1. Form a Neighborhood Association. Get together with some neighbors and form a Neighborhood Association. Hold regular meetings. These meetings will form the basis, later on, for Home Assemblies. This, together with Employee Associations and Household Associations (see items 2 and 3 following) are the three most important things anyone can do. It may seem pointless at first, since these associations will have no power or money. But they will begin to attract energy and will become focal points for siphoning power and wealth out of capitalism back into the communities from which they were originally stolen. (See also “What can neighborhood associations do?” below at #1 under Further Discussion.)

      2. Form an Employee's Association. Get together with some co-workers at your workplace and form an Employee’s Association. Bypass unions. You will have to meet on your own time. Hold regular meetings. These meetings will form the basis, later on, for the Peer Circles of self-managed Projects (and part of the basis for escaping wage-slavery). There may be several such groups in one shop. It is only through face-to-face associations like these that an autonomous opposition culture can once again be generated. Even if you start with only half-a-dozen people word will get around that there is a meeting where the problems of the workplace are being discussed. This will become the focal point of a consciousness that is opposed to corporate culture. Without this counter consciousness there is no possibility of effective opposition. (See also “What can employee associations do?” below at #2 under Further Discussion.)

      3. Form a Cooperative Housing Association. This can be done right now. Several families can pool resources and buy a building to form an extended household. Groups of people, single and married, already rent houses together and live cooperatively. Where buying is clearly out of the question form a Tenants Association in your building. Try to begin sharing resources and living cooperatively. These cooperative housing associations will form the basis, later on, for Households, as in our initial sketch. (See also “What can household associations do?” below at #3 under Further Discussion.)

      4. Build a Meeting Hall. Pool resources with neighbors and build a place to meet. The first neighborhood to do this will go down in history as having launched a new civilization. Most neighborhoods, no matter how poor, somehow find money to build churches. If they wanted to they could build Meeting Halls. Obviously, they must first perceive a need for them. They must want to associate, want to begin to exercise control over their lives in cooperation with their neighbors. They must see the meetings as the linchpin of a new way of life.

      5. Organize worker-owned businesses. Worker-owned businesses, in and of themselves, cannot destroy capitalism. As long as they are operating in a capitalist market they will face bankruptcy unless they pay attention to the bottom line. Actually, they merely replace the traditional capitalist owner with a shop full of capitalist owners. Thus worker-owners are merely joining the petty bourgeoisie. Which is what the New Left did in a big way in the early seventies. We created a multitude of what we thought of as “alternative institutions” (we were actually just going into business for ourselves). There were food coops, bookstores, day care centers, clinics, publishing houses, auto repair shops, community newspapers, psychedelic shops (with clothing, leather goods, music), and so forth. But the capitalists were not hurt by this at all. On the contrary, they benefitted greatly. They simply took over all our new creations and mass marketed them, making billions in the process.

      Nevertheless, there are at least two very important differences between regular businesses and worker-owned ones. The latter can abolish internal hierarchies and self-manage the shop in a democratic way, and they have greater flexibility about using any extra wealth created. Instead of paying dividends to stockholders they can use income to support opposition movements, or they can simply raise their own salaries, shorten their work hours, or lower their prices. Actually, in real life most worker-owners end up working longer hours for less pay than they would in a traditional enterprise. They also tend to start out democratic but end up managerial, due largely I think to the pressures and temptations of the surrounding capitalist market, and not I hope to inherent flaws in human nature.

      If there were dozens of worker-owned businesses in a community, providing needed services and making useful products, in addition to supporting anti-capitalist struggles, they could accumulate a wealth of experience and become the initial core, later on, for the self-managed Projects of democratic autonomous neighborhoods. They could become the basis for socially conscious, cooperative labor, democratically agreed upon labor, as opposed to labor that is bought and sold.

      Worker-owned businesses are a growing movement in the United States (around 1500 majority-owned businesses so far I think). Some of them in the same trade are forming networks for mutual support and to share information. They can become revolutionary however only by becoming part of a movement to destroy capitalism and build something else, as sketched in this book, for example.

      6. Try to convert local business families to the democratic autonomous way of life. That is, try to convince them to give up private ownership and switch to worker-managed projects controlled by the neighborhood Home Assembly. This may not be as hard as we at first imagine. The petty bourgeoisie (i.e., small business families) is one of the most desperate and miserable classes in capitalism. They work unbelievably long hours. Very few of them are getting rich. They go bankrupt by the thousands, losing everything they have, all their money and all their long years of labor. Those who do survive may still be on the verge of going under. They are constantly being gobbled up by chain stores and I doubt that the buyouts are all that wonderful. These people are on the fringe of the corporate world. They have been a shrinking class for over a hundred years. Maybe some of them are ready to throw in the towel. They have sought not only to get rich, but “to be their own boss.” That is, they have striven to escape wage-slavery by going into business for themselves. But there is another way to escape wage-slavery and be your own boss — participate in a worker-managed project. If we could convince even 10% of them to convert their properties to cooperatively owned and operated projects, this would provide a starting financial base for neighborhood autonomy. If we could convince 20, 30, or 40 percent, we would have a very substantial material base for transforming our neighborhoods.

      7. Change jobs and move to worker-managed projects as opportunities emerge. We should shift our employment from the giant corporate world to worker-managed, neighborhood-controlled projects. The wealth that we produce in the former is siphoned off into the coffers of global capitalism. The wealth we produce in the latter can be retained in the neighborhood. There is a very big danger here though, namely that we will end up doing poverty level work. So we must never let up on our overall attack on capitalism, as described herein. We must not be content to live in the backwaters, barely subsisting in our impoverished neighborhoods, however autonomous they may be, while capitalism goes rolling on.

      8. Set up local currencies. Most people don't even know that we don't have to use ruling class money (government or bank money) or that we can issue our own. Local currencies, of which there are many types, help us to get free from the world market, strengthen local markets, and thus build self-sufficiency and autonomy. They enable us to stop circulating the money of our oppressors, and thus escape, partially, the system of control based on that money. Local currencies also provide a way to stop wealth from being drained out of the community. Although local currencies are possible now (and many experiments are under way) they will probably be outlawed if the practice spreads.

      9. Organize a Community Land Trust. These are not-for-profit corporations which acquire and hold land in the public interest. They are an existing legal form in the United States which autonomists should be using more than we are. They are a way of fighting the real estate industry, and of resisting the continuing concentration of land ownership. Like Community Development Corporations, they can easily become regressive, but if used properly they could become, later on, the basis for neighborhood control of all the lands upon which the neighborhood lives and works. Getting control of the land is always the first step capitalists take when beginning an attack on the autonomy of any people. With us, in the core capitalist countries, the land is long gone. But in many parts of the world the enclosure (expropriation of the land by the masters) is just now happening, and on a massive scale. Peasants and native peoples everywhere are being forced to register their holdings, which have traditionally been communally defined, thus turning the land into a commodity which can be bought and sold, under state and market rules. Another way of emptying the land is to make peasant farming unviable, by flooding the country with cheap, subsidized farm products from the rich countries. Sometimes peasants are simply driven off the land by force. Contemporary Colombia is a prime example, where the combination of death squads and toxic spraying have made millions landless, to become dwellers in the vast urban slums.

      Community Land Trusts do not overcome the problem of land being treated like a commodity of course, since the land still has a title registered with the state. They are thus only a stop gap measure, but one which might be used now to start the process of re-appropriating the land.

      10. Start switching to solar/wind energy. This will be easiest for people living in small towns and villages. There are already solar and wind units that can supply all the electrical needs of a small community. It will be hardest for people living in dense urban or suburban neighborhoods. Solar and wind power has gotten cheaper and cheaper. It is about ready to takeoff, so to speak, but under corporate control — vast solar and wind installations feeding electricity into the corporate-controlled grids. What communities, and even private households, must do is use the new technology to get free from the grid and thus achieve a measure of self-sufficiency and autonomy. There may come a time when this will make the difference between survival or death. For now though it is an essential step toward taking power, in both senses, back from capitalists and returning it to democratic communities where it belongs.

