Autonomous Skills and Collective Solidarity

Introduction

Autonomous skills are back in fashion. In times of crisis, activists rediscover the appeal of self-reliance: grow your own food, print your own media, secure your own communications, map your own territory. When systems wobble, we reach for tools that promise continuity if the grid fails. Yet there is a danger buried inside this instinct. The line between collective autonomy and individual survivalism is thin, and the system prefers us alone.

Every empire teaches obedience through the myth of stability. We are told the wheels must keep turning, that disruption equals death, that responsible citizens tend the machinery. But crises reveal the fragility beneath the spectacle. Pandemics, financial crashes, climate disasters expose how dependent the machine is on compliant bodies. When obedience falters, so does the illusion of inevitability.

The question is not whether to cultivate autonomous skills. It is how to ensure those skills deepen solidarity rather than harden isolation. How do you practice printmaking, mutual aid, territorial awareness or food sovereignty in a way that strengthens shared purpose instead of producing micro-entrepreneurs of resilience? How do you avoid becoming unpaid subcontractors of the very system you oppose?

The thesis is simple but demanding: autonomous skills must be ritualized as collective practices oriented toward sovereignty, not survival. When embedded in shared storytelling, transparent processes and an explicit theory of change, they become engines of trust and prefiguration. When hoarded or professionalized, they become another cog in the machine.

The Trap of Survivalism: When Autonomy Becomes Isolation

Autonomy is seductive because it feels like control in a world spiraling beyond your grasp. Learn to print your own materials and you are less dependent on corporate platforms. Learn first aid and you are less vulnerable to institutional neglect. Learn to grow food and you reduce reliance on fragile supply chains.

Yet autonomy practiced as an individual hedge against collapse mirrors the logic of the system. It assumes scarcity, competition and privatized risk. It says: prepare yourself. It whispers: trust no one.

The System Loves the Isolated Prepper

The dominant order does not fear your backyard garden. It does not tremble at your personal generator or encrypted chat. In fact, it benefits when responsibility shifts downward. If you can patch your own wounds, print your own flyers and manage your own anxiety, the state can retreat without conceding power.

This is the co-administration trap. You step in to solve gaps left by austerity or repression. You distribute masks during a health crisis, coordinate relief, maintain order. Soon you are navigating permits, negotiating with authorities, aligning with official guidelines to avoid repression. The radical impulse morphs into crisis management.

History is littered with movements that slid from insurrectionary energy into bureaucratic caretaking. Occupy Wall Street generated a contagious critique of inequality in 2011, spreading to hundreds of cities within weeks. Yet as encampments stabilized, energy shifted from disruption to logistics: food safety, sanitation, internal governance. The state waited, then evicted. Without a path to sovereignty, the ritual decayed into memory.

The lesson is not to avoid care or infrastructure. It is to avoid mistaking maintenance for transformation.

Autonomy Without Solidarity Reinforces Division

Individual resilience can inadvertently reinforce class and cultural divides. Those with resources accumulate skills and tools. Those without remain dependent. The movement fragments into experts and spectators.

When a skill becomes a badge of distinction rather than a shared commons, hierarchy creeps in. The person who owns the press, controls the server, holds the medical knowledge becomes indispensable. Authority reconstitutes itself inside the alternative.

If your autonomous practice cannot survive your absence, it is not autonomy. It is personal leverage.

To escape this trap, skills must be collectivized, demystified and embedded in rituals that generate mutual reliance. Autonomy must scale sideways, not upward. This shift moves us from survivalism toward sovereignty.

Ritual as Infrastructure: Turning Skills into Commons

Movements are not just campaigns. They are ritual engines. They transform strangers into comrades through repeated, meaningful acts. The danger lies not in repetition itself but in predictable repetition. When a tactic becomes a script, power adapts and neutralizes it. But when a skill becomes a living ritual, open to remix and participation, it builds trust faster than repression can track.

