Transitional Strategy for Abolishing Property and State

Introduction

Every revolutionary movement faces a dangerous paradox. You want to abolish property, dismantle the state, and end exchange as the organizing logic of society. Yet you must act inside a world structured by deeds, police, contracts, wages, and money. How do you build the bridge without becoming the bridgekeeper?

Too often, movements drift into reformist gravity. Transitional measures that were meant to erode domination instead stabilize it. A cooperative becomes a competitive firm. A community land trust becomes a niche landlord. A direct democracy experiment ossifies into a committee with permanent chairs. The revolution shrinks into administration.

The problem is not that transition is necessary. The problem is that transition is usually designed without a theory of disappearance. If you do not intentionally encode abolition into your interim structures, those structures will defend themselves. Every institution has survival instincts.

The strategic task, then, is to design transitional measures that actively dissolve property, state power, and exchange while cultivating collective awareness and shared sovereignty. These measures must be more than symbolic gestures. They must be rehearsals that feel different in the body, that alter habits, that change how people relate to time, taste, touch, and each other.

The thesis is simple and demanding: transitional institutions must be built as self-eroding scaffolds, pedagogical rituals, and sensory laboratories of sovereignty. Only then can they avoid becoming the next regime.

Transitional Measures as Disappearing Scaffolds

The first principle is ruthless: every transitional structure must contain its own sunset.

Movements often design institutions for durability. Longevity feels like success. But if your ultimate aim is the abolition of property, state, and exchange, durability can be counterrevolutionary. The scaffold must not confuse itself with the building.

Design for Self-Abolition

Embed expiration into your structures.

A community land trust, for example, can declare from its founding charter that after a fixed period of collective learning, formal titles will convert into renewable stewardship licenses subject to regular communal review. The point is not legal purity. The point is to normalize the idea that possession is conditional on community consent, not eternal right.

A mutual aid fund can adopt a depletion mandate. Instead of accumulating reserves, it must redistribute all surplus within a defined cycle. If funds exceed a threshold, automatic triggers convert excess into free distribution events or debt cancellation. Accumulation becomes structurally difficult.

A worker cooperative can include an anti-accumulation valve: no retained earnings beyond a shared cap, no individual equity that appreciates, and a rule that any wage differentials must narrow annually until they disappear. The organization is placed on a glide path away from market logic.

The lesson is clear. If you do not encode non-accumulation, accumulation will encode you.

Anti-Entrenchment Architecture

The state reproduces itself through delegation and representation. Transitional measures must sabotage this tendency.

Rotate roles by lot rather than election where possible. Impose strict tenure limits. Require that anyone who holds facilitation or coordination roles must train their successor before stepping down. Authority becomes a relay race rather than a throne.

Publish all processes transparently. Make budgets, decisions, and errors visible in real time. Secrecy is the seed of bureaucratic crystallization.

These design features are not cosmetic. They shape consciousness. When people see leadership as temporary, when they expect institutions to dissolve or transform, they internalize sovereignty as something they hold directly, not something delegated upward.

Occupy Wall Street briefly embodied this energy. Its general assemblies were chaotic, inefficient, sometimes naive. Yet for a season people felt what it meant to deliberate without representation. The encampments were not sustainable. But their fragility was part of their force. They demonstrated that politics need not always be mediated by professionals.

The question is not how to freeze such moments into permanent form. The question is how to design cycles of emergence and dissolution that cultivate capacity without hardening into statehood.

To move forward, transitional measures must not only erode structures of power. They must transform how people feel sovereignty in their bodies.

Cultivating Shared Sovereignty Through Governance as Pedagogy

Abolition is not merely institutional. It is psychological. The state persists because it lives inside habits of obedience and delegation.

If your transitional measures do not confront this interior state, they will reproduce it.

Decision-Making as Training in Autonomy

Every meeting is a classroom.

