Acknowledgments

      Getting Free, in a much shorter version, was first prepared for the conference on “Critical Issues in Contemporary Anarchism” held at Montague, Massachusetts on June 7-9, 1996. I would like to thank the organizers of that conference, John Petrovato and Cindy Milstein, for providing an incentive to get it written.

      I would like to thank the following friends and acquaintances who read various earlier drafts of the essay and returned comments to me (my apologies if I have overlooked anyone): George Salzman, Betsy Rueda Gynn, Libardo Rueda, Jaime Becker, Brian Hart, Juan Carlos Oretga, Sonya Huber, Gary Zabel, Chris Pauli, Brian Griffin, Henry Jung, Bob McKinney, Thomas Reifer, Marianela Tovar, Behrooz Ghassemi, Monty Neill, Charlene Decker, Steve Heims, Danielle Zabel, Jon Bekken, Sanya Hyland, Mark Laskey, Suzanne Miller, Sarah Shoemaker, Barry Tilles, Andrew Nevins, Hudson Luce, Tony Young, and Alex Dajkovic.

      I also presented the paper at a workshop at the Anarchist Gathering held in Lawrence, Kansas in June 2002. The essay was well received and I got much useful feedback from some of those attending.

      I had interesting conversations about the book via e-mail with Lenny Gray, Edwin Laing, Marc Silverstein, (I)An-ok Ta Chai, Duy Nguyen, Brian Martin, Micah Bales, Derek, Kenny, Simon Cumming, Hugo Mildenberger, Sebastien Gagnon, Louis Gosselin, and Matt Leonard.

      I was able to improve the essay considerably because of these many suggestions, although I did not agree with all of them. I've tried to answer some of the criticisms in this revised version.

      I did the typesetting and proof reading myself (and am therefore responsible for the remaining mistakes), but I had help, much appreciated, in reproducing and distributing the first edition, from Betsy Gynn, Jon Bekken, Kenn Browne, and Chris Pauli. Unfortunately, the manuscript has not yet been privileged to receive the attention of a good copy editor; I’m sure the text could be improved thereby.

      I would especially like to thank George Salzman. Without his interest and encouragement I doubt if the essay would have reached this finished form. He carefully read the various versions of the essay, and made comments that helped clarify the text at numerous places. He has also promoted the essay vigorously in many ways, including posting it on his web site, and arranging to have it translated into Spanish. Naturally, he doesn’t (and hardly anyone does) agree with everything in it.

      A first edition was published in the fall of 1998 in only eighty copies, photocopied (not printed), but bound in book form. A second version, revised and expanded, was posted on the Internet in the winter of 2000, under the name of Jared James. The Internet version was updated with further additions and revisions in February, 2002. This last, and final, version was wrapped up in January 2004.

      Rather than load this book down with footnotes, I've decided to refer the reader instead to another book of mine, Emancipatory Social Thought: A Partially Annotated Bibliography in English for the Libertarian Left and Progressive Populists in the United States, which gives references to most of the topics discussed here.

      I would also like to refer the reader to other essays I’ve written over the past few years which supplement Getting Free. These are included in my book, Selected Writings: 1969-2004. Eight of them are also available by links immediately below, which are repeated just following the Recommended Reading section, the final one of the essay.

      Neither of these works, Selected Writings or Emancipatory Social Thought has yet been published, but they are available on the Internet at: (web site address to be announced).
 

Supplementary essays

1. Breaking Out of the Cage and Destroying Our Jailers
2. Weakness of Protest Politics
3. Seeing The Inadequacies, a flawed anarchist strategy for achieving a free society.
4. A Stake Not a Mistake, misunderstanding United States foreign policy.
5. Is Greed All that's Wrong with Capitalism?
6. Majority Rule
7. Indigenism
8. Loss of Anti-Capitalism
9. Identities

      The main purpose of this book is to try to persuade revolutionaries to shift the sites of the anti-capitalist struggle, and to select new battlefields. I identify three strategic sites for fighting — neighborhoods, workplaces, and households — which I believe will not only enable us to defeat capitalists but also to build a new society in the process.

      The advantage of shifting the battleground to the three strategic sites is that it is an offensive strategy, not merely a defensive one. That is, it is not merely our reacting to things we don't like and want to stop, not merely our resisting what they are doing to us, but rather our defending what we are doing to them through our new social creations. It means that we would begin to take the initiative to build the life we want, and then fight to defend this life, and defend our social creations from attacks by the ruling class. I think people will be much more willing to fight for something like this, than to fight to stop outrages of the ruling class elsewhere, which often seem remote from their everyday lives. But we should be quite clear that this will involve us in terrible fights. We will never be able to establish free associations on any of these sites without directly confronting ruling class power.

      In listing all the strategies that have failed it isn't my intention to denigrate the revolutionary efforts of past generations. Resisting and defeating capitalism has been an historical project of enormous scope; revolutionaries have poured their lives into strategies they considered best at the time. I'm simply trying to take stock, and to reflect on where we've been and what we've tried, and on where ought to be going now, and what we ought to be trying to do. I do not claim that the strategy I outline here is the end all and be all. It's a proposal, that's all, an assessment, a reflection on what I think it will take for us to win. But I'm only one person. Fashioning a new anti-capitalist strategy for our times is obviously a task for millions.

      Nor is it my intention (in listing what I claim are failed strategies) to say that people should stop resisting altogether. It is to argue that these forms of resistance, although they have accomplished a lot, haven't gotten us very far toward our ultimate goal of destroying capitalism. They haven't enabled us to overthrow the system, defeat the ruling class, or build a free society, and I don't think they ever will.

      Some of these failed strategies, like the Leninist vanguard party, social democracy, dropping out, and guerrilla warfare, should be abandoned completely. Others, like demonstrations and single-issue campaigns, should clearly be subordinated to the main task of building free associations in neighborhoods, workplaces, and households. It's not so much that strategies like strikes, civil disobedience, or insurrections are wrong in themselves. It's that they are not enough, and by themselves cannot defeat capitalism. To win we must add another whole dimension.

      The sad truth though is that the three strategic sites we could be fighting on, and which might lead us to victory, are largely being ignored. The workplace struggles going on are largely reformist, as are most neighborhood organizing initiatives, while there is very little organizing at all being done around households. So the bulk of our energies are not going into these three strategic sites at all, but into other arenas. I would feel much better about all the demonstrations, the marches, the civil disobedience, the single-issue campaigns, if significant struggles were also being waged in workplaces, neighborhoods, and households. But in the absence of these fights, where does all the rest get us? Not to victory, that's clear enough.

      The recent, spectacular resurgence of radical movements the world over, first symbolized by the Battle of Seattle in November 1999, and continuing on through Quebec City and Genoa, highlights the issues I've raised in a most urgent way. As heartening as these developments have been, and as wonderful as they are to see, it's all too possible that they will go nowhere, and will eventually fizzle out and disappear, just like the revolts of the sixties did, unless they can be linked to struggles to seize control of our lives on the local level.

      Somehow, it has come to be accepted that this is what radicals do — demonstrate — when they want to protest or stop something, and that mass demonstrations take priority over everything else. I will be arguing that we have it just backwards, upside down. If we had reorganized ourselves into neighborhood, workplace, and household assemblies, and were struggling to seize power there, then we would have a base from which to stop ruling class offensives like neoliberalism, and if we then chose to demonstrate in the streets, there would be some teeth to it, and not be just an isolated, ephemeral event, which can be pretty much ignored by our rulers. We would not be just protesting but countering. We have to organize ourselves in such a way that we have the power to counter them, not just protest against them, but refuse them, neutralize them. This cannot be done by affinity groups, NGOs, or isolated individuals converging periodically at world summits to protest against the ruling class, but only by free associations rooted in real everyday life.

      And if we were organized like this it might not even be necessary to go to mass demonstrations at all. We could simply announce what we were going to do to them if they didn't cease oppressive practices. But opposition movements gravitate again and again to these kinds of demonstrations. "Taking to the Streets", we call it. We can't build a new social world in the streets. As long as we're only in the streets, whereas our opponents function through real organizations like governments, corporations, and police, we will always be on the receiving end of the tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets, and, almost everywhere in the world but North America or Europe, real bullets, napalm, poisons, and bombs. This predilection for protests and demonstrations prevailed throughout the sixties, as the movement traveled to Washington DC time and again, taking to the streets. We are still like children, only able to 'raise a ruckus'. We are not yet adults who can assemble, reason together, take stock of our options, devise a strategy, and then strike, to defeat our enemies, and build the world we want.

      We are living in a window of opportunity. Anti-capitalist forces have been at a strategic impasse for decades, with widespread confusion over both the shape of the new world we want and how to dismantle the existing one. But the complete collapse and discrediting of the Bolshevik model in Russia and all over the third world, and the equal bankruptcy of Social Democracy in Europe, opens up the possibility of redefining radical politics, of rethinking the goal of the revolution and its strategy. For the first time in over a century anarchist perspectives are back on the agenda in a serious way. Anti-statist approaches are gaining ground, even among some communists and marxists. I think of my essay as a contribution to this world-wide effort to redefine radical politics and to break out of the impasse that has stymied the revolution ever since the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, the Socialist Democrats were defeated in Germany in 1919, and the Spanish Revolution went down to defeat in 1939.

