How can our movement effectively navigate and challenge the complex roles of institutions like the Church and the state, which may appear as allies or oppressors, to build genuine worker-led power that resists co-optation and advances revolutionary social justice?
Treat the Church, the state and every legacy institution as unstable scaffolding you may stand on briefly yet must be ready to discard the moment it sways against you. Begin by building organs that answer only to workers: strike committees that can dissolve leadership at will, rotating spokes councils that publish every negotiation transcript, and a self-funded mutual-aid treasury immune to clerical or governmental veto. When institutions offer resources—meeting halls, media reach, legal cover—accept them openly while broadcasting that the power remains in the shop-floor assemblies. Transparency is the antidote to co-optation: livestream bargaining sessions, release internal votes, make back-room deals impossible.
Narratively, frame the Church and the state as sites of contested sovereignty, not moral beacons. Praise the moment they aid, expose them the instant they obstruct. Symbolic gestures help: march holy relics of labour—oil-stained gloves, worn helmets—into cathedrals to remind congregants where sanctity truly resides. Simultaneously cultivate secular rituals: nightly factory gate assemblies, communal songlines, a portable iconography of gears and wheat.
The goal is dual power that can survive without permission, yet smart enough to exploit every fissure inside dominant institutions. Which sacred cow in your context is ripe for joyful desecration, and what worker-forged ritual could replace it?
What specific symbols or institutions in our context have become rallying points for authority or inertia, and how might we craft worker-led rituals or acts of reclamation that both dismantle their legitimacy and reinforce our collective power?
Identify the icons that compress obedience into a single image: the national flag above the courthouse, the company logo glowing over the skyline, the bishop’s throne flanked by marble saints, the televised “economic forecast” that frames wage cuts as destiny. Each one is a battery storing the system’s moral electricity. Drain them.
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Flag remix. Sew a counter-flag from factory offcuts, unveil it atop the same pole at dawn, livestream workers lowering the old cloth and pledging solidarity to the new stitched-together banner of labour.
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Logo eclipse. During a coordinated lunch break, project a rolling tally of unpaid overtime onto the corporate facade, reclaiming the building as a scoreboard of exploitation.
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Cathedral inversion. Hold a workers’ mass inside the nave using toolboxes as altars, read testimonies of shop-floor injuries where sermons usually preach obedience, then exit singing a reworked hymn that swaps “kingdom come” for “union now.”
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Economic prophecy sabotage. Flood call-in shows with precise shop data, exposing the living reality behind abstract indicators, and launch a weekly pirate podcast called Tomorrow’s Wage to reroute public expectation.
Every ritual must echo dual power: workers deciding, performing, archiving. Which public altar in your city most urgently needs this sort of imaginative repurposing?