      11. Start growing some of our own food. This will make sense only in the context of struggles to re-empower local communities and destroy capitalism. The objective is to regain a degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy in order to be able to abandon and hence gut and destroy the profit-system. Otherwise we play right into their hands. Capitalists no longer need vast millions of people. They couldn’t care less if we scurry around in our little vegetable gardens, garage workshops, and utility rooms trying to scrape together the bare necessities of life. As long as they control the major technologies, the governments, and markets sufficient for the continued accumulation of capital, they are happy, and can control the world. They would be happy to see millions of us simply die off. In fact they are talking about this already, all the time, and looking forward to it.

      So the tactic of 'starting to grow some of our own food' stems not from any romantic illusion about mother earth or about working with our hands, but from our dire need to establish independence in order to survive. Today’s urban populations are unimaginably vulnerable to the disruption of food supplies. And don’t think for one minute that governments and corporations won’t block food shipments, if they have to, to protect themselves and the system they are devoted to. In fact, structurally induced famines have already reached epidemic levels in the contemporary world. So 'growing some of our own food' applies not just to first world neighborhoods, but also, and especially, to the poorer countries which have been forced into importing basic food stuffs while their own lands are given over to cash crops for export (e.g., coffee, sugar, bananas, beef).

      We don't need farms to start growing food. We can do it in the backyard, or in roof top gardens. We can build solar powered greenhouses, and try aqua culture and hydroponics. There are many ways to start getting free from agribusiness.

      12. Set up a neighborhood storehouse to facilitate mutual aid. At first this will simply be a depository where persons can put in things they don't need and take out things they do need. This could include food, for example, as people in the neighborhood start growing more and more of their own food. A person or family who has grown more food than they need will put it in the storehouse, where it can be taken out by persons and families who need food. It will be a way of facilitating mutual aid and sharing. It could also include clothing, especially children's clothing. As children outgrow clothes, these clothes could be put in (or returned to) the storehouse to be available to other children who need them. Same with toys, and many other items, like books, dishes, furniture, appliances, extra plants, scrap lumber, and tools. As the neighborhood gets more and more free from the market, more and more of the necessities of life (and even non-necessities) will be channeled through the storehouse. Eventually, all production – industrial, agricultural, etcetera – will be funneled into the storehouse. After the needs of the neighborhood have been met, excess production will be exchanged with other neighborhoods. There might be inter-neighborhood, or even regional, storehouses for some items. It will be by means of arrangements like this that we will eventually be able to abolish money. Setting up such a storehouse is something that could be done right now, in every neighborhood. In some communities, there already exists a similar organization, in the form of thrift stores of various kinds (Salvation Army, Goodwill, Veterans). In these stores, although their goods have usually been donated, the items are nevertheless sold for money. But in a voluntarily organized and run storehouse, the money could be eliminated.

      13. Support orthomolecular medicine and the preventive health care movement. Medicine as currently practiced is a ruling institution that seeks to control us just like schools do, and corporations, and the government itself. It also wants to sell us drugs, cut us up (for a high fee), and keep us coming back again and again. We must start breaking free from it, start reducing its influence over our lives, start gutting it of power. The best way to do this is not to get sick. We must take charge of our own health and learn how to take care of ourselves. A step in this direction is to become advocates and adherents of orthomolecular medicine — a new philosophy of health and sickness founded in the 1970s by Linus Pauling and his colleagues, which was actually mostly a crystallization of long-standing alternative health practices, although they certainly gave them a new twist and a firmer scientific foundation.

      We should go to doctors and hospitals only as a last resort, and when we do go we must question everything they do. Never let them treat us like pieces of meat. Never let them do a single thing to us without forcing them to explain it, and to wait until we decide whether we want the treatment.

      Some of us should also try to begin establishing neighborhood health clinics. This will be difficult because medicine is tightly controlled by the state, together with the drug companies, insurance companies, and doctors themselves in their professional organizations. Nevertheless, some progress can surely be made toward neighborhood-controlled clinics even if it is only education at first to spread the preventive health care movement. These clinics will become, later on, the means whereby we take back control of health care in our democratic autonomous neighborhoods.

      Naturally, people who presently work in hospitals should be forming employee associations, with an eye to eventually taking over the hospitals. But the seizure of hospitals will probably take place at about the time that it becomes feasible to seize factories, farms, offices, and stores. In the meantime, we should be getting free from mainstream medicine by practicing preventive health care and by establishing independent neighborhood clinics.

      14. Do not work hard at our jobs. Generally speaking, this cannot be anything as obvious as an explicit slowdown (deliberate slowdowns have their place of course). Rather, when we start a new job we should work at a level far below our true ability. Never let them know we can do more. Do just the bare minimum not to get fired. This may still be quite a high level of output in a very competitive labor market where there are millions of gung-ho employees trying to impress the bosses and get ahead (i.e., get promoted) or perhaps just trying to keep their jobs. But as more and more workers adopt this attitude it will be harder and harder for the bosses to tell what the real capacities are. The centuries-old struggle between capitalists and workers turns precisely on the capitalists’ need to extract more value from the direct producers than they pay out in wages and benefits. This battle has been, and is being, fought over the length of the working day, wages, speed-ups, breaks, vacation time, intensity of work, sick leave, lunch periods, overtime, age of retirement, health and pension benefits, and so on. Anything that requires capitalists to pay more while getting less weakens their world and strengthens ours.

      But “not working hard at our jobs” goes somewhat beyond these other kinds of struggle. No business could last a year if it weren’t for the enthusiasm, energy, and dedication that workers bring to their jobs. This happens everywhere, at every construction site, in every factory, and in every office. There are always those few who keep the business going, or even keep it operating smoothly. Capitalism would collapse without this creative energy, without this problem-solving, without this free intelligence applied to new situations. Just look at what happens when a few workers do attempt to “work to rule” — things start to unravel fast. Capitalists still continue to preach that workers should just do what they’re told and not think about it (“Just Do It”). At the same time they usually blame workers when things go wrong, for not having seen the problem and taken the initiative to fix it.

      The principle of “Not Working Hard at Our Jobs” means that we will assume no responsibility for the success of the business, bring no enthusiasm to our work, fix nothing when things go wrong, solve no production problems for them, volunteer no information, make no inventions, improve no procedures — in short do as little as possible. This is a way of stopping capitalists from extracting wealth from our labors. It also throws a monkey-wrench into the capital accumulation process, without which the system collapses.

      There have always been people who sloughed off at work. This often creates tensions because other workers usually have to do the work the slackers are not doing. But what if all of us, or most of us, sloughed off? The strategy of “Not Working Hard at Our Jobs” suggests precisely this — that we all become malingerers. This does go against the grain however, at least for a lot of us. It is natural to want to do well, to develop skills, to be proud of our work. We have to realize though that our exploiters rely upon these good motivations of ours and use them against us. Our natural instincts to excel at our tasks are being used to destroy us, our communities, and in fact the earth itself.

      Finally, the extent to which any individual can become a slough-off will vary depending on that person’s situation and personality. People who live in extensive networks of family, friends, and co-workers, can risk getting fired more easily. Very isolated people can’t. Also, some people are more afraid than others, more subject to peer pressure, and to pressure from the bosses. Only fearless and secure people can snub their noses at bosses and peers alike. If we could get our neighborhood, workplace, and household associations going then more of us could be brave enough to become first rate slough-offs at work. Also, it would help immensely, in fact it is vitally important to the strategy, if we could use the energy thus saved for other skills and tasks not exploitable by capitalists, for activities which would build our world while undermining theirs.

      The tactical principle of 'Not Working Hard at Our Jobs' strikes capitalism at its core, could become a central component of an opposition culture, and is something that could be started today by every employed person. Just don’t do it. Don’t care. Don’t try.