      My essay helps renew radical politics in several ways I believe. By outlining a three pronged attack on the system, by focusing not merely on the workplace (seizing the means of production) but also on neighborhoods, and households, it anticipates a recapturing of decision-making, that is, its relocation, out of state bureaucracies, parliaments, and corporate boards, and into our assemblies. It also emphasizes capturing the means of re-production (and not only of production) through household associations. Its guiding principle is free association. It focuses squarely on the necessity of building an opposition movement and culture, and of creating for ourselves new social relations. It also integrates the goal and the strategy for achieving the goal, suggesting very concrete steps that ordinary people can take to defeat capitalism and build a new world.

      I have taken some ideas for granted, in addition to an anti-capitalist outlook, which the reader needs to be aware of in order to understand why I have written as I have. My sketch of a new social world and a strategy for achieving it is based on a firm commitment to direct democracy, not representative democracy or federation. I am aware that almost everyone now automatically dismisses direct democracy as being no longer possible in a “complex industrial society.” I have always disagreed with this view.

      You will also not be able to understand my remarks unless you are aware that I think of capitalism as a worldwide system, which is approximately 500 years old. Capitalists started establishing their way of living in Europe, between 1450 and 1650 roughly, and then, over the next several centuries, carried their practices to every corner of the globe, destroying and displacing other traditions, usually through warfare. World history for the last 500 years is thus in the main the story of this assault capitalists have thrown against the world’s peoples, beginning with the peasants of Europe, in order to seize their lands and force them into wage-slavery (wealth making laborers), tenancy (rent paying residents), and citizenship (tax paying subjects). It is also the story of the worldwide resistance to this invasion. A good part of the story of course is taken up merely with the fights among capitalists themselves.

      You should also be aware that, from this perspective, countries that came to be called communist were just capitalist states doing what capitalists always do, enslaving and exploiting their populations. There was always a radical tradition that perceived the Soviet experiment, and the colonial revolutions that aped it, in these terms (council communists, western marxists, anarchists, and anarcho-syndicalists). Now that the Soviet Union is gone, more people are realizing that communist countries were just capitalism in a different form, and had little to do with the struggle against capitalism.

      A further assumption I make is that it is impossible to defeat our ruling class by force of arms. The level of firepower currently possessed by all major governments and most minor ones is simply overwhelming. It is bought with the expropriated wealth of billions of people. For any opposition movement to think that it can acquire, maintain, and deploy a similarly vast and sophisticated armament is ludicrous. I have nothing against armed struggle in principle (although of course I don't like it). I just don’t think it can work now. It would take an empire as enormous and rich as capitalism itself is to fight capitalists on their own terms. This is something the working classes of the world will never have, nor should we even want it.

      This does not mean though that we should not think strategically, in order to win, and defeat our oppressors. It means that we have to learn how to destroy them without firing a single shot. It means that we have to look to, and invent if necessary, other weapons, other tactics. But we must be careful not to fall into the nonviolence/violence trap. Is tearing down a fence a violent act, or resistance to the violence of those who erected the fence in the first place? Is throwing a tear gas canister back at the police who fired it an act of violence, or resistance to an act of violence? Nonviolence is a main ideological weapon of a very violent ruling class. They use it to pacify us. They use their mass media to preach nonviolence incessantly. It's an effective weapon because we all (but they don't) want to live in a peaceful, nonviolent world. We would do well to chart a careful course through this swamp.

      In this essay I have focused on the three strategic associations that are needed to defeat capitalists. I have not attempted to discuss also the numerous and varied cultural associations that will undoubtedly be created by free peoples, covering every conceivable interest.

      As will become evident, I'm writing from the perspective of someone who lives in the United States of America. This is the only culture that I'm familiar with in any depth, although I have traveled abroad, lived two years in the Middle East, and have studied other cultures. My remarks are therefore most relevant to others living in this country, and to a lesser extent to persons living in other core capitalist countries, and to a still lesser extent to persons living in the rest of the world, although I hope everyone may find some value in it.

      This essay has been written for those who already want to destroy capitalism. It is not intended to persuade anyone that it ought to be. That is a task of a different kind. What is self-evident to me, as it is to most radicals, is unfortunately not so self-evident to others, not even to the working class itself. Nevertheless, I have included a short initial section on how we do not want to live, in hopes of attracting a wider range of readers, readers who may be quite unhappy with their lives but who are far from attributing their misery to capitalists. I’ve also included a list of recommended readings for those who want to explore emancipatory social thought further.

      There are places where you can come over a bridge and see a whole big city spread out before you. The Mystic River Bridge coming into Boston is such a place, as is the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan, or the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco. Driving over one of these bridges you can see the dozens of skyscrapers, the hundreds of office buildings and factories, the hundreds of stores and shops, thousands of people bustling along, traffic everywhere, and ships in the harbor. And you think to yourself, how could we ever presume to change all this? It is so vast. Countless activities. Millions of people going to work everyday. Thousands of enterprises. Goods being shipped. Phones ringing. How could we ever presume to change it?

      And yet this whole enormous edifice is built on one tiny single social relation: wage-slavery (the extraction of wealth by force from the direct producers by the accumulators of capital). The government bureaucracies, the police, the thousands of lawyers, the schools, the courts, are all there to enforce this tiny single social relation. But hardly anyone knows this anymore. This fact has been carefully hidden in dozens of ways. The knowledge that this wealth is extracted by force has long been lost, even though brute force is used all over the world on a daily basis to defend this relation, and even though millions of us face unemployment (and hence destitution) not so infrequently. The knowledge that we are slaves, being bought by the hour rather than by the lifetime, has also been lost. We have been wage-slaves for so long we have forgotten there is any other way to live. We have forgotten that once we had land and tools and could live independently, providing for ourselves, without being forced to sell our labor power for wages.

      So this is the first and most important awareness we can come to: we should not be living as slaves but as free people. Seen in this light capitalism does not seem so invincible, but actually rather vulnerable. If we could only sever this single relation we could destroy capitalism and free ourselves to create a new social world. This is undoubtedly why capitalists go to such lengths to camouflage, mystify, and deny the wage-slave relation. It is their Achilles’ heel.

      A second awareness is more easily come by. If we take a stroll around one of these cities, noticing the kinds of buildings that exist, we will come up with something like this list: banks, factories, department stores, warehouses, office buildings, shops, churches, houses, apartment buildings, museums, schools, an occasional union hall, sports arenas, theaters, restaurants, convention centers, garages, airports, train stations, bus depots, nightclubs, hospitals, nursing homes, gyms, malls, hotels, courthouses, police stations, post offices. What we will never see is a Meeting Hall. If we happen to live in a capital city we will be able to find there somewhere a single chamber, where the politicians meet. Worshipers congregate in churches of course. Unionists hold meetings sometimes in their union halls, businessmen convene in downtown centers, spectators aggregate in theaters and arenas to watch games, movies, plays, ballets, and concerts, and students gather for lectures, sometimes in large auditoriums. But there are no Meeting Halls, as such, for citizens, where we can assemble to make decisions and govern our own lives. So how can it be said that we live in a democracy, if we don’t even assemble, nor have any facilities for doing so? Here is a second awareness we can come to. Not only should we not be living as slaves, we should not be living in an undemocratic society, but rather in a real democracy, where we govern our own communities.

      Beyond these two basic awarenesses, there is the awareness of the linkages between our many miseries and the wage-slave system. This awareness is more difficult to acquire, mainly because capitalists, and their PR men, take such pains to blame the sufferings of the world on anything and everything other than their own practices. If there is starvation in Bangladesh, it’s because there are too many people, and not because agricultural self-sufficiency has been destroyed by capitalist world markets. If the oceans are dying from oil tanker flushes, this is a shame, but it’s really no one’s fault; it’s just the price we must pay for progress and civilization. If millions are living in abject poverty in the shantytowns of third world cities, there is nothing unusual about this; it’s just part of the worldwide “process of urbanization”; they never mention that governments and corporations have seized the peasants’ lands, forcing them to leave their homes. If cities are filling up with the homeless it’s because these people are lazy and won’t look for work, and not because there aren't enough jobs for everyone, and rents are sky high. If there is filth and trash everywhere it’s our own fault because we litter. And it’s no mystery why cities are congested with traffic; we just keep refusing to use car pools. The list of such subterfuges is endless.

