No Bosses, No Managers, No Owners
Everything we’ve been taught about human nature, leaders, and hierarchies is wrong.
“Strong people don’t need strong leaders,” — Ella Baker
“Every end has its means” — Errico Malatesta
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[UPDATED: Wed Aug 16, 3:18pm]
Before I dive in, I’m going to outline some assumptions. I assume that you, dear reader, care about the people in your life and your community, that you want to see them thrive and reach the fullest of their potential, and that you don’t want them to be subjected to any kind of injustice, brutality, or violence. I’m also going to assume that you believe you should be free to live your life as you wish more or less, so long as your freedom doesn’t infringe on someone else’s, and that you believe every other living thing should have that same freedom.
For the purposes of this essay, then, I’m going to call those the values of freedom (free to live your life), equality (everyone else is also free to live their life) and solidarity (caring about people).
I’m also going to assume that you know that not everyone is free to live their life as they wish. Oppression exists in many forms in today’s world: racism, sexism, classism, ableism, the list goes on. But things haven’t always been this way. We, humans, have not always organized societies based on social hierarchies. Some societies today still don’t. Then how did it get this way? And why?
If there are points of contention between us, then, I assume they are in the understanding of the extent of these problems, their origins and nature, and what exactly we need to do to build a world where every living thing is free, equal, and cared for.
I am choosing to focus on values, as opposed to ideologies, because too often disagreements are really fights over labels, and that serves no one.
Take a moment to think about a simple but radical question: what would you do if your survival was not tethered to a job?
Your answer may depend on a lot of things- do you like your job? Does it meet your physical and spiritual needs? Do you do it voluntarily or is it necessary for your survival?
When did you start learning about jobs? What were you told about them— that they were dignifying? Or a slog? Live to work? Work to live? Were you told that there were bosses and workers? Owners and employees? Were you told how things came to be that way?
Did you learn that people should work to make their way otherwise they’re deadbeats or losers? Did you learn that hard work would lead to wealth and success? Has it?
The reason I ask you to think about these questions is because the lessons we learn about the world, we internalize, and then as we grow older we more or less take them for granted, and act accordingly. Over time, across generations, social conditions can become so normalized as to seem totally natural, sometimes we may even say they are “human nature,” as if there were no choices made in the process, and no one to hold accountable, no option but to accept things as they are and move on. But if that were true, how did the united states become a country? Prior to that it was divvied up as a mixture of british, french, dutch, and spanish colonies. Prior to that, it belonged to the numerous Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island.
To form societies is human nature, to form a specific society is a social process involving many choices. In order to understand why any given society is highly unequal then, we must move beyond the thought stopping cliché of “human nature,” and work to understand the social processes involved in its creation. This is especially important for people who care about freedom, equality, and solidarity, because to understand the path it will take for us to get to where we want to be, we have to understand where other people went wrong. To rephrase Errico Malatesta’s quote from above, we have to create the means to arrive at these ends, otherwise like so many others we will fail.
It is possible to say, as many people do, that injustice or inequality exists apart from hierarchy as a form of social organization. This can feel true, after all they are so ubiquitous they couldn’t possibly be the source of injustice, right? People arguing this often point to ancient greece and mesopotamia and say — “see! rich people, class, and hierarchy have always existed. It’s human nature. There are rich folks and poor folks in the bible! This is just the way of the world.” But, as I will show over the course of this essay this is false and rooted in a worldview that places the the global north (europe, north america, australia, new zealand and japan) in a position of superiority over the Global South (Africa, Central and South America, Asia [outside of japan], and Oceania [outside of australia and new zealand]), and places modern civilization in a position of superiority over Indigenous ways of life.
IF HIERARCHIES AREN’T HUMAN NATURE, WHY DO THEY KEEP POPPING UP EVERYWHERE?
The way any system is structured- be it an ecosystem, a state, or a community group- determines how the beings in it behave, and in turn their behavior comes to shape the system. It’s a mutually reinforcing cycle. The bigger and more powerful that system, the more influence it has on the people, animals, plants etc. living in it.
While not an advocate for or fan of his communalist philosophy in general I find that social ecologist Murray Bookchin’s essay What is Social Ecology? provides a helpful framework for thinking about human nature and evolution.
“…the natural world and the social are interlinked by evolution into one nature that consists of two differentiations: first or biotic nature, and second or social nature. Social nature and biotic nature share an evolutionary potential for greater subjectivity and flexibility. Second nature is the way in which human beings, as flexible, highly intelligent primates, inhabit and alter the natural world. That is to say, people create an environment that is most suitable for their mode of existence.” (emphasis mine)
I would even say, people create an environment that is most suitable for their purposes.
