Exit Strategies: Why We Say, "Build And Fight"

We are living in times of unbearable speed. Speed that robs us of the time needed to really grasp the situation and to collectively act upon it. Without access to reflection and collective action, this constant acceleration can only end in collapse of the system itself. Some would celebrate this, and we empathize with that. But like it or not, collapse *is* the system now. 2008. 2020. 2026. Katrina. Sandy. Maria. Uri. Helene. This is just how we mark time now. They're already selling us the next one in advance. In their own propaganda, on the eve of their IPOs, AI prophets are promising us calamity before profit. Whether it's due to artificial super-intelligence, technological unemployment or a massive speculative bubble, we've been reassured that next crisis is already lined up, coincidentally right behind an unprecedented rally for investment.

The consensus from above is clear. There is no Green New Deal. There is no Build Back Better. It's Drill Baby Drill and 3C of warming. The future is already canceled. We have no choice but to invent one of our own. What does that look like, and more importantly, how can we get there? For starters, we need to look more closely at where we actually are.

Institutional Capture

An honest appraisal of the last several decades of organizing tells us that the state apparatus is the domain of the exploiter, and that its opportunities for both reform and conflict have been repeatedly overestimated by our movements, due at least in part to relative successes that happened generations ago. It would also tell us that our core weakness is the lack of material, technical, and relational capacity that is within our collective control. These two facts intersect. Under this advanced capitalist regime, without the development of diverse reservoirs of collective power, our political maneuvers are nothing but demands yelled into the void, or at best calls made to a senator's bored intern. Even the occasional periods of Doing Something, such as a protest movement or a direct action network gaining prominence, are reabsorbed into the machine as it inevitably co-opts the "realists," hires the opportunists, and jails and kills the radicals. Those of us left behind gain lessons and scar tissue in equal measure. For every person who bounces back ready to fight harder, one or more exit due to burnout and a sense of hopelessness. Thus, a kind of kinetic equilibrium is maintained.

And all along, the machine not only marches on, but grows, turning ever more of our planet into garbage and its people into frail, dependent subjects of an Empire of Entropy. They waste our precious water on corn, methane, and Portland cement, and in exchange we get to be the human equivalent of Foie gras, gulping down sugar and red meat to soothe the malaise of living on a concrete heat island that can only be traversed by burning a gallon of gasoline in a two-ton death box (if we can even afford one). They take every hour we can afford to give, and every bit of our physical and/or mental capacity with it, and in exchange we get the privilege of wasting away on mobile apps that milk us for dopamine because going outside is too hot and expensive. They discipline us as laborers and control us as consumers. Their systems work ceaselessly, automatically, to mold us into the perfect capitalist subject. - a being that can only either work or consume. To allow us to do anything else would be an unforgivable opportunity cost. Ruthlessness is rewarded with market share, compassion with elimination and irrelevance.

Escape Velocity

Given the lack of opportunities for reform within this system, we advocate for a three-pronged approach.

1. Maintain an ideologically specific anarchist organization.
2. Support anarchic relations in existing spaces via social insertion.
3. Develop the solidarity economy.

The first two prongs are contained within the practice of especifismo, which is already summarized amazingly elsewhere. The third is a bit more complicated to describe, but it can be summarized as a tactical exit from all institutions that have been captured by the owning class. This means building alternative institutions that are decentralized, horizontally governed, radically transparent, and beneficial to communities on their own terms. One example would be a network of worker cooperatives that pool resources and work together to accomplish more than they could individually. Another would be a solar buying cooperative that shares bulk savings on panels and batteries. Another would be a community land trust that takes housing stock off the market and puts it in the hands of the people themselves.

