Rebuilding Collective Power Today

How new solidarities and autonomous spaces can revive class consciousness

Introduction

We are living in a time when the old languages of solidarity no longer communicate. The word worker once carried a singular image—a body in a factory, a union card in hand, a shared shift whistle calling thousands at once. Those images have evaporated into code, gig apps, and service interactions spread across screens and streets. Under neoliberalism, this dispersal is celebrated as flexibility and freedom, yet it is primarily a method of dissolving class identity. The factory has been replaced by invisible corridors of individual hustle, while the collective spirit that once animated solidarities has been captured by algorithm and fear.

This dispersal carries a profound political consequence: when class consciousness erodes, so does the capacity for coordinated defiance. Each worker becomes a brand. Each grievance becomes a personal failure rather than a structural wound. Trade unions—once engines of imagination and resistance—find themselves defending crumbs instead of redesigning the bakery. To survive, they must reinvent both their purpose and their ritual forms.

The challenge is not merely organizational. It is psychological and cultural. We need new ceremonies of belonging, new mythologies of cooperation, and shared sanctuaries where solidarity can be practiced as daily life rather than nostalgic slogan. What follows is a vision for reconstructing collective power: stitching fragmented workers into a renewed class identity, building autonomous spaces that embody alternative values, and using storytelling as the weapon that turns ordinary cooperation into insurgent imagination.

The thesis is simple: only when solidarity becomes visible, lived, and creative again will movements regain the confidence to challenge neoliberal hegemony and craft new sovereignties beyond it.

Reimagining Class Consciousness in a Fragmented Economy

Neoliberal capitalism thrives on the illusion that everyone is an entrepreneur of the self. The gig economy is not an accident but the logical endpoint of that ideology—a condition where precarity feels voluntary and exploitation hides beneath flexible scheduling. Rebuilding class consciousness begins by naming this illusion and mapping the hidden connections that tie scattered workers together.

Stitching the Dispersed Workforce

Imagine the new workforce not as scattered atoms but as a hidden network of value extraction. The rider delivering meals, the coder debugging apps, the caregiver tending elderly relatives—all contribute to a single circuit of accumulation. The aim is to transform these dispersed sites of labour into nodes of recognition. Mixed-sector assemblies, hybrid forums, and listening circles are contemporary equivalents of the old factory meeting. They create what one might call narrative density—spaces where participants realize their struggles share a common infrastructure.

These assemblies are not therapy sessions; they are laboratories of power. When people from distinct sectors compare how algorithms, landlords, and subcontractors orchestrate their conditions, they begin to perceive the architecture of their collective subordination. Out of that recognition arises the possibility of shared action that transcends sectoral limits.

From Employee Identity to Collective Myth

Old trade unions built solidarity through shared contracts and predictable routines. The new condition of class fragmentation demands mythic storytelling instead. Every generation needs its own unifying fiction to mobilize willpower. Today, the myth must proclaim that everyone renting their life to data platforms or service chains is part of one working class. Stories catalyze identification faster than ideology alone.

Public rituals can make this myth tangible. Group rent strikes, synchronized “log-off hours,” or coordinated boycotts turn private economic frustration into visible collective rhythm. Such gestures dramatize interdependence, creating the sense that liberation from isolation is itself a political event.

The Strategic Value of Visibility

Visibility functions as solidarity’s oxygen. When each micro-occupation or gig worker can see the others, fear loses its hold. Pop-up gatherings in public squares, simultaneous citywide lunches, or digital dashboards showing hours of unpaid labour made visible all cultivate the sense that the invisible workforce is vast and awake. Visibility transforms scattered frustrations into an emergent political subject.

By merging myth, story, and visibility, movements excavate the raw material from which class consciousness can be reforged.

Transitioning from diagnosis to spatial practice, the next step examines how to embody collective power within real, physical autonomous spaces.

Autonomous Spaces as Engines of Solidarity

The neoliberal city is designed for transaction, not congregation. Public life shrinks into privatized enclosures—cafés charging rent by the minute, coworking towers run as commodities. Yet beneath this architecture of consumption lies its weakest point: the existence of countless derelict spaces, neglected buildings and underused halls awaiting new ownership. Autonomous spaces occupy these voids not merely to house meetings but to operate as proof that cooperation can outperform capital.

Organizing the Commons Makeover

Start with cartography. Identify every vacant storefront, church hall, old pub or school within cycling distance. Each represents an opportunity to challenge enclosure. When possible, negotiate minimal rent through community benefit—offering to renovate or animate the property in exchange for access. When authority resists, direct action can rewrite the rules: a weekend-long commons makeover conducted without permission can transform an empty site into a vibrant hub before bureaucracy even takes notice. Speed is political leverage.

