5 Steps to Non-Violent Revolution
Keys to building proper mutual aid networks and establishing functional worker power
So you wanna do a revolution, do ya? Wanna institute fairness and equity, and abolish systems of oppression for all? Well unfortunately that doesn’t happen from posting on twitter or reading 19th century Russian Crust Punks. That’s direct action baby!
One of the things I have been working on over the last few months is trying to answer the question “What does building a large scale mutual aid network look like in regards to preparing for a push away from capitalism?” The question is not an easy one, and I recognize there are going to be more answers to it than people you ask, however, I think I have boiled it down to 5 Keys that while may not cover everything, should get us far enough along to take it seriously.
Stage 1: There is no revolution without Food Security and Food Sovereignty
So long as all the very baseline level of needs are controlled by “others”, you cannot have any attempt at working towards revolutionary progress. As such, anarchists need to start organizing in their neighborhoods on building proper Food, Water, and Power security. Growing a small garden or a few veggies is incredibly simple. Plants simply need soil, sun, and water. Let’s not make it complicated. You can grow food. Yes you, the one who tells their friends they have a “black thumb” and kill all your houseplants. First, houseplants are finicky and can die super easy out of nowhere for almost no reason. That is not a measure of your ability to grow things. Second, the game changes a bit when you need that plant to keep living, so that you can keep living. You’re a lot less likely to forget to water your dinner.
That being said, I am not going to go into the nitty-gritty on all the steps to growing food for you. I am instead going to drop some links here for you to click through so you can learn for yourselves. There are a couple of Youtube channels I watched when I wanted to learn about gardening as I tried to find the person who best explains things in a way I understand. So here’s those with a Short descriptor for your convenience:
MiGardener - Luke who is the host, lives in Michigan. A place you would think is difficult to grow an abundant supply of food. However, his videos cover a method of gardening that produces exceptionally high yields in small spaces and each of his videos breaks down everything you need to know about growing any specific fruit, veggie, flower, etc. That being said, he is a little long winded and sometimes will over explain something. But his grow guides helped me take a 15x20 section of backyard in Alabama and not have to buy groceries for an entire summer off a $50 investment.
Nature’s Always Right - Steven walks through the process of converting his backyard into a fully profitable market garden as well as some inventions/innovations on growing and caring for chickens, building compost, and more. It’s an easy watch and he does skim by a few things, but if you’re watching him in addition to others, it’s an excellent resource.
James Prigioni - James is a grower/homesteader in New Jersey who has converted his back yard into a fully self reliant permacultre food forest. This method takes a lot of work up front and is best suited (in our case) for communal involvement, but the rewards starting after year 3/4 are that you have a ton of food that just shows up all year with little to no effort moving forward. His approach is straight forward and easy to digest.
Epic Gardening - Kevin much like Luke with MI Gardener, is about growing maximum yeilds in minimal space. The difference is he does so with his micro-sized front yard in San Diego, CA. This is an excellent resource if you live in a major city/urban envireonment, apartment complex, or other places where you feel you don’t have the “space” to grow food.
Now for those who will inevitably complain about some reason why you can’t grow enough, the trick here at PA is that You don’t have too! A single 4x8 raised bed in your back yard is enough to grow 2-3 different vegetables including lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, and more. And here’s where the community comes in. If you and each of your neighbors can build a single bed (which costs about $30 to buy all the materials) you can share the spoils amongst the group and everyone can have more than enough to sustain without having to work a whole farm. For those who are over-zealous like myself, its easy to manage 8-10 beds at a time once you put in the upfront effort, it’s only about 30 minutes a day of upkeep. Organizations like LA Crop Swap1 and the New World Growers2 are excellent examples of how having a few neighbors putting in a little effort can create massive positive changes.
In addition to growing food, water collection and filtration will be necessary. Most of the channels I listed above have some excellent videos on collecting water for managing your beds, and those systems can be upsized to also handle your home needs. Feel free to check out some homesteading channels on YT to learn more.
As for the energy portion, this is where that “using the system against itself” thing us anarchist enjoy so much comes into play. If you live in a house, sign up for solar. It’s easy. In 90% of cases you even save a couple dollars a month on your electric bill and it costs you nothing up front (because they install the system and you pay for it monthly by paying the solar company instead of the electric company your bill). When the time comes for us to mass exit the system, you’ll simply quit paying them, and because everything is already wired up, you’ll keep your electricty3.
Remember, we don’t care about hurting companies bottom lines or stealing electricity. That shit should be free anyways. Don’t feel bad for your electric company. Fuck em.
Stage 2: Community Defense: It ain’t yours if you can’t protect it.
The neat thing about being far left, is that once you move far enough to the left, you get your guns back. And while guns are cool and shooting stuff is both fun and a necessary skill for you to learn, that is simply a single portion of what constitutes community defense. CD is an umbrella term that means: Protecting the members of your community from outside threats. That can be either state actors, shithead libertarians who don’t know how to open their buckets of 20 year food, cops, etc.
This is done in a multi-pronged approach:
Buy a gun and learn to use it - This means investing time at a range, and practicing with your weapon of choice so that you are comfortable and capable of shooting the thing attacking you and not the person on your team. A good resource if you know absolutely nothing about firearms is Honest Outlaw on YT.
Know all your neighbors - One the greatest things you can read is an excellent article published on why cops can’t infiltrate anarchist communities because a) they read too much, b) they can’t cut funding cause it’s a loose network of poor people, and c) they are always immediately outed as cops because everyone knows everyone and when some random new dipshit arrives, everyone is suspicious of them and grills them until they out themselves. You can read about that here. So knowing who is a member of your community, who isn’t but is still cool, and who absolutely should be Shot on sight, is tantamount to maintaining a successful community.