      The truth is that most of the suffering in the world now is directly attributable to capitalists. I wouldn’t want to put an exact percentage on it, but it is way way up there. But for capitalists, most of the illness in the world could be eliminated, as well as most of the hunger, most of the ignorance, most of the homelessness, most of the environmental destruction, most of the congestion, most of the warfare, most of the crime, most of the insecurity, most of the waste, most of the boredom, most of the loneliness, and so forth. Even much of the suffering caused by hurricanes, floods, droughts, and earthquakes can be laid at the feet of capitalists because capitalists prevent us from preparing for and responding to these disasters as a community, in an intelligent way. And recently, capitalists are to blame for the increased severity of some of these events, which is due to global warming, which capitalists have caused. Unless you’re already convinced, I know you’re not going to believe these bald claims. But others have documented the linkages between these various evils and the profit system, if you care enough to study their works.

      I have my own personal hate list. I hate advertisements, seriously. Nothing could be sweeter to me than living in an advertisement-free world. I hate congested cities, being stuck in traffic jams, not being able to park, being ticketed unfairly, having to suffer the rudeness of Boston drivers. I hate car alarms, a perfect example of a totally unnecessary aggravation, but for the insanity of capitalism. (To see the connection between the scourge of car alarms and capitalism will be a test of your newfound awareness of linkages.) I hate insurance companies, the biggest racketeers in America (not counting the Savings and Loans crooks of course). I hate the Internal Revenue Service, the Registry of Motor Vehicles, and the Metropolitan Transit Authority. I hate telemarketing. I hate call waiting. I hate weather forecasters; they are alarmists, and not one of them likes rain (among their many other faults). I hate cops; and they are everywhere now, even at the movies, in workplaces, department stores, parks, schools, and libraries. I hate bosses. I never had one who was a decent human being (at least not at work), but always twisted in some way, mean, self-centered, or arrogant, or else incompetent, bluffing through it, pretending not to be, with no one daring to say otherwise. I hate mechanics. I hate the terrible insecurity of not having a reliable income. I hate this precarious existence. I hate looking for a job, big time. This is when you realize what a bind they’ve got you in. No way to live without a job; so hustle, make the rounds, update the resume, get the interviews, all for free (i.e., job hunting is unpaid labor which benefits corporations). Money running out or already gone; no one to help. Desperate to find someone to buy your poor self by the hour. Desperately seeking slavery in order to go on living. This is what I hate. And then, once a buyer is found, the boredom, drudgery, and fatigue starts all over again, and you see your life slipping away, all used up by businessmen, and all for nothing. I hate living alone, with my crippled emotions and aborted love life. I hate television with a passion, and have ever since the first set appeared in my parents’ home in 1951. I hate doctors. I hate seeing the earth, such a beautiful place, go down the tubes, just so some greedy morons can make a profit. I hate not being around small children, they being the loveliest creatures to grace our lives (most of them). I hate social scientists. Nothing has done more to make the world unintelligible than their decades of jargon and gibberish. I hate standing in line at banks (and I hate banks). It’s bad enough that I’m paying them to use my money to make themselves a profit. It’s the standing in line to do it that rankles. I hate automobiles, in too many ways to even count. I hate nondairy creamer. I hate seat belts, the thousandth way they have found to blame the victim. I hate being chased off the beach during a hurricane. I hate Smoky the Bear. I hate lawns. I haven’t even begun to list all the things I hate about our present disorder.

      I suppose, to be fair, I should list now all the things I love, in order to balance the picture, but it wouldn’t be in character.

      We can turn now to a notion of how we might want to live. Let’s assume, for the moment, that we could start from scratch to build a totally new social world, building up our neighborhoods just the way we wanted. What would they look like?

      I have imagined a neighborhood with the following features (see below for a Footnote on Terminology):

      Households: Households are units of roughly 200 people cohabiting in a building complex which provides for a variety of living arrangements for single individuals, couples, families, and extended families. The complex will have facilities for meetings, communal (as well as some private) cooking, laundry, basic education, building maintenance, various workshops, basic health care, a birthing room, emergency medical care, and certain recreational facilities. Households are managed democratically and cooperatively by a direct assembly of members (the Household Assembly).

      Projects: Projects include all cooperative activities (more than one person) in agriculture and husbandry, manufactures, higher education, research, advanced medicine, communications, transportation, arts, sports, and so forth, plus cooperative activities undertaken within the household itself (cooking, teaching, child care, health care, maintenance, etc.). Buildings will be designed and constructed for these various activities. Internally, projects are managed democratically and cooperatively by a direct assembly of members (Project Assembly). Some projects, perhaps most, are controlled, in the larger sense, directly by the neighborhood, through the Home Assembly. Other projects are controlled by agreements worked out among several or many Home Assemblies.

      Peer Circles: Peer Circles are units of roughly 30-50 people. All persons in the neighborhood will belong to just one peer circle, located at their primary project. For some this will be in the household but for most it will be in a project outside the household, or even outside the neighborhood. All projects are broken down into such circles. These circles meet within the project to discuss issues, and, where necessary, coalesce into project-wide general assemblies. Votes are taken within meetings but tallied across meetings, within each project. Peer circle meetings are necessary because genuine face-to-face discussion and deliberation are seriously constricted in groups larger than 50 people.

      Because households contain many persons whose primary project is not within the household, but who are nevertheless living there, and who will want to be engaged in the self-governing of the household, I will refer to the Household Assembly as a distinct entity, different from Project (workplace) Assemblies, even though the household includes Peer Circles for such projects as cooking, teaching, childcare, and healthcare.

      Home Assembly: The Home Assembly is the core social creation. It is an assembly of the entire neighborhood, roughly 2000 people, meeting in a large hall designed to facilitate directly democratic discussion and decision-making. In practice of course the size of Home Assemblies will vary considerably. Its upper limit though is determined by the number of people who can meet in one large hall and still engage in democratic, face-to-face, unmediated decision-making.

      An Association of Home Assemblies: Home Assemblies will join together, by means of a pact or a treaty agreement, to form a larger association. There will be an overall agreement which will define the association in general, as well as many specific agreements for particular projects.

      The Home Assembly is the neighborhood governing itself. The neighborhood makes its own rules, allocates its own resources and energies, and negotiates its own treaties with other neighborhoods. The neighborhood will control the land on which it lives, and all projects and households within it.

      Please note what this arrangement of social relations does not have: hierarchy, representation, wage-slavery, profit, commodities, money, classes, private ownership of the means of production, taxes, nation-states, patriarchy, alienation, exploitation, elite professional control of any activity, or formal divisions by race, gender, age, ethnicity, looks, beliefs, intelligence, or sexual preference. This neighborhood, so organized, will be the basic unit of the new social order.

      Those familiar with radical traditions will recognize in this sketch a melding of the anarcho-communist focus on community, the anarcho-syndicalist focus on workers control, and the feminist focus on abolishing the distinction between public and private spheres of social life. It is my belief that each of these cannot be achieved without the other. The achievement of workers control alone would leave no way for the community as a whole to allocate its resources (e.g., to decide whether to phase out a project or start up a new one), whereas the achievement of community control alone, without simultaneously controlling the means of production, is meaningless, empty. And the failure to democratize and socialize households, including them (and hence reproduction) as an explicit and integral part of the social arrangements, would leave a gender based division of labor intact, thus perpetuating the public/private dichotomy.

      New towns have occasionally been built from scratch in recent decades, primarily by “developers” as commercial enterprises. Also, many completely new utopian communities were established throughout the nineteenth century in the United States, and perhaps elsewhere. It will surely be possible, given the resources, to build new communities from scratch in the future, at least on a limited scale. This will certainly be the exception though rather than the rule, especially at the beginning of this revolution. For the most part building from scratch will be out of the question for the first 50-75 years.

      The actual task we face then is to transform existing structures (buildings, plant) and social relations into the desired ones. We need to try to imagine how our model neighborhood would look after having been converted from a typical urban neighborhood (rather than built from scratch). Let’s see first if we can convert the existing physical plant into something more useful for democratic, cooperative living, keeping in mind that this is the easy part; the hard part is transforming social relations (e.g., property, family, work, and play relations). I will deal with this more below in discussing how to get there.

      Factories and shops can be converted easiest of all. These can be used pretty much as they are (after they have been seized of course). Space will have to be cleared somewhere in them for peer circle meetings and project-wide assemblies.

      More difficult is how to convert a street full of individual residences into households. It can probably be improvised however as follows: build passageways and tunnels between the buildings; set aside certain rooms for workshops, child care, health care; block off certain streets to sort of enclose the unit; expand one or two kitchens into a communal unit; rearrange bedrooms; clear an apartment for a meeting hall.

      It will also be difficult to find a meeting space for the Home Assembly. There are options however. There may be a union hall, a church, a roller skating rink, or a high school gym in the neighborhood. But also, warehouses, supermarkets, and department stores have large open floors which could be cleared and made into meeting halls. Most of these spaces however could not hold 2000 people. It may be necessary to begin with smaller Home Assemblies — say five households of 200 each — for a Home Assembly of 1000 members, instead of ten households for a 2000 member Home Assembly.

      Later on, after the flow of wealth out of the neighborhood to the ruling class has been stopped, and after the stolen wealth of the ruling class has been re-appropriated, neighborhoods will undoubtedly want to, and have the resources to, build specially designed Home Assembly Halls, as well as new Household complexes. But at first we will have to make do with what already exists. The wealth of centuries is embedded in the existing architectural plant, a plant which reflects capitalist values, priorities, and social relations. It will take a long time to tear down and rebuild this physical world, rebuilding it to express the needs of a free people.