      Naturally, there are safety precautions that must be observed. Crane operators, pilots, bus drivers, surgeons (and dozens more workers in critical jobs) must be skillful enough to ensure that nobody gets hurt. Within these limits though there is still plenty of room for sloughing off. Most jobs are not critical at all.

      Also, sloughing off at work must be accompanied by the determined effort to build something of excellence elsewhere. Otherwise, sloughing off becomes a way of life and amounts to nothing more than sinking into slothfulness and apathy.

      15. Organize locally to stop ruling class offensives in the community. There are numerous examples of this already. A town has mobilized to stop a Wal-Mart from moving in and destroying all the local small businesses. Communities have mobilized to force the clean up of toxic waste dumps. Neighborhoods have organized to stop expressways from being built right through the middle of their homes. Some suburban sprawl (damn little though) has been blocked. Proposed dams have been stopped. Forests, wetlands, and seashores have been saved. And so forth. This is where capitalists have to be stopped – locally, in our communities. Why? Because this is where our strength is.

      Even if one hundred thousand militants converged periodically in cities and capitals around the world to protest at the summit meetings of the world's ruling classes, this is nothing compared to the tens of millions, hundred of millions worldwide, who could become engaged in struggles at the local level. Most people cannot go to regional, national, or continental demonstrations. They have to work and cannot leave their jobs. Plus travel is expensive and beyond the means of many people. Plus they have family responsibilities. Hence protests at summit meetings is perforce limited mostly to more affluent students and other movement celebrities who can afford to operate on a national or global level. Quite a few less well off persons do manage nevertheless to go to these events, by taking vacation time, using up savings, and the like. But they are not the majority. Moreover, in order really to be able to defeat capitalists on the global level, we would have to get control of national governments, and that is simply not in the picture. So however useful national and global protests are for highlighting issues, articulating demands, and putting pressure on our rulers, it is at the local level that the real battles must be fought.

      16. Start applying criminal laws to capitalists and government officials. This has started to happen. It's quite surprising that it hasn't happened long before now. Not long ago a couple of corporate executives were convicted of murder, because they knowingly allowed an employee to be poisoned to death at the workplace. This was the first case of its kind in the United States. Pinochet has been arrested and may be placed on trial in Chile. Kissinger may well be brought to trial as a war criminal. All this is an excellent development. If we could only bring the criminal laws to bear on capitalists themselves, and their functionaries in government, this by itself would almost be enough to destroy capitalism, because capitalism cannot exist (that is, capitalists, as a world class, cannot make profits) without violence, brutality, oppression, theft, lies, and murder. It requires all that to keep the system going, speaking in global terms. If we could hold them to the same laws that all the rest of us must obey, their scam would be exposed, and the system would collapse.

      17. Democratize all voluntary associations. By democratize, of course I mean direct democracy, whereby an association is operated cooperatively, through face-to-face assemblies. Unfortunately, the practice of direct democracy has almost disappeared from our culture. Instead, the first thing we do when we get together to establish an association, is to elect officers and hand over authority to them, thus disbanding our meetings, and forfeiting our power of self-government. That is, we establish a hierarchy, even though this is seen as democratic (whereby we choose leaders periodically through elections). But this practice could be abandoned and we could return to the practice of direct democracy. No one is stopping us from doing this right now, in all the many and various associations we establish, whether they be educational societies, chess clubs, baseball teams, parent-teacher associations, professional organizations, quilting bees, orchestras, health clinics, youth centers, food coops, or what have you. This could be done in all organizations that we establish which are not registered with the state. So-called not-for-profit corporations, which are registered with the state (that is, incorporated by the state), are usually required, by law, to have a board of directors and officers. Nevertheless, in many cases, it is possible to do the paper work to meet the official requirements (which demand the establishment of hierarchy, that is, an authoritarian structure for the enterprise), but to run the project internally, unofficially, with direct democracy. At present, it is an unfortunate fact that not-for-profit corporations and so-called non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are almost invariably authoritarian. But this is something that we might be able to change, long before it becomes feasible to seize, and thus democratize, corporations per se. The experience we could thus gain now with direct democracy in our voluntary associations, non-profits, and NGOs would help us later in our workplace, neighborhood, and household assemblies.

      18. Reject mainstream divisions of social knowledge. About a hundred years ago, largely in response to a very powerful labor movement and a vigorous anti-capitalist culture, conservatives in Europe began parceling up social knowledge into fields or disciplines, which rapidly became institutionalized as departments in universities, and then as occupations in the labor market. The main ones were economics, political science, and sociology. But also, history was partitioned off more completely as a specialized and more limited discipline, as was philosophy. Psychology had already been separated out earlier. Anthropology was added in. There is not the slightest justification for any of this. There is no such thing as an economy, for example. But such a claim sounds idiotic to contemporary minds. What conservatives have succeeded in doing is thoroughly trouncing another way of looking at human life which uses a different set of categories entirely, namely the radical critique of capitalist civilization. These false divisions are now one of the greatest barriers to understanding the world we live in.

      19. Don’t watch television or listen to the radio. I'm referring to corporate media of course. For most people it’s probably best not to even own televisions or radios. Every hour given up to corporate programming is one hour less available for face-to-face association with friends and neighbors, one hour less available for building independent lives, for creating an autonomous culture, and for assembling the social arrangements that will replace capitalism. Mainstream television and radio are unspeakable evils, with their endless hours of advertising, their biased newscasts, their destruction of conversation, their silence about everything important, their trivialization of knowledge, their distortion of history, and their endorsement of greed, vulgarity, and brutality. Television creates a false, mediated world, a cultural world that has been filtered through the prism of capitalist values. We come to act and talk as if the only things we have in common are what we have all seen in the movies or on television or heard on the radio. This comes to be the mediated linkage that binds us together. We no longer have direct cultural linkages emerging out of our own face to face interaction, but only these round-about, second hand, artificial, distorted ones.

      I have known only a few persons who could watch television without being damaged. These are persons who are already deeply steeped in an alternative culture. They don’t so much watch television as they study it, like they would a species of insect never encountered before. They examine television, with a critical eye, bringing to the task already developed autonomous knowledge and values with which to judge it. They see it as data, to be analyzed, to discover what the ruling class is doing, and what spin it is putting on current events. They read between the lines to decipher what’s happening in the world. This is a very important thing to do, but it is not for everyone.

      This presents a problem. We all need to be aware of what’s happening in the world. We can read the newspapers, but mainstream newspapers must be approached with the same 'reading between the lines' critical eye needed for television and radio. At present the best resource is the independent media, which can be consulted regularly to keep informed. Hopefully, a growing opposition culture will continue to invent ways to bypass corporate/government media.

      A report was made about what happened in a remote village in northern India when the first transistor radio arrived. Within a short time villagers no longer danced around their fires singing songs. Instead they sat and listened to the canned music from New Delhi.

      20. Support the Independent Media. What began in the 1960s as Underground Newspapers, and continued to flourish in the 1970s and 1980s as the Alternative Press, has come into its own in the 1990s as the Independent Media. This is a much better name. Why should our publications be considered alternative rather than mainstream, instead of the reverse? It is corporate media after all that is not authentic, being nothing but a propaganda machine, and is therefore out of line, dishonest, marginal, based on special interests (profit), inimical to human life, subterranean, and immoral. So why should this be considered mainstream? Well of course it is mainstream, for capitalism, and that is why the term mainstream is a dirty word for us. Still.

      Our Independent Media now consists of hundreds of newspapers, magazines, newsletters, journals, and zines, as well as independent radio and television. The most spectacular development in this area, in just the past few years since the Battle of Seattle in November 1999, has been the rapid creation, on a world scale, of IndyMedia Centers, using the Internet. These centers collect written, audio, and visual reports about current events and make them available to anyone with access to the Internet. This is a critically important strategic initiative. The new generation of activists seems to be very media savvy, far surpassing the media skills of earlier generations of militants. They seem to be focusing more on how central media are, and therefore on how crucial it is to fight in this arena.

