Web Log: Plotting a new course

2024-11-6

Throughout all the thoughts and efforts I've done over the past couple years, the thought has been in the back of my head that eventually things will sort themselves out, or more precisely that the status quo I learned growing up, of capitalism, liberalism, electoralism, and other dull things, would realistically win the day agaisnt the fanciful and shortsighted far right. I kind of hoped that we would break out of bland and suffocating paradigm but at the same time it was a comfort that the future didn't rest on the initiative of millions of ordinary people stepping up and fighting to protect one another.

Today it feels like that notion was the wrong one after all. After years of capturing every arm of the most powerful state in the world, Trump, and a whole crew of powerful, hateful people have been given the keys to control the whole thing, and entrench all these tendrils of control. This is nothing that anyone doesn't already know, but the one thing revealed to us today is that the whole future of a regenerative caring society, is not only not certain, but maybe not even likely.

It feels like my efforts, which broadly align with solarpunk and anarchism, are now no longer the gap filler for the liberalish status quo but rather are now standing on their own. I can't imagine the liberal powers coming to help me or my communities as they don't even promise to in word let alone deed.

So where do we go from here?

The new course to take needs to be focused not on sneaking under the radar of liberalism, but rather on surviving whatever level of right wing dictatorship comes to pass. While I think local organising still is the core of any robust and people-serving movement, the local focus is no longer sufficient since increasingly dire threats will come from outside local communities. And the focus must be shifted away from what we can do right now, to: how can we make sure there is a future for all of our efforts to continue on?

We need to build a firm and lasting foundation and we need to build it global. The incentives for corporate owned social media communication now clearly and wholly lie with that of the right, and will become even more propagandised and hostile to anticapitalist organising. The internet is the most critical of organising mediums and it must now be our number one task to build internet networks that are not beholden to those interests. Decentralised and self hosted social media is a requirement to having a society that can survive the state capture by Trump and his collaborators. It will need to be hardened in some way against direct attack but that only matters after we have built these networks on a meaningful scale.

We must ensure that our efforts are not erased along with each community and person that is destroyed, and in order for these communities and people to keep safe, they must know that their efforts will be safe even when they retreat. The second main focus of this change in course needs to be a collective culture of archiving, to preserve our learnings and stories and keep them safe, for generations if necessary. This would look like; a wide scale system for passing such information between groups so that it can be preserved in safer places, social practices for documenting work done from the community scale up, both what worked and didn't work, and practices for curating this work so that it is in useful forms for whoever might read it. There should also be effort on the technical aspects of storing this information, software that can be read by future generations, and hardware that can be safely hidden away for long durations where needed.

For my part, I am creating a knowledge garden, for ordering, preserving and sharing my own thoughts and learnings in organising, as well as the Solarpunk Knowledge Garden to do the same for as many other communities as possible.

Will this be enough?

Of course no one knows and I'm sure we'll need to change course many more times from here, but we have to do what we can, that's really the only option. We need to figure out how to operate a society without the support of the various means of power around us, which has of course been done many times before. But we have to make it work in the context, in the world pervaded by the numbness of capitalism, we have to make people care. Many people found their purpose in religion, and where that starts to fade, nationalism or racial supremecy. But what clear purpose can we rally people around, have people commit what is necessary for survival, to uphold? For some, abstract freedom or justice or care is enough. But is that enough to hold communities together under ever increasing oppresion? People need the hope that what they're fighting for will outlive them. While our stories and knowledge can be part of that, what holds those together?

I don't know what the answer is but it's something that we must create now. A 'religion'? A guiding story? A mesh of cultures? A captivating vision of the future? *Some* sort of values and principles that we can clearly articulate, clearly know when to step in and defend, unlike whatever values the liberal powers stand for, that can be swapped out at a moments notice however convenient. This purpose will look different for everyone but we need to keep creating and honing these purposes until they can do the job of getting us through this.

I guess that can be my call to you: When you are trying to get through the day, when you are deciding your courses of action, when you're working alongside your community, ask why? What is it that truly matter? Turn those ideas over in your head, and share them with your friends and allies, and combine them, and write them down, and put them online, and from the bottom up we can build the foundation to outlast us

--Ember