A Note On Our Strategy

**This blog post is taken from a facebook post by our own Aaron Goggans that went viral. We thought it might be useful to share it on our website too**

I'm really excited to see so many people coming out of the paralyzing shock of the first few months of Trump 2.0. I'm starting to see people advocate for a favored tactic to overcome Trump and I think this is really good to see. I thought it might be useful to offer a gentle nudge that in the long run any tactic is only going to be as effective as the strategy is it is organized under. Our opposition is going to learn how to negate even the most brilliant tactic in time. Strategies are what we can lean on to develop the next tool to defend our communities and build the world we want.

One simplistic understanding of strategy is a 1. series of tactics to overcome 2. specific obstacles towards 3. a specific goal. All three points of strategy are essential for strategic action and coordination.

I believe we have to be clear about what we are building and why, what we are blocking and why, who we are fighting and why. We have to explain the obstacles to those goals. Most importantly, we have to share a vision for what our end goal is. Without these things we have no strategy to invite others into.

Let me offer an example:

At the WildSeed Society we seek a world where everyone can get their needs meet with dignity and joy. This is not a utopia but rather a society that has evolved beyond thinking people have to earn food, shelter, medical care and community to one in which we know we are all safer and happier if everyone in our community has their basic needs met.

We think that this will require 3 broad domains of social change which we call movements because they will require the self-organization of diverse communities moving towards a shared goal to achieve. We don't think this could ever be a top-down process as we have so much to learn to build the world we want.

1. Movements for Spiritual Liberation where we all ground in our connection to and co-responsibility for the betterment of life. By spiritual we don't mean theological or religious. Rather we mean spirit as the traditions, rituals, music, liturgy etc that help us feel into the sense that we are part of larger wholes that we actively co-create and are thus co-responsible for. This might be a Bob Marley song, an X-Man comic or the Quran.

2. Movements for Social Transformation where were abolish hierarchies of human worth [systems of race, class, gender-binary, etc] in favor of an ethic of universal care. This would require us to give up identities based in oppression in favor new ways of thinking about ourselves and which "we's" resonate with us. It would require us to extend care to people regardless of their race, gender, class, ability or nationality. It would further require us to abolish and replace systems based on punishment and social ostracization. It would also need us to rethink leadership was a set of collective processes rather than an individual identity or role.

3. Movements for Economic Revolution where we abolish capital which we define as a social relationship where the people who own the means of making things [factories and companies etc] own the things made [goods, houses, intellectual property etc] instead of the people who do the work of making things. Instead communities would collaborate on production to meet community needs outside of both market pressure and state control through democratic commons. Not a command economy or a free market economy but a solidarity economy where local production coops and consumer coops network together to assess need and expand production to meet it. An economy where markets only exist to connect communities too distant to be in regular relationship.

We believe that there is an emerging coalition of organized ideologies that stand in opposition to these three movements for a better world. We believe they form the basis of pillars of support for Donald Trump. Yet we believe that they are not in lock step but rather constantly competing for dominance. We are under no illusion that they or Trump are the only obstacles to the world we envision. Instead we see them as the driving forces behind a movement that is titling society away from any path in which our vision could be organized for. Overcoming them is thus the first task of this strategy.

They are:

Techno-Fascist [Think Elon Musk and Peter Thiel] who seek to profit off the disruptions that they instigate with anti-social automation and financialization until they have the power to consolidate the state either into a corporation with a autocratic CEO or network of city states lead by CEO's.

Christian Nationalist [think Hegseth and Mike Johnson] who seek to instil a theocratic patriarchal re-organization of American life in which men are legally and cultural the head of families, families are the basic political unit, and professed faith in set of theocratic principles is a prerequisite for political and economic leadership.

Aggrieved populist [think Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller] who seek to seize power from the cultural elites and self-interested corporate powers that have defunded and [they believe] culturally marginalized their communities by rolling back the advancements of Black, Indigenous and people of color as well as women, LGBTQIA and religious minorities which they believe was at their expense.

These ideologies seek different ends but we believe they all share 4 points of unity:

1. Belief in the value of "traditional hierarchies"[race, class, gender] as schemes of social organization.

2. Belief in social change as a zero sum game. In order for them to win someone else must lose.

3. Belief that there are some groups who the law must protect but not bind and other groups who the law should bind and but not protect.

4. Either a skepticism or outright hostility to concepts of democracy that extend to everyone in a society.

Each of those points of unity are diametrically opposed to the world we want. They are in fact antithetical to conditions necessary for us to organize for that world effectively.

We know that the defeat of the MAGA coalition would not immediately usher in a world in which we all get our needs met with dignity. But believe it would allow for the building of an open, democratic society which we believe is the necessary conditions for our three movements to flourish.

We utilize a Block-Build-Be frame to organize the tactics that we believe will be necessary to overcome this dark triad.

Block: Are tactics that seek to slow down harm or protect the spaces and communities we are building. Our Block tactics further utilize the Move-Strike-Defend-Recover framework. This means escalating local fights against the regime, moving national resources into those local fights in ways that make local ecosystem stronger, defending against movement wide blow back to those escalations through coordinated movement defense and as well as having dedicated resources for recovering from those fights. There is no way that we can stand toe-to-toe with the state in every fight. We will have to be mobile and strike where they are weakest.

Our tools in these strikes should be campaigns of non compliance (strikes and boycotts), disruptive mass mobilizations that make business as usual impossible and mutual aid programs that resource frontline communities while showing that a more caring response than the states tactics is possible. Crucially, mutual aid cannot met the increasing needs of a state in retreat [only the commons could do that]. Rather mutual aid is about building a base that can fuel and protect the Build strategy.

Build: are tactics that build alternative understandings and institutions to meet community and movement needs. Our Build tactics further utilize a regenerative movement ecology frame that seeks to build movements with their own funding mechanisms and community supported leadership. This means a network of cooperative that seek to meet community needs while donating profits to fund movement institutions. It also requires new movement institutions that can support veteran organizers being in accountable relationships with each other outside of programmatic organizations. This way, orgs that participate in blocking actions can be nimble with little overhead; able to emerge and dissolve as necessary because their staff is directly supported by community independent of the orgs budget.

Be: are the tactics that the Build-Fight-Defend and Block-Build-Abolish framework ignore or marginalized. Be tactics are the rituals, community spaces and cultural building work that embodies the universal ethic of care and positive regard that is at the heart of the world we want. Central to our Be strategy is the framework of the 5 R's of healing: Rest, Retreat, Repair, Reconnection, Reintegration. This is not just self care or mutual aid [which are essential] but consistent space for communal rest, safe spaces away from frontline to repair harm, rituals to reconnect to the vision that pulls us (not the pain that pushed us) and work to reintegrate our comrades back into the movement after rupture and healing journeys in ways that also address the reasons for rupture. Our Be strategy not only makes our movements sustainable but roots them in the praxis of who we need to be to build the world we want.

We believe articulating this strategy is crucial as we are finally starting to leave the "shocked" stage of resistance. As we start to form new coalitions and networks we need to articulate strategies to orient towards. We don't expect everyone to agree to one strategy. Rather we think steel sharpens steel. The more we articulate different strategies the more clarity we will all have about what we want, what's working and what we need to leave behind in the protracted struggle. With clarity will come conviction, hope and resilience