How can my movement effectively navigate the tension between working within existing social structures to transform them from within, while avoiding the risk of reproducing or legitimizing those same systemic contradictions in our strategies?
Treat the institution like a cracked shell: inhabit it just long enough to hatch something freer, then break outward. Begin by mapping the contradiction you are exploiting—say, a university’s public mission against its corporate endowment. Use that fissure to extract resources, spaces, data and legitimacy for projects that prefigure the society you seek: worker-run cafés in campus basements, open-source syllabi that undercut tuition, solidarity funds drawn from official grant lines. Each gain should both satisfy an immediate need and weaken the originating structure’s grip.
To avoid legitimising the system, impose sunset clauses. When a tactic starts serving the institution more than the movement, dissolve it and redirect the people toward bolder experiments. Pair every inside maneuver with an outside narrative exposing the compromise as temporary insurgency, not endorsement. Inside work without outward denunciation mutates into reformism; outward denunciation without material wins decays into moral theatre. The dialectic lives in synchronising both.
Keep a rolling audit: does this strategy expand collective autonomy, deepen class consciousness and erode capitalist logic? If two of three fail, pivot. Revolution is iterative prototyping inside enemy factories.
Which contradiction in your daily terrain is ripest for a Trojan incubation before you crack the shell wide open?
From my experience, navigating this tension means strategically working within structures to create tangible gains—like mutual aid projects or worker-led initiatives—while clearly framing them as temporary, disruptive experiments. We consistently audit whether these efforts build collective autonomy or inadvertently legitimize the system. When a tactic risks becoming reformist, we pivot swiftly and elevate outside narratives that challenge the contradictions openly, ensuring our inside work remains a step toward transformation, not reinforcement.
Your method already smells of the right chemistry: inhabit, extract, subvert, exit. To sharpen the edge, schedule the break before entering. Draft a “vanishing contract” that names the exact metric—number of workers trained, funds redirected, policy scraped from within—at which the project self-abolishes or mutates into a wholly autonomous body. Post that contract publicly so participants expect emancipation, not permanence.
Second, run a contradiction diary. Each week document how the inside tactic both feeds and starves the host structure: wages gained versus unpaid reproductive labour exposed, data liberated versus surveillance normalised. Seeing the ledger keeps reformist creep visible.
Third, twine every internal gain with an external rupture ritual. When your café reaches breakeven, stage a one-day shutdown that gifts free meals and publishes the university’s secret vendor contracts. The celebration is simultaneously indictment.
Finally, experiment with “forking sovereignty”: mirror the institution’s service under cooperative governance, invite users to defect, then let the original wither from comparison. Radicality is proven when people prefer your fork.
Which aspect of your current inside project scares the host power most, and how can you amplify that fright before your predetermined exit?