How To (Non-Violently) Overcome Capitalism: A Short Guide

From https://publicdelivery.org/banksy-flower-thrower/

A fair criticism of progressives is that we tend to point out socio-economic issues and immoralities and tell people to ‘get involved,’ but then rarely give advice of how to begin overcoming things like capitalism, imperialism, inequality, etc., unless it’s to repeat more or less useless platitudes like ‘vote harder’ or ‘think local, act global.’ And people (correctly, mostly) assume that if they just go out into the streets and start throwing bricks, the sociopathically militarized police and their sadistic political masters are just going to gun every ‘terrorist’ down, and nothing that does anyone any good will get accomplished. The result of this is that while most people are pining for the fjords revolutionary change, practically no one knows how to start and certainly (and reasonably) doesn't want to be the first or only one to stick their neck out.

That being said, there is sadly no ‘one-size-fits-all’ guide for dismantling one social paradigm and installing another. Even under this global neoliberal capitalist paradigm, we all live in different ecosystems, neighbourhoods, towns, cities, regions, and continents, not to mention cultural and legal particularities. Just as climate change will affect us all in uniquely shitty ways, so capitalism fucks us all differently. What I mean is, no one is going to ever be able to write something like, Step 1.) You will need precisely $2,043,509,242.43 USD; Step 2.) Buy exactly 438 hectares. The advice is necessarily going to be much more general, and you are going to have to tailor it for the cut of your jib.

However, one thing that you will almost certainly have to do sooner or later if you start to ‘decapitalize’ your life is face down the police (or whatever group is permitted to commit violence on behalf of the state). They are the inevitable fist that will come down hard on those who defy the government’s power. And if you want to get rid of capitalism, you are going to need to defy the government (municipal, state/provincial, and federal). The good news (in a silver linings kinda way) is that cops are fucking cowards, and a well-organized and determined neighbourhood can certainly stand up to them. (Which is not to guarantee there won’t be any casualties; but there are going to be casualties in any case, as climate change accelerates, disasters increase in severity, food and water becomes scarcer, and the ruling class gets more nakedly vicious in their unending effort to protect and increase their unearned privileges.) Overcoming the government(s) will be a tougher battle, but with a proper mutual aid network and the willpower not to surrender when they squeeze your banks, employers, health insurers, family and friends, etc, you can defeat them too. The trick to remember with democratic governments is that the politicians don’t care about anything except their poll numbers; they have literally no principles they aren’t willing to sacrifice to stay in power; embarrass them publicly enough and they’ll fold over faster than the spineless sacks of shit they are. (If you live under an unfortunately less-than-democratic regime, like the US, you likely cannot rely on the (eventual, begrudging) shame and embarrassment of your political masters. But you are probably more aware than I about what you can and cannot get away with before the skull-crackers come a-calling, so I'll leave it to you.)

Step One: Hang Out.

You are going to need a community, because you are not going to be able to do this by your lonesome. And I’m not even talking about defeating capitalism yet, I’m just talking about living your life half-decently (ie, so it’s not just a miserable slog face down through sewage toward death). To build a community, you’re going to need to get to know your neighbours. So, have a get together. However, do not come out swinging like a rabid lumberjack with all kinds of anti-capitalist revolutionary black bloc Molotov cocktails and brass knuckles shit like you’re trying to chop a whole forest down with one swing. It’s just going to freak people the fuck out. (Trust me. It’s weird, but for some reason people generally don’t feel comfortable around extremists.)

Just have a normal dinner party, or a normal picnic in a local park (get the necessary permits, if any), or meet up after church/temple/ashram/pagoda/etcera. Literally just get together, get to know each other, and start building relationships, like normal-ass humans. I want to be very explicit here: what you are doing is trying to make real relationships. This isn’t a how-to guide for starting a fucking cult. Don’t try to ‘groom’ your neighbours into anarcho-sydicalists or whatever. You are literally just trying to make strangers into neighbours, and neighbours into friends. There is no goal in Step One beyond building genuine, consenting human relationships. If your neighbours aren’t into you, or you’re not into them, do not try to force it. Just try to find people who vibe with you.

