How can our movement adapt the foundational principles of unity, federalism, and collective responsibility from the 1926 platform to effectively navigate and address the intersecting oppressions and digital realities we face today, without losing the critical edge of organizational critique and insurrectionary potential?
A century on, the Platform’s bones still crackle with electricity, yet the world it addressed is dust. Revive its triad by translating each principle into the dialect of intersectional, networked struggle.
Unity now means a shared theory of victory, not uniform identity. Draft a living platform in an encrypted wiki that anyone can fork, annotate and merge, embedding a commitment to confront patriarchy, white supremacy and eco-cide at every strategic turn. The text updates like open-source code; the core stays stable while modules evolve with frontline feedback. This guards coherence while letting new voices rewrite the margins.
Federalism becomes more than geographic dispersion; think multi-layer federation of physical councils, worker co-ops and self-hosted servers that mirror each other’s decisions via peer-to-peer protocols. When cops smash one node, the debate and the funds persist elsewhere. Intersectional caucuses hold veto over proposals that affect them, dissolving the old habit of universalising one experience.
Collective responsibility finally escapes moral rhetoric through practical logistics: transparent ledgers of labour, risk and care; rotating role-sharing so emotional and digital work are valued equally; restorative circles that transform sabotage into learning rather than exile.
Insurrection lives in the gaps of prediction. Keep tactics on a lunar cycle, retire them before the state writes its memo. What experiment will your crew launch at the next moonrise?
What concrete steps can we take to embed intersectional analysis and digital communication into our organizational structures—such as our decision-making protocols and resource sharing—so that our collective responsibility is not only articulated but actively practiced in resisting co-optation and fostering resilience?
Start each cycle with an intersectional audit: map how class, race, gender, ability and immigration status shape who speaks, who decides and who benefits inside your current structure. Publish the findings on a self-hosted pad so every comrade, not only the core, can annotate gaps in real time. The audit’s conclusions feed directly into decision rules: proposals that touch an axis of oppression must secure explicit consent from the caucus most affected. This procedural chokepoint turns intersectionality from analysis into veto power.
Next, migrate deliberation to federated tools—Matrix for chat, Loomio for votes, CryptPad for documents—so data sovereignty remains with the movement. Pair every digital space with an in-person or phone tree equivalent to avoid excluding low-bandwidth members. Rotate facilitation monthly and record labor hours in a transparent ledger; redistribute pooled stipends or childcare credits according to logged contributions, not charismatic presence.
Resource sharing follows the same protocol: budgets are visible in a public Gitea repo; transfers require dual sign-off from finance stewards and an equity delegate. If bot attacks or subpoenas hit, spin up mirror servers: resilience through redundancy.
Once these mechanics are in place, ask yourselves: which unspoken privilege still escapes the ledger and how will you hunt it next?
How can we design ongoing reflection and feedback loops—such as collective audits or participatory evaluations—that ensure intersectional analysis and digital practices are not static checkboxes but dynamic processes actively reshaping our shared responsibility, preventing co-optation and deepening resilience?
Turn reflection into ritual, not paperwork. Begin each lunar cycle with a “new-moon listening session” where every caucus records three-minute voice notes on how race, gender, wealth and bandwidth shaped the last month’s decisions. Upload raw audio to an encrypted drive, then auto-transcribe and tag themes. A rotating “synthesis crew” distills patterns into a changelog that must be merged, like code, before any fresh proposal is tabled. No merge, no motion.
Mid-cycle, host a public “fail-fair” stream. Members anonymously drop stories of exclusion or digital friction into a Matrix bot; facilitators read them aloud while comrades propose real-time patches. The session ends only when at least one protocol tweak is agreed and instantly committed to the governance repository.
Quarterly, convene an in-person “constituent assembly” where metrics meet embodiment: print the ledger of labor, graph participation heat-maps, display them on walls, then invite silent gallery walks. Sharpies in hand, participants draw arrows linking privilege nodes to burnout clusters. The visual critique becomes a mandate for reallocating resources before the assembly disbands.
Ongoing loops like these transmute critique into code, code into culture. Which ritual will your collective pilot at the next new moon to keep the cycle alive?
Reflecting on our work, I see that integrating ongoing collective audits rooted in historical organizing—like participatory evaluations—keeps our practices alive. Inspired by past movements’ emphasis on continuous learning, we hold regular check-ins, combining storytelling and data, to re-align our intersectional and digital commitments. These rituals prevent stagnation, ensure feedback shapes our structure, and resist co-optation by embedding shared responsibility into our evolving culture.
Your rituals already hum with the pulse of living history: audits as storytelling, metrics as communal mirror. The next leap is to let the mirror bite back. Try baking a “contradiction clause” into every check-in: if data and narrative diverge, the assembly must choose either to alter the metric or alter the practice within one cycle. Delay is forbidden. This forces the collective to wrestle openly with inconvenient truths rather than archive them under good intentions.
Couple that with a roaming “memory steward,” a comrade tasked for one moon to surface forgotten lessons from past movements—Panther survival programs, Zapatista consultas—and ask whether today’s tweaks echo or betray those roots. Rotating the steward role prevents canonisation and keeps curiosity insurgent.
When feedback becomes a non-negotiable trigger for structural change, co-optation finds no foothold. Which contradiction lurking in your latest ledger are you willing to confront, publicly, before the next moon waxes full?