Pair each major decision with a short reflection on which aspect of domination is being dismantled. If you are voting on resource allocation, name explicitly how this differs from market exchange. If you are resolving conflict, surface how you are avoiding police or courts. Make the hidden pedagogy visible.

Use nested consent models that require embodied responsibility. For instance, allow someone to block a proposal only if they commit to implementing a workable alternative. This shifts power from abstract veto to lived accountability.

Random selection for certain councils can interrupt charisma politics. It reminds participants that sovereignty is not the property of the eloquent.

The Paris Commune of 1871 offered glimpses of such governance. Officials were recallable and paid wages comparable to workers. The symbolism mattered. Authority was tethered to ordinary life. Yet even there, the logic of representation lingered. The lesson is not to reject all delegation, but to treat it as a temporary prosthetic rather than a permanent limb.

Measuring Sovereignty, Not Scale

Movements love counting participants. Bigger crowds feel like progress. But size can coexist with dependency.

Instead, develop a sovereignty dashboard. Track indicators such as:

• Frequency of reliance on police or courts
• Volume of transactions conducted without money
• Percentage of resources collectively stewarded rather than privately owned
• Number of roles rotated versus held continuously

Display these metrics publicly. When cash usage drops, when conflict resolution remains internal, when rotation increases, participants see sovereignty growing.

This transforms abstract abolition into observable change. It also exposes stagnation. If your cooperative depends on bank loans and insurance corporations as much as any small business, then despite radical rhetoric, sovereignty has not increased.

Honest measurement is an act of courage. It prevents self-congratulation.

Governance, when designed as pedagogy and tracked by sovereignty metrics, becomes a daily rehearsal in living without masters. Yet cognition alone is insufficient. Abolition must be felt.

Sensory Laboratories of Post-Exchange Life

Most political education addresses the mind. But property, state, and exchange are also sensory regimes. They organize what you taste, how you touch, how you measure time.

If you want people to commit to abolition, you must change their sensory experience.

Taste: Eating Beyond Price

Hunger is a powerful teacher.

Commons kitchens can source food outside monetary exchange where possible: gleaned produce, cooperative farms, surplus redistribution. The rule is simple. No prices, no payment, no tip jars.

Before eating, participants acknowledge collectively that no one has purchased this meal. The first bite becomes a ritual of decommodification.

Such practices echo historical moments when food became a site of uprising. Bread shortages helped ignite the French Revolution. But here the aim is not riot. It is rehearsal. What does nourishment feel like when detached from money?

Over time, participants may begin to question why food ever required exchange. The palate shifts. Abolition acquires flavor.

Touch: Unlearning Ownership

Property is tactile. It is the sensation that this object is mine.

Create spaces where objects circulate rapidly and visibly. Fabric banks where clothes are dismantled and remade on the spot. Tool libraries where borrowing is frictionless and ownership is deemphasized. Workshops where items are repaired collectively and returned to common use.

Encourage practices that erase proprietary marks. Remove brand labels. Replace them with communal insignia that signify stewardship rather than ownership.

When hands repeatedly share, fix, and redistribute objects, the nervous system learns that possession is provisional. Law is replaced by habit.

Time: Breaking the Clock of Capital

Capitalism disciplines through time. Wages are measured by the hour. Debt accrues interest by the day.

Transitional measures can disrupt this temporal regime.

Adopt cyclical rhythms tied to natural or collective calendars rather than market schedules. For example, every new moon, all internal contribution tallies reset to zero. Every full moon, roles rotate by lot. Seasonal festivals trigger redistribution of stored goods.

Publicly track days since last cash transaction or weeks since external enforcement was used. The passage of time becomes a countdown to greater autonomy.

These rituals anchor abolition in bodily rhythm. Participants do not merely endorse a theory. They feel a different tempo of life.

The Quebec casseroles during the 2012 student strike offer an instructive example. Nightly pot and pan protests transformed sound into a shared pulse. Households that never attended meetings became participants by stepping onto balconies and striking metal. The auditory field shifted. Sovereignty resonated through neighborhoods.