Step Two: Hold Regular Discussions.

Once you and your neighbours have reached a point in your relationships that you’re regularly hanging out, celebrating birthdays and graduations, trading recipes, babysitting, dogsitting, apartmentsitting, etc, you’ll inevitably discover each others’ hopes and dreams, fears and nightmares. You’ll find out what you’re struggling with and what you’re great at. You will inevitably have conversations about “oh, if only this/that could be different!” And you will inevitably learn everyone’s politics.

By politics I mean the original kind, which is the art of getting along with your neighbours. I don’t mean figuring out who’s more or less progressive or conservative than you and trying to proselytize them onto your side. This isn’t some kind of purity test or popularity contest. Some people want to be more directly involved with the community, others prefer staying on the margins. Some people are comfortable with public speaking, others aren’t. Some people are skilled at getting friendly with strangers, others are better at scaring them off. Some people are willing to put themselves in harm’s way, others not so much. These are the politics you need to know about each other.

Once you do, then you can begin discussing exactly how you’re going to get capitalism off your community’s back. Here’s are some of the sort of questions you’ll need to ask:

• Can we start growing food for ourselves? Can we generate our own electricity? If so, how much? And how are we going to equitably distribute resources so that everyone has enough?

• Can we help each other with repairs and maintenance? Can we make a community tool shed? Community garage?

• Can we start a community emergency fund so none of us have to worry about evictions, foreclosures, or repos?

• Can we go on rent/mortgage/credit card strikes?

• Can we provide adequate healthcare for ourselves?

• How far are we willing to go with this kind of stuff? Where are our red lines?

The goal of Step Two is to get a sense of your community as a living being, so to speak. Figure out what kind of shape your community’s collectively in and what kind of shape you collectively want it to get to. This will likely require quite a bit of homework (have you heard of OVERBURDEN? I think it’s got some pretty relevant stuff (for free!) if you need somewhere to start). Then you can figure out what kind of training regime you’re comfortable with, what kind of a nutrition plan works best for you, and set achievable goals along a reasonable schedule. And just as everyone’s body is uniquely different, so is everyone’s community. What works for one community might not work for another. And as with Step One: don’t force it. There is no point in exchanging one coercive non-consensual system for another; the only way a consensual community gets built is if it’s consensual right from day fucking one. Immoral means will never produce, let alone justify, a moral end.

Step Three: Start!

Once you know the direction you all want your community to go in, it’s time to strike the earth! get to work! Maybe come up with a list of top three or five things you can do easily or quickly, or that you collectively want to do the most, and let everyone volunteer for whatever particular thing they want to do. I genuinely can’t stress this enough: do not force anyone into doing something they don’t want to. You will inevitably have enough work to go around, and people are more than diverse enough to enjoy doing an extremely broad spectrum of things. You will all need practice, of course, but you’ll probably be pleasantly surprised how quickly consensus can be arrived at among a group of people who all trust each other because they’re all trustworthy. And if you’ve built a strong community foundation of rock-solid trust and consent together, getting volunteers will probably be a piece of piss.

Of course although it will always be rewarding and worthwhile, the work will not always be fun and easy. At times it will be difficult, painful, and exhausting. You will make mistakes, experience failures, get injured, and want to give up. You will get insulted, threatened, dehumanized, and possibly arrested. You may be imprisoned, or even killed. Such have often been the historical consequences of rebelling against society, any society. The people who are in power are people who believe they should be in power, and thus that they have every right to use their power against those who threaten it. And rejecting their authority and denying the legitimacy of their power is as much an existential threat to them as attempting to usurp and take it. They will fight back.

