The Strategies To Shape What Comes Next

 Counter Revolution Without The Revolution

Perhaps the best way I have heard this current moment in the U.S summed up is, to paraphrase Naomi Klein, that we are experiencing a counter-revolution without a revolution. Trump’s regime is seeking to push back against an imaginary revolution that supposedly occurred after the civil rights movements of the long sixties in which attempts at stopping racism supposedly morphed into “reverse racism.” The call of the counter revolution is always that the revolutionaries went too far.

Apparently, to the painfully mediocre men who refuse to engage in critical thinking, the fight for racial justice became the fight to replace white people. For them, women’s liberation has morphed into “gender ideology” that seeks to eliminate the idea of women all together while systematically emasculating men.

As Klein pointed out in a recent interview, the danger of a counter-revolution without a revolution is that there is no revolution to defend. No one is going to take to the streets to defend DEI or affirmative action since any gains they made were either unsubstantial or overshadowed by broader economic forces. Yes, universities were more diverse, but they were also prohibitively expensive and started weakening tenure as soon as women of color started getting Ph.D. is high numbers. Yes, c-suites were more diverse but there were also more anti-union and wages were stagnant. Yes, women got lactation rooms, but they rarely got maternity leave or equal pay and leaning in ended in burning out.

This begs a fundamental question, how do we stop the counter revolution and shape what comes after?

Organize. Organize. Organize. 

Daniel Bessner once said on his podcast American Prestige that "Organize!" becomes the left's rally cry when it doesn't have a strategy. I think there is some truth to this. Yes we should organize but what should we organize for and how? A strategy needs to be more than vibes and optimism. It needs to be a concrete plan to overcome specific obstacles towards a goal. It's also not something one writer such as myself can come up on his own in isolation. So rather attempt to lay out a detailed strategy I want to outline a potential strategic framework that might be a place to continue this conversation. 

I think the goal of any strategy to shape what comes next should be a coalition of organizations, movements and communities capable for articulating concrete alternatives to both Fascism and Liberal-Democracy AND contest for power on the local, national and international arenas.

We need to articulate concrete alternatives because the crises we face as a society are a direct result of the failures of current system. The pre-Trump status quo was unable to stop climate devastation, provide clean water to areas like Flint Michigan, stop killing unarmed Black and indigenous people or provide economic stability to most people. The current Trump lead trajectory is going to lead to economic collapse, needless wars and increased inter-community violence at best, WW3 at worst. There is no acceptable normal to return to and we should be skeptical of any one trying to organize us under the guise of normalcy. 

The system is broken and needs to be replaced. A return to any prior version of the system will simply result in another, stronger Trump like figure in the future and even more exasperated or checked out electorate. 

We need that coalition to be able to contest power because the powers that be won't follow an alternative path unless we demand it. It has to connect the local to the international sphere because the chickens always come home to roost. Trump is the imperial presidency flexing its muscles domestically. That is to say, since WW2 its been clear that the kind of global violence needed to provide the kind of profits that could both satisfy the wealthy and leave enough left offer to satisfy workers was not popular.

Thus questions about "national interest" had to be shoved into executive agencies that we could use the excuse of "national security" to hide the worst violence of American Empire from the general populace. This requires the legislative and judicial branches to give up its powers of declaring war and overseeing its prosecution. This in turn grew the power of the president in accountable ways. [Read more about this in Aziz Rana's article "Constitutional Collapse"] 

The power to create a state of exception that violated the civil liberties of American muslims for the "War of Terror" is being used against immigrants and palestinian solidarity organizers. In the coming weeks it will likely be used against citizens who dissent from government policy. When it does, the tools that sheriffs and local police use to stop domestic dissent will have been developed by defense contractors for use in the Forever Wars. For Empires, domestic politics are international politics. [Hear more about this on the American Prestige Podcast.]

It is tempting in moments like ours to place the blame solely on the feet of the Republican Party. Yet the imperial presidency and racist uses of "states of exception" are bipartisan projects. FDR interned Japanese citizens and excluded Black people from many new deal programs.  Mass incarceration and NATO interventions were major projects of the Clinton Administration. It was Democrats, under the leadership of Joe Lieberman, who devised of the Homeland Security Agency. And it was Obama who responded to the abuses of the Bush regime by refusing to hold them accountable and trying to put War on Terror on stronger legal footing and thereby legalizing the overreach just in time for Trump to come into office. Finally it was Nancy Pelosi and the democrats suggesting that Palestinian Solidarity organizers be investigated for giving material support to terrorist. 

Again, I cannot stress enough that a return to normalcy--even the hallowed days of the Obama era--is a credible solution to failures of our political-economic system. 

The obstacles to reaching this goal are plentiful. We could write a whole book on this. For they sake of brevity I'll over simplify it into three main domains of obstacles:  Repression. Under-Resourcing. Lack of Social Cohesion. 

