We’re not going to stop imperialism by making appeals to the imperialists and their forces of domination and destruction.
We’ll stop imperialism when we do the hard(est) work of building parallel social, economic, and political infrastructure able to undergird a defensive force.
This “parallel social, economic, and political infrastructure” can’t be grounded in the same social relations and organization that define the oppressive system we’re in.
It has to be grounded in cooperation, communalism, and direct democracy.
It has to feel worth fighting for.
It’s not just about striking, unionizing, or doing work around organized labor for individual (reactive) actions. It’s about a holistic approach centered on “world-building” that can generate not only a new, liberatory social logic, but resources for defensive infrastructure too.
Let’s build directly democratic communities and economic democracy so that we can one day fight our own battles with comrades around the world in moments of crisis as this system continues to decay and consume itself.
States are the most violent, destructive, anti-democratic structures ever produced by humankind.
They are weapons of class rule and the ultimate expression of domination.
The idea that there could ever be a “democratic state” is oxymoronic.
And just so we’re clear:
The U.S. is also an apartheid state, so for anyone to imply that the U.S. or any other nation-states of the “West” are somehow bastions of democracy in contrast to what we’re seeing with the State of Israel is to hold on to a “dream” built on nightmares.
The State of Israel is a settler-colonialist nation-state just like the USA, so recent IOF attacks on Palestinians at their place of worship in East Jerusalem come as no surprise.
The solution, however, doesn’t lie in more bourgeois nationalism and statism, let alone Capitalism.
Various forces – political, religious, etc. – exploit the violent, reactionary acts of the Israeli nation-state against the Palestinian people to push their own agendas.
These agendas almost never have anything to do with freedom, but rather more forms or flavors of domination.
The solution lies in transcending the nation-state model, theocracy, and the capitalist system altogether.
The solution lies in a global, confederal system that does away with colonial borders, and is defined by *directly* democratic social, economic, and political organization.
Anyone who accepts or supports top-down, hierarchical social relations is authoritarian.
Both Liberals and Conservatives are authoritarian by this metric, since they support Capitalism.
Forces Libs and Conservatives typically label “authoritarian” are usually authoritarian too.
What most Liberals, Conservatives, and authoritarian “Leftists” don’t grasp is that anything truly “Left” is where direct democracy begins, and exploitation + domination ends.
Hierarchy and extraction, whether upheld by private corporations or a state, can only be authoritarian.
Look past surface aesthetics and rhetoric and ask yourself these questions when evaluating whether or not political orgs and/or tendencies are authoritarian:
Are they okay with hierarchy and individual leaders giving orders from the top? Are these “leaders” instantly recallable?
When are we going to confront the reality that countless “Left” media personalities are directly and indirectly complicit in perpetuating the narrative that there is no way out, simply by critiquing *what is*, without exploring (in very practical, accessible terms) *what can be*?
One of the most insidious elements of this phenomenon is that it is actually driven by the logics of these social media platforms most of us use to communicate.
Talking heads channel our righteous rage into low-hanging-fruit “takes” instead of informational seeds for liberation.
“Organize locally,” “join a union,” and “make sure to vote in your local elections” are frequently empty, meaningless, vague, footnote talking points anchored in zero political programs, and in what are typically broader discussions about horrible recent events, or personalities.
While it is tiring to have to revisit and re-explain concepts and methodology we have been acting on for years now, it is absolutely necessary, and we *need* each other.
All we ask is that people do their due diligence in research.
For a more expansive breakdown of the history of “dual power” specifically, please see the thread below.
As people become more open to the idea that Capitalism is trash, don’t leave them hanging without suggestions for what the institutional alternatives could be, and how we can build them!
Anticapitalist slogans are great, but they are not enough.
People want practical solutions.
We have new (and much more accessible) resources and materials regarding “institutional alternatives” and organization on the way, but the thread below is a great place to start.