Maybe some general comments are now in order about the above proposed tactics. Please note that all of them are things that can be started right now by all of us as individuals or as small groups. They don’t require us to build vast national organizations (let alone international organizations, something which is once more being frequently called for given the latest surge in the globalization of capital). They don’t require vast resources, guerrilla fighters, or extraordinary bravery. They don’t require us to give up our lives for a cause or deny ourselves the pleasures of life.

      On the contrary, they require us to start creating enjoyable, quality lives. They don’t require us to be super intelligent, widely read, or highly educated. They don’t require us to adopt a party line or have a correct consciousness. They don’t require us to spend our lives building bureaucratic organizations like unions or parties. They don’t ask us to petition the state. They don’t require us to work for changes in legislation. (In fact, a good rule of thumb is that if a tactic requires changes in legislation drop it.)

      You may notice also that many of the items listed above are designed to stop the ruling class from controlling what we think. This is in many ways the front line of the war. There are no longer any historical conditions, and haven’t been for a long time, which prevent us from building a new social world. It is the consciousness-controlling weapons they have deployed against our minds that prevent us. They have managed to erase, for example, practically all knowledge of former anti-capitalist struggles. Instead they fill our brains with sports and media trivia. A top priority of an opposition movement must be to counter and neutralize these weapons so that we can learn to think for ourselves again.

      Several of the items listed above are acts of resistance, for example, not voting, not watching tv, not going to college, not becoming a boss, not cooperating with the police. It is necessary and important to reject, refuse, and break with a host of small practices which support capitalist relations. It is mainly through such acts of resistance that we can generate an opposition movement and a counter-consciousness.

      Many of the items are intended to weaken and subvert the government and corporations. The first and easiest step toward weakening a government of course is simply to withdraw our support and declare our opposition. After that we can start finding dozens of concrete ways to subvert it, including all those listed above. For example, we can increase our demands on the government, asking for more and more and more. After all, the wealth is ours. We can demand far more than the government can ever deliver. This puts their system under stress and opens up avenues for us to take action elsewhere. We can support the tax resisters league, a strategy which can’t get very far as long as a government is strong enough to impose heavy fines and prison sentences. But perhaps it can lay the groundwork for later tax resistance on a massive scale. We can support draft resistance movements, and in general, discourage anyone from fighting in their wars. We can oppose corporations. We should join every anti-corporate campaign we hear about. We can try to destroy their credibility, expose all the tax breaks they get, expose all the government subsidies they get, show how they never have to pay to clean up the messes they make, and show how they buy the legislators. Once we have gotten over the idea that the government is ours, we can think of a hundred ways to weaken and subvert it.

      The heart of the proposed strategy however is free association — in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, in our households. This is how we can defeat them. You may think such associations will not be able to destroy capitalism, but you’re wrong. There is great power in association. The capitalists will be scared out of their wits if the country starts to be covered with associations, in every neighborhood and at every workplace. Naturally, they will be scared only if these associations start taking direct action to monkey-wrench the system and re-appropriate power and wealth. If all we do is gab, or throw a block party once a year, or throw a Christmas party at the office (one big happy family), they’ll have nothing to worry about. The enslaved populations of the capitalist world have been rendered harmless precisely because our traditional associations have been destroyed and we have been reduced to the pitiful condition of living as isolated individuals, or as small nuclear families.

      It’s time to start associating again, this time not because of tradition, but because we know that’s what we want. These associations will have to be defended, obviously, because they are going to be attacked viciously. Our main fighting and militancy should be saved for defending the new social arrangements we are creating and not in attacking capitalist institutions directly. We must not forget that practically the entire world is embedded in capitalist relations and we are dependent upon these for survival. If we destroy capitalist relations and structures before we have created for ourselves alternative means of survival we will die. So the emphasis has to shift to building the new world we want, and then to defending it from attack, all the while we are trying to abandon, gut, and vacate capitalist premises and practices.

      This proposed strategy has been criticized for not being very militant, for withdrawing from confrontation with corporations and the state. This is a mis-perception I think, probably caused by my rejection of so many traditional tactics, like demonstrations. But clearly, there is no way that we could create the free associations we want without confronting ruling class power.

      Another question raised about the proposed strategy is whether it actually adds up to the defeat of capitalism. Do the forty-four tactics, most of which are about what not to do, really do the job? What is the mechanism? How will capitalism actually be defeated? It's true that many of my recommendations are about what not to do. They are mostly about building an opposition culture. But the crucial first three, about setting up workplace, neighborhood, and household associations, are positive steps, as are other ideas scattered throughout the list, like setting up cooperative banks, community land trusts, worker-owned businesses, neighborhood health clinics, local currencies, and so forth.

      But the decisive event in the overthrow of capitalism will be the shift of decision-making power from national legislatures and corporate boardrooms to neighborhood assemblies and worker-controlled projects. It is inconceivable that this could happen all at once everywhere. It will obviously be a gradual process, but one which nevertheless could take place within a definite historical time period. First the assemblies have to be created and defended. Then more and more decision-making has to be taken away from capitalist institutions (government, corporations, schools, etc.) and returned to local bodies. This will be slow at first, in scattered locales. But the process could gather momentum, as it spreads to more and more communities, so that later on, as capitalist structures begin to implode, the transfer of power and wealth back to home assemblies could be rapid and massive.