      21. Don’t buy into the culture industry or commodified entertainment. In the heavily commodified cultures of the core capitalist countries we can hardly move without using a commodity transaction. We certainly cannot live. We can’t even die. There are options, nevertheless, in the hours when we are not forced into wage-slavery (the core commodity transaction).

      I believe that in our non-working hours we must consciously avoid commodified activities. A commodified activity is one which is organized as a business to yield a profit to the entrepreneurs. Quite obviously this cannot be an absolute rule, otherwise we couldn’t do anything, couldn’t go out to dinner, couldn’t go dancing, couldn’t travel, couldn’t listen to music, couldn’t read a book. But what we can do is start shifting the emphasis, start shifting the ratio of commodified to non-commodified activities, and be more selective about which commodified activities we do (some are worse than others).

      Most of us are heavily dependent on commercial entertainment, whether it be movies, television, CDs, rock and roll clubs, home videos, or spectator sports. Every hour of our non-wage laboring time we spend on commodified entertainment strengthens capitalism and reduces the time we have available for creating an autonomous culture. The very worst commodified entertainment is that which reduces us to spectators, to passivity; movies, television, and commercial sports are the bad ones. (There is a highbrow version of spectator entertainment — plays, concerts, and ballets.)

      Even active entertainment requires equipment — boats, bikes, golf clubs, tennis rackets, binoculars, fishing gear — and as such ties us to the leisure time industry. But these uses of leisure are far better than spectator entertainment. But has someone who spends every available free hour playing golf been captured by the culture industry? I think so. Has someone who spends every available dollar maintaining a motor boat been captured by the culture industry? I think so. Add into this all the people who spend themselves broke every week playing the horses, buying the latest CDs, reading the latest romance novels, going to rock concerts, eating out, taking tours, going to bars, going to the movies, going to ball games, going to bowling alleys, skating rinks, and pool halls, going to nightclubs, going to stock car races, visiting amusement parks, and you see a population enslaved to the leisure time industry, to commodified entertainment and activities. All these activities destroy community and isolate us from each other.

      The crazy thing is that this is all voluntary. No one is forcing us to do any of this. Capitalists have captured our laboring hours by force and turned us into slaves. But they have captured our so-called leisure hours by seduction and turned us into spectators and consumers. It’s going to be hard to break free from the culture industry. The trouble is that most of this stuff is fun. We have to realize though that it is destroying us. We can, and we must, break free from it.

      This is certainly one way we can all begin today to gut capitalism. We can learn to play instruments again and make our own music. We can learn to sing together again, an ability which we have lost (yet people who have forgotten how to sing can never make a revolution; so here’s a thought; we can destroy capitalism by starting to sing again). We can get together with neighbors and play sports. We can hike together and cycle, go on picnics, attend free lectures, form discussion groups and argue, play games in our own homes, go camping (but without a van load of equipment), read (good books instead of trash), organize community dances with live local musical talent, stage plays, sit and talk, visit friends and relatives, sleep, sit around and do nothing. The capitalist culture industry would collapse tomorrow without our endless purchases.

      22. Don’t Vote. There is a whole list of things not to do, namely don’t waste time on any of the strategies that have failed. Voting (in elections for representatives to local, state, and national governments) deserves special mention though, because of the horrible ambivalence that still surrounds this issue. The ambivalence stems in large measure from the obvious fact that it can make a considerable difference in our lives whether the government is controlled by right-wing fanatics or liberal do-gooders. Governments, after all, if run by nice people, and if the internal dynamics of capitalism permit it (i.e., if the rate of profit is sufficiently healthy) can do many beneficial things for the average worker. What governments cannot do is destroy capitalism, because they are an integral part of capitalism.

      We have to face up to this. Any time or energy put into winning elections will always fall short of achieving our true objectives. We cannot afford this waste. Time is short. We have to stop fighting for what we can get and start fighting for what we want. We have to reserve our energies for those strategies that will destroy capitalism and create a new world. Revolutionaries who argue that we have to do both, that we should be electing socialists or at least progressive liberals to office, all the while we are building alternative institutions and attacking the system in other ways, just aren’t being realistic. You can spend decades of your life trying to build a new labor or progressive party, but what have you got even if you succeed? Not what you really wanted!

      There are in addition all the other objections to voting, like that it perpetuates the illusion that we are living in a democracy or at least a quasi-democracy, that it legitimizes the system, that running for office is an option only for the very rich, and so on. You may recall the anarchist quip that if voting could change anything it would be illegal. There is a bumper sticker which reads: “Don’t Vote! It only encourages them.” To refuse to even cast a vote, for the lesser of two evils (the "evil of two lessors"), even though it only takes an hour or two, is an act of resistance. It is a conscious rejection of capitalism, a refusal to be bought off with crumbs, and as such is a step toward building an opposition movement.

      Although universal suffrage was won largely through working class, feminist, and civil rights agitation, it was long ago turned into a controlling mechanism by the ruling class, to be used against us. We should make a clean break with this practice and start taking direct action to destroy the system that is killing us by the millions.

      A Caveat: Continuing Ambivalence. No matter how powerful the arguments against voting are, I can’t help but waver when faced with a situation like that in the United States in 2004. It is now not just a question of the lesser of two evils, because the difference between a full-fledged fascist regime and a regular right-wing government might add up to millions of lives lost, plus the loss of whatever maneuvering room we have left for liberatory struggle. People can always struggle of course, even under fascism, but they are starting from way back, from a much weaker position. Let’s hope that the split in the ruling class is severe enough to derail real fascism from emerging.

      But it may actually already be too late. One can’t help but suspect that the hard-right extremists who have seized control of the US government will never give up power. Fascist types have after all been struggling to seize control at least since the murder of John F. Kennedy in 1963, and probably for a couple of decades before that. So now that they have finally gotten control of all three branches of government, most of the courts, the media, and the military-industrial-intelligence agency-university-prison complex, are they going to give up power? I wouldn’t bet on it. They have already put in place most of the things they need for a totalitarian police state. So they probably will either steal the election using the electronic voting machines and other election fraud strategies, like scrubbing the voting rolls, or else they will stage some crisis and declare martial law. Assuming though that this latter doesn’t happen and that the election is fair, there is surely a strong case to be made for going to the polls to try to dislodge the neo-conservative extremists from power, in favor of some less vicious ruling class representative (our only choice, since candidates who might represent the people are barred from the race; and even if candidates with a peoples agenda do occasionally make it into office, they are immediately neutralized by the brokers of international capital, like has just happened recently to Lula da Silva in Brazil).

      23. Recover our own language. We no longer speak our own freely created language. We speak the language of our rulers and their hacks. It’s no wonder, considering the bombardment from schools and mass media we have been under. Also, we don’t really talk much with each other any more, which of course is the only way a language can be created. Instead we listen, to them. We walk around with earphones on our heads. We listen to teachers, sometimes for twenty years. We listen to the news, to talk shows, to weather forecasters, to advertisements by the thousands, and to the stock market report, even though few of us own stocks (and those who do, don't own many). We listen to the President. We listen to bosses, ministers, doctors, and psychiatrists. Some people can’t even sleep unless the radio or television is on. There are radios in every car, in every workplace, in every kitchen. Millions of people wake up every morning to clock radios. There are radios on the beach and in camp. We listen to the MTA, over their loudspeakers in every station and train, telling us not to step over the yellow line, not to smoke, not to litter, to report vandals (222-1212), and to have a nice day, with nary a grimace of protest from a single passenger. We are constantly listening, to language not of our own making.

