media and the narrative. In the end, this coup has been accomplished through the neo fascist disregard for ideology other than its own self-enrichment. Without ideology, fascism simply channels the grassroots of proletarian discontent and its own false ideas and theories to shape and use this messaging before sending it back down to the base for culture war fodder and what is often termed the “red meat”.
The neoliberal center has crafted its narrative from the top and sent it down through the traditional means of communication further alienating itself, and the perceived “left”, as rightly out of touch with average working people.
As long as this dynamic is in place, the fascists will control the narrative.
Neoliberalism refuses to recognize the political center has been abandoned. Neo fascism recognizes this and welcomes those abandoning this middle politics.
Our movement must generate messages from our community hubs and our base – the people. This is our only path to the new Media landscape where our voice can be heard, amplified and eventually can control the narrative with the truth replacing the smears, lies and distortions manipulated by the ruling fascist elite.
Information, our intelligence, must provide this counter-narrative to eventually capture and take back the national and international narrative. We represent the Truth in the face of Power and it is our mission to educate.
We need messaging and symbolic victory as well as provocative and inclusive branding. We need an international organ for mass communications – such as calling for large-scale boycotts, demonstrations and for strikes.
The Resistance Today
This is hardly a subject I’m qualified to discuss with great authority. That being said, let me offer some humble observations.
First, labor has acted and is uniting, using tactical strikes and working for better conditions for its members and really all workers. In the US, labor has been cut to its knees and merely a shadow of its former presence. Much can be said about this, but labor is moving and growing in America despite the darkness of this hour.
Second, demonstrations are setting the stage and bringing us together in common outrage of the fascist takeover here in America and elsewhere. We are uniting, creating relations and alliances, and organizing.
Finally, we have the boycott movements.
This website has quickly emerged as an important one announcing recent boycotts:
https://thepeoplesunionusa.com/
Through the Black Radical Tradition and the Black Church, we have:
https://www.targetfast.org/
Here’s a piece on the Telsa takedown demonstration/boycotts including some sense of the smears and accusations from the fascists:
Telsa Takedown on Democracy Now
To participate in these global tactical boycotts one simply need not act. So, there are no valid excuses.
Join in these boycotts to move Power or do not and become moved by Power. It’s that simple.
We must act as one.
Better ideas, suggestions, improvements and comments are all welcome.
Resist. Unite.
