Towards Autonomous, Intergenerational Communities on U.S.-Occupied Territory

This text is the final section of "The Challenge of Autonomy: Prospects for Freedom Going into 2021," originally given the header "Conclusion: A List of Starting Points." It's been edited here to read smoothly as a standalone piece. The full document can be downloaded as a PDF from Bay Area Intifada or read online on Raddle.

Why recirculate these proposals now? They are clear, down-to-earth instructions which can help take concepts like "autonomy", "prefigurative politics", or "decolonization" out of the abstract and into the practical. This means, as the authors acknowledge, they can be debated, disagreed with, and modified. They may also be productively engaged as counterproposals to those of appelists.

- George Jackson

“I set up a plan and then i seen it through
I gave you a chance cuz i believed in you
No matter how hard it gets, see it through
My only reward was just to see you grow.
So see it through, see it through…
No matter how hard it gets, see it through…
No matter how hard it gets.”
- The Jacka

    The young people getting active in the streets today are entering a desert of political options and conversations. A degenerate political left represents the only well-known alternative to openly fascist Democrats and neo-nazi-courting Republicans^[1], a left that has grown so petty bourgeois (middle class) in its class character that it has very little relationship to the physically existing world, as outlined in section 1. For those of us who actually want to make this thing materially viable, we need to focus on building the actual material infrastructure for self-determination, independent of police and State assistance.
    This infrastructure building should be our top priority over and above all else, except for the most vital acts of direct, effective resistance, as outlined in section 2. While theory, organization-building, discussion groups, verbal protest and civil disobedience are all important - even vital^[2] - none of them are sustainable without community power-building to prepare us for the long term.
    You can strategize however fits you and yours best but these are some labels we like to
organize priorities and projects under, in a very rough chronological order of how we feel they
need to be handled:

A. “Breathing Room”
B. Alliances
C. Sustainability

Each stage will require multiple avenues to be pursued at once, there will be a LOT of trial and
error, and all of it is easier said than done. You have to be ready to stick with it and not be
praised or recognized or rewarded. Once you get some very bare bones, basic housing,
resources, and relationships in place, the whole process has to start over again, many times
over. You build it piece by piece - block by block, street by street.

    We’ll break each of these 3 stages / areas down into suggested baby steps:

A. Breathing Room

    Living under capitalism as a Black person is like being suffocated financially, mentally, emotionally, socially, and spiritually, until you physically die. It’s just a question of how long before the physical part sets in. We have no intergenerational wealth, no assets, and no security even if we do attain them. Studies show that Black people who get wealth are stripped of it by institutions of racism (banks, courts, hospitals, schools, laws, basically everyone and everything) faster than anyone else.^[3] It’s pointless to talk about political autonomy if we still can’t even feed our children.
    So the first step is to get some kind of breathing room. This has to happen in a few different areas to give us the space to then make power moves as functional collectives - not divided or independent individuals. We have 11 suggestions based on our own experiences, and expect this stage should require an investment of anywhere from 6 to 24+ months depending on the level of community and political cohesion you’re starting out with:

1. You need money. A communal surplus of money. You don’t have to be rich, but you will need money. Establish a pool of capital that you hold together collectively - not private individuals sponsoring others! We want power not handouts. The simplest way we’ve found is to form a collective with clearly spelled out common goals, and start paying monthly dues into the communal fund. This should be a collective of persons deeply rooted in their communities, with community ties to each other. The funds should be controlled by someone that is chosen and trusted by consensus of the group. She should be someone who is extremely accountable - for example, to a political organization that could be appealed to if she betrayed our trust and who could effectively reign her in, parents, religious congregation, a life-long or multi-generational circle of loyal friends, or other tight-knit community. If you start with 5 people paying $20 a month this will be enough to get started. Although it should be mentioned that ENSLAVED Africans plotting insurrection in the 1830s managed it by each member donating a full day’s wages every month into their communal fund!^[4] So it all depends what the level of seriousness is on your part as an individual, as well as the level of trust within the collective over all. Until we get the resources to sustain ourselves independently of capitalism, anything that doesn’t make dollars, for now doesn’t make any sense. It will remain so in general until we are able to start developing the means to produce our own wealth and address our own needs independently. Anyone who wants to misuse a theoretical critique of capital to obscure this reality, please see endnote 5.⁵
   