      We even allow them to start piping their language right into our children’s brains before they can even talk. It is a language filled with euphemisms, double-speak, psycho-babble, and befuddlement. It is an ugly language. Compared with only a hundred years ago our language now is impoverished, polluted, and degraded, with greatly weakened expressive powers. We cannot think straight using this language. Although it sounds strange to say so, words are very concrete things, and we can pay attention to them. We don’t have to say “industrial society” instead of “capitalism”, to cite only one example. Whole books are now being written on Double-Speak by oppositionists. We should study them. We should also study the words, whenever we can find them, of the very first victims of capitalism, in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. They had a clearer perception of what they were being hit with. Even in the 19th century, opposition language was still rich and powerful. Study the speeches of William Morris or Voltairine de Cleyre, for example, if you want to see how pitiful our language has become compared to theirs.

      24. Recover the capacity for self-defense. Never before in history has a people been rendered so utterly defenseless before its oppressors as have the working classes of the capitalist world, classes which now include the overwhelming majority of people. We own no land and cannot grow the food we need. We own no tools and cannot make the necessities of life, not even clothing and shelter. We own no weapons and cannot defend ourselves against attack. Our communities and families have been broken up. We cannot control what our children are taught. We can no longer make our own music. Our language is no longer our own. Each week we hand over our money to the ruling class for safekeeping. We are completely at the mercy of our rulers (and yet we think we are free!).

      Even our character has been changed and weakened. Long gone from us is the fierce independence and resistance shown by peasants and native peoples the world over (including those in Europe) when they were first assaulted by capitalists. We are now a tamed class of people, so tamed that we are no longer even aware that we have been tamed. We are a subdued, cowed, pacified, controlled, contained, managed, manipulated class.

      We are not completely tamed, however, and this is our strength and only hope (or despair, if all they need is to mostly tame us). The fact that they have so far failed, even with all their governments, schools, firepower, and mass media, to completely tame us, tells us that they can never completely tame us (short of genetically altering us, which I’m sure they’re already working on around the clock). It tells us that we can win, that we are stronger.

      Quite obviously, recovering the capacity for self-defense is not a simple matter of stockpiling Uzis. In fact it’s not a simple matter at all. It’s practically the same as recovering the capacity to live autonomously. Nevertheless there are many things we can do in the meantime. For example, we can establish cop watches. Whenever an incident happens involving the police, we should gather round and observe. This in itself will act as a brake on police brutality and provide eye witness accounts to anything that happens. Unfortunately, things at present are going in exactly the opposite direction. Many neighborhoods are setting up crime watches, under the direct supervision of their local police departments. In effect, they are turning themselves into cops, to spy on their neighbors, in the name of fighting crime. If this trend continues, before long it will be like it was in Russia, with family members ratting on other family members to the state's secret police. They will not see the crimes perpetrated by the government, corporations, and the police themselves, but only the street thugs that are threatening their neighborhoods.

      Feminists were on the right track when they started taking karate classes in the late sixties. They said they were tired of feeling vulnerable and helpless. So they started learning karate and other methods of self-defense. We should revive this interest in self-defense but broaden it. It must be raised to the community level, and not remain just an individual practice. And since we can never acquire tanks, helicopters, patrol cars, gas grenades, and all that other weaponry (nor should we even want to), we have to invent social weapons with which to resist them and defend our selves. I admit that this is a formidable and daunting task. Anyone who has survived in a ghetto for long realizes what it's like to live in an occupied territory. Half-a-dozen patrol cars can be at any incident within minutes, with more on the way, and helicopters hovering overhead. How can we possibly overcome such firepower?

      To be quite honest about it, I don't quite see how break-away, autonomous neighborhoods could be defended against the military might of the bourgeoisie. But then, neither is it possible to see how a break-away nation could be defended. We have just seen, in their attack on Yugoslavia, what they can do to a whole nation which they want to break up. They bombed it back to a pre-industrial level, wiping out in seventy-eight days of bombing raids the productive toils and accomplishments of a whole people for half a century. So the difficulty we have in imagining a defense of our neighborhoods cannot be solved by reverting to a statist strategy, or by building armed forces to engage the ruling class militarily on its own terms — Yugoslavia after all was well armed -- because we're just as bad off on that level.

      The answer to the dilemma lies, I suspect, precisely in our smallness, in our ubiquitousness, in direct action, and in the tactics of determined non-cooperation and resistance to violent oppression. After all, we're not starting from scratch. There is much to be learned from the long tradition of nonviolent resistance to physical force. We must also study tactics and strategies of war, however, because that's what we're involved in.

      I do believe that we can win. But perhaps I'm just dreaming. We must never forget that they are willing to murder entire populations to protect their ability to accumulate capital, and have done so again and again.

      25. Engage the Fight against Religion. As recently as the 1960s it was possible to think that the battle against religion had been won. The tremendous advances of Enlightenment values from the eighteenth century on seemed solidly in place. So how does it happen that forty years later we find ourselves living in a world of resurgent religious fundamentalism — Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Hindu?

      A big part of the explanation, I submit, is that the US government and its various puppet regimes, sometimes together with its imperialist allies, have been very busy murdering progressive people the world over, for a very long time now. To be more exactly correct, they have been murdering people who reject capitalism and imperialism, the majority of whom are secular people. That’s at the bottom of it. Most recently they destroyed a progressive and secular state in Yugoslavia and replaced it with right wing mini states based on religion and ethnicity. Before that they destroyed a progressive and secular state in Afghanistan, because it was allied with the Soviet Union, and replaced it with a state based on Muslim fundamentalism (in the biggest CIA covert operation in its history). They wiped out the progressive community in Iraq, using their ally Saddam Hussein, by murdering thousands of communists, syndicalists, socialists, anarchists, liberals, and secular humanists. They destroyed the democratic regime of Mossadeq in Iran, and replaced it with a royal dictator, the Shah, who proceeded to exterminate Iran’s progressive, liberal, secular community (many of whom were communists and socialists). So the only social force left that was powerful enough to overthrow the Shah twenty-five years later was Islamic Fundamentalism. Socialists and progressives in Israel have been oppressed and marginalized for decades by right-wing governments backed by the United States. Is it any wonder then that Jewish Fundamentalism has gained the upper hand? In India the United States has consistently allied itself with right-wing, pro-capitalist governments which vigorously suppress any movement aiming to deepen and extend democracy, whether by liberals, socialists, or communists, until only Hindu fascists are left controlling the government. The list goes on and on. They slaughtered at least half a million communists in Indonesia in 1965. They murdered 200,000 people in Guatemala, 30,000 in Argentina, 3000 or more in Chile.

      The same thing has been happening inside the United States. Can there be any doubt that the government’s destruction of the New Left in the late sixties and early seventies paved the way for the resurgence of Christian Fundamentalism? If the sixties revolution had been successful, or even partially so, this phenomenon most likely would never have happened. Even leaving aside the New Left, would the country now be in the grip of Christian Fundamentalists if the fascist thugs in the ruling class hadn’t murdered so many progressive leaders, like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr, John and Robert Kennedy, Walter Reuther, and more (most recently Paul Wellstone)? This is no new thing. They killed the leadership of the anarchist movement in Chicago in the 1880s; and more generally, they destroyed an autonomous working class culture, which was imbued with communism, socialism, anarchism, secularism, and atheism. They destroyed the country’s huge socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist movement in the 1920s, by killing, jailing, or deporting its leaders, and otherwise sabotaging its operations. They terminated the Black Panthers, murdering 27 of them, jailing many more, and burning down their offices across the country.

      But do you ever see them murdering right-wing Christians? Of course not. Capitalists hate enlightenment, but love religious fanatics. They encourage, foster, and fund them, along with all the other mystics, sectarians, and dopes they can get their arms around. We no longer need to look back in history to see that organized religion has always been the whore of the state. The current mating between Christian Fundamentalists and right-wing extremists of the Republican Party is all the proof we need. But it’s a strange affair, because Money, and the power to make it, is the only God republican extremists ever worship.