Understand your neighborhood and its gaps - There is a reason medieval castles and townships had walls around them. Your community doesn’t necessarily need a moat, but having an understanding of where threats can come from and having systems in place to neutralize them is vital for your survival. Don’t assume cops are too stupid and out of shape to hop your back fence.
Having access to fellow leftists with military experience and training can go a long way to ensuring the survival of your commune. So don’t just scream “baby killer” at every veteran you come across as plenty of them were radicalized left by the things they saw and did and will gladly join your team to fight the power if you let them.
Stage 3: Community Organizing - Someone has to do it, may as well be you!
Having your community be all on the same page is key to success. It’s your responsibility as an anarchist to be a leader in your community and help organize and educate your neighbors in a way that can build solidarity and worker power. Activist Willy Baptist speaks about organizing through the parable of “Muhammad goes to the mountain”, in order for Muhammad to speak from the mountain top he must first actually go to the mountain top. The mountain doesn’t move, and it sure as shit isn’t going to pull itself out of the ground and come find him.
From an organizers perspective, the people are the mountain. YOU have to go and organize them. People, especially your neighbors aren’t going to knock on your door and ask if you’ll organize them. You gotta get out and do it. This however relates to my previous article on building small tent groupings and being careful who you let in4. That being said, here’s 12 things to consider when it comes to being a leader in your community:
Make others feel safe to speak up and share their ideas/feelings/concerns
Communicate expectations
Challenge people to think and think through problems. Teach a man to fish …
Be accountable to others
Lead by example
Seek continuous feedback (relates to #1)
Properly allocate and deploy talent. Don’t put your best gardener on guard duty.
Avoid procrastination. It CAN’T be put off till later. Get it done when it needs to.
Stay Positive and maintain a good attitude. Even when its tough. Show outward positivity.
Be a great teacher. Teach what you know. Learn what you can. Inspire others to teach as well. Everyone has value and knowledge to share.
Invest in relationships. Per the CD section. Know your community and spend time with them.
Generally enjoy the responsibility. Its a big deal that people look to you, enjoy it without letting it go to your head. But take pride in your efforts.
There are gonna be plenty more articles on organizing in the community, so I won’t cover a lot more here. One thing I will recommend is you follow the YT channel for NASO: The North Alabama School for Organizing and check out the website. They teach weekly classes on how to organize in the community, and host fireside chats with organizers to learn new ways of thinking and strategy for organizing. Those can be found at:
https://naso.network/
and
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiuNWc8L9tWHIEm07_rRZrQ/ (drop a sub on YT so they can lock in a shortened URL. YT requires 100 subs for that. It doesn’t cost for those who didn’t know.)
Stage 4: Skill Exchange: People know a lot more than you think they do
The reason your great grandma was able to plow through the great depression on two cans of spam and box of denim is because they knew how to do things. Granny could sew her own clothes, repair them, etc. Grandpa knew how to fix stuff around the house and didn’t need to call someone to change outlets, repair the roof, or fix a chair. These are indispensable skills to have and your neighbors have them. Especially your old neighbors. Just like you can teach them how to work their smart phone, check email, or post maga bullshit on their grand-kids Facebook walls, they can teach you all the various tricks they’ve learned over their lives on how to survive. Have kids in the community spend time learning from elders. Learn to fix a car, repair a sink clog, shingle a roof, etc from those around you and make community activities in which people can all learn at once.
Letting the elderly die alone and miserable in their homes without sharing their knowledge is peak capitalist bullshit, and we’re better than that.
Stage 5: Theory and Education: The LEAST important thing in a revolution
I know half the folks who were reading up to this point are going to check out on me forever after this, but look: Theory is the thing you do after you revolted and have time sitting around your garden to read and contemplate the nature of things. If you are constantly concern trolling about the need for theory before the revolution even starts and also accepting that theory is ever growing and changing; and for all intents and purposes, is infinite; then, you’re admitting you would rather sit comfortably in your armchair and read, than do anything meaningful.
By all means, build a neat little free library in your front yard and stock it with socialist, communist, anarchist literature. Cool beans. But don’t go around your neighborhood and demand everyone read Das Kapital and State and Revolution before they start planting their garden beds. There is a time and a place for education, and it’s when the primary work of survival is done. It is a luxury.
So focus on building power and liberation in your neighborhoods first. Seriously, you probably have 20 houses on your street. Talk to them. Get to know them. You don’t need to go door knocking asking if people want to join you in overthrowing the bourgeois state, you can learn something about them, have them over for dinner. Plant seeds of revolution by discussing things like food sovereignty, energy independence, skills and trades, etc.
If enough people simply went and organized the small group around them, you could easily have the systems in place and moving towards a full exit of the system: General strike, debt strike, and purchase strike; in 12-18 months. It’s really that simple, if you just start imagining a better world, and then taking the small steps to improve it. A 1% improvement every day is a 37x overall growth in a year. A 1% drop each day can have you at almost nothing in the same time.
Stay safe out there, plant some lettuce, buy a gun, and live free.
-EQ
https://www.cropswapla.com/
https://newworldgrowers.com
It’s important that you make sure your system is set as off-grid not on-grid, as the on-grid systems have inverters that are programmed to be able to be shut off by the power authority in your area in case of outages, etc. Meaning they can shut you down, even with solar panels. The other option is to learn how to disconnect those inverters.
https://earthquake.substack.com/p/discussing-leftism-what-it-is-and?r=kcjgt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&utm_source=copy