      But when we do rebuild, the mark of our new civilization will be its assembly halls. Just as earlier worlds have been marked by the pyramids of ancient Egypt, the temples and theaters of ancient Greece, the castles and cathedrals of medieval Europe, and the banks and skyscrapers of modern capitalism, so the new social world of a cooperatively self-governing people will be known by its meeting halls. They will be its most distinguishing architectural feature. They will undoubtedly come in all shapes and sizes. Besides the large general assembly chambers for neighborhoods (Home Assemblies), there will need to be small caucus rooms in every project and every household for peer circle meetings, as well as project-wide and household-wide assembly rooms. A deliberating people will design, build, and equip excellent and beautiful spaces for deliberation.

      To complete this sketch we would need to imagine at least two more arrangements, one for a typical small town, and another for a typical peasant village, two rapidly disappearing social entities (given the continuing, violent enclosures forced through by our corporate rulers). Peasant villages the world over, although under heavy attack and rapidly disappearing, nevertheless still possess a basis for community, with many communal traditions still in tact. These traditions are not always and everywhere relevant to creating a free, anarchistic society, but some of them are. Marx, after all, believed that Russia could skip capitalism and move directly to communism by building on the peasant commune. Small towns still exist too, in every country. Even in a highly urbanized country like the United States, there are still 20,000 towns with a population below 10,000, 15,000 of which are below 2500. There is no reason why these small towns couldn't switch to direct democracy right now if they wanted to.

      It will be easier I think to transform small towns and peasant villages into our desired neighborhoods than suburbs or dense urban areas. But maybe not. Megalopolises and suburbia will surely wither away, decade by decade into the new civilization, as the countryside is repopulated with livable, cooperative, autonomous communities of free people. (Needless to say, the vast shantytowns of the neo-colonized world will be the first to go.)

      A neighborhood is a very small place, relatively speaking. Although there may be many villages or small towns left in the world with populations as low as 2,000, they are rapidly disappearing. Most settled areas are much more densely populated. Consider a town of 90,000 for example, which is a very small town by today’s standards. An average Home Assembly size of 2,000 members means we will have 45 Home Assemblies in the town. A city of 600,000 will have 300 Home Assemblies. A city of 1,800,000 will have 900, a city of 9,000,000 will have 4500.

      This shows us immediately the tremendous power of this strategy. For the people in a small town of 60,000 to reconstitute themselves into 30 deliberating bodies to take charge of their lives, resources, and neighborhoods is an unbelievably powerful revolutionary act. Just the mere act of assembling is revolutionary, without even considering all that these assemblies can do. Capitalists depend a lot on keeping us all isolated. Our assembling starts to destroy that isolation. It is an act that will be next to impossible to stop, an act that has the power to destroy capitalism, and an act that has the potential to build a new civilization.

      This is the way to think of the revolution. It is a people re-assembling themselves (reordering, reconstituting, reorganizing themselves) into free associations at home, at work, and in the neighborhood. Capitalists will fight this. They may outlaw the meetings, bust them up by force, arrest those attending, or even murder the assemblers. But if we are determined they will not be able to block us from reconstituting ourselves into the kind of social world we want.

      The basic social unit is the Home Assembly, as described above. For many purposes however these Home Assemblies will want to cooperate with other Home Assemblies. They will coalesce to accomplish certain objectives. In other words they will sometimes form larger associations. They will do this by treaty negotiations. They will negotiate agreements to govern all supra-neighborhood projects. Sometimes these agreements will involve just a few Home Assemblies, sometimes many. That is, agreements will encompass larger or smaller numbers of Home Assemblies, depending on the nature of the project. A telephone system will require a regional or even inter-regional pact. A local park may involve only three or four neighborhoods. The highway system will require regional agreements. A large manufacturing facility may involve 15 or 20 Home Assemblies. Similarly for hospitals, large research facilities, orchestras, and so forth. A considerable amount of the activity in the world at present is governed by such treaties and not by legislation (for example, the worldwide postal service among nations). Also, contracts between corporations are more in the nature of treaties (mutually agreed upon terms and conditions) rather than laws (although they are enforced by a nation’s laws). So we should not be frightened by this. The number of inter-neighborhood agreements the Home Assemblies will have to work out to regulate our common endeavors will be well within the range of complexity manageable by human intelligence. It probably won’t exceed a couple hundred agreements (not counting trade agreements, which may run into the thousands).

      Beyond agreements governing particular projects there will need to be a general agreement about the nature of the association. Becoming a signature to this agreement or pact is what it means to join an “Association of Democratic Autonomous Neighborhoods.” There will need to be agreements about membership in neighborhoods, about the basic structures of the neighborhood itself (Households, Projects, Peer Circles, Home Assembly), about voting procedures within the assemblies, about territory and resources, about leaving the association, about not even joining the association, about aggression and defense, and so forth. (See the Appendix for a Draft General Agreement for such an association.)

      Negotiating these treaties will involve a lot of work at first, less so later. Nevertheless, it will be an ongoing process. Procedures and facilities for negotiating will need to be established. These treaty negotiating procedures will probably not differ all that much from the way treaties are negotiated among states: delegates from each neighborhood will be sent to regional treaty drafting conferences, with the final ratification resting with the Home Assemblies. The main difference lies in the number of negotiating parties, a hundred and a half nations versus tens of thousands of neighborhoods.

      Although this may seem cumbersome, there is no alternative if we want to govern our own lives. The alternative is to relinquish control into the hands of regional or inter-regional elites, thus voiding our determination to be autonomous, free peoples. Besides, it probably looks a lot worse than it will prove to be in reality.

      Once we have in mind a clear notion of how we might want to live we can begin to see ways to bring this new world into being, and to see what obstacles have to be overcome.

      Perhaps the greatest obstacle we face is the enormous capacity capitalists have acquired to shape and control what people think and how they see the world and events taking place in it. Radio, television, and movies are the greatest weapons ever to fall into the hands of any ruling class. Add to this all the other instruments of mass communication — books, newspapers, magazines, newsletters, advertising, videos, computers; then add years and years of schooling, ruling class control of all major institutions, propaganda at work, the homogenization of culture, and the destruction of families, neighborhoods, and communities. Given all this it is hard to see how an autonomous, opposition consciousness could ever emerge, or survive the system’s attacks if it did emerge.

      Nevertheless, capitalist control of consciousness and culture is not total. Opposition movements continue to be born even now. There are cracks in the empire through which the irrepressible creative subjectivity of human beings can find outlets. This is our main hope. The rapid creation of a worldwide Indymedia, in just a few years (dating from November 1999), is a spectacular manifestation of this hope. I'm sure there are many other ways that we can break the hold of ruling class thought, prove that we have not been totally brainwashed by the doublespeak of their media, and assert our own values and perceptions.

      Another big obstacle we face is the labor market itself. We have to go to where the jobs are. This means that many of us are moving all the time. Many of our current neighbors will be gone in a couple of years (or we will be gone ourselves). Even if we managed to set up neighborhood assemblies, their members would be constantly turning over. Nevertheless, in every neighborhood, there are also many who manage to stay put and who could provide the needed continuity and stability.

      Having to follow the jobs also results in a huge disjunction between where people live and where they work. The vast majority of people who live in urban or suburban areas, throughout the world, do not work in the neighborhoods where they live. They commute to jobs somewhere else. Even if this job is only half a mile away it most likely takes them out of the Home Assembly district (depending on population density of course). That is, even if a neighborhood succeeded in establishing a Home Assembly and even if workers in a neighborhood seized the factories and offices there, we would still be dealing with two sets of people. And many suburban neighborhoods do not even have factories and offices; thus suburbia itself is an obstacle, and will have to be dismantled or rebuilt. So how could a neighborhood-based Home Assembly become a decision-making unit governing the projects in that area? It would take decades, even if capitalism were destroyed, for people to get relocated into projects nearer home. This must of necessity be a gradual process. In order to avoid total chaos and disintegration, most people must go on working at the jobs they have and know. Otherwise we would all die. There would be no food, no transportation, no medical care, no electricity, no heat, no clothing. So it is quite clear that at least initially there cannot be an integrated neighborhood decision-making unit comprised of a gathering of Peer Circles from Projects and Households into a Home Assembly.

      But this is not the whole story. There are still compelling reasons for sticking with the strategy. For one thing, even in a thoroughly reconstructed social world, there will be many inter-neighborhood projects which will be governed by pacts struck by several Home Assemblies rather than being controlled solely by a single Home Assembly. So some people will always be working away from the neighborhoods where they live. That is, some persons will attend their Home Assemblies as individuals who are members of Peer Circles from outside their neighborhood. Secondly, it is only by reconstituting ourselves into neighborhood, workplace, and household associations, despite the obstacles, that we can destroy capitalism and thus slowly start to undo the absurd work/home spatial patterns thrown up by this idiotic system.

