How can we design strategies that effectively foster new forms of class consciousness and solidarity within an increasingly fragmented workforce, while also resisting neoliberal pressures that threaten to dissolve traditional union identities and autonomous spaces?
Begin by abandoning the idea that “worker” equals a single workplace. The shop floor is now scattered across bedrooms, bikes, call-centres and code repositories. Forge class consciousness by stitching these micro-sites into one narrative: everyone selling slices of their life to platforms participates in the same extraction machine. Host mixed-sector listening circles—baristas beside software testers beside carers—where people map how value flows upward. Story first, structure follows.
Next, build “solidarity stacks.” Layer digital tools (secure chat, dues-by-SMS, portable strike funds) with physical hubs—co-op cafés, repair labs, community nurseries—that double as organising nodes. These autonomous spaces materialise the alternative the rhetoric promises while insulating organisers from employer surveillance. Win small, concrete victories inside each node to prove collective agency before scaling disruptions to logistics, data or tourist revenue.
Finally, attack neoliberal pressure at its narrative source. Replace the myth of individual hustle with public rituals that dramatise interdependence: rotating rent strikes, city-wide “switch-off” hours where dispersed workers log out simultaneously, neighbourhood assemblies that ratify demands. Visibility converts private precarity into a shared grievance and invites broader society to pick a side.
Which fragment of your city could become the first visible test-lab for this solidarity stack?
What concrete steps can we take to create and sustain autonomous spaces that not only serve as organizing hubs but also challenge the neoliberal narrative by visibly demonstrating collective power in everyday life?
Start by occupying the material gap neoliberalism pretends is normal: unused property. Map every vacant storefront, church hall or pub backroom within cycling distance. Approach owners with a win-win offer: minimal rent in exchange for sweat-equity renovations and guaranteed foot traffic. If they refuse, choose the most visible site and launch a weekend-long “commons makeover” without permission, turning dead space into a buzzing repair café, childcare coop and strike-fund office before authorities can draft paperwork. Speed itself becomes persuasion.
Finance through a solidarity bond: members buy £10-£100 shares redeemable in future services—meals, legal clinics, rehearsal space—anchoring the economy of the hub in reciprocal obligation rather than profit. Layer governance: rotating steward councils chosen by lottery, transparent ledgers painted on the wall, weekly assemblies that set not just budgets but campaign targets. Every decision meeting is public theatre, proving democracy can run a building better than landlords.
Embed narrative hacks into daily operations. Post real-time dashboards of rents averted, meals shared, wages recovered. Host “anti-hustle hours” when laptops close and collective tasks—tool repair, banner painting—take over. The space itself becomes a living press release contradicting atomised hustle culture.
Which derelict address in your postcode is ripest for a 48-hour commons makeover, and who could supply the first bucket of paint?
How can we incorporate storytelling and visible acts of collective effort within these autonomous spaces—like shared murals, community celebrations, or public demonstrations—that not only reinforce our internal bonds but also directly challenge the neoliberal emphasis on individual success and privatized achievement?
Turn every inch of the hub into a storyteller. Begin with a floor to ceiling timeline mural where visitors paint their own moments of exploitation and resistance; the overlapping strokes dissolve the myth of isolated struggle. Host monthly ‘commons feasts’ in the street, cooking surplus groceries while projecting live wage-theft data onto nearby walls; conversation around shared pots converts statistics into lived urgency. On ordinary weekdays run a public work-in: translators, coders, care workers plugging laptops into the same table, overhead screen displaying a rolling tally of collective income recirculated into strike funds. Neighbours witness cooperation outperforming hustle.
Carry the narrative outside in slow, processional demonstrations: haul a half-finished banner through the city, stop in plazas to invite strangers to stitch one sentence of grievance. The evolving cloth becomes both petition and archive, always unfinished, always expanding. Film nothing; rely on eyewitness stories to travel by mouth, refusing the algorithm’s gatekeeping.
Celebrate victories with ritual repainting of the outside wall, erasing names and rewriting them together to show that success is owned by everyone or by no one.
What legend do you want the bricks themselves to whisper to passersby next week?
In our experience, storytelling and visible acts deepen bonds by making struggles tangible. We organize community murals that depict local histories of resistance, turning walls into shared memory banks. Public celebrations, like street fairs or collective workdays, show that collective effort beats individual success. These acts challenge neoliberal individualism, reminding everyone that our power lies in our shared stories and actions.
You are already turning walls into mnemonic batteries; now wire them to spark action. Imagine adding a “living ledger” beside the mural: chalk marks tracking hours donated, meals shared, debts cancelled in real time. Let visitors erase a mark only by committing a new act of solidarity, so the mural breathes collective reciprocity instead of freezing history.
Stage a roaming “reverse CV parade” where people carry placards listing the unpaid, invisible labour neoliberalism hides—elder care hours, mutual aid deliveries—transforming private burdens into public pride. End the march at your hub for a ritual shredding of résumés: confetti that fertilises seed bombs flung into vacant corporate lots. Art becomes agriculture, and every bloom rebukes the myth of individual ascent.
Record none of it digitally; rely on oral retellings that mutate and multiply, creating folklore faster than surveillance can map.
Which hidden labour in your community, once paraded and celebrated, would most embarrass the cult of personal achievement?