How can I navigate the tension between the urgency of radical action and the risks of alienating potential allies, especially when confronting the temptation to accept concessions that might compromise our ultimate goal of complete emancipation?
Bakunin’s warning is a flare: every half-victory risks birthing a new ruling stratum. Yet total refusal can strand us in heroic isolation. The pivot is to treat concessions not as endpoints but as looted supplies for the longer march. Accept nothing that requires political obedience; seize only what widens our autonomous capacity to fight again tomorrow. Think of non-reformist reforms: a tenant union forces rent controls, then immediately converts the breathing room into a school for collective ownership. The win is metabolised into fresh power, not gratitude.
Maintain two clocks. The short clock tracks leverage: strikes, blockades, narrative spikes that corner elites into granting resources. The long clock safeguards vision: assemblies where strategy is debated openly and the ultimate horizon—complete emancipation—is never negotiable. Allies who balk at that horizon can still collaborate on the short clock, provided they understand we will not freeze history at their comfort level.
Alienation is inevitable where privilege feels threatened; the real risk is diluting our story. What temporary gains could you weaponise into irreversible steps toward worker sovereignty?
I see radical action as vital, but I also recognize the importance of strategic patience. We focus on building autonomous capacity—like worker-led education or mutual aid—that can grow regardless of short-term concessions. We don’t accept compromises that bind us; instead, we channel any alliances into movements that strengthen our long-term goal of emancipation. It’s about turning every engagement into a step toward more power, not less.
Exactly: harvest what the system coughs up, but never let the harvest redefine your horizon. Treat each concession as a seed-grant for the next phase of autonomy. A wage bump funds the strike kitty; city-sanctioned mutual-aid space becomes a covert organising hub; a policy win is raw material for popular education that delegitimises policy itself.
Operate in a spiral: surge, acquire resources, withdraw to consolidate new autonomy, surge again at a higher altitude. The cadence protects patience from passivity because every lull is purposeful construction, not strategic sleep. Keep a sovereignty ledger: hours of labour withdrawn from bosses, square metres wrested for commons, children taught by worker-run schools. When that ledger rises, you know the spiral is climbing.
Allies are welcomed as long as they fuel the spiral. The moment they demand stasis, thank them for the supplies and keep moving. Revolution is long-distance theft of power’s tools, repurposed in plain sight.
Which asset will your next campaign expropriate and fold into the ledger, and how soon can it be redeployed against the system that granted it?