Re-Architecting Resistance, Part III
Welcome to our third episode of “Rearchitecting Resistance”, where we talk about the architecture of our movements, why they have failed, and how to do better. At this point, it’s less of an orchestrated series and more just going through the various planks and points, of which there are many. You can find parts one and parts two at the links.
We shall begin.
One of the biggest things that took us down in the past 10-15 was ops. Ops on ops on ops. Everything from social media ops by venture capital — raising fake communities backed by filthy money, to actual CIA infiltration, to the many corporations who dismantled movements person by person through fear, threats, roving fascist games, and from reformists, steadily shifting any radical or revolutionary element back into voting for democrats and being campaign managers for them, all while the democrats continue to work side-by-side and in lockstep with republicans on literally all of the most important issues of our time. They have continued to spread the lie that Democrats provide a better way forward than Republicans, when rather it is both of them that must go away; look no further to the fact that the border aggression, chalked up totally to Trump, has increased under President Biden, as well as the war hawk agenda, and involvement in foreign wars.
The biggest op of all, of course, is how capitalist corporations in America literally bought out massive swathes of resistance leadership, bribing them with fake promises of “changing things from the inside”, large checks and stock options, and appeals to vanity and the desire for a platform.
The goal needs to be creating insulation and protection from ops, but more important than that, it is *to design a movement that can work despite the known presence of ops.* Unfortunately, the CIA is always going to be in the chat room, multiple people you have worked with in the movements were assets of either a corporation or an intelligence agency, reformists will never stop trying to blunt the movements for personal gain, fascist gangs online will never stop attacking us, and capitalists will never stop trying to buy people out. We can’t change what they are doing, but we can understand it and try to make our resistance more resilient to them.
I think one of the first things we need is to develop pride in our identity within the resistance, opposing the oppressor; to prize loyalty to cause, to create a culture where selling out to capitalist corporations is recognized as selling out, is treated like selling out. This of course requires the ability to understand these tactics of the enemy, and that is an understanding that we should seek to broadly teach; and it should be part of an educational program. The only way to keep people from selling out is to recognize and discuss the phenomenon, and to create a culture against selling-out, where taking packages from the enemy is understood as traitor behavior, and where it is socially punished. In previous iterations, nothing was said or done when, for example, people in the anti-venture capital movement of the web 2.0 bubble, got gigs at some of the worst venture-backed jobs in the Valley … and if you said anything about it (I did) there was tons of pushback, and that pushback was indicative of the trend across the entire resistance effort, where doing this kind of “change it from the inside” bullshit was actually the propulsive movement of the reformist effort.
As part of effectively and accurately modeling the system so that we can act upon it, we need to start talking about this on our teams and in our movements, understanding it as a threat on par with our other justified fears of intelligence infiltration. When people join a movement, they need to be told that people are going to come to them with money, platforms, fame, podcasts, jobs… that this is one of the foremost tactics of venture capital and other enemies in politics and society. Everyone needs to be warned, and then held accountable; if someone truly sells out the movement, they should be socially shunned by it. This is very basic principle for maintaining a movement, that we are actually kicking people who would prefer to work for the enemy out. And fuck off, there are jobs available that aren’t working for war criminals, and that don’t use the movement as a bargaining chip in a salary. This was never about a lack of other options. Every single person i know who took a sell-out venture capitalist job could have easily worked at 10,000 other startups. The people they recruit for this shit are NOT people who had no other options. Period. They are preying, specifically, on highly skilled, organized movement leaders. And while their jobs offers are the best on the plate, they are almost never the only option.
Changing this model means drawing more lines of what is and what is not, resistance. This is not to say that having a job is bad, or that working on something you care about professionally is necessarily bad, but rather that *specifically selling out to material bad actors*, through *positions you gained because of independent resistance work*, thus becoming their agent and locating your resistance within the enemy superstructure, is, in fact, bad. Indeed, perhaps one of the biggest distinctions to make, is an understanding that we do the real resistance work outside of these structures. And it is not particularly difficult to discern if someone is trying to pay the bills and keep it moving, or if there is a serious conflict of interest of the “resistance” work they are being paid for, by, let’s say, a startup that is funded by literal fascists.