So the final question you must ask of yourself is: are you willing to chance an early and possibly violent death in the pursuit and defence of your community’s future? (Of course, there’s always the chance of an early and violent death—anyone can slip and fall, after all—, but in this case I mean specifically at the hands of the police, or a militia, or the secret spooks with their blacksites, or just one person with a stupidly overpowered gun and a tragically underpowered mind.) It’s okay if the answer is no. Not everyone is a rebel or revolutionary, even under terrible oppression. The instinct to live is not a force that should be dismissed or trivialized. But if you are willing to put everything on the line, perhaps building a new society one community at a time is something you could start doing together with your family, friends, and neighbours. Maybe take the day off work? (Because, while haste makes waste, it would certainly be better to start sooner and work with some urgency rather than later and leisurely: the climate (and society) is genuinely coming apart at the seams.)

P.S. I want to make it crystal clear that when I say you’ll have to ‘face’ the police, I do not mean ‘engage them in a gun fight.’ I mean: you’re going to have to stand and/or sit there—recording everything—and refuse to comply while they beat the living shit out of you, arrest you, imprison you, and possibly murder you. The only way to win is to make sure there are too many of you for the cops to go through (the idea I’ve seen around the internet about holding 1,000 small protests rather than one huge demonstration, thus spreading the cops too thin for them to be able to seriously bully anyone is strategically brilliant). You will not win a gun fight with them, because they’ll just call in more cops and then sooner than later the military. 

If the cops pulverize you (and to be sure—unless you live in a shithole country like the US—there’s definitely a chance they won’t, so long as you keep what you’re doing non-violent (though I strongly suggest you prepare for police brutality anyway, just to be safe rather than sorry)), you fight back by humiliating the politicians with irrefutable evidence of their jackboot thugs kicking the teeth out of old people, mothers and small children, and disabled people; firing off their weapons indiscriminately, slamming their vehicles into whatever they want; and generally behaving like the ignorant, bigoted, immature bullies they are and will continue to be. In any case, replacing capitalism in your community does not require the slightest violence or coercion against anyone, from anyone, for any reason.

(Some) Further Reading

Coming Back to Life, by Joanna Macy and Molly Brown. Subtitled The Work That Reconnects, this exceptionally wonderful book is literally a how-to guide for bringing “people into new relationship[s] with their world, to empower them to take part in the Great Turning, and to reclaim their lives from corporate rule.”

The Great Turning, they explain, is their term for one of the three popular stories or lenses through which we make sense of the modern world, and which they describe as “involv[ing] the emergence of new and creative human responses that enable the transition from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Society”. The other two are Business As Usual, in which we are lied to by the ruling class that “there is little need to change the way we live;” and The Great Unraveling, which is “an account backed by evidence of the ongoing derangement and collapse of biological, ecological, economic and social systems.”

Their assumptions:

“1. This world, in which we are born and take our being, is alive. It is not our supply house and sewer; it is our larger body. The intelligence that evolved us from stardust, and interconnects us with all beings, is sufficient for the healing of our Earth community.

2. Our true nature is far more ancient and encompassing than the separate self defined by habit and society. We are as intrinsic to our living world as the rivers and trees, woven of the same intricate flows of matter/energy and mind. Having evolved us into self-reflexive consciousness, the world can now know itself through us, behold its own majesty, tell its own stories — and respond to its own suffering.

3. Our experience of pain for the world springs from our connectivity with all beings, from which also arise our powers to act on their behalf. When we deny or repress our pain for the world, or treat it as a private pathology, our power to take part in the self-healing of our world is diminished. This apatheia need not become a terminal condition. Our capacity to respond to our own and others’ suffering — that is, the feedback loops that weave us into life — can be unblocked.

4. Unblocking occurs when our pain for the world is not only acknowledged, but experienced. Information about the crises we face, or even about our psychological responses to them, is insufficient; only when we allow ourselves to experience our feelings of pain for our world can we can free ourselves from our fears of the pain — including the fear of getting permanently mired in despair or shattered by grief. Only then can we discover the fluid, dynamic character of feelings. Only then can they reveal on a visceral level our mutual belonging in the web of life.

5. When we reconnect with life by choosing to bear our pain for it, the mind retrieves its natural clarity. Not only do we experience our interbeing in the community of Earth, but also mental eagerness arises to match this experience with new paradigm thinking. Concepts, which bring relatedness into focus, become vivid. Significant learnings occur, for the individual system is reorganizing and reorienting, grounding itself in wider reaches of identity and self-interest.

