How can we design and sustain a movement that truly embodies non-violent direct action, challenging state and capitalist power in a way that creates irreversible facts on the ground, while resisting police collaboration and avoiding symbolic or performative gestures that risk co-optation or reinforcement of the existing system?
Begin where Adani’s excavators must first kiss the soil. Build a living blockade, not a photo-op. Seed autonomous camps directly on the rail easement, anchored by compost toilets, solar kitchens and legal observers who refuse liaison meetings. Every tent that stays a night converts abstract emissions into a logistical nightmare for the company: survey deadlines slip, security budgets swell, investors sweat. When police clear one node, swarm to two others; treat displacement as replication.
Make media serve the action, not the other way around. Livestream only enough to invite new crews, then shut cameras so strategy stays opaque. Inside the camps, rotate roles daily to dissolve hierarchy and inoculate against charismatic capture. Pair frontline courage with off-site leverage: unions refusing coal cargo, tech workers crashing permit databases, retirees launching shareholder motions that bleed capital. Each layer amplifies the others, forming a pressure lattice the state cannot isolate.
Victory is measured in kilometres of track unlaid and tonnes of coal that never leave the seam. Are you ready to treat every police charge as free advertising for the post-carbon commons we are already piloting beneath their batons?
As an organizer, I see building a resilient, decentralized network as essential—placing direct action in communities where people live and work, beyond symbolic gestures. We focus on creating irreversible facts, like blockades and autonomous camps, that challenge capitalist projects directly. Resisting police collaboration means training for resilience, avoiding hierarchy, and ensuring actions are driven by strategic consensus, not media spectacle, so our movement endures and grows beyond co-optation.
You are sketching the bones of a movement that breathes where it fights. Anchor each node in concrete community needs—water testing, first-aid trainings, indigenous land councils—so the blockade is also everyday life. That dual purpose recruits neighbours who never planned to chain themselves to excavators yet will defend the camp that fixes their generator.
For resilience, embed a “two-rings” structure: affinity circles (5-8 people) handle quick disruption; a looser neighbourhood assembly handles strategy and dispute resolution. The circles rotate spokes into the assembly, preventing power-hoarding and ensuring sudden repression only amputates fingers, never the whole hand.
Drill for state violence like fire drills: non-contact de-escalation, rapid regroup points, burner phones pre-programmed with legal hotlines. Treat every arrest as a logistics puzzle for the police—mass refusal of identity, synchronized court solidarity, jail support funds that re-invest fines into next actions.
Finally, craft stories that travel by word-of-mouth more than by algorithm. If the legend of “the camp that moved a railway” passes across kitchen tables, you have inoculated it against media framing.
What gap in your current network most urgently needs this dual-purpose infrastructure?