Again, this is not a specious and emotional argument but rather a material argument, that acknowledges how corporations, non profits, and Democratic, capitalist and reformist political parties and interests, have sucked up massive amounts of movement time and energy. And people need to stop playing dumb and like they don’t understand selling out as a concept, or what it does to us. I am not advocating a witch-hunt, nor am I advocating punishing people for needing jobs, or for wanting to work in at least nominally social progressive causes; rather for a recognition of how The Package is used to manipulate and de-fang movements, and taking the necessary steps to protect our movements, people and assets, from this infiltration tactic; this is also about setting clear boundaries between the people’s movement, and the fake reformist movement designed and then staffed by venture capital, American capitalist political parties, and so on. I.e., we should no longer count on “from the inside” working as a strategy, and seek to stop capitalist corporations from leeching off on, feeding on, incorporating and assimilating, the movement, via the people they have hired; there needs to be a line drawn, and a wall built, and this comes down to, more fundamentally, the taint of war criminal, police and government, capitalist money in the movement, the tying of the movement’s financial future to bad actors, as if our intentions suddenly make the obvious material conflicts between “inside” and “outside” disappear, or its coercive mechanisms less lethal.
A culture of pride in our work, a sense of identity that is derived from outside the superstructure, is mandated, and will only work when we draw distinctions, and start calling out the way that certain patterns of taking jobs, money, political positions, compromise platforms and allegiances towards bad and orthogonally positioned actors; and then, how these bad actors use this to deradicalize the movements, suck up all its leaders, and neutralize movements. And ultimately, if someone involved in a movement makes that decision to go work for the other side in a way that is clearly compromising, they should be cut off from leadership roles in the movement; they are compromised. However, I encourage us to see this as a systems problem, one that albeit preys on personal conceit and greed; we haven’t had any standards whatsoever for this kind of conduct, not even the question of if being bribed into the inside, where all is deradicalized and dies, is a good idea.
I truly believe that after all we have been through, people will be willing to see this reality more clearly, and hopefully, more receptive to an idea that these things are problematic.
Of course the ideal would be that if we are getting people into those positions, it is *us* that are the infiltrators, us that are using the mechanisms in service of the movement, us that is running ops and using the access strategically; this has simply not been the tenor of our engagement with the enemy and thus we are getting very little back out of the people who “go to work for the inside” and we have seen that this isn’t facilitating either resource gathering or movement progress. A sufficiently advanced and sophisticated movement would be networking all these “inside the system” folks and actually using that network to cleverly extract resources feeding directly back into the movement. However, if you go in as a “change it from the inside” and not as an organized infiltrator, clear headed and determined, with clear material goals, and backing of the subversive activity from the movement, you get absolutely nowhere.
To the theme of resiliency and using what you have, I absolutely believe there are large populations of people currently working inside the system, and many of whom had good intentions, have now come to see their fruitlessness, and certainly weren’t being supported by a movement backbone, who could be organized in and of themselves, and start finding ways to more strategically extract resources, share intel, move as a coordinated body across many infiltrated positions, and I think that would be really exciting. And much more in line with our goals.
+ I’ve written substantially here about creating a new economic background for the movements so that we can fund our own efforts independently; of course a large part of this is being able to provide for people in the movement, and particularly to create full-time positions, where the foremost leaders and organizers in the movement are paid to do so. This is certainly a highly relevant point but as it has been discussed earlier in this series and in this blog, I’ll spare you a rehashing except to say, that this also has to do with the fundamental issue of managing money in the movements, and is part of a broader financial crisis that is almost totally preventing leftist organization, which has been reliant on institutional, corporate and political money that is now being withheld; there is no more vital movement to put the pressure on these bodies that was generating the jobs. Let this be a lesson on taking money from the enemy.
One of the reasons that we are so vulnerable to corporate and political infiltration and buy out, is because we have not put a sufficient emphasis on finding paths to people working on these things full time, or supporting them in giving a significant amount of their time to the movement, by paying them.
I believe that the most important money to be spent in the movement is on people’s time, and that that should be the focus of movement spending. Time is the most valuable thing we can get out of our people, and focusing on time primarily, provides us a reasonable and material way to reason about money on the left, and how we might move forward with self-financing, which is abundantly possible and a major component of all successful leftist political organized of the past. The focus should be on securing people’s time and attention on the matter before them, and not force them to seek a platform for their activism, in a corporate shell.
