The Revolution Starts at Home, and So Does the Revolutionary.

How to Find Our Place in the Struggle for Liberation: A Thread

What I’ve pictured above is an example of how you might map your various spheres of influence. Many of us become awakened to join the struggle and want to leap headfirst into radically changing our entire city, but don’t know how to even start.

My suggestion: start with understanding and mapping out what is in your personal reach. What is in your greatest ability to change/influence? Begin there. By strengthening that sphere, you will build your power to influence and strengthen others.

You: you have the most power to change yourself. Attend to your own internal contradictions. Unlearn the toxicity taught to you by Empire. Learn the history of struggle. Figure out your values, discover how to act in integrity to those values.

You—>Your relationships: When you strengthen your own sense of your values, when you build your understanding of history, when you learn how to speak to those values and to challenge Empire’s propaganda, you will better be able to bring that into your relationships.

Your relationships: Family, friends, partners, co-workers, classmates, neighbors, etc. You have the most influence and impact with those closest to you. Challenge their oppressive understandings. Offer new possibilities. Practice healthy communication and accountability together.

Your relationships—>Your workplace: When you strengthen your relationships and communally build up shared values and with them shared power, you can bring that power to bear on larger social spaces and collectively affect the conditions of those spaces.

Your workplace: shorthand for anyplace you engage with a larger community. Your work, your school, the place you volunteer, etc. A space that structurally holds power in your community, and thus takes significant collective power to change or disrupt. 1/3

Use your relationships of shared values you’ve built to apply pressure within the range of those collective relationships. With coworkers, that might be unionizing or starting a co-op. With fellow organizers, that might mean changing the goals/standards/practices of an org. 2/3

What you can do here is entirely dependent on the relationships you have. What does your collective power allow you to begin doing that you otherwise could not have done alone? Be creative, there are so many avenues where one might apply collective power in the struggle. 3/3

Your workplace—> Your neighborhood: Building new ways to relate to one another in the work we do, as well as finding ways to work together under our shared values can free up all involved to reach further into the community and use collective resources to affect it.

Your neighborhood: shorthand for a sphere of influence beyond a single workplace. This can mean helping build larger networks of worker co-ops or unions. Or organizing actual neighborhoods to resist gentrification. 1/2

Similar to the workplace, what you can do within your “neighborhood” is dependent upon the smaller organizations of people within them, which are dependent on the relationships within them, which are dependent on who the individual people are within them. 2/2

Your neighborhood—> Your town or city: Building up large networks of communal power under shared values is what allows for change on a larger scale. This is what allows for autonomous zones to be built, or general strikes to be called, that can affect a much larger social space.

Your town or city: You can meaningfully and *sustainably* begin to change large swaths of the social landscape by building communal power and understanding the specific context of that landscape. Learn where power can be most effectively leveraged with the least cost. 1/2

Use your collective knowledge to root out the spaces where the power of Empire is weakest, and also where your collectivity is the strongest. Build Dual Power- strategic direct action against Empire on one hand and new mutual aid based infrastructure on the other. 2/2

This is all an single example and should be treated as such. What I am suggesting here is not that everyone must follow this exact formula, but the opposite. What is within range varies person to person, community to community, and that’s a GOOD thing.

There is too much shame flying around about what is or isn’t “real” revolutionary work. Not every person/group needs to amass enough power to engage in city-scale direct action. What’s important is that everyone be engaging in the struggle within their range as best as they can.

Your range might only ever extend to yourself and your relationships, and that is still valuable work! For every person connected to the struggle, we have a whole other set of ranges and power to build upon, and that’s what revolutions are made of.

All that, imo, liberatory work asks of us is for us to be honest and accountable to what is in our range, do our best to strengthen it outward. That is inherently going to look different for everyone, and that can make us all collectively powerful.

Also, you need not make yourself the perfect revolutionary before you work on your relationships, nor do your relationships need to be perfect before you reach out into your workplace or neighborhood. We ALL are constantly working on building up everything within our range.

The point is that the more you build yourself up, the better you’ll be able to show up in your relationships. The more you build up the people in your life, the more you’ll be able to collectively act in your larger community. But this work can and does happen simultaneously.

As the saying goes, many hands make short work, and all that we need from each other is that we work within our power as best as we can. If we establish this as our communal expectation, revolution will be sure to follow.

Thanks for reading.

Love and Solidarity

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