6. The experience of reconnection with the Earth community arouses the urge to act on its behalf. As we experience bodhichitta, the desire for the welfare of all beings, Earth’s self-healing powers take hold within us. For these powers to function, they must be trusted and acted on. The steps we take may be modest undertakings, but when they involve some risk to our mental comfort, they free us from old safe limits. Courage is a great teacher and bringer of joy.”

The book includes many various practices and examples that you can concretely implement in your life and community, drawn from traditions all over the world.

A Paradise Built In Hell, by Rebecca Solnit. Through investigating several natural disasters (the 1906 San Fransisco Earthquake, the 1917 Halifax Explosion, the 1985 Mexico City Earthquake, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York on 9/11, and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005), Rebecca Solnit makes it painfully clear that in times of crisis and disaster it is almost always family, friends, neighbours, and strangers that do the rescuing, saving, and sacrificing; while it is almost always the ‘official response’ of police, government, and the media that piles moral atrocities onto physical destruction.

For example, “Thousands of people survived Hurricane Katrina because grandsons or aunts or neighbors or complete strangers reached out to those in need all through the Gulf Coast and because an armada of boat owners from the surrounding communities and as far away as Texas went into New Orleans to pull stranded people to safety. Hundreds of people died in the aftermath of Katrina because others, including police, vigilantes, high government officials, and the media, decided that the people of New Orleans were too dangerous to allow them to evacuate the septic, drowned city or to rescue them, even from hospitals. Some who attempted to flee were turned back at gunpoint or shot down. Rumors proliferated about mass rapes, mass murders, and mayhem that turned out later to be untrue, though the national media and New Orleans’s police chief believed and perpetuated those rumors during the crucial days when people were dying on rooftops and elevated highways and in crowded shelters and hospitals in the unbearable heat, without adequate water, without food, without medicine and medical attention. Those rumors led soldiers and others dispatched as rescuers to regard victims as enemies.” (Spoiler: the main reason for this is that the ruling class only cares about property, money, and their own power; they do not care about the well-being of others.)

Toward an Ecological Society by Murray Bookchin. I think of Murray Bookchin as a better Bernie Sanders. This collection of essays will lit a fire under your ass in the best way possible. It will also help you see how ecological concepts like spontaneity, diversity, and fitness-for-purpose are also deeply fundamental to human sociability and community.

“What we now call ‘radical’ is an odious mockery of three centuries of revolutionary opposition, social agitation, intellectual enlightenment, and popular insurgency. Radical politics in our time has come to mean the numbing quietude of the polling booth, the deadening platitudes of petition campaigns, car-bumper sloganeering, the contradictory rhetoric of manipulative politicians, the spectator sports of public rallies, and finally, the knee-bent, humble pleas for small reforms—in short, the mere shadows of the direct action, embattled commitment, insurgent conflicts, and social idealism that marked every revolutionary project in history. Not that petitions, slogans, rallies, and the tedious work of public education have no place in these projects. But we do not have to hypostasize adventuristic escapades to recognize the loss of a balanced revolutionary stance, one that has enough sense of time and place to evoke the appropriate means to achieve appropriate goals. My point is that the very goals of contemporary radicalism have all the features of a middle-aged bourgeois opportunism—of ‘trade-offs’ for small gains, of respectability for ‘mass’ but meaningless constituencies, of a degenerative retreat into the politics of the ‘lesser evil’ that itself generates a world of narrowing choices, finally of a sclerotic ossification of social ideas, organizational habits, and utopistic visions.