Inside these hubs, combine utility with symbolism. Include childcare cooperatives, repair labs, free libraries and hot-desking zones for freelancers who refuse isolation. Blend digital infrastructure with tangible community life—secure chats for coordination, portable strike funds, and ledger walls recording victories and failures alike. In each case, the hybrid of physical and digital enhances resilience against surveillance and co-optation.

Financing the Space Without Reproducing Capitalism

Autonomous spaces should not rely on philanthropic donors who dilute their radical intention. Instead, design internal currencies of solidarity. A simple method is issuing solidarity bonds: small-value shares purchased collectively and redeemable in local services—meals, legal clinics, or shared workspace time. This reconfigures investment as reciprocity rather than speculation. Money cycles through mutual obligation rather than extraction.

Daily governance must also defy hierarchical norms. Stewards chosen by rotating lottery, open assemblies for budgeting, and transparent ledgers literally painted on the walls resist bureaucratic ossification. Every decision becomes public theatre, showing that democracy can function better than managerial control. The building itself becomes pedagogy.

Architecture as Political Manifesto

Even the decor of these spaces communicates resistance. Graffiti-like data boards listing rents prevented, hours volunteered, or wages recovered transform statistics into living testimony. Corridors lined with portraits of local cleaners, drivers and coders remind visitors who sustains the city. A room infused with collective meaning grows immune to commodification; it refuses to serve as mere venue and instead becomes an altar of shared purpose.

Such hubs are not utopias detached from struggle. They are base camps for urban reinvention, command posts for campaigns, and sanctuaries of rest after battle. Each becomes evidence that self-organization can deliver order and beauty without capital’s permission. Through direct occupation, participatory governance, and visible mutual aid, movements reclaim the everyday as terrain of revolutionary practice.

Transitioning from autonomous infrastructure to its narrative ecosystem, the next section explores how storytelling and visibility cement solidarity in cultural memory.

Storytelling as Revolutionary Infrastructure

Every social order sustains itself through myth. Neoliberalism’s dominant myth is that success belongs to the self-reliant individual. To counter it, activism must create an alternative mythology of interdependence where achievement means shared flourishing rather than personal ascent. Storytelling re-enchants solidarity by converting statistics into shared memory.

Turning Walls into Memory Banks

Begin with art that remembers. Community murals depicting local histories of resistance transform grey walls into archives the public can read in passing. When each brushstroke carries a resident’s hand, historical abstraction becomes immediate. Such murals are more than decoration—they function as mnemonic batteries that recharge collective pride.

Deepen the ritual by adding living ledgers: chalk marks or painted symbols that record ongoing acts of solidarity—hours volunteered, meals shared, debts forgiven. Visitors erase a mark only by committing new contributions, turning the wall into an evolving contract of mutual care. History becomes alive, and reciprocity becomes tangible.

Public Rituals of Cooperation

Ritual transforms belief into behavior. Monthly commons feasts hosted in the street can fuse nourishment with message: cooking surplus groceries while publishing real-time data about wage theft or eviction rates. Eating together dissolves the psychological borders that neoliberalism installs between consumer and worker. Each shared pot becomes political theatre announcing that cooperation is more satisfying than competition.

On ordinary days, collective work-ins—public co-working sessions where freelancers, translators, carers and coders share tables—turn invisible labor into spectacle. Overhead screens displaying cumulative income redirected to mutual funds turn activity into demonstration. Passersby see coordination defeating isolation.

Processional Narratives

Demonstrations themselves can be reimagined as narrative journeys. Rather than static marches, imagine processional workshops where participants carry half-finished banners inviting strangers to add grievances along the route. The fabric grows longer with each encounter until it wraps city squares in collective handwriting. Petition becomes art, and art becomes protest. No algorithm translates it; message travels mouth to mouth, reclaiming the human act of retelling.

Folklore Against the Algorithm

In a society where every moment invites documentation, refusing digital capture becomes subversive. Leave events to oral transmission. Let each retelling mutate facts creatively until they become legend. Folklore multiplies faster than state surveillance can catalog. A movement remembered through story, not file, cannot be deleted.

When storytelling is lived rather than posted, solidarity acquires longevity. The narrative of shared effort binds generations together, ensuring that activism outlives platforms. Thus storytelling functions as the bloodstream of revolutionary infrastructure, circulating values where institutions once stood.

The next section turns from narrative to collective practice, exploring how daily rituals of cooperation translate vision into structural power.

Collective Rituals and the Everyday Revolution

True transformation occurs when the act of living itself contradicts the dominant ideology. In neoliberal society, competition saturates every gesture—from job seeking to self-promotion. To counter it, activists must craft daily rituals that celebrate cooperation and materialize shared power. These rituals function as embodied propaganda.

