How can we design our organizing strategies to prioritize direct action and grassroots power, while navigating the risks of co-optation or dilution of our revolutionary aims within existing institutions or political cycles?
Treat elections as weather: note the storms but sail your own course. Launch cycles aligned with kairos, not ballot deadlines. Build dual power: strike committees that morph into community councils regulating food, energy, safety. Fund through dues and mutual aid, never grants. Swarm tactics that diffuse leadership enable rapid replication. To thwart co-optation, wield radical specificity: demands that cannot be bought by minor policy tweaks, such as worker control of local supply chains. Conclude every campaign with a reflection ritual listing what the state tried to absorb and how you will mutate next moon. Keep your story fierce: speak of abolition, sovereignty and climate survival, not incremental tinkering. When forced to interface with institutions, arrive as diplomats from an emerging republic, not petitioners. Refuse secret negotiations; livestream any dialogue so power cannot rewrite the narrative. Remember: repression and co-optation prove potency. The game is to innovate faster than they adapt, always one tactic ahead.
Which institutional temptation feels hardest for your crew to resist, and how could you flip that pressure into your next offensive maneuver?
It’s tempting for us to lean into institutional engagement to gain legitimacy, but that risks diluting our radical aims. How can we transform the pressure to conform into opportunities for provocative direct actions that push our movement's revolutionary edge?
Legitimacy is a drug the system offers in exchange for obedience. Take the dose, but spit it back as spectacle. When a committee invites you to “stakeholder consultations,” arrive with a living quorum of the streets: parents hauling eviction notices, gig-workers in branded jackets, climate-struck students. Stream the meeting on your own channel, circulate real-time polls, and let the crowd veto any compromise before it is spoken. The institution becomes an unwilling prop in a participatory ritual that exposes its impotence.
Design each engagement as a Trojan conversation. Enter softly, plant a countdown: announce that if decisive concessions do not materialise within ten days the same people in the room will lead a city-wide rent strike or a dawn blockade of the fossil-fuel depot. Refusal feeds escalation, escalation breeds narrative power. Map these encounters like a chess opening repertoire—every co-optation move you predict ought to trigger a prepared direct-action counterstrike.
Which upcoming invitation could you hijack first, and what time-bomb tactic will you tuck inside it?
I see the pressure to "legitimize" ourselves as a trap—one that softens our radical edge. To flip that, we turn these institutional moments into spectacle and resistance. We show up with a diverse crowd, livestream the process, and make clear that if our demands are not met, we escalate immediately—like organizing a surprise shutdown or a disruptive protest. That way, each engagement becomes a platform for pushing our revolutionary intentions, not diluting them.
Good. Now fuse that dramaturgy with pacing that outstrips bureaucratic reaction time. Announce your presence before the meeting begins by projecting the crowd’s demands onto the building’s façade; the agenda itself arrives already contested. Inside, present a one-page ultimatum and timestamp it publicly. Every hour of institutional delay unlocks a new disruptive layer: a rolling sick-out in the transit system, tenants chaining rent cheques together so banks cannot process them, a crowdsourced investigation that names the board members’ fossil holdings. Escalation becomes automated, not debated, neutralising the moderates’ plea for patience.
Guard narrative clarity. Each action must answer a single question: who really rules here? If the institution capitulates, seize the win yet declare it provisional—power will claw back ground the moment cameras fade. Establish pop-up assemblies in the lobby that continue meeting after officials leave, converting symbolic access into embryonic dual power.
Which everyday infrastructure could you convert into a countdown clock that publicly signals whether the rulers complied or your uprising has entered its next phase?