To get these kinds of projects off the ground, we need professional and personal networks of people with a diverse set of needs and skills, which is exactly what we've been accruing through our years of organizing. Our members have been learning how to capture and store water, grow food, build structures, deploy communications and energy infrastructure, provide medical support, practice and co-train in self-defense, and so many other things that it would take pages just to enumerate them. At the highest level, the strategy is to gradually increase the degree of sophistication with which we coordinate our collective skills and needs, building a dense web of mutual care that transcends the limitations of mere kinship. In short, we are remaking society from the bottom up. It's a tall order, but we aren't the only ones filling it. There are organizations and networks all over the world working toward this same audacious end, and we're just playing our one little part in it.

Let's Get Real: Politics Without Politicians

In Cooperation Denton, we focus on specific strategies that we expect, in our local context, to still be relevant in five and ten years time. We are planning things in decades. We are preparing toward the pessimistic side of things and building aspirationally from there. We are taking public welfare more seriously than the government. We are taking housing more seriously than the landlords. Our moves do not change based on this week's news. We are determined to stay situated in what is real.

But what is real? Nowadays, we get so overwhelmed by reality that it's hard to really tell anymore. But if we indulge in that ever waning luxury of self-reflection, a few things still come into focus, with profound implications for effective political action. A large language model doesn't seem real, and indeed a lot of the speculation around "AI" is built on air. It doesn't seem anywhere near as real as a local watershed, whose lifeblood flows through the bodies of all nearby living things. But all those ones and zeroes in cyberspace are physical states on real hardware. That means that a large language model can deeply and dramatically impact a real watershed. Unlike our robot overlords, we in Cooperation Denton see the absurdity of giving 1.3 billion people's water to AI in a world where 2.1 billion people still don't have safe access to it. We also recognize that people don't like dying from thirst, or PFAS pollution, floods, or heat and humidity. Each year, oil and gas executives kill your neighbors, and our politicians yap about trans people in bathrooms and imaginary cartels. No wonder Texans think we don't like politics. Our politicians are little more than spokespeople for our exploiters!

The time has come to get real about the cost of allowing the state to be the sole container of our rights against the corporations that they write into existence. We must build alternatives beyond the state's grasp, managed by communities of solidarity with everyone who shares our fate. This is not an invitation to "look past our differences," but to look right at them, learn about them, and embrace them as part of a new path forward. We must develop a diverse, non-hierarchical front against the polluters and resource hoarders who manipulate and exploit us. This united front must take every care to avoid reproducing the conditions that got us here. We must confront white supremacy, patriarchy, queerphobia, ableism, and other threats to solidarity. At the same time, we cannot allow our momentum to be co-opted by green-washing, pink-washing, or a pseudo-inclusive capitalism that defers its ethical contradictions to investment portfolios. To do so would only allow cherry-picked examples of social mobility to act as a proxy for real economic justice. The only path forward that does not collapse in on itself is both explicitly anti-capitalist and intersectionally feminist.

The Takeaway

The reason that it is so difficult to imagine a future beyond capitalism is that we are in a period of exponential capture by commoditization. A ride to the airport or a grocery trip went from being the duty of friends and family to a hyper-exploitative gig economy in a matter of just a few years. This was funded based on pure speculation, on the idea that investors could make money years or even decades in the future under a horrific and novel set of circumstances that they would have to spend billions to bring to fruition. What we are living through is a strategy of deliberate cancellation by tech oligarchs of any popular future. They say as much over and over again. That is what is happening now the umbrella of "AI," as scores of money - more than it would cost to do actually good things that we actually need - are being set ablaze to turn sand into algorithms so that already rich people can realize "a future where intelligence is a utility...and people buy it from us on a meter."

We have a duty to ourselves, to each other, and to future generations to demand something better. In an era dominated by the infernal machinery of ecocide, resistance is defined by the deliberate, unceasing insistence on your value and purpose as nature defending itself. We must imagine a world that is as good as theirs is horrible, and do everything we can to bring it about. We must demand the future. What they refuse to give us, we will take. What we can't take, we will make. And above all, we will share what we have and leave nobody behind. Together, we must build and fight.

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