How can our movement deepen its organizational practices to move beyond superficial demands and slogans, ensuring that our horizontal structure actively fosters radical transformation rather than just reformist gestures that dilute class struggle?
Treat the general assembly not as a microphone circle but as an embryonic government-in-waiting. Instead of debating what the state should do, decide what you will seize responsibility for right now: housing, food, health, digital infrastructure. When the camp feeds the neighbourhood or keeps lights on during a blackout, slogans crystallise into lived defiance and class lines sharpen. Horizontalism gains teeth when each working group controls a concrete lever of daily life, federates with its twins across cities and publishes transparent ledgers of resources captured and redistributed.
End the cycle of protest-pause-petition by weaving production into occupation: community kitchens that cut ties to capitalist supply chains, strike funds converted into cooperative credit unions, liberated buildings turned into 24-hour clinics. Decisions then revolve around allocation, not rhetoric, compelling participants to practice the hard art of collective power rather than symbolic purity.
Measure progress in degrees of autonomy won, not likes or legislative promises. Once your assemblies can guarantee survival for their base, reformist crumbs look laughably small and the bourgeoisie recognises a rival authority, not a plea.
Which subsystem of everyday life will your movement commandeer first, and how quickly can you make the old order feel redundant?
How can we design our organizing processes to prioritize tangible control over vital everyday subsystems—like food, health, or housing—in ways that challenge the existing power dynamics and deepen our collective autonomy?
Start by running a ruthless inventory of the city’s daily metabolism: where bread is baked, insulin stored, rents funnelled, servers cooled. Publish that map inside the movement, then birth affinity guilds that each adopt one artery. A food guild strikes deals with night-shift bakers, rescues grocery waste and pilots a solidarity pantry. A housing guild practices rapid legal defense while quietly acquiring empty buildings through community land trusts. A health guild trains street medics, stocks mutual-aid pharmacies and negotiates with sympathetic clinicians.
Every guild holds decision power over its resources yet remains accountable to a federated assembly that allocates surplus and settles disputes. Regular open audits replace charismatic leadership, creating a feedback loop in which autonomy feeds legitimacy. The theory of change is simple: the more neighbours rely on us, the less they fear leaving the old system, and the more hostile that system becomes to repressing us because it would trigger visible hardship.
Stage public “switch-on” rituals when a guild hits viability: the first free clinic day, the first rent-free winter. These moments dramatise sovereignty gained and invite replication elsewhere, turning isolated experiments into a networked counter-infrastructure.
Which artery will you map tomorrow, and who will you trust to keep its pulse beating outside the market’s grasp?
What concrete steps can we take to empower each subsystem (food, housing, health) to develop independent decision-making capacities and resource control—ensuring that our collective autonomy is measured by our capacity to sustain ourselves outside the existing power structures, and how can we coordinate these efforts to maximize their transformative potential?
Begin by seeding autonomous cells around concrete needs, not abstract issues. A food cell secures a storefront, turns dumpster-diverted produce into community meals and tracks surplus on an open ledger. A housing cell forms a land trust, crowd-buys a foreclosed building and invites tenants to co-own governance. A health cell trains medics, stocks a free pharmacy and hosts nights where uninsured neighbours receive care without paperwork. Each cell adopts sociocratic circles: decisions by consent, roles rotated quarterly, budgets transparent on a public pad. Autonomy deepens when revenue streams arise inside the cell—sliding-scale cafés, tool rentals, member dues—so resources never hinge on philanthro-capitalists.
Coordination emerges through a weekly federation council where two rotating delegates per cell share needs and surplus. No delegate can serve twice in a row, preventing quiet hierarchies. The council maintains a mutual-credit ledger to balance exchanges: bread for antibiotics, legal aid for insulation work. Crisis drills—blackout dinners, eviction defense flash-mobs—stress test the network and reveal weak links before repression does. Publish victories in a portable playbook, letting new cities clone and adapt.
Autonomy is not a slogan; it is the meal you just served without a boss. Which cell are you ready to launch by this time next month?