Printmaking as Rehearsal for Sovereignty

Consider neighborhood printmaking. On the surface it is a technical skill. Ink, paper, layout, distribution. But when organized as a collective ritual, it becomes something more profound.

A communal print session gathers bodies in a shared space. Decisions about content are debated. Language is sharpened. Disagreements surface and are metabolized. Hands learn together. The product circulates physically, bypassing algorithmic choke points.

This is not nostalgia for paper. It is a rehearsal for sovereignty. A group that can articulate its own narrative and distribute it autonomously has already captured a fragment of authority. The Diebold email leak in 2003 demonstrated how decentralized mirroring of suppressed information could overwhelm legal intimidation. When students and activists replicated files across servers, including a U.S. Congressional server, the attempt at censorship collapsed. Distribution was defense.

Yet the power was not in technical skill alone. It was in collective participation. Many hands reduced vulnerability. Transparency prevented co-option. The act of mirroring became a shared defiance.

If printmaking becomes a service provided by one skilled member, it drifts toward dependency. If it is opened, taught, rotated and remixed, it becomes a commons. The ritual is the point.

Transparency as Antidote to Co-option

Co-option thrives in opacity. When processes are hidden, leaders can negotiate quietly, compromise invisibly, or steer direction without consent. Transparent rituals disrupt this dynamic.

Open print sessions, public editorial debates, shared skill maps of the neighborhood create a culture where power circulates. You inoculate your group against charismatic capture by making methods explicit.

Transparency also accelerates diffusion. Digital connectivity shrank the spread of new tactics from months to hours. A ritual that is easy to observe and replicate multiplies. Québec’s casseroles in 2012 transformed private kitchens into public protest. Nightly pot-and-pan banging required no permit, no central committee. The sound itself carried coordination. The ritual was accessible, joyful and contagious.

The insight is clear: design skills as rituals that others can inherit without asking permission. That is how solidarity thickens.

Collective Storytelling: The Strategic Core of Solidarity

Skills without story are tools without direction. A movement that can print but cannot articulate why it prints will drift. Collective storytelling is not a soft add-on. It is the furnace where purpose is forged.

Story as Theory of Change

Every tactic hides an implicit theory of change. Do you believe disruption forces concessions? That crisis ripeness determines outcomes? That consciousness shifts precede material transformation? Naming your story clarifies your strategy.

The U.S. civil rights movement fused direct action with a moral narrative that reframed segregation as a spiritual crime. Sit-ins and marches were not random disruptions. They were staged to reveal injustice on national television, triggering epiphany in the broader public. Voluntarist action met subjectivist transformation.

Collective storytelling sessions allow your group to surface these assumptions. Why are we here? What do we believe will actually shift power? Where are we blind?

When anyone can contribute, remix or challenge the shared narrative, you avoid dogma. The story becomes a living document, not a sacred text.

Vulnerability as Strategic Asset

Storytelling is risky because it invites vulnerability. Participants reveal fears, traumas, contradictions. But vulnerability, when held collectively, becomes adhesive. Trust grows not from polished manifestos but from honest testimony.

Movements often fracture over unspoken tensions. Resentments calcify. Power imbalances hide. Open storytelling rituals surface these dynamics before they metastasize.

There is also a psychological dimension. Activism assumes catastrophe has already occurred. Climate breakdown, democratic erosion, economic precarity create ambient despair. Without spaces to metabolize this grief, movements burn out or radicalize into nihilism.

Ritualized storytelling protects the psyche. It acknowledges fear without surrendering to it. It reframes despair as shared rather than private. Psychological safety is not indulgence. It is strategic durability.

Naming the Taboo

Every movement has a forbidden topic. Perhaps it is internal class tension. Perhaps it is disagreement over tactics, including violence. Perhaps it is doubt about eventual victory.

The most dangerous yet necessary act is to name this taboo aloud. Authority hates a question it cannot answer. So do movements.

