Radical Community Plan Draft 1.o

We are told that we have always lived in a world of haves and have-nots, a world where some people are powerful and others helpless, the few using their power to steal what is made possible by the work of the many.

Helplessness then is the core enemy of all people and it is only through becoming independent will be free, and only through freedom will we be able to live the lives we want to live and save the humanity of those who currently rule over us.

Why are we helpless? Because we have nothing to sell but our ability to work. Because we have nothing we are forced to accept the conditions we are given in the workplace and in the world. Because we must constantly scrape together our survival we have no time to figure out how we want to live and bring it about. And because we haven’t organized ourselves to be powerful we have nothing and are in no position to change our conditions.

It is time to say enough of this helplessness. It is time to attack it at the root, to build our own power, and to salt the earth in which it grows. And this can be done today, and it is our responsibility to take it on, for our ancestors and their blood, sweat, and tears, that brought us to this day, and for our grandchildren’s grandchildren, whose futures we must always keep in mind.

How do we eliminate helplessness?

• We attack work and the conditions that force us to work
• We build and live out the world we want to live in
• We grow the movement
• We transform the world

We do this by building assets, building community, building power. And we do this in the right way. If there is one thing we have learned from our bosses, our politicians, our cops, from all the corrupt faces of power, it is that people act in their own self-interest whoever they pretend to stand for. We must take this into account.

Our world then must do away with representation that allows people to speak their interest in the voice of the many, and the centralization that puts the rule of one over the interest of all. In our world all people will be involved in running things in a direct participatory way. In our world there will no be centralization of control, no single group to make uniform our dissenting goals.

No to representation! Only direct democracy is real democracy!

No to centralization! Only we can speak for ourselves!

Work can be attacked by replacing fear with freedom. We attack the current conditions of work by organizing workplaces, creating fair and democratic alternative workplaces through cooperatives and by building the infrastructure and support system to undermine our need to work all together by building community self-sufficiency and a culture of solidarity and mutual aid.

We can build the world we want to live in by replacing fear with freedom. We treat each other with respect and dignity, we talk in person, we intentionally build our relationships to each other, and we speak of each other and our different goals and ability with critical respect. But that is not all. We create our own spaces and cultural institutions, we find and work together with like minded people, we create a welcoming culture of solidarity, friendship, and joy

We grow the movement by replacing fear with freedom. We build relationships and collaborations with our natural and unlikely allies. We make better use of our existing infrastructure. We think seriously about winning, about creating real, non-compromised solutions to every problem, and we target strategic people and institutions accordingly.

We transform the world by making our freedom international, by linking together with and inspiring others all over the world.

Want more details? Keep reading! Also, consider the free online book Getting Free by James Herod, and joining the EXCO class by the same name this February, 2008.

Ideas for the Twin Cities’ Radical Community:

When we think about the pathetic state of affairs and the pathetic attempts to change them we must be confronted by the facts that helplessness is an enemy that can only be overcome by people themselves, and that we are not building a world based on free stuff, we are building a new world. As such, while it is crucial that we take advantage of charitable donations and the variety of other nonprofit mechanisms, at the heart of our plan must be the building of a new, just and sustainable economy, and new assets…new sources of life.

New economies:

• Cooperatives and cooperative conglomerates.
• A Radical Timebank where people can trade their labor equally to the benefit of all
• Property acquisition and sustainable use through a Radical Land Trust
• A mass-membership radical community foundation and bank

This foundation/bank would support in a variety of ways…

• Radical Citizens’ Network
• Strategic education through EXCO and a skillshare database
• Radical Land Trust
• Workplace organizing through the Industrial Workers of the World and other radical unionizing efforts
• Cooperative Conglomerate
• Repair cooperatives: Open Circuit, Sibley Bike, etc
• Radical spaces/radical neighborhood groups
• Collective purchasing operations
• National and international networking