For example, if your goal is to have absolute rule over people, you might create a kingdom. Over time, through struggle, the king will establish their authority. The people will believe themselves to subject to the king’s authority. Institutions like armies, police, courthouses, schools and churches will develop all to reinforce the authority of the king. They may even come to believe god chose the king. The more institutions that develop, the more deeply rooted that king’s power will be.
There’s a complicating factor to this. Nietzsche called it the “will to power”: people have a fundamental drive to exert their will on the world; a human being’s natural inclination is freedom. A king’s inclination is to protect and expand their authority.
Under this arrangement, the people will, broadly speaking, want to do one of three things: become the king (by whatever means), submit to the king (thereby subverting their own will to power) or rebel against the king. Most people, most of the time, will fall in the second category; the risks and punishments for trying to become the king and failing are severe, same for rebellion. For some, the temptation to become the king will be too great to ignore, and for others the risks of rebellion will always be less than the brutality of the status quo.
Even though these conditions may seem normal to the people within them, that doesn’t make them just. It doesn’t make them “natural.” It just means they have been normalized through a social process. In fact, the king’s authority only exists insofar as she has the ability to use force against anyone threatening her authority. The lives of peasants in a kingdom are rarely dignified. Meanwhile, the king takes a sizable chunk of the nation’s wealth for herself, and distributes the rest to the aristocracy she has overseeing her various lands. Remember though, this isn’t theft, god ordained the king to be her representative on earth. It is her right to do with the riches of her country as she wishes.
So, from the perspective of freedom, equality, and solidarity the kingdom must be dismissed as an oppressive social structure, one that humans are clearly capable of creating, but not one that is “human nature.” What it says is, that humans will more or less accept their social circumstances, especially when the threat of force is involved.
SLAVERY, COLONIZATION, AND THE MODERN NATION-STATE
Society is what Murray Bookchin refers to, in the above quote, as “second nature,” or social nature. For “western” society this has entailed a belief that human beings were separate from and superior to “first nature.” This is a story at least as old as the bible: it is in genesis that god gave man dominion over the Earth. This is Judeo-christian cosmology. Cosmology can be seen as the backdrop for all other forms of knowledge.
In their powerful essay, The Erotic Life of Stones, Dominique Ganawaabe and S0ren Aubade put it this way,
“Although we inhabit the same streams and valleys, the different origin stories we draw from have a defining influence on how we perceive our world and what we are drawn towards.”
If your origin story teaches you that you have dominion, or absolute ownership/supreme authority, over the earth, you will begin to behave that way. You will be drawn to social structures that reinforce that idea.
From the viewpoint of “western” society, forests, oceans, land, minerals, etc are simply the raw materials from which a civilization is built, and as you have absolute authority over them, you have no need to consider your impact on their wellbeing. This explains the destructive character of the process of “western” civilization. From this perspective it can be said the purpose of civilization is to prove absolute supremacy over “first nature.”
This can be seen in the justification for european colonialism which came from the series of papal dictates, or bulls, commonly named the doctrine of discovery. Effectively, some popes decreed that all land that had not been christianized was officially unoccupied and up for grabs, and the people on that land were savages that needed to be forced into permanent servitude for their own good. At this point, dominion over the earth, also came to mean dominion over the Indigenous people of the earth. Pope francis recently apologized for this, though it’s far too little way too late.
Through the process of colonization, european societies and people started coming in contact with social arrangements they had never encountered before. Many of these arrangements were egalitarian. It’s no surprise then that the thinkers of the enlightenment era, the european philosophical movement characterized by a commitment to “reason,” began to ask questions about the “origin of inequality.” They had, prior to this, seen their social order as divinely ordained, rather than a social process created by kings to enrich themselves and expand their power.
Philosophical questions like, what does it mean to “be?” (ontology) and “how do we know what we know?” (epistemology) began taking up more and more of the discourse. They were concerned with concepts like Truth and Justice and Freedom and Equality; all ideals of a revolution of thought that led to a social revolution kicked off by the american war for independence. But, because the new country was built on a contradiction, its history and much of the knowledge produced during the enlightenment and since is built on racist foundations.
