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RatifyGuy1776 OP wrote

Reply to comment by tuesday in Anarchopolitanism by RatifyGuy1776

The freedom to leave is a fantasy so long as capitalism exists.

It's like that now because there's nowhere to flee to. Imperialism hasn't missed a spot. Your best case is hiding out for a few years at a time, being a tiny little blight on some land they haven't got around to exploiting yet. If we somehow achieve a real federation of municipalities, you'll be able to leave the empire by walking, and have a reasonable expectation that you'll find a community doing something better. My model for this concept aims to make it even easier than that, with the Gatehouse system.

They say that they'd be happy to "allow" a left-anarchist commune exist but that's not true so long as that commune has usable space that a capitalist wants.

Getting as far as these two antagonistic polities existing presupposes that we've decentralized enough that the expansionist will not have the sort of control over media narratives that makes it easy to get away with now. If that's not an attainable goal, nothing will free us. A great deal of my plans are based on rolling the dice on extreme long shots like this, because it seems like they're the only thing that could work. Fortunately, in the past few years, we've seen that the hegemony's narrative control is already getting tenuous, even without us pitching the biggest tent possible to make conscious use of the tools we have. If there's an opportunity, it's now.

Then don't. It's that simple.

My life is already almost entirely composed of getting high and drunk to ease the impotent anger I have about humanity collectively committing suicide. I'm trying to figure out something else I can do about this bullshit. The more popular methods that feel more like justice have been ineffective for longer than I've been alive. The breaking point for me came when I realized that what makes the billionaires behave the way they do is fear. They rightly believe we are a mortal threat to them. If you're fighting the billionaires instead of talking to them, your enemy is primal terror. You're not winning that one.

Any ideology that advocates against violence done in defense of self and community is one that's asking to be dominated immediately.

I agree.

There's an implication built into essentially my entire project: "this probably won't work, but..." The first-order analysis of the state of the world is that the oligarchs have absolutely no reason to bargain with us. Their first instinct will be to refuse to do so, as it almost always has been. They have everything, and they don't even need most of us to maintain it. What the fuck can we bargain with?

This is what I advocate simply because it's the only thing that could work. I don't really think it will, at least not immediately. The reason it could work is that the specific way I've imagined doing it ultimately carries a very serious threat behind it.

The #Ratify core document is an explicitly non-violent call for a constitutional convention. Getting enough people shouting about something in the founding documents that the establishment supposedly derives its power from makes it impossible for them to ignore or suppress it without showing their authority to be completely illegitimate.

Americans have... problems... but the one thing that's really great about them is that there are thousands of them who have just been waiting their whole lives for the government to tip their hand like that. So far, the rifles never come off the wall in enough numbers to do jack shit because everyone only engages in electoralism, so it's trivial to turn everything into tribal bullshit and convince most of the people that the line hasn't yet been crossed. Right now, the US Constitution is just an artifact of the imperial cult, but that's exactly why it's available to us as a potent weapon.

You have to start by offering a peaceful solution. When they slap that offer out of your hands, more people will get angry. Eventually, the capitalists will be the ones who are forced to negotiate; their other option will be years of counter-insurgency against their own tax base. Our military is already bad at that when half of it isn't defecting. The people can't lose if they are actually roused to action, and that will happen by putting the establishment in a position where nobody can deny they broke the rules.

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