    When deciding whether someone meets the criteria to be invited to this table in the first
place, ask yourselves not about the individual or their qualities isolated within themselves, but
rather, “What do they contribute to community-building?” And “What community does this
person represent that makes them important to link to? Who are their peoples? How loyal are
they to them? Do they switch up allegiances or comrades more than once or twice in a lifetime?
What are they really about in terms of actions, not ideas or words?”
    It’s about communities, not individuals. “Activists” tend to revolve around charismatic individuals, ideologies, and social media clout holders. The first are dangerous when not controlled by or accountable to a tight-knit, functional communal structure. The second are mostly hot air that you should avoid getting entangled in or taking too seriously - they usually don’t correspond to anything concrete or political (“political” meaning, actual power, not words) or tell you anything about how the people claiming them will act when it really gets real. The third - social media clout holders - should be avoided like the plague.

2. Once we have a bare bones supply of capital held in common, it’s time to start buying and training with weapons - NOT TO USE THEM ANYTIME SOON - but once we actually have to use them, by then it will be way too late. The best thing about this country aside from the right to remain silent is the right to stay strapped. Take advantage before Joe and Harris cancel it. Make your own calculations to make sure revenues always exceed expenses, and you always have a little communal pocket money available at any given time. All applicable gun laws should be strictly studied and obeyed. Educate! As for illegal and unregistered weaponry, even suggesting or discussing such things should never be tolerated. These kinds of weapons are only useful for offensive and retaliatory operations. Those who know, don’t say. Those who say, don’t know and need to shut up.
3. If you have that level of trust established, work together to help each person in the community gradually raise their credit score. Research with knowledgeable people and the internet how this is done. It takes time and it will be very important down the road.
4. Consciously choose your own leaders rather than allowing them to emerge “organically” without anyone agreeing to it - or if not, then use the group’s consensus as your leader, and be disciplined about it. If someone is going to be chosen to decide what communal monies will be spent on, exactly when and how etc, to call shots in security situations, or other important roles, that person should be chosen by consensus. This isn’t out of principle for us but practicality: if you can’t reach consensus on this, your group might not be ready for all of the steps just yet. Once the consensus is reached, then their decisions should be respected whether you always agree with every minor detail or not. If a more horizontal structure is what makes you feel warm and fuzzy, then the consensus of the group on any given issue should be treated like a leader. Everyone has to stand by that consensus decision loyally, without preventing it by standing on individual opinions stubbornly, or rendering it ineffective by changing their positions all the time. Beware of informal leadership who function the same as chosen leaders but can never be held accountable because you simply refuse to acknowledge that’s what they are or formalize their positions. Most of our traditions as Africans are leadership-oriented (occasionally even to a fault), based on shared religion, honor, loyalty, and kinship groups choosing who we follow. Rather than someone who holds all the power forcing everyone else to obey. So we should take advantage of that rich tradition and build on it, not abandon it completely for Eurocentric ideas of what equality means or looks like. Entertainers, anyone who is always in the limelight, easily offended or prideful might not be the best choice.^[6] Anyone who always takes revenge for slights against them (justified or not), asks for leadership or says they are best suited for it, should be completely disqualified from the start.
5. Put together a phone tree of people to call in potentially dangerous situations. Develop protocols on how to respond to specific thresholds - domestic violence vs. threats, interpersonal conflicts, etc. Talk to honorable community members who have experience in de-escalation, hood politics, and professional security work. Get well-rounded advice from a variety of people with different perspectives and experiences. Move cautiously and move humbly! You can’t prepare or train too much.
6. Carefully select possible control zones - neighborhoods or other areas where our specific communities (however you want to define yours, that’s on you) can exercise some level of power and start laying the groundwork for future autonomy, in close cooperation and confederation with any other communities that live there. That means somewhere we have real, deep roots, ideally going back generations. If not, then decades - or at bare minimum, some years of deep relationships and 1,000% solid alliances with those who do.^[7]
7. Join a trade (union or other) apprenticeship. Plummers get the best pay, electrical and carpentry are probably the most vital skills to add to the movement. You need money and you need skills even more.
8. Begin developing your food production skills: Start a garden. Yes, it is a cliche. And yes, it is also necessary. At the risk of sounding corny and played out, this is actually important for obvious reasons. It saves money, gives a boost to health and longevity in urban food deserts, and gives us a lifeline / baby-step in the direction of self-sufficiency from capitalism. It’s also something that you can all get your hands dirty doing together. Seek out help from experienced gardeners so you don’t waste years learning by trial and error. Study hard, be creative.
9. Assign specific individuals to focus on intelligence and counter-surveillance. Keep detailed lists of names, addresses, ranks and roles of fascist and neighborhood watch organizations. Again, not to do anything to them - but for now just to have the data. In your potential geographical control zones, you need to start early mapping out where all of the means of surveillance are - get on apps like Nextdoor, memorize all of the cameras, and make a game-plan for how to swiftly blind all of them in a few minutes if necessary. Know all your local snitches, do not antagonize them or draw needless attention to yourselves. You’ll need stashes of spray-paint and to educate yourselves on security culture - this is one thing left-wing activists and Google are both very good for. Study Michael Collins and the Mau Mau.^[8] Counter-surveillance is a subtle thing - think outside the box!
10. Housing. Establish collective house(s) with members who have stable income, strategically so as to cut costs. Shopping collectively can help save as well. Calculate the surplus income, and agree on a fixed amount that goes into the community fund. This will act as savings toward purchasing property, investing in collective business that can multiply, etc. We would recommend shooting for $1,000 per month, ideally.
11. Something Else Entirely. Don’t like these ideas? Got a million objections? Very well. Do it differently, then… But do something though!