What is most terrifying about present-day radicalism is that the piercing cry for ‘audacity’— «L’audace! L’audace! encore l’audace!»—that Danton voiced in 1793 on the hightide of the French Revolution would simply be puzzling to self-styled radicals who demurely carry attache cases of memoranda and grant requests into their conference rooms, suitcases of their books into their lecture halls, and bull horns to their rallies. The era of the ‘managerial radical’ (to use Andrew Kopkind’s damning phrase) has pushed radicalism itself into the shadows of history. What we encounter today is the universal bureaucratization and technocratization of radicalism as such not merely in the triumph of organizational bureaucracies and centralized leaderships but in the very outlook, vision, and ideas of its most articulate acolytes. The ‘managerial radical’ is the practitioner of organizational technique, of efficient manipulation, of mass mobilization as goals in themselves. Technique has become the substitute for social idealism.

Radical theory, in turn, fares even worse as the ideology for this historic turn in radical politics. Where socialism and even anarchism have not been reduced to dogmatic echoes of the last century, they have become disciplines within the academy, where they serve to garnish ‘managerial radicalism’ with theoretical exotica. Much that now passes for ‘radical’ theory are either footnotes to the history of ideas or intellectual obscurantism that supports the pragmatic obscurantism of the political marketplace. The term ‘marketplace’ should not be taken as a metaphor. The colonization of society by a bourgeois sensibility—a result of the colonization of society by the market—is now complete. For the market has absorbed not only every aspect of production, consumption, community life, and family ties into the buyer-seller nexus; it has permeated the opposition to capitalism with bourgeois cunning, compromise, and careerism.”

Obviously there are more than three relevant books out there. Any work on political philosophy (everything from Sun Tzu’s Art of War to Blueprint for Revolution by Srdja Popovic) will almost certainly be useful in some way. I also do not want to discount the obvious power of religious texts to inspire great change. But I would like to highlight a surprisingly helpful genre that seems to be totally overlooked by adults: children’s and young adult literature.

Works like The Chronicles of Prydain by Lloyd Alexander, The Song of the Lioness by Tamora Pierce, Tales of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the Animorphs by K.A. Applegate, tell of children and young adults learning how to act with awe-inspiring moral courage in the face of overwhelming violent intolerance. And I have often found that when (good) writers simplify complex adult problems down to a level younger people can understand, it has an incredibly clarifying effect for any (attentive) adult who is also struggling with such things. These works can also help you reconnect to your own childhood and younger self, which often feels a lot like—to borrow a phrase—coming back to life.

From The Farthest Shore, by Ursula K. Le Guin:

“Arren did not understand all of this; nor did he want to understand it, now. He had been drawn a little way into that ‘darkness’ of which wizards spoke, and he did not want to remember it; it was nothing to do with him. [...]

‘My lord,’ he said, his mind veering away rapidly to another subject, ‘why—’

‘Sleep!’ said Sparrowhawk with mild exasperation.

‘I can’t sleep, my lord. I wondered why you didn’t free the other slaves.’

‘I did. I left none bound on that ship.’

‘But Egre’s men had weapons. If you had bound them.’

‘Aye, if I had bound them? There were but six. The oarsmen were chained slaves, like you. Egre and his men may be dead now, or chained by the others to be sold as slaves; but I left them free to fight or bargain. I am no slave-taker.’

‘But you knew them to be evil men—’

‘Was I to join them therefore? To let their acts rule my own? I will not make their choices for them, nor will I let them make mine for me!’

Arren was silent, pondering this. Presently the mage said, speaking softly, ‘Do you see, Arren, how an act is not, as young men think, like a rock that one picks up and throws, and it hits or misses, and that’s the end of it. When that rock is lifted, the earth is lighter; the hand that bears it heavier. When it is thrown, the circuits of the stars respond, and where it strikes or falls the universe is changed. On every act the Balance of the Whole depends. The winds and seas, the powers of water and earth and light, all that these do, and all that the beasts and green things do, is well done, and rightly done. All these act within the Equilibrium. From the hurricane and the great whale’s sounding to the fall of a dry leaf and the gnat’s flight, all they do is done within the Balance of the Whole. But we, insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature. We must learn to keep the Balance. Having intelligence, we must not act in ignorance. Having choice, we must not act without responsibility. Who am I—though I have the power to do it—to punish and reward, playing with men’s destinies?’”