When you design storytelling rituals that invite challenge, you prevent stagnation. You make it safer to dissent internally than to splinter externally. Solidarity becomes rugged enough to hold disagreement.

This is how you move beyond survival toward shared purpose. The group does not merely prepare for collapse. It imagines and rehearses a different order.

From Mutual Aid to Sovereignty: Beyond Co-Administration

Mutual aid surged globally during the COVID-19 pandemic. Neighbors delivered groceries, sewed masks, shared funds. These acts were beautiful and necessary. They revealed how quickly solidarity can emerge when institutions falter.

But mutual aid can stall at charity. It risks becoming a patch on a broken system rather than a wedge to replace it.

The Difference Between Service and Power

Service alleviates suffering within existing structures. Power redesigns those structures.

If your food distribution network remains dependent on state permits, corporate supply chains and philanthropic grants, it is fragile. If it evolves into community-controlled agriculture, land trusts or cooperative markets, it accumulates sovereignty.

The goal is not to reject collaboration outright but to measure progress differently. Count sovereignty gained, not heads served. Have you increased the community’s capacity to decide for itself? Have you reduced dependency on hostile institutions?

Queen Nanny’s maroon communities in eighteenth-century Jamaica did not simply hide from colonial authorities. They forged autonomous settlements, negotiated treaties and defended territory. Their survival was collective and political. It carved out space beyond plantation control.

Temporal Strategy: Burst and Build

Movements operate in twin temporalities. There are fast bursts of disruption and slow projects of institution-building. The art is to fuse them.

A print campaign may spike attention around a specific injustice. A storytelling circle may crystallize shared analysis. But these must feed into longer-term structures such as cooperatives, councils or digital commons that embody the alternative.

Time is a weapon. Bureaucracies move slowly. If you crest and vanish inside a short cycle, you exploit reaction lag. But if you never cool your energy into durable forms, you dissipate.

The challenge is to treat each ritual as both spark and scaffold. Disrupt, then consolidate. Agitate, then institutionalize on your own terms.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To ensure your prioritized skills and rituals deepen solidarity rather than isolation, adopt a deliberate framework:

• Collectivize the Skill: Design every autonomous practice so it can be taught, rotated and replicated. Document processes openly. If one person leaves, the ritual survives.

• Embed Story Sessions: Pair technical gatherings with structured storytelling. Begin or end print nights, food distributions or training sessions with a circle that asks: why are we doing this and what are we building?

• Map Sovereignty Gains: Create a simple metric for tracking increased self-rule. Did this month’s actions reduce reliance on an external authority? Did they expand collective decision-making power?

• Surface the Taboo: At least quarterly, host a facilitated session dedicated to naming unspoken tensions or doubts. Normalize internal critique as loyalty, not betrayal.

• Design for Diffusion: Make your rituals easy to copy. Publish guides, host open workshops, invite neighboring groups. A tactic that spreads laterally builds resilience against repression.

These steps anchor autonomy in shared purpose. They shift the question from how do I survive to how do we govern ourselves.

Conclusion

Autonomous skills are not inherently radical. They can either fortify isolation or fertilize solidarity. The difference lies in ritualization, transparency and story.

When you practice printmaking as a collective commons, you rehearse narrative sovereignty. When you embed storytelling into your gatherings, you clarify your theory of change and metabolize despair. When you measure progress by sovereignty gained rather than services delivered, you resist the slide into co-administration.

The machine demands obedient stability. It relies on individuals tending its wheels. Your task is not merely to step away from the machinery but to assemble another engine altogether, one powered by trust, shared risk and imaginative defiance.

The future of resistance is not bigger crowds repeating predictable scripts. It is smaller circles inventing rituals that scale sideways, building fragments of self-rule that can interlock when crisis peaks.

If collapse came tomorrow, would your group know how to decide together? Would you trust one another enough to govern yourselves? That is the real test of whether your autonomous skills have matured into collective sovereignty.