B. Alliances

1. Once you have something, then bring it to the table. The concept of “allies” without any power to align around is nothing more than an exercise in pointlessness and vanity. Uniting and confederating with others should be based on bringing something to the table to share, no matter how meager, and asking the same from others for mutual benefit. And community cohesion and loyalty are the greatest of all resources. This is the basis of this section.
2. Stay local but think regional now. Think about the geographical space you inhabit, and how it is linked strategically to other cities, towns, counties, states, borders and countries. What are the most important points to connect? What would be the easiest ones to connect? Balance the answers out and start investing time and work into building relationships with comrades in those areas. Always keeping in mind that what we are building is communal - we are not interested in mere individuals unless they can fit into that and be accountable to it somehow. Each community has its own way of conceiving of and working that out - what’s important is just that it exists and that it’s strong, in whatever form or tradition that community has already established for itself. Arrange physical gatherings to discuss these ideas, break bread, spend time with each other’s families and communities, become familiar with each other’s neighborhoods and cultures and histories. Are these individuals loyal? Are they communalists or individualists, in terms of how they’ve lived their lives and how they’re moving now? That’s how you find out who you can really build with.
3. When your community is in consensus that the timing is right, cement your relationships with these other communities in specific resource exchanges, formal agreements and pacts.
4. Stay solid rooted in the neighborhood but always think like a nomad - always expanding options, always keeping them open. The stronger the bonds between different areas, the more possibilities for migration and geographic flexibility. The full extent and details of how climate change will damage or even render uninhabitable some areas of the Earth, are not known to us yet. Not to mention whatever changes in the aggression level and volatility of the State as well as right-wing non-State elements - white terrorist groups, etc. Therefore it makes sense to keep in the forefront of our minds the ability to move from place to place. There may come a day when it is useful for one community to pick up and find shelter with an allied one elsewhere until things in their home-area die down. For children and civilians to be able to do so while those equipped for it stay behind and shoot it out with the neo-Klansmen, until it is safe for everyone to return. Or any number of other unknown scenarios. Transnational connections should be cultivated with this in mind as well. We need to be not only practical but adaptable and creative at all times!
5. Get a foothold in the countryside. We need both rural and urban footholds at all times, either one is not enough by itself. Having someone who rents or owns in a remote rural area, or in a small town within easy distance from remote areas and enough space to grow food for a couple families, is very useful. Always expanding and diversifying your options, always keeping them open…
6. Something Else Entirely. Do these ideas not apply well to your local politics and situations? All good. Do it differently. But do something though!
   

