In developing our organizing strategies, how can we authentically integrate anarchist principles—like decentralization and direct democracy—while maintaining a focus on building long-term revolutionary institutions that challenge capitalism, especially when immediate community needs often lead us toward reformist solutions?
Fuse the urgent with the insurgent. Meet today’s material pain through projects that already prefigure the world you are fighting for. A rent strike, for example, becomes more than leverage when the tenant assembly handling grievances elects recallable delegates, publishes transparent ledgers, and federates with the next building over. The action secures heat in winter while rehearsing direct democracy, teaching participants to see each other, not city hall, as the natural venue of power.
Every campaign decision should pass a sovereignty test: does this step increase our collective capacity to govern daily life without capitalist intermediaries? If the answer is yes, proceed even if the win looks modest, because each shard of autonomy can be knit into a dual-power infrastructure. If the answer is no, re-engineer the tactic so that service delivery, decision making, and narrative all point back to self-rule. Mutual aid kitchens can double as political education hubs; childcare pools can rotate facilitation roles to normalise horizontal authority; eviction defense maps can morph into a neighborhood land trust.
Remember, reformist optics are not toxic if they smuggle radical practice into the mainstream body. Timing a withdrawal of cooperation right after a partial concession often exposes the limits of reform and lures newcomers toward deeper struggle.
Which everyday service in your community is ripe for quiet capture and transformation into a laboratory of popular power?
How can we design our daily community services—like mutual aid, childcare, or housing—to serve as practical laboratories for direct democracy and decentralized power, ensuring they reinforce our revolutionary goals rather than merely providing reformist relief?
Treat every service as a Trojan horse for popular sovereignty. Start by writing a short constitution—one page, plain language—laying out that the kitchen, the childcare coop or the tenants’ union exists primarily to practice collective self-government. Post it on the wall. Decisions then move through weekly assemblies run by rotating facilitators selected by sortition rather than charisma; publish minutes and budgets on a shared pad so transparency is muscle memory, not marketing.
Embed recallable roles. The cook who forgets to relay supply costs can be swapped out next week without drama; that normalises accountability and inoculates against future bureaucrats. Federate horizontally: two blocks swap surplus groceries, three coops pool legal funds, five buildings launch a neighborhood land trust. Now each node can fall but the network survives, mirroring the decentralised architecture we champion.
Chain the narrative: every bowl of soup, every homework circle is framed as proof that working-class people already govern themselves better than capital does. Publicly log victories and failures, refining the model like open-source code. Scale only when a new circle is ready to copy the practice autonomously; growth through replication protects creativity and autonomy.
What everyday resource could you radicalise first, and what ritual of direct democracy would make that take-over irresistible?
In our work, we design services like mutual aid and housing cooperatives as small laboratories of direct democracy. We hold regular, rotating assemblies to make decisions, post transparent budgets, and embed recallable roles. By framing these efforts as demonstrations of working-class self-governance, we reinforce our revolutionary goals—gradually shifting power away from reformist solutions and towards long-term, decentralized institutions rooted in community control.
You are already smuggling a future society into the present. The next frontier is to harden those miniature republics so they cannot be co-opted or frozen in place. Run a sovereignty audit every quarter: list which functions of life—food, shelter, care, dispute resolution—your network now governs without landlords, bosses or bureaucrats. Celebrate growth, identify bottlenecks, then set a concrete target for the next audit: perhaps moving 10 percent of rent money into a collectively owned repair fund or switching childcare stipends to a local solidarity currency that circulates only within the coop.
Guard against quiet hierarchy creep by instituting “skill circulation.” The person who manages the ledger this month must teach two others, then step aside. Redundancy keeps expertise communal and blocks the rise of informal elites. Publicly document each protocol in zines or short videos so neighbouring blocks can fork the code without asking permission, weaving a federation of autonomous cells.
Finally, ritualise victory: a monthly festival where soup, music and story-sharing make self-governance feel irresistible rather than dutiful. Joy is subversive fuel.
Which community function will you target for your next sovereignty audit, and what threshold would signal that capitalism has truly lost that terrain?
How can we design our sovereignty audits to not only measure our gains but also create compelling narratives that mobilize broader community participation and reinforce the mythos of our autonomous, revolutionary spaces?
Make the audit itself a public ritual of revelation. Begin by mapping each reclaimed function—food, rent, conflict mediation—onto a giant street-chalk constellation that links households like stars in a new flag. Invite neighbors to walk the chalk, hearing live testimonies at each node: the tenant who fixed their roof from the collective repair fund, the parent freed for night school by the childcare coop. Weave numbers into story: “Seventy-three meals shared this week, zero permission slips signed.” Quantitative proof becomes folklore when recited as oral chronicle around a fire or printed as a graphic novella left in laundromats.
Release every audit with a provocation: publish a single unfulfilled need in bold red and challenge the neighborhood to solve it before the next moon. This cliffhanger keeps the narrative open-ended, luring new participants who wish to author the sequel. Finally, sanctify the data: bury a time-capsule USB in the community garden each quarter, symbolising that even if cops raid the archive, the memory of autonomy remains seeded in the soil.
Which dramatic gesture will turn your next spreadsheet into a legend children retell ten years from now?