+ Individual and team development. We read a ton of shit in the movements and I think that’s super great, but another thing that needs to be added to this is a curriculum that is specifically focused on how to design movements and how to make them succeed, that focuses on core theory, design and skills, that focuses on team building, up-skilling, and working in multi-speciality environments. The movement should be receiving and churning out people that are much more competent, effective, networked, organized, reflective and highly trained than before they arrived.
Skill development in general is something we need to work on within the movement, seeking to actually train people in successful resistance, in the best technology tools to use, in the best team strategies and designs that we have. The focus has been on filling an organization or campaign or what have you, with more and more bodies, but rarely has it been focused on proactively nurturing the revolutionary talent that we need to succeed; a single highly organized person with backing from a revolutionary structure can literally be more effective than 1,000 or more people who do not have that deliberant movement education.
In this affair, we need to be educating people on how distributed teams operate in high performance environments, like computer engineering; we need to be looking at a number of modules for team development and health, and that should include everything from training on DBT and other widely adopted and practiced therapeutic modules, use of conflict management skills, and in revolutionary theory and literature. There is a massive body of best practices for managing teams and momentum, and yet, these are not typically used or applied. Particularly for movements caught in the never-ending hype cycle, skill development, planning for the long-term of both the individual actor and the movement, takes a back seat to the frenzied bursts of activity; here again, the idea of measured, principled, planned and theoretically sound, action, has consistently taking a back seat to the social media rhythm of short-term, bursty, and ultimately unsustainable action.
In short, we need to actually teach people how to do this and the assumption that anyone with a passion for this, is ready to go, rather than working on upskilling and coordinating movements more tightly using widely available modules for team development and action, is really fucking us. Using just a few techniques from these fields, can significant improve the velocity and organization of any resistance body.
+ Another architectural matter has been the overwhelming focus on the American state and America that we saw here in America; while there was global solidarity at key moments, we would be lying to ourselves if we said that this was central aim of many movements, where we focused on simply America, and often on American elections as the primary goalpost. Even where there was global participation in movements, this was not the central and foundational aim; we were not building global infrastructure and relations from the ground up, where that was baked in, and the idea of the global body rather than the national body, foremost. Much of the international cooperation was sparked by expats from different countries, immigrants, people with family in other countries, who have provided this bridge; an essential one, one that should be the basis for an overall movement where EVERYONE is globally aware and engaged, where these is much great emphasis on moving as a global body, of knowing of global struggle, and of working on teams WITH each other; the global, multi-specialty team. I believe this is the only way forward, and global coordination should be the first impetus, and unifying theme; the time for truly global movement, for truly global resistance bodies, has come; this means changing how we operate resistance teams and changing the makeup of our teams, which should be global, remote and distributed in nature.
And certainly this doesn’t mean not focusing on America at all, although personally, I’m the fuck out of working with the American left due to how impotent, backwards, embarrassing and useless it is, and is determined to be. That aside, this doesn’t mean there is no domestic component, but rather that we gain an organized international force, that we are contributing here, and other movements of sympathy and alliance are as well, and vice versa.
Particularly here in the imperial core, our position is one that is particularly valuable in the global battle, and there is absolutely a place for recognition of one’s ability to act with great clarity and effect at their country; none of this contradicts the idea of building movements from the ground up to be global, to be cross-movement, to be cross-continent, and where the effort is to work as a global body, moving together against the oppressor and the enemy financial system.
One thing that we do know from the field of engineering, is just how deeply these choices contain and impact what the movement is capable of, and what it will do. In order for movements to actually be global, they must rely on global teams, global communications, global strategies. There is no way to fake this, there is no way to half ass tack it on later, it must be from jump, it must be foundational, and we should be working with the global resistance as a primary goal.
This implies that we, as participants in the movements, are not just focusing on one narrow area, but are working on core issues as they span globally. There is no problem in America that is not a global systems issue — militarized and tech-powered policing, poverty and wealth inequality, gender violence, all —there is nothing anywhere that can be truly resolved through any other than global systems action. We are simply not making use of the system WE have, and it is time to fundamentally re-calibrate.
+ In the next post, we will be focusing more in-depth, on our major alternative to how movements have been built in the last 10-15 years. That alternative is building infrastructure; building sustainable resistance infrastructure designed for long-term viability, enabling us to actually play the long game as well as the short, and making sure that we are actually building things over time, rather than putting up efforts made of toothpicks and glue that are quickly lost in the squall.
See you then!