      So for the past thirty years, the Christian Right has been waging an unrelenting cultural war against liberals and secular humanists (communists, socialists, anarchists, and atheists are now so marginalized they’re hardly even on the scope). They grew dissatisfied with simply enjoying their religious freedom. They decided to go political, and capture the state, in order to impose their beliefs on the nation. We have to embrace this fight once again, or else the Enlightenment will turn out to have been just a blip in the long history of human intolerance and fanaticism.

      26. Start Negotiating Global Agreements. Critics of a decentered world claim that many of our problems are worldwide in scope and therefore require world institutions to deal with them. It’s true that we face many global crises that can only be solved on the global level, but it is not true that we need a world government, or some such, to solve them. Local communities could start negotiating global agreements on their own initiative, bypassing governments. If existing treaties, negotiated by governments, are worth supporting, they could simply endorse these (and there are many such treaties, dealing with weapons in space, the oceans, nuclear weapons, land mines, torture, and so forth). Or they could revise these where necessary to improve them and make them compatible with anarchy. Or they could start writing their own treaties. Naturally, this assumes that we have local communities that are trying to take back control of their lives. The recent phenomenon in the United States wherein over two hundred city councils have passed resolutions against the USA Patriot Act, and in defense of the Bill of Rights, indicates the direction we should be moving in. The experience gained in the Sister Cities movement might be relevant. The international networks of NGOs might be relevant also.

      The idea that we need national governments (or even worse, a world government) to reach global agreements to deal with our problems is ridiculous. National governments, more often than not, are the causes of these crises.

      27. Abolish War. Abolish war? I’ve got to be kidding, right? This is a fantasy if there ever was one. The thing is, modern war has become horrible almost beyond human comprehension. Two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 210,000 people. One hydrogen bomb dropped on any major world city would kill millions of people instantly. So far this has never happened, but hundreds of nuclear missiles are still on hair trigger alert in both the United States and Russia. It is a miracle they’ve never been fired (and there have been some very close calls). The government officials who keep these missiles aimed and ready to fire at a moment’s notice, with grossly inadequate safeguards against false alarms, are truly criminally insane. They should be arrested immediately and locked up. But they won’t be, will they?

      The bombardment of Baghdad in the spring of 2003 was done from far up (supersonic bombers at 15,000 feet) or far away (cruise missiles launched from ships hundreds of miles away). None of the bombardiers or missile launchers were killed from enemy fire when making their attacks. It’s not really war. It’s slaughter. And now we have radioactive uranium munitions. Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Iraq are polluted with them. They will go on killing (cancer) and maiming (deformed babies) until the end of time. We have cluster bombs which continue to kill, mostly children, for decades after the "war" is over. We have land mines, millions of them, scattered over dozens of countries, which kill and kill and kill. We have 50mm bullets, one round of which will tear a body to shreds or blow a child’s head off. We have fire bombs, concussion bombs, bunker buster bombs, and smart bombs.

      The first modern war, the American Civil War, the first war to mobilize the entire society on both sides for the war effort, produced 562,130 casualties, and this was a war fought with primitive rifles and canons. The First World War, the war of the machine gun, killed an estimated ten million people. The Second World War, the war of airplanes, tanks, submarines, bombs, torpedoes, artillery, mortars, and grenades, killed roughly 40 million. The Korean War killed four million. Two million were killed in Vietnam, 600,000 more in the secret bombing of Cambodia. Two hundred and fifty thousand, one third of the population, were killed in East Timor. Isn’t it time to put a stop to this madness?

      There has always been a vocal minority which opposed war. But for the most part war protesters have mis-diagnosed the problem, seeing war merely as a moral issue. It is a moral issue of course, but it is not only that, for modern war has a structural basis, namely the state itself, with its national government, with its participation in the nation-state system (and in the mechanics of capital accumulation embedded in it). Every government arms itself, as much as it can afford, and claims a monopoly of violence within its territory.

      "War is the health of the state," said Randolph Bourne. "War is a racket," said Smedley Butler. Both were right. The state (and its war machine) is needed by capitalists. War is a necessary and inevitable feature of profit-taking. War is needed not only to maintain empire, and to control domestic unrest, but as a source of profit. All this is always done in the name of the ‘national interest’ of course, but most people realize now that this phrase is just a euphemism, a code word, for the interests of the national and international ruling class, not the interests of the general populations of nations.

      Capitalism would probably collapse without the military-industrial complex. The US economy is now heavily dependent on the arms industry, as are the economies of several other industrialized nations. These countries spend billions from general tax revenues making weapons which they sell (or more often, give away) to tin pot dictators the world over. The Pentagon itself is the most enormous war machine in the history of the world, and is tightly integrated with the arms industry. The more wars there are, the more money they make. Every time a cruise missile is fired, they get to build another one, at a million dollars a shot. Every time some country’s infrastructure is destroyed, transnational corporations get to go in and rebuild it, making billions. Of course, they never put it back like it was.

      Abolish war? How? Dismantle the state, and the profit system, which is what this book is all about. This is the only way. As far as I know there has never been a mass movement, especially an international mass movement, to abolish war. But we could build one. Perhaps the demonstration against the impending US invasion of Iraq, by ten million people, in thirty countries, on five continents, on February 15, 2003, signaled the beginning of such a movement. It will have to be a grassroots initiative. Obviously governments are not going to dismantle themselves or their war machines. But local communities could start to take a stand, declaring their opposition to war, all war. They could begin negotiating a global treaty to abolish war. They could encourage everyone to refuse to fight. What if millions of people the world over simply refused to go to war, and resisted the draft, going to prison instead if they had to? Unlikely? Well, are we just going to sit back and wait for the cruise missiles to start raining down on us, or to be obliterated in a flash by a nuclear blast, or to watch our sons and daughters, husbands and wives murdered and maimed in imperialist wars?

      A campaign to abolish war would be a direct threat to the profit-mongers, and is therefore a good tactic to use in getting out of capitalism, and into a world full of democratic autonomous communities, a world without states or war.

      28. Get control over union pension funds. At present, billions and billions of dollars that workers have saved are controlled by corporate bankers who use the money to bust unions, red-line poor communities, and finance more corporate enterprises, among other things. If you are in a union or know someone who is, begin to agitate to get these funds removed and re-deposited in worker- and community-friendly cooperative banks, or at least removed from corporate control in some other way.

      29. Don’t cooperate with the police. Except perhaps in urban ghettos, the police in the advanced capitalist states work in a very friendly social environment. This is a shame. It reflects some very bad attitudes on our part and lack of political awareness. Far too many people still think the police are here to protect us from crime, whereas in fact, by rendering us defenseless, police are a major cause of crime. Police may spend a tiny portion of their time, half-heartedly, on the problems of ordinary people (but when was the last time the police ever caught someone who robbed you, or recovered the stolen goods?). The great bulk of their work however goes to defend corporate property, to suppress unapproved movements and gatherings, to put down protests, to constantly watch us (surveillance), to ride herd on us (e.g., the ubiquitous patrol car), and to disarm us (you even need a permit to carry mace). Police are the front line mercenary troops of capitalists.

      So here’s what we do, at the very least. Never ask a cop for directions. In fact, don't even talk to cops unless you absolutely have to. Never invite a cop into our homes to advise us about security measures (they have such a program). Do not cooperate with any police programs designed to organize us and our neighbors to help fight crime. If we hear of police going into the public schools to give talks to grade schoolers about safety, pull our kids out of school that day. Whenever we see cops making an arrest, gather around to observe; our very presence is a deterrent. Organize cop watches. Never answer any questions beyond those legally required; instead exercise our right to remain silent (so we will have to know our rights). This may get us in trouble. Nothing infuriates cops more than refusals to answer their questions. But it is an essential act of resistance, and if practiced widely, would rapidly lead to a clear awareness that cops are not here for us.

