Well if you’re interested in starting a solidarity network in your town, by all means check out this helpful guide from SeaSol, which lets you know how to get started. But for those who don’t have that kind of time, I’d encourage folks to explore solidarity through collective direct action like joining a picket line.
Though I’d attended plenty of protests, most of which were symbolic (stop the war, demand reproductive justice, etc.), I had never stood on a picket line before two years ago. Since then I’ve organized pickets, and also walked with nurses, Red Vines candy makers, university students, hotel workers, former Whole Foods workers — all kinds of people fighting for better job conditions. It’s given me a much deeper appreciation for one way that people work together to reclaim their bodies, the labor-power of their bodies, in interrupting business-as-usual. With all the austerity measures and company cutbacks happening all over the country and the world, and all the organized resistance bubbling up, it should not be too hard to find a picket line to join!
…How do we create a society that produces for collective need and well-being, rather than privatized profit? A society where ordinary people exercise direct co-operative control over the places where they live and work every day? Where no individuals can “own” the resources that everyone — including non-human animals and the earth’s ecosystems — relies on to survive and thrive?
The word I use for this kind of reimagined society is communism. I know that word is triggering for a lot of people, and especially for those who’ve had close dealings with so-called “communist” regimes that are actually state-capitalist or basically dictatorships. But that’s not what I mean by it.
Working toward real communism, like vowing to liberate all beings from suffering, may seem futile, but it is not. We take it seriously. We even make plans, though we don’t presume to know exactly how everything will happen. This stuff is complex!
