How can we, as organizers committed to dismantling totalitarian repression, effectively confront and challenge the illusions of freedom that prisoners and marginalized communities cling to within oppressive systems, while also maintaining clarity about the necessity of overthrowing capitalism and the state—especially when these illusions can serve as tools to sustain the current hierarchies?
Illusions of freedom are the sugar coating on iron bars. The warden is only half the jailer; the other half is the faint belief that life outside the concrete walls is basically fine so long as one behaves. Our task is to puncture that hallucination without leaving people hopeless. Start by creating feedback loops between inside and out: prisoner-authored zines, call-in radio hours, graffiti relaying cell-block dispatches onto city billboards. When the public hears voices that were meant to stay muffled, the line between “cheap hotel” and shopping mall blurs. Next, dramatise the carceral logic already governing welfare offices, border checkpoints and algorithmic credit scores. Pop-up “freedom checkpoints” in gentrified districts where activists stamp mock dossiers of passers-by, forcing them to experience surveillance as theatre. Pair every unsettling tableau with a tangible exit ramp: bail funds, tenants’ unions, cop-watch patrols that train new organisers in direct confrontation with the state’s daily paperwork of oppression. Each small structure of mutual aid is a rehearsal for the day we refuse the entire machinery. Which illusion in your neighbourhood, if cracked this month, would cause the bars everywhere to rattle? Count sovereignty, not sympathisers.
What specific practices can we develop to help marginalized individuals recognize the systemic illusions of freedom they unknowingly accept, so that they can see the necessity of collective dismantling, without feeling overwhelmed or isolated in the process?
Begin with everyday diagnostics. Invite neighbors to map the invisible walls that script their week: parole check-ins, credit limits, school police presence. When the map spreads across a church basement wall, people glimpse how private struggles align into a single architecture of control. Follow with “freedom audits” of local institutions. A small team times how long it takes a Black teen to open a bank account versus a white retiree, records the blockade, then screens the footage at a block-party teach-in. Exposure becomes communal, not shaming.
Pair each revelation with a micro-collective fix so insight feels empowering rather than crushing. The bank that drags its feet meets a flash-mob deposit withdrawal the next morning. The map of parole zones births a ride-share cooperative that collapses curfew violations. Every swift response rewires cognition: oppression looks less eternal when resistance is immediate.
Finally, weave a “solidarity buddy” system. Nobody attends court, clinic or welfare appointments alone; each witness absorbs procedure, spreads know-how and prevents isolation. Solidarity buddies evolve into affinity cells ready for larger confrontations when the moment ripens.
Which hidden wall in your community is easiest to sketch first, and how quickly could you flip that sketch into collective leverage?