The Reverse CV Parade

Instead of glorifying achievement, imagine parades where participants display placards listing the unpaid and invisible labor they perform: caregiving, community support, mutual aid deliveries. By publicizing what capitalism hides, such processions invert humiliation into pride. They expose the foundational hypocrisy of meritocracy and remake dignity as a collective property.

These parades need not seek media validation. Their power lies in the discomfort they create for onlookers habituated to private success. Each placard acts as mirror, reminding passersby that the urban economy depends on hidden labor rendered voiceless.

The Ritual of Collective Renewal

Victories must be celebrated communally, not personally. A practice such as repainting the outer wall of an autonomous hub after each campaign—erasing all names and rewriting them together—demonstrates that success is a shared act. Erasure here is not loss but purification from ego. The ritual teaches participants that achievement belongs to the process, not the individual.

Similarly, shared maintenance days, collective meals, and non-monetary exchanges reinforce that cooperation is the default condition of life. Over time, such rituals weave a texture of mutual reliability stronger than any formal contract.

Creative Disobedience as Spiritual Discipline

Movements endure only when they integrate rebellion into culture, not sporadic spectacle. Art, song, and daily coordination must feel as natural as breathing. Once disobedience becomes daily routine, the psychic distance between protest and life collapses. A society raised on obedience needs precisely this intimacy with rule-breaking to recover its moral imagination.

Autonomous spaces thus evolve into living temples where ordinary cooperation becomes a sacrament. Through repetition, participants internalize a new moral order grounded in solidarity rather than competition. The revolution, in this view, is not an event waiting to arrive but a new habit already being rehearsed.

The final section translates these principles into actionable guidelines for activists seeking to build and sustain such spaces in the present moment.

Putting Theory Into Practice

Bringing these ideas to life requires concrete practices that blend experimentation with discipline. The following steps outline how organizers can begin.

1. Map and Occupy Gaps
Identify dormant or neglected urban sites—vacant shops, abandoned offices, underused halls. Evaluate access routes and visibility. Where negotiation fails, stage rapid occupation events that transform them before authorities react. Treat speed as persuasion and visibility as protection.

2. Build the Solidarity Stack
Combine physical hubs with digital infrastructure: secure messaging channels, SMS-based dues systems, and portable strike funds. Ensure redundancy so repression in one domain does not dissolve the whole structure.

3. Finance Through Reciprocity, Not Charity
Issue small solidarity bonds redeemable in shared services. Track transactions publicly to maintain transparency and faith. Keep external funders at arm’s length to preserve political autonomy.

4. Govern Through Ritualized Democracy
Organize weekly open assemblies and rotating stewardship teams. Display budgets and decisions on physical walls. Involve newcomers quickly through visible task rotations to avoid centralization of charisma.

5. Make Storytelling a Daily Habit
Maintain murals, living ledgers, and oral storytelling sessions. Use each meeting to recount local victories and historic analogies. Treat narrative as practical infrastructure, not ornament.

6. Stage Cooperative Spectacle
Plan public rituals such as commons feasts or reverse CV parades that contrast visibly with consumer culture. Allow participation from neighbors and bystanders to expand the emotional perimeter of solidarity.

7. Embed Psychological Care
Schedule decompression rituals and reflection nights after intense actions to sustain morale. Protect the psyche by sharing emotional labor collectively rather than delegating it to leaders or professionals.

8. Measure Sovereignty, Not Size
Count progress not by crowd numbers but by degrees of autonomy gained—spaces liberated, decisions made without external authority, income redirected toward mutual funds. Victory equals new self-rule.

When practiced collectively, these steps generate a cycle of renewal where each small success becomes fuel for broader transformation.

Conclusion

The decline of traditional unions is not simply a failure of leadership; it signals a deeper shift in the political metabolism of capitalism. The world of stable workplaces and uniform contracts has dissolved, replaced by fragmented identities and gig-based survival. Yet within this fragmentation hides untapped potential. Every dispersed worker carries a fragment of the collective body waiting to be reassembled.

Rebuilding class consciousness requires more than nostalgic revival of industrial traditions. It demands the invention of forms that fit the fluid conditions of contemporary life. By weaving together autonomous spaces, creative rituals, and storytelling infrastructures, activists can turn neoliberal atomization into material for solidarity’s rebirth.

The real battle is spiritual as much as structural: a confrontation between the myth of individual triumph and the lived truth of mutual dependence. Each autonomous hub, each mural, each shared meal is a rehearsal for a future where cooperation eclipses competition.

The measure of success will not be membership numbers or social-media reach, but the ability to generate new sovereignties—self-managed realms of collective meaning that persist beyond protest cycles. These spaces prefigure the society we claim to desire.

The question that remains is not whether such transformation is possible, but where the next experiment will begin. Which building in your city waits to declare independence from the logic of profit and be reborn as a laboratory of common life?