      Another huge obstacle to creating the envisioned Association of Autonomous Neighborhoods sketched above is the worldwide division of labor. Every little enterprise (office, workshop, clinic, classroom) gets supplies and equipment from all over. Light bulbs come from way off. Paper, pens, electricity, computers, furniture, medicines, machines come from way off. In the short run, no enterprise could continue to function if these networks of trade were disrupted. But at present this trade is corporate controlled. In recent decades, given transnational corporations and the further globalization of capital, the worldwide division of labor (and trade networks) has taken another expansive leap. It has suited capital’s purposes to decentralize production, scattering plants all over the world, all made possible by the new communication and information technology. It doesn’t have to be this way, of course, nor is this necessarily the best way to organize production. But this existing division of labor, induced and shaped by the imperatives of capital, certainly does constitute an obstacle to establishing democratic, autonomous communities of free people. It will take time to restructure the circulation of goods to reflect the principle of freedom rather than slavery.

      In the meantime, the existing trade networks will have to be maintained and worked with. But who will maintain them? And how? Obviously you can’t overthrow the corporate world but somehow maintain its division of labor. Which leads us to an important insight: residential patterns and divisions of labor cannot be overthrown; they have to be replaced. (This is true also for capitalist property relations and capitalist institutions of decision making.) I have no doubt that Home Assemblies and self-managed Projects will be able to eventually build up extensive networks of interchange to replace the existing corporate-controlled ones.

      Speaking of capitalist property relations, they have traditionally been seen as the greatest single obstacle to achieving communism. The fact that the capitalists “own” the land and factories, and that this “ownership” is inscribed in law, upheld by the courts, and enforced by the police, this fact is what has led anti-capitalist forces to focus primarily on the state in their efforts to abolish these property relations. This strategy proved ineffective, through nearly a century of trials. In any case, any attempt to establish autonomous neighborhoods, with cooperatively run households and projects, would run smack up against capitalist property relations, and they would have to be overcome.

      The military might of the capitalist ruling class is of course an obvious obstacle to the establishment of democratic, autonomous neighborhoods. Their ability and willingness to simply murder us, if they choose to, to protect their profits, is very daunting indeed. Nevertheless, although this firepower is overwhelming, it is not invincible. We can defeat it. I hope I am beginning to show how in this essay.

      We must never forget however that we are at war, and have been for five hundred years. We are involved in class warfare. This defines our situation historically and sets limits to what we can do. It would be nice to think of peace, for example, but this is out of the question. It is excluded as an option by historical conditions. Peace can be achieved only by destroying capitalism.

      The casualties from this war, on our side, long ago reached astronomical sums. It is estimated that thirty million people perished during the first century of the capitalist invasion of the Americas, including millions of Africans who were worked to death as slaves. Thousands of peasants died in the great revolts in France and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the enclosures movement in England and during the first wave of industrialization, hundreds of thousands of people died needlessly. African slaves died by the millions (an estimated fifteen million) during the Atlantic crossing. Hundreds of poor people were hanged in London in the early nineteenth century to enforce the new property laws. During the Paris uprising of 1871, thirty thousand communards were slaughtered. Twenty million were lost in Stalin’s Gulag, and millions more perished during the 1930s when the Soviet state expropriated the land and forced the collectivization of agriculture, an event historically comparable to the enclosures in England (and thus the Bolsheviks destroyed one of the greatest peasant revolutions of all time). Thousands of militants were murdered by the German police during the near revolution in Germany and Austria in 1919. Thousands of workers and peasants were killed during the Spanish Civil War. Hitler killed 10 million people in the camps (including six million Jews in the gas chambers). An estimated 200,000 labor leaders, activists, and citizens have been murdered in Guatemala since the CIA engineered coup in 1954. Thousands were lost in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. Half-a-million communists were massacred in Indonesia in 1975. Millions of Vietnamese were killed by French and American capitalists during decades of colonialism and war. And how many were killed during British capital’s subjugation of India, and during capitalist Europe’s colonization of Asia and Africa?

      A major weapon of capitalists has always been to simply murder those who are threatening their rule. Thousands were killed by the contras and death squads in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Thousands were murdered in Chile by Pinochet during his counter-revolution, after the assassination of Allende. Speaking of assassinations – Patrice Lumumba, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci (died in prison), Ricardo Flores Magon (died in prison), Che Guevara, Gustav Landauer, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Fred Hampton, George Jackson, the Chicago anarchists, Amilcar Cabral, Steve Biko, Karl Liebnicht, Nat Turner, and thousands more. Thousands are being murdered every year now in Colombia. Thousands die every year in the workplace in the United States alone. Eighty thousand die needlessly in hospitals every year in the United States due to malpractice and negligence. Fifty thousand die every year in automobile accidents in the US, deaths directly due to deliberate capitalist decisions to scuttle mass transit in favor of an economy based on oil, roads, and cars (unsafe cars to boot). Thousands have died in mines since capitalism began. Millions of people are dying right now, every year, from famines directly attributable to capitalists, and from diseases easily prevented but for capitalists. Nearly all poverty-related deaths are because of capitalists. We cannot begin to estimate the stunted, wasted, and shortened lives caused by capitalists. Not to even mention the millions of us who have died fighting their stupid little world wars, and their equally stupid colonial wars. (This enumeration is very far from being complete.)

      Capitalists (generically speaking) are not merely thieves. They are murderers. Their theft and murder is on a scale never seen before in history, a scale so vast it boggles the mind. Capitalists make Alexander, Caesar, Genghis, and Attila look like boy scouts. This is a terrible enemy we face.

      I can just hear the cries of protest now that we cannot blame all this on capitalists, Hitler’s holocaust as well as Stalin’s Gulag, racial murders as well as famines. I can and I do, and if this were another book than it is, I could present reasoned arguments and evidence to back up this claim.

      1. Social Democracy (gaining control of the state apparatus through elections). We can’t destroy capitalism by running for office. It hasn’t been done and it won’t be done, even though numerous governments have been in socialist hands in Europe, sometimes for decades. It won’t be done because governments don’t have the last say, they don’t control society. Capitalists do. The government doesn’t control capitalists; capitalists control the government. Modern government (i.e., the nation-state system) is an invention of capitalists. It is their tool and they know how to use it and keep it from being turned against them. Although building worker-controlled political parties, and then using those parties to win elections and get control of governments, and then using those governments to establish socialism, seemed like a plausible enough strategy when it was initiated in the mid-nineteenth century, it's way past time for us to recognize and admit that it simply hasn't worked. Capitalism goes rolling on no matter who controls the government.

      2. Leninism (capturing the state apparatus by force of arms). We can’t destroy capitalism by taking over the government in a so-called revolution. This has been the most widely used strategy during the past century in countries on the periphery of capitalism (National Liberation Movements), beginning with the Russian Revolution. Dozens of “revolutionary parties” have come to power all over the world, but nowhere have they succeeded in destroying capitalism. In all cases so far they have simply gone on doing what capitalists always do, accumulate more capital. They become, inevitably (and in spite of their intentions), just another government, in a system of nation-states, inextricably embedded in capitalism, with no possibility of escape. Generations of revolutionaries devoted their lives this strategy. It seemed like the best thing to do at the time, and maybe it was. But now, after nearly a century of trials, it's painfully clear that the strategy has failed, and more and more revolutionaries are coming to this conclusion. The few remaining die-hard leninists, who are still struggling to build a vanguard party to seize state power, are definitely, and thankfully, a dying breed.

      3. Guerrilla warfare. We cannot destroy capitalism with guerrilla warfare. This strategy has been mostly deployed as part of National Liberation Movements in colonial countries in order to capture the governments there. It is a form of Leninism. As noted above, Leninism in general didn’t work. And now, guerrilla warfare, as a particular tactic within Leninism, doesn’t work. Capitalists have learned how to defeat it. The strategy was based on the assumed unwillingness of the capitalists to murder the civilian population in order to kill the guerrillas too. Capitalists showed no such reluctance. They are willing to murder on a massive scale, and uproot and displace whole populations, in order to defeat guerrilla movements. And they win. (The current wars in Colombia and Iraq will perhaps serve as the final test of the strategy.)

      Some wild-eyed romantic revolutionaries have thought to adopt the strategy for use in the core countries, with disastrous results. Capitalists have been delighted to have a new enemy, namely “terrorists” and “anarchists,” now that “communists” are gone. But of course they will malign any opposition movement, so this is not the reason guerrilla warfare will not work here. It won’t work because it is part of Leninism (seizing state power) and Leninism didn’t work. It will not work because of the overwhelming firepower amassed by every advanced capitalist government. It will not work because it doesn’t contain within itself the seeds of the new civilization. I would think twice before joining the underground.