C. Sustainability

Some of the following points can’t be considered as strictly “tried and tested” like most of our others, because we’re still working on them or haven’t managed them all yet. Stay creative. But we strongly believe all of what we say will be essential in the years to come. And consistency is key:

1. From Renting to Owning. The goal of renting properties collectively is to pool money to eventually own something collectively - otherwise it’s a pointless waste of money and a trap.
2. From Hustling for Capital to Building Anti-Capital: Real Resources. Once we have cut costs, acquired communal property ownership, and maintained a stable surplus of capital (even a very small one), we should then reinvest the profit of all this into weaning ourselves off of dependency on capital altogether. With a long view toward total self-sufficiency: producing our own energy, healthcare, education, security, food, (eventually) clothes and shelter, to such an extent that were the entire capitalist system to collapse and the dollar lose all value, our basic infrastructure would still be standing. Individuals will need to commit their lives to learning environmentally sustainable carpentry methods, plumbing, electrical work, marksmanship, gunfighting tactics and more. This means our end goal in acquiring capital is not succeeding within capitalism-imperialism, but rather weaning ourselves off of our addiction to it. Capital resources are a necessary short-term means. Non-capital resources that can sustain us in and of themselves - food, clothes, shelter, etc - are the actual goals! Otherwise we’re just on the merry-go-round of the market system with everyone else… and that’s a vicious cycle.
3. Prioritize the Next Generation: Start an educational cooperative - ideally in a building you own, even if that means a living room - for the community’s children and any others who want to attend. Raise the next generation of soldiers and keep this thing going. Don’t give your kids up to “They Schools.” Organize cookouts, play-days, after-school activities for ample socialization. Pass this on.
4. Study John Robb’s Ideas on Resilient Communities in Brave New War, Small Wars
   Journal and similar enemy publications. Why should the right wing be the only well-prepared ones? Why should we not think so far ahead when our enemies do?
5. Intel is the future. The future of struggle will depend on our ability to use counterintelligence even better than the pigs. John Robb and others like him have written extensively about how decentralized resilient communities and “open source” war theory can become invincible to conventional armies and governments. There is no reason why such insights cannot be useful in low-intensity conflicts (potentially bordering on low-intensity civil war within the foreseeable future) in North America as well. Study hard! Our security efforts should be localized, community-wide affairs, and our intelligence apparatuses should develop the same way, but they should also ideally work with all communities and regions. Especially in terms of sharing information around threat levels from far right and neo-Klan groups (3 percenters, Oathkeepers, “proudboys” aka Loud boys, etc, etc…).

^[1] Defined as by George Jackson, in the empirical, political-economic, structural sense of the word - as a nationalist, capitalist totalitarian State built on the unity of bourgeois, labor, and State power, with ideological details playing an ultimately “non-essential,” mainly psycho-social role. Blood In My Eye, pages 117-177.

^[2] Anonymous, The Siege of the Third Precinct in Minneapolis.

^[3] McIntosh, Moss, Nunn and Shambaugh, “Examining the Black-White Wealth Gap.”

^[4] Many slaves were allowed to find employment while giving most of the wages to the master. Julio Pino, Jihad in Brazil.

^[5] https://redirect.invidious.io/watch?v=FBhw0iWZcho

^[6] Al Hajj Malik Shabazz / Malcolm X on Black self-defense vs. spectator culture as well as taking entertainers as leaders vs. choosing them collectively. We would say that most modern day social media activists/talkers and influencers are also entertainers, just with political overtones.

^[7] “Kibbutz communism” - the practice of foreigners, such as European Jews in Palestine or white leftists in California, simply setting up shop inside of preexisting communities - is not communism, nor is it autonomy in any sense related to what we’re talking about. Describing kibbutz type, settler-communalism as non-racist so long as it remains open to the locals integrating into their cultural hegemony and accepting their political and moral values, is an irrelevant distinction.

^[8] Edgerton, African Crucible. Kanogo, Squatters and the Roots of Mau Mau. Hart, The I.R.A. and Its Enemies. Wilderson, Incognegro.