Calvin Warren in his essay, Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope, puts it this way —
“…pulverized black bodies sustain the world — its institutions, economic systems, environment, theologies, philosophies, etc. Because anti-blackness infuses itself into every fabric of social existence, it is impossible to emancipate blacks without literally destroying the world.”
This is shown explicitly in the american context. When the declaration of independence and constitution were written, citizenship rights were doled out solely to landowning white men. The subsequent 80 years of legal, cultural, and economic reality was built on this basic contradiction. The american government secured its first loans on the cotton trade. True emancipation of the slaves would have brought about the total collapse of the united states. Instead, they just reconstituted it a bit, and left a loophole for continued slavery via prison labor.
So, while things for black folks post civil war initially improved, the white powers that be reworked the laws and government to fit their interests, and america’s racist foundations got baked even deeper and more abstractly into our social fabric.
There was a similar plight for Indigenous folks too. In the 19th century, the doctrine of discovery transmogrified into manifest destiny. The belief was that it was our responsibility to conquer, settle on, and prosper in the american west. The problem was, people lived on that land, the united states government had and continued to sign treaties with them, yet the new americans were given license to take it by violent means, treaty or no treaty.
The name for this social system is settler-colonialism. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang in their seminal essay Decolonization is not a Metaphor described settler-colonial civilization in this way,
“The settler is making a new “home” and that home is rooted in a homesteading worldview where the wild land and wild people were made for his benefit. He can only make his identity as a settler by making the land produce, and produce excessively, because “civilization” is defined as production in excess of the “natural” world (i.e. in excess of the sustainable production already present in the Indigenous world).” (emphasis mine)
Diné artist, activist, and writer, Klee Benally, describes the process of “Western” civilization hauntingly in his essay Unknowable: Against an Indigenous Anarchist Theory,
When we ask the question “What does civilization want?” we are visited by the ghosts of our children. The specters of a dead future. Emaciated skeletons buried beneath vulgar stories of conquest upon conquest upon conquest. Civilization has no relatives, only captives. Breathing dead air and poisoned water, it owns the night and creeps towards distant constellations. Its survival is expansive unending hunger, a hunger that has been named colonialism; a vast consumption that feeds on spirit, and all life… We name this consuming of existence, this assertion of “superiority,” as a war of wars against Mother Earth.
Colonization is not the story of heroic adventurers “discovering” new unoccupied lands. It’s not the story of human nature; that’s a rationalization. It is a brutal process of all out war and destruction committed by people who believed themselves to be superior. It’s also not in the past.
The Indigenous genocide via the process of “civilization” is ongoing (e.g. MMIW, Residential Schools, poisoned water, oil pipelines, destruction of the Amazon and so many other ways too numerous to mention here). It exists in subtle and overt ways: through “western” science and medicine rejecting “traditional” medicine; through christianity treating Indigenous spirituality as “heathen” and “pagan;” through endless land deals, and mining sacred lands; through neocolonial practices in Africa, robbing the countries of their wealth, while leaving the people poor and dependent on foreign aid. The erasure of Indigenous peoples is a ubiquitous cultural reality throughout the so-called civilized world.
There’s another reality that undermines the “western” view that social hierarchy is a product of human nature: a cultural commitment to ecology and egalitarianism was and is a core principle of most of the Indigenous societies of both american continents. (some writings about and examples of this Aragorn!, Waziyatawin, Eve Tuck, Haudenosaunee, Society against the State, Zapatistas). There were many egalitarian societies on the African continent as well, as explored in the first few minutes of this video from YouTube essayist Andrewism.
To be Indigenous, is to be “of the land,” not in dominion over it. As Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Wang write-
“Indigenous peoples are those who have creation stories, not colonization stories, about how we/they came to be in a particular place — indeed how we/they came to be a place. Our/their relationships to land comprise our/their epistemologies, ontologies, and cosmologies.”
Dominique Ganawaabe and S0ren Aubade describe the Lakota cosmology this way-
“For the Lakota, like many traditional cultures, the line between the earth and the sky is undifferentiated or even nonexistent. Looking up at the constellations, we can still find any pattern we are open to sensing. We can see one star as dried willow or a buffalo rib. One thing can contain a duality or be tri-fold. Animism — from Anima. the Latin term for life — signals the existence of spirit in all objects and phenomena. By this definition the stones are still breathing. We can have fervent threesomes with the clouds and mountains. We can be penetrated by deer antlers or dissolve in newly forming rivers.”
If, then, we are being honest, rather than arguing that hierarchies are human nature, the most we can say is that people from “Western” society are drawn to them because they feel culturally familiar, they reinforce our origin story, and because they give us dominion over the land and others.