      4. Syndicalism (federations of peasant, worker, and soldier councils). We cannot destroy capitalism by seizing and occupying the factories and farms, at least not in the way this has been tried so far. Nevertheless, of all the strategies that have failed, syndicalism is the only one that had a ghost of a chance of succeeding, and the only one that even came close to creating a new world. It came close in the great Spanish revolution in the thirties. Unfortunately, that magnificent revolution was defeated. In fact, all syndicalist revolutions have failed so far.

      I believe there are serious flaws inherent in the strategy itself. For one thing, the syndicalist strategy ignores households, as if households weren’t part of the means of production. Thus it excludes millions of homemakers from active participation in the revolution. Homemakers can only serve in a supporting role. It also excludes old people, young people, sick people, prisoners, students, welfare recipients, and millions of unemployed workers. To think that a revolution can be made only by those people who hold jobs is the sheerest folly. Perhaps immediately after syndicalists “seize the factories” and make a revolution this exclusion could be overcome by having everyone join a council at home or in school, but this is no help beforehand, during the revolution itself. The whole image is badly skewed, wacky.

      Moreover, syndicalists have never specified clearly enough how all the various councils are going to function together to make decisions and set policy, defend themselves, and launch a new civilization. In the near revolution in Germany in 1918 the worker and soldier councils were for a few months the only organized power. They could have won. But they were confused about what to do. They couldn’t see how to get from their separate councils to the establishment of overall power and the defeat of capitalism.

      In the massive general strike in Poland in 1980, factory, office, mining, and farm councils were set up all over the country. But they didn’t know how to coalesce into an alternative social arrangement capable of replacing the existing power structure. Moreover, they mistakenly refrained from even attacking ruling class power, with the intent of destroying it. Instead they merely wanted to coexist in some kind of uneasy dual structure (perhaps because they were afraid of a Soviet invasion; but a strategy that has not taken external armies into account is badly flawed).

      Workplace associations would have to be permanent assemblies, with years of experience under their belts, before they could have a chance of success. They cannot be new forms suddenly thrown up in the depths of a crisis, or in the middle of a general strike, with a strong government still waiting in the wings, supported by its fully operational military forces. It is no wonder that syndicalist-style revolts have gone down to defeat.

      Finally, syndicalists have not worked out the relations between the councils and the community at large, and to assume that workers in a factory have the final say over the allocation of those resources (or whether the factory should even exist) rather than the community at large, simply won’t do. Nor have syndicalists worked out inter-community relations. In short, syndicalism is a half-baked strategy that has not been capable of destroying capitalism, although it has been headed in the right direction.

      5. General Strikes. General strikes cannot destroy capitalism. There is an upper limit of about six weeks as to how long they can even last. Beyond that society starts to disintegrate. But since the General Strikers have not even thought about reconstituting society through alternative social arrangements, let alone created them, they are compelled to go back to their jobs just to survive, to keep from starving. All a government has to do is wait them out, perhaps making a few concessions to placate the masses. This is what DeGaulle did in France in 1968.

      A general strike couldn't even last six weeks if it were really general, that is, if everyone stopped working. Under those conditions there would be no water, electricity, heat, or food. The garbage would pile up. We couldn't go anywhere because the gas stations would be closed. We couldn't get medical treatment. Thus we would only be hurting ourselves mostly. And what could our objectives possibly be? By stopping work, we obviously wouldn't be aiming at occupying and seizing our workplaces. If that were our aim we would continue working, but kick the bosses out. So our main aim would have to be to topple a government, and replace it with another. This might be a legitimate goal if we needed to get rid of a particularly oppressive regime. But as for getting rid of capitalism, it gets us nowhere. I don't think we should put any energy into agitating for a General Strike.

      6. Strikes. Strikes against a particular corporation cannot destroy capitalism. They are not even thought to. The purpose of strikes is to change the rate of exploitation in favor of workers. They have only rarely been linked also to demands for workers control (let alone the abolition of wage-slavery); nor could capitalist property relations be overcome in a single corporation. The strike does not contain within itself any vision for reconstituting social relations across society, nor any plans to do so.

      In recent years strikes have even lost most of the effectiveness they once had for gaining short term benefits for the working class. More often than not strikers are defeated: their union leaders sell them out; the owners bring in scabs, or simply fire everyone and hire a whole new crew; the owners move their plants elsewhere; the government declares the strike illegal and calls out the state militia. Strike breaking is a flourishing industry on Consultant Row. Decades of anti-union propaganda by corporate controlled media has destroyed a pro-labor working class culture, which in turn helps management break strikes. Nowadays, for strikers to get anywhere at all, entire communities have to be mobilized, with linkages to national campaigns. Even so, they are still aiming only at higher wages, health benefits, and the like. They are not anti-capitalist. With rare exception, they are not even fighting for a shorter work week, not to mention workers control.

      I do not believe that this situation is temporary or can be reversed. So however important strikes are, or once were, in the unending fight over the extraction of wealth from the direct producers, they cannot destroy capitalism as a system.

      7. Unions. Unions cannot destroy capitalism. Although unions were created by workers, mainly to help protect themselves from the ravages of wage-slavery, they have long since lost any emancipatory potential. They were easily co-opted by the ruling class and used against workers, as a disciplinary tool, to prevent strikes, to prevent job actions, to drain power from the shop floor, to stabilize the work force and reduce absenteeism, to pacify workers, to water down demands, and so forth. Almost from their beginnings in the middle of the nineteenth century (and with rare exception) unions have been “business unions”, working in cahoots with capitalists to manage “labor relations.” There is an inherent flaw in the strategy. It is based on constructing a bureaucratic institution outside the workplace instead of free association of workers inside the workplace. In any case the heyday of unions is long since past and any hope of bringing them back is delusive.

      In recent years there has been a movement to rebuild unions, even in the United States, which is notoriously lacking in labor consciousness, and where union membership is down to eight percent in non-government workplaces. Also in other countries though, especially poor ones, there are some strong union movements, arising in response to industries having been moved there, or to the appearance of sweatshops. With rare exception, these unions are not anti-capitalist. Naturally, it's important to fight for better working conditions, higher wages, shorter hours, and health benefits. Such struggles do often highlight the evils of the wage-slave system, as well as improve the lives of workers. Who could not be excited by the rapid emergence of the student anti-sweatshop movement on college campuses across the country? But something more is needed if we want to get rid of capitalism. Even if current labor activists succeed, and rebuild unions back to what they once were, can we expect these newly rebuilt unions to accomplish more than previous ones did, at the height of the unionization drives of a strong labor movement, a movement that was embedded in communist, socialist, and anarchist working class cultures, cultures which have now been obliterated? Hardly.

      8. Insurrections. Insurrections cannot destroy capitalism. I don’t even think the ruling class is very frightened of them any more. You can rampage through the streets all you want, burn down your neighborhoods, and loot all the local stores to your heart’s content. They know it will not go anywhere. They know the blind rage will burn itself out. When it’s all over these insurrectionists will be showing up for work like always or standing again in the dole line. Nothing has changed. Nothing has been organized. No new associations have been created. What do capitalists care if they lose a whole city? They can afford it. All they have to do is cordon off the area of conflagration, wait for the fires to burn down, go in and arrest thousands of people at random, and then leave, letting the “rioters” cope with their ruined neighborhoods as best they can. Maybe we should think of something a little more damaging to capitalism than burning down our own neighborhoods.

      9. Civil Disobedience. Acts of civil disobedience cannot destroy capitalism. They can sometimes make strong moral statements. But moral statements are pointless against immoral persons. They fall on deaf ears. Therefore, the act of deliberately breaking a law and getting arrested is of limited value in actually breaking the power of the rulers. Acts of civil disobedience can be used as weapons in the battle for the hearts and minds of ordinary persons I guess (assuming ordinary persons ever hear about them). But they are basically the actions of powerless persons. Powerless persons must use whatever tactics they can of course. But that is the point. Why remain powerless, when by adopting a different strategy (building strategic associations) we could become powerful and not be reduced to impotent acts like civil disobedience against laws we had no say in making and which we regard as unjust?

      Moreover, civil disobedience is a tactic used primarily by more well off and securely situated activists who can count on friends and family to raise bail, and who can be pretty sure of not getting a long prison term. This is not true of course for those strongly motivated religious persons who sometimes embrace long prison sentences as part of bearing witness to a higher morality. But you almost never see poor people or minorities deliberately getting themselves arrested, because they know that once in prison they are not likely to get out.

      Civil disobedience has the additional disadvantage that the movement has to spend a lot of precious time and money getting people out of jail. Enough people get arrested anyway, against their wills. We don't need to be having to struggle to free persons who voluntarily put themselves in the hands of our jailers.