• The U.S repressive apparatus is powerful. It has been invested in by both parties to combat everyone from communist, civil rights workers, AIDs activist and right-wing extremists. It employs both the hard power of law enforcement and the soft power of media influence. With advent of surveillance capitalism, repression through all of our devices is only getting more effective and ubiquitous. From cointelpro, to Tigerswan infiltration of Standing Rock Protest there is an well resourced network of public and private actors that seek to derail progressive and left movements. This leads to both in-fighting and lack of trust in protest movements, including the widespread belief that protestors are merely paid agents of some (anti-semitic coded) cabal of marxist. 
• Progressive and Left Movements are structurally under-resourced. Years of neoliberalism and austerity means that most left-leaning money goes towards filling the gaps of our social safety net. What is left over is geared towards electing democrats nationally. Very little goes towards organizing. For the price of swing state senate campaign the left could build an entire new ecosystem of movement institutions, instead millions are spent to mobilize people for election and demobilize them immediately afterwards. Most importantly, left funding tends to hyper-contingent on outcomes and short sighted. Right-wing funging on the other hand is often decades long and continues through scandals and legal fights. This gives the right wing an increased ability to fail and have the agenda be shown to be massively unpopular and still be unfunded until they find a way to make it palatable and successful. Meanwhile the left gets blamed to failed presidential campaigns that ran to the right of center. . 
• The first two obstacles shape the ways left movement's grow and develop. The destruction or co-option of movement leaders and institutions has led to fundamental skepticism of organization itself. Many new activist have never experienced a functional organization or leadership that was not corrupt, self-serving or inept. Americans are also some of the most propaganized people in modern history. Most people, even most activist, have a poor understanding of the history of movements, the ideologies that informed movements or the questions that they grappled with. Most young activist have only be exposed to conspiracy theories and theories of change espoused in corporate media. Without the resourcing to build media apparatuses, those highly informed organizers tend to be in academia or similar bubbles that either don't know how to or can't afford to connect with regular people. American political frameworks, even among activists, are often an incoherent mix of liberal, utopian socialist and reactionary all divorced by the practical realities that should inform strategy.
• Its no wonder that we spend much of our time infighting: we have little practical experience governing, are largely maligned for things we didn't do, our organizations are constantly competing for limited funds, we can't agree on the context in which we are operating and face steep social and financial consequences when we fail that our opponents do not. 

Creating Left Life-Worlds

So how do we overcome these obstacles?

I wish I knew. I think my friend Kelly Hayes is on point when she says we don't know what tactics are going to be effective in this moment. We are going to have to try a bunch of things and see what works. I will posit one theme to guide our experiments though: I think we need to create Life-Worlds. 

Life-worlds are an idea I borrow from the German philosopher Jurgen Habermas. 

It is, in a sense the overlap between life-conditions [our material reality and social circumstances] and life-perspectives [the stories we tell and meaning we make about our circumstances]. Life-worlds are our lived reality. Life-worlds help determine our positions in society including which political actions we deem are necessary, positive, antagonistic or taboo. They help determine the shape of our political activity and the limits of any revolutionary activity. 

“Life-world means a person's subjective construction of reality, which he or she forms under the condition of his or her life circumstances.” -Bjorn Kraus

When we get together with other people we can build shared life-worlds when our Life-perceptions and Life-conditions overlap. The means what is happening is affecting us in similar ways and we are understanding it in similar ways. 

Often times things like race, class, age and political ideology prevents us from being in the same life-world. Hurricane Katrina is a great example of how all these factors lead to dramatically different understandings of what was happening and why. Some people saw a city besieged by neglect and disinvestment in a time of crisis and others saw a city overrun by "thugs and criminals." 

In today's politics we often use identities like race or class to as a shorthand for shared life worlds. Yet these terms are not interchangeable. For instance, Both Angela Davis and Condoleezza Rice grew up in middle class Black families in Alabama and lost friends in the bombing of 16th street baptist church. They both went to prestigious universities and pursued careers in both academia and serving the public. While their Life-conditions have very deep similarities their life-perceptions are almost polar opposites and their ideas of public service are equally different. 

It's also important to note that shared life worlds are not always good things or useful for effective relationships. Often times, deeply sharing a lifeworld with another person can lead to losing our sense of self in a relationship. On the community side, a shared lifeworld can also lead to groupthink and cultist behavior. If you like very complicated diagrams, you can check out this diagram of LifeWorlds I created a few years ago. 

So when I say we need to build shared life-world I mean pluralistic life-worlds based on care and a vision for a better world that can hold many worlds. I'm not referring to dogmatic echo-chambers or "a left Joe Rogan." I mean series of interconnected spaces in which individuals can share their experiences and have those experiences validated while working with others to collaboratively distill shared truths and meaning from their disparate experiences.