To be clear, this is not some sort of “noble savage” narrative. All societies have conflicts, problems, struggles, and imperfections. In addition to the destructive costs, civilization has made aspects of life easier. The point is to see that a social structure is something created, that not all social structures lead to inequality, and to respond to the settler tendency to see problems in our society as “human nature” rather than the results of our social process.
In their excellent book The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow share an exhaustive study of the stunning array of social relationships human beings have manifested over the course of our 300,000+ years on this planet. Their insights are driven by one core question- given how frequently human societies have broken off from one another and adapted based on the needs and wants of the people, why have modern nation-states become so incredibly static? Why have so many people given up on fundamentally reimagining social relations?
It was not an inevitability that society would end up this way, and it’s not an inevitability that it will stay this way. In fact, with the impending climate collapse it’s almost certain it won’t. Things will get very bad in the lifetimes of most of the people alive today. They could even get much worse this decade. We need to start seeing the modern “western” nation-state for what it is: a temporary, tragic, and confused phase of human society; a failed experiment that is best put behind us like a rotting husk.
WHAT WOULD A SOCIETY BASED ON FREEDOM, EQUALITY, AND SOLIDARITY EVEN LOOK LIKE?
[NOTE: Special thanks to Klee Benally for inspiring me to rework this section based on some questions and feedback, and some readings]
The exact shape of this type of society is unknown. Many people find that answer annoying or evasive. The people who wrote the united states declaration of independence and constitution didn’t know what the united states was going to look like in 250 years. Nor did people expect them to. That would have been absurd. Instead, they wrote their ideas with a commitment to certain inalienable rights, regardless of the future outcome. Unfortunately, their words were ultimately empty platitudes.
By eliminating the modern nation state, we would be liberating the land and all people to begin to truly live, based on freedom, equality, and solidarity. By not writing down a specific dogma or plan, we are guaranteeing those rights for future generations. Relying too heavily on the types of pre-programmed dogmatic political frameworks like the constitution, or marxist-leninism leads to social rigidity, stagnation, and authoritarianism. The current polarization in our political landscape is testament to this, we have been unable to separate, grow and change as needed.
Anarchist writer ziq wrote of the importance of pragmatic flexibility.
The avoidance of hierarchies needs to be more important than sticking to a pre-written ideology… Dedicated ideologues often tarnish anarchy as being ‘vague’ and lacking in exact instruction. I’d argue this is exactly why anarchy succeeds and manages to be so ageless; reinventing itself with every new generation of revolutionaries. Prescribing a one-size-fits-all solution to life is impractical in an ever changing, multi-cultural world.
There are a few things that I can say for sure, it would require giving the land back to Indigenous peoples. It would require total rejection of private property. It would require radical and uncompromising transition to an anti-colonial future. That is necessarily unsettling. It’s also liberating. It would bring all decision-making back down to a local level. Most political decision-making is already done at the local level, the point would be to replace local governments which are hierarchical power structures, with bottom-up councils (or whatever form best suits the local community) and consensus decision making.
Here are a few other visions/anti-visions for the anti-colonial future.
In a different essay, Do Anarchists Support Democracy? ziq said this
Instead of a large group laboring to make democracy work so they can agree on a course of action, it would be far more productive for smaller groups made up of people with shared interests to splinter off and co-operate to follow their own plans that require no compromise because their interests are already aligned.
Métis activist Tawinikay, in a 2018 speech described her vision this way
I would like to see the centralized state of Canada dismantled. I’d like to see communities take up the responsibility of organizing themselves in the absence of said central authority. Community councils meeting weekly to discuss the needs of the community and the limitations of the land to provide for those needs, with a renewed emphasis on staying within those limits. Decisions made on consensus, with a more active participation from all persons. Participation made more accessible by the lessening of work necessary with the return to a subsistence economy rather than one of accumulation. I’d like to see more conversation, more cooperation, more shared production. A system that may have regional communication and collaboration, but always with an emphasis on the primacy of the community to determine its own needs and values.
The YouTube essayist The Anti-School Teacher explores this topic in his video “Replace it with Nothing.”
The YouTube essayist Anark explores the topic in his video, “After the Revolution.”