      10. Single-issue campaigns. We cannot destroy capitalism with single-issue campaigns. Yet the great bulk of the energies of radicals is spent on these campaigns. There are dozens of them: campaigns to preserve the forests, keep rent control, stop whaling, stop animal experiments, defend abortion rights, stop toxic dumping, stop the killing of baby seals, stop nuclear testing, stop smoking, stop pornography, stop drug testing, stop drugs, stop the war on drugs, stop police brutality, stop union busting, stop red-lining, stop the death penalty, stop racism, stop sexism, stop child abuse, stop the re-emerging slave trade, stop the bombing of Yugoslavia, stop the logging of redwoods, stop the spread of advertising, stop the patenting of genes, stop the trapping and killing of animals for furs, stop irradiated meat, stop genetically modified foods, stop human cloning, stop the death squads in Colombia, stop the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, stop the extermination of species, stop corporations from buying politicians, stop high stakes educational testing, stop the bovine growth hormone from being used on milk cows, stop micro radio from being banned, stop global warming, stop the militarization of space, stop the killing of the oceans, and on and on. What we are doing is spending our lives trying to fix up a system which generates evils far faster than we can ever eradicate them.

      Although some of these campaigns use direct action (e.g., spikes in the trees to stop the chain saws or Greenpeace boats in front of the whaling ships to block the harpoons), for the most part the campaigns are directed at passing legislation in Congress to correct the problem. Unfortunately, reforms that are won in one decade, after endless agitation, can be easily wiped off the books the following decade, after the protesters have gone home, or after a new administration comes to power.

      These struggles all have value and are needed. Could anyone think that the campaigns against global warming, or to free Leonard Peltier, or to aid the East Timorese ought to be abandoned? Single issue campaigns keep us aware of what's wrong, and sometimes even win. But in and of themselves, they cannot destroy capitalism, and thus cannot really fix things. It is utopian to believe that we can reform capitalism. Most of these evils can only be eradicated for good if we destroy capitalism itself and create a new civilization. We cannot afford to aim for anything less. Our very survival is at stake. There is one single-issue campaign I can wholehearted endorse: the total and permanent eradication of capitalism.

      Many millions of us though are rootless, and are quite alienated from a particular place or local community. We are part of the vast mass of atomized individuals brought into being by the market for commodified labor. Our political activities tend to reflect this. We tend to act as free-floating protesters. But we could start to change this. We could start to root ourselves in our local communities. This will be more possible for some than others of course. There can be no hard and fast rule. Many of us though could start establishing free associations at work, at home, and in the neighborhood. In this way our fights to stop what we don't like, through single-issue campaigns, could be combined with what we do want. Plus we would have a lot more power to stop what we don't like. Our single-issue campaigns might start being more successful.

      What is missing is free association, free assemblies, on the local level. If we added these into the mix, we would start getting somewhere. We could attack the ruling class on all fronts. There are millions of us, plenty of us to do everything, but everything must include fights on the local level, especially at the three strategic sites.

      11. Demonstrations. We cannot destroy capitalism by staging demonstrations. This most popular of all radical strategies is also one of the most questionable. As a rule, demonstrations barely even embarrass capitalists, let alone frighten them, let alone damage them. They are just a form of petition usually. They petition the ruling class regarding some grievance, essentially begging it to change its policies. They are not designed to take any power or wealth away from capitalists. They only last a few hours or a day or two and then, with rare exception, everything goes back to the way it was. If they do win an occasional concession, it is usually minor and short-lived. They do not build an alternative social world. They mostly just alert the ruling class that it needs to retool, or to invent new measures to counter an emerging source of opposition.

      But even if demonstrations rise above the petition level, and become instead a way of presenting our demands and making our opposition known, we still have not acquired the power to see that our demands are met. Our opposition is empty. It has no teeth. In order to give some bite to our protests we would have to reorganize ourselves, reorient ourselves, by rooting ourselves, assembling ourselves, on the local level. Then when we went off on demonstrations to protest ruling class initiatives and projects there would be some muscle behind the protests, rather than just shouted slogans, unfurled banners, hoisted placards, street scuffles, and clever puppets. We would be in a position to take action if our demands were not met. Then when we chanted: "Whose Streets? Our Streets!", our words might represent more than just a pipe-dream.

      Demonstrations are not even good propaganda tools, because the ruling class, given its control of the media, can put any spin it wants to on the event, and the interpretation it puts is invariably damaging to the opposition movement, assuming they even report the event, for their latest approach to these events is simply to ignore them, and black out news about them. This is very effective.

      And what are the gains? An issue can be brought to the attention of the public, or rather, to a small minority of the public, because for the majority, the protesters' message is neutralized by the corporate spin. Also, more people can be drawn into the opposition movement. For those participating, a demonstration can be an inspiring experience. (In many cases, though, this high is offset by the onset of dispiritedness upon returning home.) Demonstrations can thus contribute to building an opposition movement. But are these small gains worth the expense? Large national demonstrations drain energy and resources away from local struggles. Are they worth it? But even local demonstrations are costly, requiring time, energy, and money, which are always in short supply among radicals. Are demonstrations worth all the work and expense they take to organize? No matter what, they remain just a form of protest. They show what we're against. By their very nature, demonstrations are of limited value for articulating what we are for. We were against the war in Vietnam, but what were we for? We are against the World Trade Organization, but what are we for?

      Rather than taking to the streets and marching off all the time, protesting this or that (all the while the police are taking our pictures), we would be better off staying home and building up our workplace, neighborhood, and household associations until they are powerful enough to strike at the heart of capitalism. We cannot build a new social world in the streets.

      12. New Social Movements. The so-called New Social Movements, based on gender, racial, sexual, or ethnic identities, cannot destroy capitalism. They haven’t even tried. Except for a tiny fringe of radicals in each of them, they have been trying to get into the system, not overthrow it. This is true for women, black, homosexual, and ethnic (including ‘native’) identities, as well as all the other identities — old people, the handicapped, welfare mothers, and so forth. Nothing has derailed the anti-capitalist struggle during the past quarter century so thoroughly as have these movements. Sometimes it seems that identity politics is all that is left of the left. Identity politics has simply swamped class politics.

      The mainstream versions of these movements (the ones fighting to get into the system rather than overthrow it) have given capitalists a chance to do a little fine tooling, by eliminating tensions here and there, and by including token representatives of the excluded groups. Many of the demands of these movements can be easily accommodated. Capitalists can live with boards of directors exhibiting ethnic, gender, and racial diversity, as long as all the board members are pro-capitalist. Capitalists can easily accept a rainbow cabinet as long as the cabinet is pushing the corporate agenda. So mainstream identity politics has not threatened capitalism at all. These have been liberal movements, and have sought only to reform the system, not abolish it.

      The radical wings of the new social movements however are rather more subversive. These militants realized that it was necessary to attack the whole social order in order to uproot racism and sexism — problems which could not be overcome under capitalism, since they are an integral part of capitalism. There is no denying the evils of racism, sexism, and nationalism, which are major structural supports to ruling class control. These militants have done whatever they could to highlight, analyze, and ameliorate these evils. Unfortunately, for the most part, their voices have been lost in all the clamor for admittance to the system by the majorities in their movements.

      There have been gains of course. The women's movement has forever changed the world's consciousness about gender. Unpaid housework has been recognized as a key ingredient in the wage-slave system. Reproduction, as well as production, has been included in our analysis of the system. Identity politics in general has underscored just how many people are excluded, and exposed gaps in previous revolutionary strategies. Also, the demand for real racial and gender equality is itself inherently revolutionary, in that the demand cannot be met by capitalists, given that racial and gender discrimination are two of the key structural mechanisms for keeping the wage bill low, and thus making profits possible.

      Nevertheless, I'm convinced that unless we can return to class politics, and integrate the fights for gender, racial, sexual, and age equality into the class struggle, we will continue to flounder.

      13. Boycotts. Boycotts cannot destroy capitalism. They have always been an extremely ineffective way to attack the system, and almost impossible to organize. They almost invariably fail in their objectives. In the rare cases where they have succeeded, the gains are minor. A corporation is forced to amend its labor policies here and there, or drop a product, or divest somewhere. That’s about it.

      In recent years boycotting has become a way of life for thousands in the environmental movement. They publish thick books on which products are okay to buy and which must be boycotted, covering literally everything, from toilet paper to deodorants, foods to toys. All they have succeeded in doing is creating a whole new capitalist industry of politically correct products. They have bought into the myth that the “economy” will give us anything we want if we just demand it, and that it is our demands that have been wrong rather than the system itself.

      It’s true that it is better to eat food that hasn’t been polluted with insecticides, better to wear clothes not made with child labor, better to wear make-up not tested by blinding rabbits. But capitalism cannot be destroyed by making such choices. If we are going to boycott something, we might try boycotting wage-slavery.

      14. Dropping-out. We cannot destroy capitalism by dropping out, either as an individual, a small group, or a community. It’s been tried over and over and it fails every time. There is no escaping capitalism. There is nowhere left to go, nowhere to drop out to. The only escape from capitalism is to destroy it. Then we could be free. In fact, capitalists love it when we drop out. They don’t need us. They have plenty of suckers already. What do they care if we live under bridges, beg for meals, and die young? I haven’t seen the ruling class rushing to help the homeless.

