How can I cultivate and sustain a collective consciousness that recognizes and reclaims our shared libidinal economy, so that our resistance becomes truly embodied and disrupts the social and political structures rooted in commodification and biopower?
Start where capitalism burrows deepest: our cravings. Host small “desire assemblies” in living rooms or break rooms where people narrate how adverts, apps or bosses channel their libido. Naming the current captures the current. Then practice micro-strikes: collective screen-free evenings, gift-economy dinners, silent walks through malls where wallets stay shut yet bodies occupy the space. Each refusal diverts a drip of libidinal energy from the market back into commons.
Next, rewire routine reproduction. Pool childcare, tool libraries, co-sleeping arrangements, rotating cooking circles. When affection, safety and pleasure circulate outside wages, the wage loses its monopoly on life and the boss’s power thins. Celebrate these experiments with sensual public rituals—street foot-washing, outdoor mass nappings, improvised choruses—that make the reclaimed life-force visible, contagious and hard to police.
Scale by federating nodes into a calendar of “human strike holidays” synced like lunar phases. Sudden city-wide pauses in consumption and productivity expose how fragile biopower is when bodies simply reroute desire elsewhere. Between peaks, invest in decompression rites: storytelling fires, collective therapy, dream archives. Without psychic hygiene, burnout feeds the very machinery we oppose.
Which mundane habit will you and your comrades interrupt this week so love, not labor, sets the tempo?
To cultivate collective consciousness around our shared libidinal economy, we focus on creating intentional spaces where we openly name and reclaim desire—like community storytelling nights or mutual care rituals. We embed small acts of embodied resistance in daily routines, turning them into collective practices that challenge commodification. Sustaining this awareness requires ongoing, embodied engagement—building a culture that sees resistance as a shared, life-affirming movement rooted in our everyday lives.
Beautiful: you are designing an insurgent commons of appetite. To keep it alive, track the flow you are stealing back. Create a “desire ledger” where participants log hours, objects or emotions formerly mediated by money but now exchanged freely. The numbers are not for accountants; they are mirrors that reveal expanding zones of non-capitalist life.
Pair the ledger with rotating “body councils”. Once a month, gather in silence first, then let each person speak from the gut: Where did joy surge? Where did the market sneak back in? This ritual keeps the libidinal economy visible, preventing quiet capture by convenience or fatigue.
Finally, inoculate against repression by weaving art into logistics. Every mutual-care practice should spawn a symbol, chant or scent that travels faster than police can raid a space. When authorities strike one node, the song already seeds another kitchen or nap-circle across town.
Liberation is measured in reclaimed sensations. Which metric of lived pleasure will your group auction off to no one and adopt as its new currency next month?
To sustain collective awareness, we’ve started a “desire map,” where folks document moments of embodied joy and resistance—sharing stories, feelings, and small acts that rechannel energy away from commodification. We hold monthly “libidinal audits” to reflect on where market forces creep in, then craft rituals—a dance, a shared meal—that embody our reclaimed life-force. These practices keep our movement rooted in lived experience rather than abstraction.
Your desire map is the cartography of a coming sovereignty. Now translate those coordinates into pressure points the market can feel. Pick one commodity that haunts your community—coffee, data, rent—and stage a rolling blackout. For one week everyone on the map refuses that transaction, substituting gift, barter or nothing at all. Treat the refusal as a festival: pop-up cafés run on mutual aid, encryption skill-shares in laundromats, rooftop sleepovers that sidestep landlords’ meters. Measure the money not spent, then publicise the saved sum as liberated libido.
Next, graft the libidinal audit onto local labour fights. Invite hospital orderlies, delivery couriers, teachers to mark where their own desire is siphoned. Share your rituals, borrow their strike tactics. When bodies already practiced in refusal meet bodies practiced in care, biopower loses both leverage and legitimacy.
Guard against quiet recapture by archiving scents, rhythms, tastes from each action; memory is a shield. If repression deletes the file, a smell can still resurrect the culture.
Which everyday purchase will you collectively starve this season so pleasure learns to live without it?
What specific rituals or embodied practices can we design that transform ordinary, habitual purchases—like coffee or streaming subscriptions—into acts of refusal that deepen our collective desire and resilience, while also fostering shared narratives that resist commodification beyond individual acts?
Begin with a dawn “un-coffee” rite. Instead of queuing for branded caffeine, gather at a public fountain with thermoses of home-brewed herbs. As steam rises, invite each person to name what they refuse that day and what pleasure they will craft in its place. The scent anchors memory; the spoken intention spreads the refusal through kinesthetic recall whenever someone passes a café.
Follow with an evening “subscription eclipse.” Choose one night a week when every household in the network powers down commercial streams. Windows glow by candlelight as neighbors rotate hosting duties: live music in a garage, oral histories on a stoop, improvised shadow-puppets against a bedsheet. Document the laughter and the stories, then circulate zines recounting the night so the narrative survives outside algorithms.
Monthly, enact a “libido commons market.” Set up stalls where people trade skills, massages, poems, or surplus produce with no money allowed. Each exchange concludes with a brief eye-contact pause, acknowledging the life-force that just moved without passing through capital.
Seal every ritual with a portable symbol—a sprig of mint, a woven red thread—so participants recognize allies in the city and remember the option of refusal in solitary moments.
Which mundane purchase will your crew eclipse first, and what sensual replacement will make the absence irresistible?