      30. Don’t join the military. Don’t become a cop. Most lackeys for the ruling class (e.g., managers, judges, politicians, lawyers) are taken from the richer middle income strata (a few from the ruling class itself) or else from working class people who have been carefully screened (i.e., filtered through the schooling system). In the case of cops and soldiers however working class people are inducted directly into the ranks of storm troopers and used to defend the capitalist order. The trouble is that for destitute persons the military looks like a pretty good deal, and police jobs are highly paid and hence highly prized. Nevertheless, the opposition movement should try, as far as possible, to throw a ban on these jobs. There is no chance of course that we could ever prevent capitalists from recruiting enough troopers. But what we could do is put such an onus on these jobs, through ridicule, disparagement, and ostracism, that anyone who signs up will know quite clearly that they are doing something wrong, betraying their communities, and crossing over into enemy ranks.

      31. Do not become a boss. The deeply entrenched ambition to be promoted up through the ranks of the corporate world is very destructive of community, equality, and freedom. It has served capitalism well, but less so in recent years with the decimation of middle income, middle management levels of employment. Promotion has never been an out for more than a few people anyway (relatively speaking, but still a large number in absolute terms). The cost is high however. In exchange for having a somewhat more comfortable life in the material sense (whether it is a better quality of life is doubtful) these people sell their souls to the capitalists, develop vested interests in defending the system, adopt the viewpoints of the rulers, enforce corporate rules, and in truth become policemen for the accumulators of capital. For workers not to even aspire to be promoted, and to refuse promotion into the ranks of managers when offered, would weaken a strategic link in the system and would seriously undermine an enterprise’s ability to operate profitably. As more and more workers adopt this attitude this would become a set of values opposed to the those of the bosses. There would be costs of course, in loss of income. But would these costs be unbearable, especially if the time and energy could be redirected into autonomous associations which further undermine the wage-slave system?

      32. Ridicule businessmen — every chance you get. Also: bankers, cops, lawyers, priests, professors, doctors, scientists, politicians, bosses, and weather forecasters. Do not defer to anyone in authority. Professionalism is another way they have discovered to destroy self-reliance, competency, and autonomy in the general population. We can hardly do anything for ourselves anymore without having to consult an expert first.

      33. Reject Robert’s Rules of Order. Robert's Rules, written by a retired army general in 1876, have become deeply embedded in popular culture in the United States, to the extent that they are often automatically taken as the bible for how groups should behave in meetings. They are like an external law, imposed on us from above. People forget that they can write any rules they want to for their meetings, or have no rules at all. Robert's Rules give far too much power to the chair. They encourage parliamentary maneuvering. They are stifling and rigid. They can quite easily be used by skillful manipulators to defeat the collective will. We need to invent more flexible and democratic, less centralized procedures for organizing our collective assemblies, procedures which allow for much more chaos, spontaneousness, interruptions, talking out of turn, quick trial votes, arguments, and different procedural options for discussing issues. It's definitely time to rule Robert out of order.

      34. Do not deposit your money in corporate banks. Instead, seek out a cooperative bank. If there is not one handy start one. It is perfectly legal at present. (Non-profit banking cooperatives will most probably be stopped through legislation if the trend becomes pronounced.) Corporate banks use our deposits to strengthen the corporate world and weaken the autonomous community world. It is loopy for us to voluntarily hand over our weekly earnings for them to use against us (and then pay them to do it).

      35. Try not to fall into debt (unless it is a life or death matter). Personal debt is one way capitalists have invented to yoke us to their world. It is extremely effective. Capitalists at present depend heavily on this mountain of debt. It would clearly hurt them if people began to opt out of it. Being in debt keeps our noses to the grindstone, makes us more afraid of losing our jobs, reduces our flexibility, and makes us blue. It is simply crazy to voluntarily give our rulers this leverage over our lives.

      36. Consider declaring personal bankruptcy, if you are heavily in debt. This is a smart move if you have nothing. If you have something it is a question of whether you are willing to live without those things that will be seized, in order to get unyoked from the usurers and re-appropriate some wealth. If millions of people start taking advantage of this law it will probably be taken off the books. In the meantime it might be used to shed debts and get out of the credit card sink-hole.

      37. Leave school as soon as possible. Compulsory education ends in most states at the age of sixteen. That’s when we should leave school. For more than a century and a half the working class has bought into the idea that education is a way to improve our lives, and if not our own then the lives of our children. This worked for some in the core countries for a while. But even in its heyday it was always overrated, because upward mobility faces severe structural limitations (i.e., there are only so many jobs at the top). By now, schooling has long since lost any liberatory value. Instead it has become a key institution for pacifying and indoctrinating the working class. It teaches obedience, punctuality, and passivity. It is a disciplinary tool. It destroys autonomy, curiosity, spontaneity, initiative, and creativity. It perpetuates ruling class values and points of view. It puts blinders on the population. It enforces hierarchy and ranking. It is foolish to voluntarily enter this system. Leaving school does not mean we give up learning. It means we will actively assume responsibility for educating ourselves. The following five points also pertain to schooling.

      38. Ignore grades. Do not attach any significance to grades. Just do the minimum work needed to get barely passing grades in order to get through the compulsory years mandated by the state. Grades in the school system are similar to wages in the factory system in that they induce competition among ourselves rather than solidarity, and trick us into striving for the approval of the authorities. It is an attitude that serves capitalists well later in the workplace.

      39. Reject credentialism and certification. I saw a friend once burst into tears of joy when she was finally awarded the doctorate degree. This is how deeply capitalist values have penetrated into our personalities. It’s true that this was also a personal triumph against considerable odds. Nevertheless it shows that we have bought into the belief that we are better, more accomplished people if we receive the stamp of approval from the state. The idea of earning degrees is thoroughly reactionary. To seek credentials, to seek to be certified, by the government, is shameful.

      They have linked this certifying system to the occupational structure. Schools are training camps and screening (weeding out) centers for the corporate world. If you can tolerate 12, 16, or even 20 years of school perhaps you won’t do too badly the rest of your life as a professor, an executive, a banker, a lawyer, or a priest. Even for ordinary working class jobs in offices, schools are screening centers. If you can’t take the discipline, the regimen, of schools, you won’t be able to take the office regimen either. If you can’t stand being graded, reprimanded, organized, punished, or insulted in school you won’t like these things in the workplace either.

      If we absolutely have to get credentials to survive in the labor market, we should nonetheless never take pride in having “earned a degree.” Degrees should be regarded just like taxes, the draft, jury duty, or drug testing: onerous rules enforced by the government, something to be avoided wherever possible or minimized where not.

      It is perhaps a little late for this advice. Capitalists themselves are abandoning schools and so-called public education, because they no longer need very many educated workers. They will be perfectly happy to leave millions, billions of people wallowing in ignorance. People are weaker that way. So our rejection of schools must absolutely be accompanied by iron determination to become a knowledgeable, skilled, highly educated people. But we can’t do this by going to school. We must do it on our own, with friends, neighbors, and comrades.

      40. Don’t go to college. For all the reasons discussed above, going to college is an absurd idea. No one is forcing you to. So don’t do it. The years can be used to better advantage elsewhere. It makes absolutely no sense to voluntarily give them another 2, 4, 5, or 8 years to work you over. Don't be seduced by the idea that you are bettering yourself by getting a degree, or that you are achieving something and being successful. Success has nothing to do with getting certified by the state. That may be their definition of success but it is not ours.

      41. Engage in intensive self-education. Seek out knowledgeable people in the opposition movements and get them to prepare readings lists, hold seminars, or give lectures. Form study-groups. Read and study constantly. Read the alternative press. Watch videos and listen to tapes made by radicals. These things can be done with the time and energy saved from school. Obviously, this can be carried only so far. If you want to become a marine biologist or a brain surgeon, you probably have to go to school. But even here many ways can be found to partially disengage from the schooling system. There are often ways to establish competency independent of school certification, through tests or actual job experience. For some skills, like carpentry, you can go to a trade school (which requires less time) or become an apprentice.