Sound, taste, touch, time. Each sense can be conscripted into the project of dissolving exchange and authority.

Yet sensory experimentation without structural awareness risks becoming lifestyle politics. To avoid this trap, transitional measures must consciously erode the contracts that anchor property and state.

Attacking the Contract Without Recreating It

At the heart of both state and exchange lies the contract. Political contracts delegate power. Commercial contracts codify value.

Abolition requires loosening this contractual reflex.

From Contract to Commons

Instead of bilateral agreements, prioritize multilateral commitments that are revisable and collective. For instance, rather than individual rental agreements, experiment with neighborhood stewardship pacts where responsibilities and access are periodically renegotiated in assembly.

Avoid reputational scoring systems or permanent ledgers in mutual aid platforms. Transaction histories can harden into proto-credit systems. Consider periodic deletion of records, emphasizing trust over tracking.

Where legal contracts are unavoidable, accompany them with public declarations that frame them as temporary shields rather than ultimate foundations. Name the contradiction openly. Concealment breeds drift.

Bridging Without Worshipping Reform

Transitional measures will inevitably operate within existing legal and economic frameworks. Taxes must be paid. Zoning laws obeyed or defied strategically.

The danger is not compromise per se. The danger is forgetting the horizon.

To guard against this, pair every pragmatic action with a visible gesture that dramatizes the ultimate aim. If you create a cooperative grocery, host regular free distribution days that suspend all prices. If you establish a land trust, hold assemblies that imagine full common stewardship beyond legal titles.

This dual practice mirrors successful movements that fused immediate demands with transformative imagination. Rhodes Must Fall in 2015 targeted a statue, a concrete reform. Yet the removal catalyzed deeper conversations about decolonizing curricula and institutions. The visible act cracked open broader horizons.

Your transitional measures must operate similarly. Each reform should be a doorway, not a destination.

Ultimately, the balance between revolutionary impulse and pragmatic necessity depends on intentional design. Without it, gravity wins.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To transform transitional measures into living rehearsals of abolition, implement the following steps:

• Embed sunset clauses and transformation triggers: Every new institution should include clear timelines or conditions under which it will dissolve, redistribute assets, or radically transform. Publish these commitments widely.

• Institute radical rotation and lottery selection: Limit tenure in coordination roles, rotate by lot where feasible, and require outgoing stewards to train successors. Authority must circulate.

• Create sensory rituals of decommodification: Host regular price-free meals, tool-sharing days, or clothing remaking events. Tie them to cyclical calendars and publicly track reductions in monetary exchange.

• Measure sovereignty indicators: Develop a dashboard that tracks reliance on external enforcement, money usage, and degree of collective stewardship. Review these metrics in assembly.

• Pair every reform with a horizon ritual: Whenever you implement a pragmatic measure, accompany it with an event or declaration that points beyond reform toward full abolition of property, state, and exchange.

These steps do not guarantee success. But they make drift less likely. They convert transition from a slide into a conscious choreography.

Conclusion

The abolition of property, state, and exchange will not arrive as a single decree. It will emerge, if at all, from thousands of rehearsals in which people experience sovereignty directly.

Transitional measures are unavoidable. The question is whether they entrench the world you oppose or prefigure the world you seek. By designing institutions that self-erode, by treating governance as pedagogy, by hacking the senses of taste, touch, and time, and by relentlessly measuring sovereignty rather than size, you can tilt transition toward transformation.

Revolution is not only a storm. It is also a series of small, deliberate acts that retrain the body and imagination. When people taste food without price, rotate power without fear, and watch money recede from daily life, abolition ceases to be abstraction. It becomes memory of a different way of living.

The state survives because it feels inevitable. Property endures because it feels natural. Exchange dominates because it feels practical. Your task is to make sovereignty feel more real than any of them.

Which ordinary routine in your community could you redesign tomorrow so that, for even one hour, the logic of property and state simply does not apply?