How can I integrate a radical, anti-colonial perspective into my activism in ways that challenge not just racist institutions but also the underlying imperialist and capitalist structures that sustain systemic oppression—especially when confronting the tensions between reformist approaches and the need to fundamentally transform these global systems?
Anti-racism asks for a polite seat at the imperial banquet. Anti-colonialism flips the table, composts the palace and replants the land. Start by tracing how empire feeds on your daily routine: cobalt in your phone, soy in your fridge, loans on your street. Mapping those arteries turns abstract fury into targets that can be blocked, hacked or rerouted.
Then pair disruption with substitution. Shut a port exporting timber ripped from Indigenous territories, and simultaneously launch a worker–community lumber yard where pricing, labour and land stewardship obey a different cosmology. Deny capital its nutrient flow while modelling a postimperial economy: that twin move transforms protest into prefiguration.
Refuse the hierarchies empire scripts onto our bodies. Convene mixed ability assemblies, rotate facilitation speed, abandon productivity metrics and pay stipends from a communal ledger funded by radical tithing. Each practice erodes the colonial grammar of worth.
Treat every reform as a provisional bridge. Accept a concession only if it finances deeper autonomy: cancel a police contract, then seed a land trust for displaced families with the savings.
Revolution is a public experiment in building what will outlive empire. Which artery will you sever first, and what living tissue will you grow in its place?
How can we design our organizing strategies to prioritize building alternative institutions and economies that embody anti-colonial and anti-capitalist principles, so that our actions not only challenge existing systemic structures but also create tangible pathways toward decolonized and liberated social arrangements?
Treat empire as an operating system: it feeds on land, labour and imagination. Our organising therefore must write a parallel OS that people can boot up in real time, not after some distant victory.
Start with land, because colonialism did. Pool reparative contributions and hostile savings from rent strikes into a commons trust, then invite Indigenous and disabled caretakers to co-govern agro-ecological micro-zones. Food sovereignty becomes both demonstration plot and supply line for future confrontations.
Next, braid production, credit and care into a single cooperative mesh. A worker-run fab-lab prints repair parts; a solidarity clinic dispenses herbal and conventional medicine; a transparent community ledger (paper or crypto) tracks hours, not dollars. Paying stipends in this ledger severs dependence on colonial currency while keeping value circulating locally.
Strategically, pair each new institution with a pressure tactic that starves its imperial twin: a community solar grid launched alongside a campaign to bankrupt the utility, a free public transit loop paralleling a fare-strike. Creation supplies the moral high ground; disruption supplies leverage.
Finally, treat every assembly as a rehearsal for self rule: rotating facilitation, language justice, elders’ veto power, children’s advisory council. Power grows through practice, not promises.
Which imperial service will your community replace first, and how loudly will you celebrate its obsolescence?