In his book, The Solutions are Already Here, Peter Gelderloos dedicated an entire chapter to imagining what the Catalonia region of Spain would look like after the successful overthrow of the modern nation-state. It begins
“A huge amount of resources have been spent to make it impossible for us to imagine a world free of capitalism, free of hierarchy, free of the institutions that originated in colonialism. As such, the only kind of imaginary that is articulated and practiced in dominant society is that of the technocratic engineer drafting blueprints onto a passive territory. One of the most potent weapons against such interventionism is situated imagining, looking at the world around us, tracing the relations we have and could have, listening to their needs, and giving those needs free rein to develop, to see what directions they pull us in.
If you did not take your eyes off the page after reading that, do so. Give yourself a moment to understand what I’m really getting at. “The world around us” is not an abstract figure. It means the ground underneath your feet. It means the organisms that provide the air you breathe, and the machines that poison it. It means the food in your pantry or refrigerator, the machines that gave it its present form. The land this food comes from, and perhaps other land, much closer at hand, from which it could come, but does not. And the why of it all.”
As he says, this process of moving into a future toward the values of freedom, equality, and solidarity is not an abstract process. It must be rooted in direct relationship with your immediate world: the people you know and interact with, the land you live on, the communities you travel through, the ecosystem you live within; it is about transforming your world through real, tangible, direct relationships and action.
Depending on how familiar you are with this, you may have a lot of skepticism or questions about how this will work. That is understandable. It is important to bear in mind that there are already nonhierarchical egalitarian societies, some have existed for millennia, others are brand new. The Zapatista’s have reasserted control over Chiapas in a mayan revolution. The Mapuche never ceded their land. In northern Syria, Rojava has been designed completely based on Murray Bookchin’s principles as interpreted and articulated by the Kurdish revolutionary Abdullah Ocalan. While still fledgling and surrounded by threats, Rojava has been growing over the past decade and represents one of the bright spots for egalitarian democracy in the world today.
SO THEN, HOW WILL MY UNCLE GET HIS INSULIN?
Wars are not won by generals, but by soldiers. Ships are not sailed by captains, but by sailors. Nike would cease to exist if the workers stopped going in to the factories. The entire economy would fall apart if people decided to go on a General Strike, and stopped participating. The existence of modern society rests on our, the people’s, continued participation in it. That means we, the people, have an incredible amount of power to change society. It also means, that we already do the work of the world. The people don’t need leaders, but leaders would be nothing without the people. So, if we want things to change, we, need to make the changes. No bosses, no managers, no owners need apply.
The American political and corporate classes have sought for decades to make us just comfortable enough, but not too comfortable; just happy enough with the status quo that we’re too scared to stir the pot. Meanwhile, they have waged immoral and totally unjustified wars, thwarted our efforts at universal healthcare and basic income, weakened unions, drove rents up, wages down and people onto the streets, imprisoned millions, perpetuated Indigenous genocide, divided us against each other, cut taxes for the wealthy, fomented regime changes throughout the world, defunded schools and social programs, poisoned our water with Teflon and lead, poisoned our people with opioids, with nuclear bomb tests and uranium mining, and brought our ecosystem to the brink of collapse — all while selling us on the idea that they are the greatest force for good in human history.
The concerns expressed by serious people who want a better world, but are skeptical that changes this radical are possible or even desirable are understandable. I do not believe we have all the answers or know the exact path that will get us there. Nor should we: that’s a path that has yet to be walked, many of the answers will come as we walk it.
It will mean accepting that much of our ways of being will fundamentally change.
Much of the supposed skepticism, though, is rooted in thought-stopping clichés. My Uncle will get his insulin because the people who care for him will ensure it, and if that’s not possible, it will mean accepting that death is a natural part of life. Doctors and researchers, etc. will collaborate on cures because they care about healing diseases, but they won’t destroy the environment or subjugate people to wage slavery to achieve it. Much diabetes will be reduced through better access to diverse, nutritious diets.
This isn’t about getting rid of medical research or doctors. It is about abolishing the copyright and trademark laws that allow pharmaceutical companies to withhold much needed medicine unless people can pay for it. It means abolishing the for-profit production of food, that locks food away in supermarkets while people starve on the street. It means opening the land back up for common use, and returning the land to Indigenous peoples.
It will also mean that medicine, teaching and construction are all seen as equally valuable dignifying work. People who want to be doctors will have access to education, not based on wealth or status but because it is their right to live to their heart’s desire, and not our right to withhold that from them.
As Tawinikay said, there will be no reconciliation so long as the state exists. This process necessarily means giving the land back to the rightful Indigenous stewards. You can’t have equality on stolen land, in a country built on slave labor.