      Even more illusory than the idea that an individual can drop out is the idea that a whole community can withdraw from the system and build its own little new world somewhere else. This was tried repeatedly by utopian communities throughout the nineteenth century. The strategy was revived in the sixties as thousands of new left radicals retired to their remote rural communes to groove on togetherness (and dope). The strategy is once again surfacing in the New Age movement as dozens of new age communities are being established all over the country. These movements all suffer from the mistaken idea that they don’t have to attack capitalism and destroy it, but can simply withdraw from it, to live their own lives separately and independently. It is a vast illusion. Capitalists rule the world. Until they are defeated there will be no freedom for anyone.

      15. Luddism. As wonderful as Luddism was, as one of the fiercest attacks ever made against capitalism, wrecking machinery, in and of itself, cannot destroy capitalism, and for the same reason that insurrections and strikes cannot: the action is not designed to replace capitalism with new decision-making arrangements. It does not even strike at the heart of capitalism — wage-slavery $#8212; but only at the physical plant, the material means of production. Although sabotage, on a large scale, if it were a part of a movement to destroy capitalism and replace it with something else, could weaken the corporate world and put a strain on the accumulation of capital, it is far better to get ourselves in a position where we can seize the machinery rather than smash it. (Not that we even want much of the existing machinery; it will have to be redesigned; but seizing it is a way of getting control over the means of production.)

      Moreover, Luddites were already enslaved to capitalists, in their cottage industries, before they struck. They were angry because new machinery was eliminating their customary job (which was an old way of making a living, relatively speaking, and thus had some strong traditions attached to it). In current terms, it would be like if linotype operators destroyed computers because their jobs were being eliminated by the new equipment. Destroying the new machinery misses the point. It is not the machinery that is the problem but the wage-slave system itself. If it weren’t for wage-slavery we could welcome labor saving devices, provided they weren’t destructive in other ways, for freeing us from unnecessary toil.

      We can draw inspiration from Luddism, as a fine example of workers aggressively resisting the further degradation of their lives, but we should not imitate it, at least not as a general strategy.

      16. Publishing. We cannot destroy capitalism by publishing. I doubt if anyone believes that we can. I mention it here only because publishing constitutes for so many of us our practice. This is what we are doing. We justify this by saying that radical books, magazines, and newspapers are weapons in the fight against bourgeois cultural hegemony. Which is true. But we are permitted to publish only because the ruling class isn’t worried one jot by our “underground press.” Their weapons — television, radio, movies, schools — are infinitely more powerful. It’s conceivable though that capitalism could be destroyed without any publishing at all. The strategy of re-assembling ourselves into workplace, neighborhood, and household associations could catch on and spread by word of mouth from community to community. Destroying capitalism is more a matter of rearranging ourselves socially (reconstituting our social relations) than it is a matter of propagating a particular set of ideas. So instead of starting our own zine, why don't we call a meeting with co-workers or neighbors to form an association?

      17. Education. We cannot destroy capitalism through education. Not many radicals recommend this strategy any more, although you still hear it occasionally. New Left radicals established free schools and even a free university or two, and there was a fairly strong and long lasting modern school movement among anarchists. But these are long gone. However, the notion that education is the path to change and the way out of the mess we're in is quite common in the culture at large. This is like the tail waging the dog. We don't even control the schools, or what is taught there. Schools and education are artifacts, and minor ones at that, of the ruling class, and are a reflection of its power over society. It is that power that must be broken. This cannot be done through schools. Even the very notion of education, as an activity separated from life, needs to be overcome. Learning among free peoples will be strikingly different. When we have achieved our autonomy, by directly engaging and defeating our oppressors, that will be the time to worry about how to conduct our learning.

      It is time to try to describe, at first abstractly and later concretely, a strategy for destroying capitalism. This strategy, at its most basic, calls for pulling time, energy, and resources out of capitalist civilization and putting them into building a new civilization. The image then is one of emptying out capitalist structures, hollowing them out, by draining wealth, power, and meaning out of them until there is nothing left but shells.

      This is definitely an aggressive strategy. It requires great militancy, and constitutes an attack on the existing order. The strategy clearly recognizes that capitalism is the enemy and must be destroyed, but it is not a frontal attack aimed at overthrowing the system, but an inside attack aimed at gutting it, while simultaneously replacing it with something better, something we want.

      Thus capitalist structures (corporations, governments, banks, schools, etc.) are not seized so much as simply abandoned. Capitalist relations are not fought so much as they are simply rejected. We stop participating in activities that support (finance, condone) the capitalist world and start participating in activities that build a new world while simultaneously undermining the old. We create a new pattern of social relations alongside capitalist relations and then we continually build and strengthen our new pattern while doing every thing we can to weaken capitalist relations. In this way our new democratic, non-hierarchical, non-commodified relations can eventually overwhelm the capitalist relations and force them out of existence.

      This is how it has to be done. This is a plausible, realistic strategy. To think that we could create a whole new world of decent social arrangements overnight, in the midst of a crisis, during a so-called revolution, or during the collapse of capitalism, is foolhardy. Our new social world must grow within the old, and in opposition to it, until it is strong enough to dismantle and abolish capitalist relations. Such a revolution will never happen automatically, blindly, determinably, because of the inexorable, materialist laws of history. It will happen, and only happen, because we want it to, and because we know what we’re doing and know how we want to live, and know what obstacles have to be overcome before we can live that way, and know how to distinguish between our social patterns and theirs.

      But we must not think that the capitalist world can simply be ignored, in a live and let live attitude, while we try to build new lives elsewhere. (There is no elsewhere.) There is at least one thing, wage-slavery, that we can’t simply stop participating in (but even here there are ways we can chip away at it). Capitalism must be explicitly refused and replaced by something else. This constitutes War, but it is not a war in the traditional sense of armies and tanks, but a war fought on a daily basis, on the level of everyday life, by millions of people. It is a war nevertheless because the accumulators of capital will use coercion, brutality, and murder, as they have always done in the past, to try to block any rejection of the system. They have always had to force compliance; they will not hesitate to continue doing so. Nevertheless, there are many concrete ways that individuals, groups, and neighborhoods can gut capitalism, which I will enumerate shortly.

      We must always keep in mind how we became slaves; then we can see more clearly how we can cease being slaves. We were forced into wage-slavery because the ruling class slowly, systematically, and brutally destroyed our ability to live autonomously. By driving us off the land, changing the property laws, destroying community rights, destroying our tools, imposing taxes, destroying our local markets, and so forth, we were forced onto the labor market in order to survive, our only remaining option being to sell, for a wage, our ability to work.

      It’s quite clear then how we can overthrow slavery. We must reverse this process. We must begin to reacquire the ability to live without working for a wage or buying the products made by wage-slaves (that is, we must get free from the labor market and the way of living based on it), and embed ourselves instead in cooperative labor and cooperatively produced goods.

      Another clarification is needed. This strategy does not call for reforming capitalism, for changing capitalism into something else. It calls for replacing capitalism, totally, with a new civilization. This is an important distinction, because capitalism has proved impervious to reforms, as a system. We can sometimes in some places win certain concessions from it (usually only temporary ones) and win some (usually short-lived) improvements in our lives as its victims, but we cannot reform it piecemeal, as a system.

      Thus our strategy of gutting and eventually destroying capitalism requires at a minimum a totalizing image, an awareness that we are attacking an entire way of life and replacing it with another, and not merely reforming one way of life into something else. Many people may not be accustomed to thinking about entire systems and social orders, but everyone knows what a lifestyle is, or a way of life, and that is the way we should approach it.

      The thing is this: in order for capitalism to be destroyed millions and millions of people must be dissatisfied with their way of life. They must want something else and see certain existing things as obstacles to getting what they want. It is not useful to think of this as a new ideology. It is not merely a belief-system that is needed, like a religion, or like Marxism, or Anarchism. Rather it is a new prevailing vision, a dominant desire, an overriding need. What must exist is a pressing desire to live a certain way, and not to live another way. If this pressing desire were a desire to live free, to be autonomous, to live in democratically controlled communities, to participate in the self-regulating activities of a mature people, then capitalism could be destroyed. Otherwise we are doomed to perpetual slavery and possibly even to extinction.

      The content of this vision is actually not new at all, but quite old. The long term goal of communists, anarchists, and socialists has always been to restore community. Even the great peasant revolts of early capitalism sought to get free from external authorities and restore autonomy to villages. Marx defined communism once as a free association of producers, and at another time as a situation in which the free development of each is a condition for the free development of all. Anarchists have always called for worker and peasant self-managed cooperatives. The long term goals have always been clear: to abolish wage-slavery, to eradicate a social order organized solely around the accumulation of capital for its own sake, and to establish in its place a society of free people who democratically and cooperatively self-determine the shape of their social world.

      These principles however must be embodied in concrete social arrangements. In this sketch they are embodied in the following configuration of social forms: (a) autonomous, self-governing democratic Neighborhoods (through the practice of the Home Assembly); (b) self-managed Projects; (c) cooperatively operated Households; and (d) an Association, by means of treaties, of neighborhoods one with another.

      But how can this be achieved? Now we must turn to the task of fleshing out this strategy, but this time in concrete terms rather than abstractly.

      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 sla