These spaces should be connected to spaces for social action based on those shared truths and meanings as wells as the shared values that emerge from them. These spaces for social action should be connected to political formations that are accountable to the truths and values of those life-worlds and seek to contest power through unionization campaigns, boycotts, strikes, and yes, even elections. 

This socially engaged life-world is, to me, what our opposition is missing. We can not move forward together if we do not share an understanding of what is happening. We will never get where we want to go if this understanding in imposed from above either. So we have to figure out constellations of organic relationships where we build shared meaning together, intentionally and democratically. 

Another way to say this is that we need to organize BLOCKing actions like the labor movements of the 30's, BUILD new institutions like the Anarcho Syndicalists of the 20's all while experimenting with new ways to BE together like new left of the 60's but with the intersectional politics of contemporary movements and the care for each other we are going to need to survive the next few years. .

Easy. No Big Deal right?

 Holistic Opposition

 Specifically it might look like utilizing a comprehensive BLOCK. BUILD. BE strategy where we weave many different tactics into a cohesive whole. 

BlOCK action stop or slow down harm to individuals and communities. They are most effective we block to protect campaigns and projects to build power, not just playing wakemole against injustice. This could look like BLOCKING anti-democratic movements with popular fronts, mutual aid and mass protests.

• Popular Fronts are big tent coalitions of unions, political parties, civic groups, social groups and business that come together to resist a common foe. A great example is the union led social movement to remove the President of South Korea.
• A successful popular front strategy would require to us organize fighting formations in communities like tenant unions, student unions and labor unions as well as entering social clubs like recreational sports leagues and book clubs. The power of any oppositional political party should arise from these groups.  
• This would require us to radically rethink what we expect from our political parties. We need an actual opposition party deeply embedded in civic society so that it can meet its supporters needs through mutual aid and push back against anti-democratic with mass protests. Imagine if the democratic party wasn’t a top down fundraising organization that occasional spoke at union rallies or indivisible marches. Imagine a bottom up political party in which national and local politicians worked together to coordinate rallies with unions, ran mutual aid programs with local religious communities and trained its youth organization to organize direct actions. This is how opposition parties are organized in almost every other country.
•  I want to be clear, I am still an anarchist. I don't think politics in any form will save us. At the same time, the state exists and it is powerful so it must be contended with. As an organizer once said (Miriam Kaba?) as long as there is a state it's important to make demands of it. The state may not be able to solve this crisis but it can either govern well enough for us to figure out a new path forward or crush us under its boots. I think some leftist should engage in efforts to build a real opposition party from the bottom up to prevent the later from happening. There are also a whole host of reforms, from medicare for all to regulating A.I, which while not revolutionary can greatly shift the terrain on that we organize on. Further, as long as the U.S remains a major power, we should try to gain as much leverage in foreign affairs as we can to constrain the worst excesses of empire if nothing else. But this must be a bottom up process. It must start with rallies, strikes, community forums and movement assemblies not a presidential campaign. 
• Mutual Aid is form of organized community care that is run by organizers who are members of the community being cared for. It works best when it is tied to popular fronts and mass protests as a form of reciprocal care and not merely service provision. While its important to help our neighbors, mutual aid alone is not a solution to any crises because it does not challenges the power structures that enable the crisis in the first place. To be most effective mutual aid should build reciprocal ties between communities and popular fronts. Mutual Aid should be seen as a concrete manifestation of care beliefs about social change: we can come together to care for each other while we make the world a better place. 
• Mass Protest are large gatherings where people register dissent and pressure power holders to change. They are most effective when they mix rallies and marches with direct action. Rallies and marches have a low barrier to entry and build a sense of common values, shared narratives and solidarity between people who want to change their society. Direct Action actively disrupts the systems and infrastructure that carries out injustice. Its Direct Action that actually wields power against injustice but mass protests are crucial to build energy and public support for direct action and popular fronts. 

There is one crucial thing to tie all these Blocking actions together. We need to block in ways that demonstrate in concrete and viscerally fet ways that a more caring response is possible. The heroic, sacrifice based movement culture of the past is understandable but incapable of meeting the needs of the moment. It plays into the idea that  we need heroes, positive deviants who are "not like other people." Sadly most people are not and will never be heroes.

We cannon have a strategy for a better world predicated on people being something they are incapable of being. We cannot keep setting ourselves up for disillusionment when we realize that our heroes were human the whole time. While we are not all heroes we are all deserving of care and capable of offering it to ourselves and others. A world in which we all try to care for each other and aspire to offer grace when we fail is infinitely more achievable than a world where we all become revolutionary freedom fighters willing to deprive ourselves of comfort and joy until we win. This is not say we can get free without sacrifice but a reminder that sacrifice is by definition giving up something we may value for something we want even more. Sacrifice is not self denial for the sake of revolutionary purity. 