When you normalize freedom, equality, and solidarity and create social structures that encourage people to develop those qualities, people will grow up believing that they have a right to have their needs met, and that everybody else does too, so when injustice occurs they will stand in solidarity.
This is not a plea for utopia. People will still do selfish things. This is a recognition that selfish people, selfish, destructive groups are far less destructive without being granted the power of the centralized nation-state.
This isn’t theoretical either, developing COVID vaccines was an extremely fast international cooperative effort demonstrating that when people are unencumbered by the traditional rules of profit motive, they can accomplish complex tasks quite quickly. The International community needed a vaccine, we more or less trusted the people who know what they’re doing to develop it (most of us did anyway), and they did.
Pointing to past societies and saying that they had brutal hierarchies too isn’t evidence that a better world is not possible. Clearly it means human beings are capable of brutality — but those societies were created through a social process that conditioned people and shaped their behavior, and they in turn continued to shape that society based on a belief that they were superior.
Just like the ecosystem, human behavior is not static, it is, as Bookchin said, highly flexible. We, at this point in history, now have the knowledge of how destructive many historical societies have been, which means we have the power to reject their ways entirely.
We need to have faith in ourselves and one another. This is achieved through direct action with people. When you stand on the frontlines with someone, you form a bond. When you stand on the frontlines to affirm someone’s right to exist and be free, you affirm your own humanity and freedom. The bonds of hard won solidarity are unbreakable. The more people we bring in, and the more we rebel, the stronger those bonds will be.
It also means people need to be autonomous, and empowered to direct their own rebellions as they see fit based on their own circumstances. Our role is to affirm one another’s dignity. Too often, white liberals steeped in the logic of “Western” hierarchies, seeing their way as morally superior, have harmed, policed, isolated, and undermined movements when they didn’t agree with their tactics or goals. This is oppressive counter-insurgent violence. Moreover, too often movements die because they orient themselves around charismatic top-down leadership rather than encouraging communities to set their agenda from the bottom up.
People who are concerned about crime and harm doers have valid concerns. Crime is an issue bred from social and/or economic need. Violence like sexual assault and murder are directly tied to the current patriarchal social conditions. One of the core notions of freedom is that self-defense is fundamentally affirming of the dignity of the victim, and that stepping in to protect someone else’s freedom is also the right thing to do. This includes a full range of potential responses (as explored really well in this thread by Lee Shevek). Dealing with harm-doers affirms freedom.
Same goes with communities — armed self-defense is fully compatible with freedom, equality, and solidarity, though hopefully a society based on those principles would be peaceful. The difference is, the choice to engage in some sort of armed conflict should be made directly by the communities involved, and the stakeholders, not by so-called leaders, representatives, or generals who drag other people’s children into unjust wars for oil.
In order to precipitate this kind of radical transformation of society, a lot of work has to be done beforehand. People need to be at a place where they are certain the future society will be better than this one or at least that things can’t get worse. They need to feel empowered to take action for themselves. That means many people may not live to see the fruits of their labor. The work is still life affirming.
Our task moving ahead is to till the soil, to shake shit up, to build alternatives within this current society, to instill some rebelliousness back into ourselves again; to stop settling for small reforms that are easily taken away; to pull ourselves out of our consumerist torpor that has been thrust upon us by greedy shitheads who think only of quarterly profits; To know that a better world IS possible, and that if we want to create it, it’s up to us.
The exact shape the revolution(s) need to take is not known, but the character of the movements must be rowdy, must be anti-authoritarian, anti-colonial, must be egalitarian, bottom up, multi-faceted, autonomous and local, must be driven by a deep sense of commitment to freedom, equality, and solidarity (or the variation that makes the most sense to you!) at all levels and in all forms for all people, must create people who will fight for themselves, and must be a total-negation of the “Western” social order.
Anything less will fall short.
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Unfortunately we don’t yet live in a stateless, classless, moneyless society and I have to pay my rent. So, if you enjoyed this essay, send me a tip! neil.p.blakemore@gmail.com on Paypal. @Neil-Blakemore on Venmo.
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Works and Writing that have influenced my thinking for this essay (There are many more, but these were directly quoted).
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-black-seed-issue-5#toc13 (Look for The Erotic Life of Rocks)
https://www.marxists.org/archive/malatesta/1922/ends-and-means.html (Errico Malatesta)
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything
Though not directly quoted or included in this draft, this video series by Daniel Baryon aka Anark is a must watch.