      The point is to stop seeing school as a place where we can learn. The great bulk of materials we are required to study there are detrimental to our health and well-being. Even purely technical subjects are riddled with ruling class values and prejudices. By rejecting schools we free ourselves from this illusion, free ourselves to begin to acquire the kind of knowledge we need to destroy capitalism, save ourselves, save the planet, and establish “freedom and justice for all.”

      42. Support the Unschooling Movement. Unschooling is a nascent tendency among some anarchists and anti-authoritarians. It is an attempt to break free from schools and to begin in the here and now to work toward the long-standing radical objective of reintegrating learning and life.

      It must be distinguished however from Home Schooling, which is a predominantly Christian Fundamentalist movement. Home Schooling is still schooling, and is a very reactionary and authoritarian movement. Unlike unschooling, where the objective is to enhance learning and freedom, home schooling, as practiced by Christian Fundamentalists, seeks to restrict learning and freedom. It seeks to prevent children from learning about the world, and about how other people believe, and to shield them from the perceived evils of liberalism and secular humanism. It is a system for indoctrinating dogma. What they are really denying their children is access to, and participation in, the long struggle humans have waged, from the dawn of history, for knowledge and freedom. The Christian Home Schooling movement has its own bookstores now, and its own textbooks and videos. They have even written weird, completely mythological, histories of Western Civilization. Their offense goes far beyond merely insisting on teaching creationism, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. They have launched a full-fledged attack on all Enlightenment values.

      I feel so sorry for these children, especially in an already locked down society like the United States. They are forced to spend their entire childhoods cooped up with their parents in a house somewhere, or perhaps with the grandparents or a neighbor now and then. To me, it seems too much like being in prison for the first eighteen years of your life. Most children the world over are still free to run and play outside. But not in America, which has got to be the most terrified nation on earth. Home schoolers never escape the supervision of their parents. They can’t even change one set of adults for another, by going to school. They don’t have moments of free time and space while walking to and from school, or riding the bus, or hanging out in the school halls or yards with friends away from teachers. Many have church activities, but these are still within a very closed social environment. More rarely, home schoolers may get to join in nonschool and nonreligious community activities. This is good, and is about their only relief from an otherwise suffocating existence. Basically, home schoolers spend their entire young lives under the never blinking eyes of parental authority. And this is exactly the way Christian Fundamentalists want it. They don’t believe in freedom for children, but discipline. Their commitments are to dogma not knowledge, theocracy not democracy, patriarchy not equality, faith not inquiry, obedience not rebellion, and dependency not autonomy. Is it any wonder that so many of these children grow up with horribly repressed, mutilated, and truncated psyches? Little Peoples Liberation is perhaps the most neglected part of the revolutionary struggle for freedom.

      I don’t know what the legal status of unschooling is. I suspect though that if you unschool your children you’re breaking the law. Home schooling however is legal in many states. Parents have to meet certain criteria. So the state still has a hand in it. Nevertheless, it is a way of getting largely free from state controlled education. Perhaps unschoolers could sneak under the radar using the home schooling laws (if they are even worried about being legal). Unschooling is obviously hard for a single family to do, and works better for several families joining together, and better yet for a neighborhood or whole community. It is a way of taking charge of our own education. Learning is better done, and is more fun, outside schools.

      You may be asking why we should give up all the resources of “public schools”— libraries, gyms, pools, classrooms, computers, art supplies, workshops, playing fields — only to scrounge around with practically nothing in our homes and neighborhoods. Here’s why. Public schools are not public at all and never have been. They are system schools, ruling class schools. Capitalists have controlled the school system from day one. Even on the local level school boards are almost invariably conservative, and are made up of the wealthier members of a community who support the status quo. Recently, even corporations and the military are being allowed to invade schools big time. Getting public control of the existing school system is like getting control of factories, offices, hospitals, or the government itself — no strategy yet tried has ever succeeded.

      But persons who work in schools and colleges should definitely be creating employee associations, with an eye to taking over these institutions. If we could seize them it would obviously be better to do so, than to start from scratch elsewhere. But seizing schools, colleges, and universities, will, I believe, prove to be a task of the same order of magnitude as seizing corporations, and will probably happen at about the same time. I doubt if schools can be democratized in isolation from everything else, any more than hospitals can. And even if we seize them, we are still faced with the fact that the institution of school is per se a very bad idea.

      In the meantime, it is better to give up the resources in order to be free to teach our own values, acquire knowledge we need, reshape knowledge, even technical knowledge, to our own purposes, and generate an autonomous culture.

      Two Caveats. (a) Recently a complication has emerged. Christian Fundamentalists, allied with the extreme right wing of the Republican Party, are trying to destroy public schools. Religious schools are a step backwards even from so-called public schools. So this campaign has to be fought, which I guess is another contradiction in the life of an anarchist. (b) Unschooling may sound like an insane idea, and completely off the wall, to children in impoverished nations in the South, as well as to children in ghettoes in the North, who are struggling to get into school, not out of it. For example, Palestinian children (and their families) make great sacrifices in order to attend school. They are trying to escape ignorance, and going to school is about the only opportunity they see to do so. So this recommendation about unschooling may not be as applicable in those situations as it is, I believe, in the United States.

      43. Don’t recycle.Don’t spend your life trying to clean up the mess capitalism is making of the earth. Spend your life destroying capitalism. Recycling was a bum trip from the very beginning. We’re suppose to spend hours and hours of our free time sorting the garbage, taking papers one place, taking cans another, taking bottles another, all the while the factories are producing millions of tons of new trash every day, more than we can ever possibly clean up. Why not stop them from making trash?

      By now recycling has become a big business. It could never be profitable of course if the recycling entrepreneurs had to pay workers to go out and collect the trash. So, very cleverly, they have recruited armies of naive environmentalists to collect the trash for them, free of charge, and bring it voluntarily, on their own time, to the factory gates. The entrepreneurs then turn this raw material into profit (with a little help from wage-slaves of course).

      Recycling will undoubtedly be a normal and integral part of everyday life among free peoples. But not now, not while it’s being used to derail us from our true task of replacing a profit-oriented death economy with the life-sustaining activities of free peoples. So jump off the recycling merry-go-round.

      44. Don’t wear a suit. It has been customary for a long time for working class families to dress up for special occasions in their ‘Sunday Best’. Dressing up has meant dressing like the ruling class — suits and ties for men and fancy dresses for women (now there are suits for women too). If you look at pictures of workers from a hundred years ago, for example the hundreds of men gathered in Union Square in New York City to hear Emma Goldman speak, they’re all wearing suits. There are many such pictures. But over the past century, especially with the decline in church attendance, workers have been abandoning suits. We should finish the job and explicitly reject suits. Suits are the uniforms of businessmen, politicians, and bureaucrats, the world over. There is no point in our aping them.

      It’s possible this tactic could become outmoded though. It seems there is a trend in some corporations to require workers to come to work in suits, while the executives drift in later in casual wear. Like in the sixties when we grew beards as a sign of protest, only to discover a short while later that executives were growing beards too; beards thus lost their symbolic value.

      I’m not too worried though about the ruling class changing its dress code anytime soon. Can you imagine a State of the Union address where they all aren’t in suits? So don’t wear a suit. It’ll be good for your soul.

      45. Do not play the lottery. Every dollar we spend on the lottery is like a gift to the ruling class. It’s like saying “Here, take my money and use it to enslave me.” The lottery is a thoroughly evil institution. The fact that millions of us spend money we can’t afford on lottery tickets proves all too vividly that they have turned our brains to mush. We are just being fleeced. Even worse than the enormous financial rip-off is the enormous psychological rip-off — this illusory slim hope that we will win and be able to escape our misery. The lottery is just another little weapon they have invented to neutralize us, disarm us, and prevent us from taking real, direct, effective action to stop our exploitation, meet our needs, and create for ourselves satisfying lives and communities.