BUILD  actions create new systems, organizations or ways of understanding that are in alignment with the world we want. I want to offer that we should seek to build  regenerative and autonomous movement commons composed of Movement Institutions, Intentional Communities and Networks of Cooperatives. 

• Movement Institutions are organizations that can take a long view, patiently planting seeds and water the grassroots in between movement cycles. Institutions offer movements political education, coordination support and a sense of movement memory. Institutions that are slower to change than campaign based movement orgs but they also nurture long term ties and foster connections between generations and movements. Powerful left institutions are crucial for any hope of an effective Popular Front.  Examples includes things like tried and true examples local peace centers or orgs like War Resisters, or new ideas like Movement Defense Hubs and Mutual Benefit Societies. In addition to these ideas, spaces like World Social Forum or the allied media conference will be crucial to cohering these disparate strategies into interconnect life worlds. 
• Intentional Communities are spaces where people attempt to live in alignment with the world they want. Rather than escapism or naive utopia we are referring to communities that full of people engaged in Blocking and Building actions who are committed to BEing together differently. Ideally, these would be something like a Votary, where veteran organizers come together to hold each accountable through years of activism. The purpose of these communities to first and foremost to sustain the activist of movement stewards and organizers. It is provide values aligned space fo reciprocal community. It is also were we can experiment with different ways to be together socially and economically, prototyping new forms of social collaboration that can be scaled up. The truth is, we have a lot of ideas of how things should be but not a lot of practical experience living with our values. I have often found when the rubber hits the road our values get both more flexible but also less nebulous. Clear but non dogmatic values are what we are going to need to build the world we want. 
• Networks of Cooperatives are groups of worker-owned, consumer-owned or producer-owned cooperatives that work together to great a semi-self-contained and small scale economies. Imagine worker owned farms and butchers that come together to market their goods in a producer commons that sells to local grocer coops. All of this might be financed by community members (themselves members of other cooperatives) who form investment cooperatives that only invest in other cooperatives. Together these cooperatives can provide good paying jobs for intentional community members who are innovating new ways be in the world. Check out our white paper on the collective commons to see how this might work. Folks like Obran, Boston Ujima Project and the Seed Commons have already innovated excited developments in these spaces. 

BE is probably the hardest part to describe because when done well we feel it in place beyond words. Be is about how we embody our values, our dreams and our love for each other. It one thing to theorize that capitalism has alienated us from ourselves and each other and quite another thing to embody being actively present in each other's lives in organic, consensual and caring ways.  I believe we need to be in beloved communities where we can safely experiment with new practices of liberation composed of rituals of belonging and social technologies of collaboration.

• New Practices of Liberation are ways that we can meet each others needs with dignity and joy at scale and in ways that are both socially and environmentally sustainable. They should be based in rituals of belonging and new ways of collaborating. This is core of what we call The WildSeed Way and our concept of the Liberating Retreat. Rather than embodying our politics through politzing the language and actions of others we need to find ways to embody of theory of change in concrete practices of care, grace and loving accountability towards our comrades and compassionate resistance against our opposition. We need to find ways to embody Wu Wei or effortless action instead of effortful ideological purity. This means using theory to build new techniques of care, practice that care with each other and then forgetting "technique" as it becomes cultures of care. 
• Rituals of Belonging are ways we come together that cultivate a sense of deep belonging in our spaces. It's how we communicate not only that you are welcome but that this space was built with you in mind. This is more than using inclusive language or community agreements. Its joint celebrations, positive initiations into group membership (instead of traumatizing baptisms of fire through arrests or other risky actions), and healing spaces. Most importantly it means resourced containers to witness each other faithfully against the grains of our oppression. Space to see people's action, especially those that make us uncomfortable, as reactions to our context and attempts to meet our needs and protect ourselves. It means offering each other grace, in a space beyond judgment, where we still held accountable for our shit. I talk about this more in depth in this Podcast from Lift Economy.
• Social Technologies of Collaboration are ways that we can coordinate our actions to reach shared goals without exploiting each other or requiring us to be dogmatic and overworked saints of socialism. In others, practical democracy that doesn't require individuals to be impossibly perfect. So often our movements either use the mainstream organization forms that are based on capitalist assumption and professional values that are antithetical to our vision or default to completely horizontal organizations that have no ladder of engagement that would allow new people to have their responsibilities grow in tandem with their skill.  We need a new way to collaborate. One example of this our Liberation Logic Organizations Handbook. 

We might sum this up in saying that we need to move from top-down politics of compromising for compromise sake, technical policy change or heroic populism to bottom-up ethics of building infrastructures for collaborative care, loving accountability and compassionate resistance. We need movements that are like water, soft and nurturing to people and but fast and furious against systems of oppression. 

This Strategic Perspective Informs WildSeed's Offerings. If This Resonates With You, We Invite You To Join Us.